Here are 100 books that Sleeping with the Enemy fans have personally recommended if you like
Sleeping with the Enemy.
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Some men need killing. Whether monsters, serial killers, or husbands, women often face off with danger and must put a stop to it. How they do that fascinates me as a former psychotherapist. Must her life be in imminent danger, his finger depressing the trigger, for her to shoot? What if he terrorized or stalked her, but at the moment of death, she sneaks up on him? What if this guy killed her family, and she seeks revenge? Where we draw these lines in fiction informs who we are as humans and the very nature of our souls. And each of the books on my list, prism-like, reveals a separate facet.
I’m ending with this unorthodox double feature (think Godzilla v. Kong) because girls who kill put a twist on the theme of this list. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice. But maybe they’re a little less nice when boys are boys.
A feminist reimagining of March’s classic 1950s novel has Claude Daigle perhaps deserving of his fate at Rhoda Penmark’s hands. What if he tormented and taunted her, and she took revenge? While the daughter in Stage’s contemporary novel walks a very narrow line that kept me unsure the whole time… the guessing was delicious. Is Hanna evil? Or misunderstood? Is her mom, Suzette, going to get her due? Or is she going insane?
The bestselling novel that inspired Mervyn LeRoy’s classic horror film about the little girl who can get away with anything—even murder.
There’s something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she’s the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?
Originally published in 1954, William March’s final novel was an instant bestseller and National Book Award finalist before it was adapted for the stage and made into a…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
Some men need killing. Whether monsters, serial killers, or husbands, women often face off with danger and must put a stop to it. How they do that fascinates me as a former psychotherapist. Must her life be in imminent danger, his finger depressing the trigger, for her to shoot? What if he terrorized or stalked her, but at the moment of death, she sneaks up on him? What if this guy killed her family, and she seeks revenge? Where we draw these lines in fiction informs who we are as humans and the very nature of our souls. And each of the books on my list, prism-like, reveals a separate facet.
I have never been as scared reading a book—that includes Stephen King’s whole oeuvre, and I am a huge SK fan—as I was this one. Barry conjures up a scene almost any woman will find familiar—you’re driving down a long, dark, lonely road, and then it gets even worse because you’re not alone anymore.
That Barry manages to create masterful suspense against a political backdrop that is even more relevant now than when the book was published is particularly dazzling. And the triumphant battle to the death at the end had my heart in my throat and my blood pulsing.
An addictive, fast-paced thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Perfect for fans of LISA GARDNER and CLARE MACKINTOSH.
'A novel like razor-wire' AJ Finn, author of #1 bestseller The Woman in the Window 'A nerve-shredding book' Rosamund Lupton, bestselling author of Three Hours
Two strangers, Cait and Rebecca, are driving across America.
Cait's job is to transport women to safety. Out of respect, she never asks any questions. Like most of the women, Rebecca is trying to escape something.
But what if Rebecca's secrets put them both in danger? There's a reason Cait chooses to…
Some men need killing. Whether monsters, serial killers, or husbands, women often face off with danger and must put a stop to it. How they do that fascinates me as a former psychotherapist. Must her life be in imminent danger, his finger depressing the trigger, for her to shoot? What if he terrorized or stalked her, but at the moment of death, she sneaks up on him? What if this guy killed her family, and she seeks revenge? Where we draw these lines in fiction informs who we are as humans and the very nature of our souls. And each of the books on my list, prism-like, reveals a separate facet.
I’m listing this novel first because who’s worse than the devil? He’s the embodiment of a woman’s fears, there when we walk into a parking lot after dark, our keys clenched between our fingers in a makeshift weapon. And in a myriad of other forms. The devil is hard to get away from, especially as a woman.
In this novel, two childhood friends have to face off with the literal devil. And what they do to him—with him—is an anthem of female friendship, a love letter to our girlhood friends, and a book whose final line is as lasting as those years in our lives, the ones we believe at the time will never, ever have to end.
