Books like Slip of the Knife — picked by fans

I loved the main character Paddy Meehan’s voice in this series. Paddy is a lowly copygirl at a Glasgow newspaper with dreams of becoming an investigative journalist during a time when girls are expected to marry out of high school and have babies, not unlike the way things were when I entered the work world. Paddy is intelligent and driven and so outside the mold that her family and boyfriend, indeed the Scottish community, cannot understand her drive to be more than what society demands she should be. She’s someone I rooted for every step of the way as she navigates the old boys’ club in the 1980s and 1990s. Combine Paddy with Mina’s brilliant writing, realistic dialogue, and compelling plotlines, and this series is one to be savored. 

Gonzo journalism meets Tartan Noir as Iain Banks ventures into crime. A journalist who’s a big fan of all the bad stuff seems to have a link to a killer picking off members of the establishment.

The second-person narration follows the killer, an unusual stylistic flourish. The answers to the horror lie within, and this book goes to some unbearably dark places. (In theory, The Crow Road is also a murder mystery.)

Thriller writer and contemporary ‘queen of crime’ Val McDermid draws deeply on her own years as a tabloid journalist to bring fictional reporter Allie Burns to life during the winter of discontent. This unputdownable tale of a newspaper investigation into matters of life, death, and corruption is so evocative of a 1970s Glasgow newsroom that I could practically smell the fags and taste the whisky. More Allie Burns stories are promised, and I for one can’t wait.

Whatever your take on politics and elections, I thought this was a truly original addition to the zombie world. Funny, and often true-to-life in an alternate reality, this book offers another interesting and sometimes horrific view of the crazy world of politics in a year that was far from the norm.

These letters of Franz Kafka to his Czech translator Milena are not formally a novel but in its essence the love novel, none of his novels were.  He wrote them 1920-1923, being ill with tuberculosis as he was visiting different sanatoriums in Germany and Czechoslovakia and she was living in Vienna in an unhappy marriage. As they only saw each other shortly three times it forms a love by letters story of burning love transforming itself into misunderstandings and conflict. Their value lies in the genial Kafka’s trying and succeeding in communicating something incommunicable about how it is to be in love accounting totally honestly for his vast complexity of emotions from the utmost passion and longing to the state of fear of being rejected. A great inspiration to me for my novel in writing about Kafka.

As a former journalist and magazine editor, I’m all too familiar with the ongoing demise of print media, and so I found myself identifying with protagonist Kate Waters, a journalist fighting to keep her newspaper job by looking for the next big story. Kate thinks she may have found it after reading a short article in her evening newspaper: the discovery of the skeletal remains of a baby at a construction site. 

Skillfully told from multiple POVs, this is as much a book about what could have been as what may—or may not—have happened, and Barton is undeniably equal to the task.

The book takes place beginning in the 1960s – a time of economic strength and cultural change. An increasing number of young, educated women entered the workforce, yet the newspaper help wanted ads were segregated by gender and the discrimination was common. In the midst of this time, Lynn Povich was hired at Newsweek, renowned for its strong coverage of civil rights and the changing social mores. But in reality, the job was a career dead end. Women researchers only occasionally became reporters, very rarely writers, and never editors. The limitations for women journalists were obvious.

Then in March 1970, Newsweek published a cover story about the Women’s Liberation Movement called “Women in Revolt”. It was at the time that more than 40 Newsweek women charged the magazine with employment discrimination. Povich was one of the plaintiffs. In the book, Povich details the lives of several lawsuit participants. She… show more.

With polished language and measured pace, Blow tells a fascinating coming-of-age story of growing up in a small Louisiana town. As the youngest in a family of five boys raised by a schoolteacher mother, with the help of her extended family, he unveils his struggles with sexual identity and masculinity.

Without Reservations gave me hope following the death of my beloved husband of 37 years. Living with his unique and nontraditional worldview, I’d grown into and inhabited a wider, less conventional way of being than my suburban middle-class upbringing had prepared me for. But once he was gone, what and who was I going to be? Steinbach’s travelogue goes to many of the places my husband and I traveled in England and Europe, and that brought reminiscences of great pleasure. But it was her inner journeying in search of her soul that gave me the courage to embark on the inner travels toward self-discovery and the independence I faced in a newly widowed existence.

Although he instructed that no one should write his biography, Orwell has had many superb biographers including Taylor (2003) and Bowker (2003), and his close friends Richard Rees, Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961), and George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit (1966).  John Rodden has written widely on Orwell’s reputation. However, the best full-scale biography remains the first, by Bernard Crick. Sonia commissioned it, then rejected it, but I like it because Crick knows more about politics than the others and, in the end, Orwell was a political writer.