The year is 1988. High school sophomores Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fourth grade. But after an evening of skinny-dipping goes disastrously wrong, Gretchen begins to act different. She s moody. She s irritable. And bizarre incidents keep happening whenever she s nearby. Abby s investigation leads her to some startling discoveries and by the time their story reaches its terrifying conclusion, the fate of Abby and Gretchen will be determined by a single question: Is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil? Like an unholy hybrid of Beaches and The Exorcist, My Best Friend s…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Some men need killing. Whether monsters, serial killers, or husbands, women often face off with danger and must put a stop to it. How they do that fascinates me as a former psychotherapist. Must her life be in imminent danger, his finger depressing the trigger, for her to shoot? What if he terrorized or stalked her, but at the moment of death, she sneaks up on him? What if this guy killed her family, and she seeks revenge? Where we draw these lines in fiction informs who we are as humans and the very nature of our souls. And each of the books on my list, prism-like, reveals a separate facet.
Whether this book should be taken as a polemic against feminism or support of feminism at its most radical—i.e., women may not always get it right in their fiercest battles, and that’s okay—is probably in the eye of the beholder-slash-reader.
But it doesn’t matter which side I’m on (cough, the second one) in terms of what this book means to me. Which is that adolescence is a tumultuous time when we all get to learn who we are and what matters most to us—if we’re lucky. If we’re less lucky, someone may come along and take advantage of our fresh, unfolding minds such that we never get a chance to bloom.
The girls at Modesta High School feel like they're stuck in some anti-feminist time warp-they're faced with sexism at every turn, and they've had enough. Sponsored by their new art teacher, Ms. Stark, they band together to form the Daughters of Eve. It's more than a school club-it's a secret society, a sisterhood. At first, it seems like they are actually changing the way guys at school treat them. But Ms. Stark urges them to take more vindictive action, and it starts to feel more like revenge-brutal revenge. Blinded by their oath of loyalty, the Daughters of Eve become instruments…
I am a writer who has written an assortment of over a hundred and seventy different articles, poems, and books. I worked for thirty five years as a psychologist and my late wife, Rosie Larner, was a social worker and lecturer. We have both dealt with cases of domestic abuse and have recognised the extent of the problem worldwide and the misery that it causes. We offer these tales under the pen-name of Rosy Stewart to show the diversity of the problems and to bring hope to the sufferers with the hope of resolution of each case to reach a wider audience.
The story is told as a memoir in first person. What I like about this is that it tells of a period in a Derbyshire working class home in the 1940s and 1950s.
The description of the family environment is very realistic and one is drawn in immediately and carried along by the love in the home is and the playful the antics of the children. However, it soon develops into a novel of a young girl who runs away from that home because her mother becomes mentally ill and her father doesn’t know how to help his wife and ends up severely beating her.
It continues into what she does on the streets of London and how she eventually ends up in a women’s refuge. It is a lesson on how things can dramatically change.
Until 1971, female victims of domestic violence were expected to 'kiss and make up' with their husbands, hide their black eyes and bruises, and bear the shame that somehow their partners' brutality was their fault. Chiswick Women's Aid was Europe's first ever refuge for what were then called 'battered women', and Jenny Smith was one of the first females who bravely made their way to this much-needed safe house. Desperate, and in fear for her life and the welfare of her two small children, Jenny had fled her dangerously schizophrenic partner, carrying only a few possessions. In the Chiswick shelter,…
I have always loved crime fiction, especially those where justice is served. I love crime stories where ordinary people doing their jobs triumph over evil. But so many crime stories are riddled with profanity, sex, and gratuitous violence. Over the last few years, I’ve searched for books that satisfy my need to read about justice but do it cleanly and in such a way that the story is not compromised. Oh, by the way, I’m also a writer of crime fiction and try to stay true to both justice over evil and telling stories in a clean but realistic way.
This book is raw, brutal, and a tough read, but it’s also clean, and that’s what I appreciated most about Walker’s telling of a girl’s story who is stuck in sex trafficking. Yes, it is another sex-trafficking book, but for me, it is a masterful insight from the point of view of those caught in it or caught by it.
Besides being a raw account of sex trafficking trauma, it’s also a compelling story that kept me wanting to read to find out what would happen. It’s a thriller and has many moments of high suspense. Watching Emma move through the phases of “the life” broke my heart but also opened my eyes.
I applaud Mr. Walker for this book. It could not have been easy to write, but I’m glad he did.
At only seventeen, Emma is used, abused, and discarded. She runs a thousand miles away from shame and judgment and falls into a stranger's arms. One careless mistake, and she plummets into the hellish world of sex-trafficking. "The life" takes everything from her, starting with her name. Deep in that darkness, Emma must find herself and find a way out. Her story is a tantalizing suspense that awakens hope.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I've always loved reading romance, and something about those jealous, possessive, alpha males just always got my heart racing. I love a hero who's all in from the get-go and will do anything for the woman he loves. He knows what he wants and goes after it. I also get how crazy busy we can be. I don't know about you, but I don't always have time to sit down and read a super long novel. Insta-love romances are short and spicy and don't take more than an hour or two to read. You can count on my insta-love stories to be filled with heat, passion, and happily ever afters.
This book is so deliciously over-the-top. Forced into a marriage she doesn't want, Sophie gets desperate and makes a crazy post online, begging someone to kidnap her. Phoenix actually does it, and it's just an insane level of possessive hotness from then on out. Phoenix is dark and gruff and growly and everything an obsessive alpha male should be.
At thirteen, I was promised to another man. At eighteen, I was married off to him by my parents. A day before we would consummate our union, as a last ditch effort to save myself, I put an online ad asking for a stranger to take me away. I never thought it would actually happen. Now, the man holding me has no intention of ever letting me go. In fact, his plans for me are much more dark and twisted than anything I ever could have imagined.
When my sister was suddenly arrested in 2017, I was thrust into an upside-down world where I had to quickly understand the severe domestic violence that she had been hiding, while also understanding the criminal legal system that was prosecuting her for killing her abuser. In order to do so, I immersed myself in experts and literature, eventually writing a memoir about the experience. These five books personally helped me understand the full scope of violence against women, whether perpetrated by an abusive person or an abusive system.
This book is the most captivating exploration into the domestic violence epidemic I’ve ever read. Published at the same time as my sister’s high-profile case, this book served as both validation and a deep education into the full scope of intimate partner violence, putting my sister’s experience into a larger context.
With page-turning writing, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder expertly challenges common domestic violence myths and makes readers aware of the signs and symptoms that allow abuse to continue. I think it is a vital reading for every person in our society.
WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM, THE HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD, AND THE LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST * ABA SILVER GAVEL AWARD FINALIST * KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY: Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, BookRiot, Economist, New York Times Staff Critics
“A seminal and breathtaking account of why home is the most dangerous place to be a woman . . . A tour de…
I’ve been reading crime fiction all my life. I love following the detective sifting through the evidence—the clues, the false trails, and the eventual denouement. It was a crime fiction book that made me realise that history is not fixed but is, in fact, detective work. It changes as more evidence is discovered or a new interpretation is accepted. That book made me decide to take history as my subject at university and I spent six deliriously happy years examining evidence, evaluating it, and, reaching conclusions. Amongst my case studies were the princes in the tower, the gunpowder plot, and witchcraft. Happy days!
The search for the body commenced. Then the victim walked into town.
Behind the picture-postcard façade of Kingsmarkham lies a community rife with violence, betrayal, and a taste for vengeance. When sixteen-year-old Lizzie Cromwell reappears no one knows where she has been, including Lizzie herself. Inspector Wexford thinks she was with a boyfriend. But the disappearance of a three-year-old girl casts a more ominous light on events. And when the public's outrage turns toward a recently released pederast and another suspect turns up stabbed to death, Wexford must try to unravel the mystery before any more bodies appear, and before…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I write what I know. My life has given me so much to write about that people seem to connect with. I started this journey as a writer to share my personal story but instead, what I authored was a novel about my life, but as a fictional story. A lot of situations that my characters find themselves in are things that I have endured or seen personally in my life and in my travels. My passion is broken people I guess, because I have been surrounded by so many of them, in my life.
This is an anthology that thirty authors submitted stories to. This book dealt with the serious subject of domestic violence. The writers ranged from the tender age of 12, who shared her real-life story dealing with abuse, to authors who submitted poetry, and others peeks into their novels. This book touched my heart and soul on a personal level as domestic violence in all its ugly forms is something that too many people don't want to discuss. It's become a secret that women, men, and children learn to deal with quietly for fear of not being believed or shame.
Voices Behind the Tears, is an anthology created by over 20 authors, writers, and poets, ranging in ages from 12 and up. They have all come together along with Saving Lives Through Lit to help bring attention to the Abuse and Violence that quietly goes on in many homes. Through true, fictionalized and excerpts, these talented, gifted contributors bring you stories to move you deeply. It is their hope you will join them and SLTL to help give aid to the agencies that assist these families... Proceeds from sales of this book will go to those various agencies...
