100 Books Like South of Broad

This book has been criticized for ignoring the brutal aspects of the Bolshevik revolution and giving us only old-world elegance and luxury. Hello? It’s historical FICTION! Instead of facts, the author gives us atmosphere, a charming main character who is being gradually revealed to us.

It made me ask: Did time change him, or was he always that way, and the events brought out his “true” self? It’s a story told in a polished style or, as one reviewer put it, with “a permanently arched eyebrow.” 

When I was a young, newly married woman, one of the more mature members in my book club presented this book to the group in 1992. To Dance with the White Dog is a story about the unfathomable bonds of marriage and the crushing grief of losing a spouse. Even better? It involves a dog 😊

Sam Peek’s adult children think he’s losing his mind or perhaps imagining the “white dog” to cope with the loss of his beloved wife, Cora. Even though I wept through most of this book, it remains one of my all-time favorites thirty years later. While the novel pushes us to consider serious matters such as death, aging, and grief, it also fills us with hope and gratitude.

Even though it breaks my heart, I reread it often. Because it is that beautiful, and because Terry Kay is that good. 

As the parent and sister of a person with disabilities, I look for authors who can handle this topic in a sensitive and loving way.

Ms. Brown does an amazing job as she weaves suspense into this depression era story. I fell in love with the characters, and this book encouraged me to keep looking for ways to include these special people into my own stories.

The plot: “Madelaine Hillyard is a world-famous heart surgeon at the top of her game. Her personal life is far less successful. A loving but overworked single mom, she is constantly at odds with her teenage daughter. At sixteen, Lina is confused, angry, and fast becoming a stranger to her mother—a rebel desperate to find the father who walked away before she was born.

Complicating matters for Madelaine are the vastly different DeMarco brothers: While priest Francis DeMarco is always ready to lend a helping hand, his brother, Angel, long ago took on the role of bad boy. Years earlier, Angel abandoned Madelaine—and fatherhood—to go in search of fame and fortune. His departure left Madelaine devastated, but now he reappears and seeks help from the very people he betrayed—as a patient in dire need.”

Though this is the story of the mother Madelaine, a surgeon, helping her ex-boyfriend as her… show more.

Edisto was the first coming-of-age novel I fell in love with as an adult reader and the book that showed me the tremendous literary potential of the genre. Padgett Powell endows his protagonist, twelve-year-old Simons, with what comes across as precociousness, but in fact reflects the depth of thinking that many young tweens and teens have. Simons wrestles with his narcissistic parents’ competing visions of his future—although neither bothers to ask him what he wants—while hanging out on the sultry island of Edisto off the coast of South Carolina with an enigmatic older acquaintance, Taurus, who offers him tastes of adult life and the kind of attention his parents are incapable of providing. Powell’s deft prose and realistic dialogue make it all fully believable, and at times riotously funny. Edisto is nothing short of brilliant.

This was the first fiction book I read after completing my Master’s degree (aka an intense diet of scientific research). I can still feel my heart opening up as I was in Lily’s heart and head, facing her abusive father in the only world she had ever known.

When she branches out and finds a place of beauty and love among three sisters who keep bees, she starts to understand the rhythms of love and I started to feel love again. I gradually picked up the clues I needed to rebuild a life with beauty.

This book took me into a world of unconditional acceptance, so wonderful I actually wept with a longing I didn’t even know I had. I hated leaving Lily behind, but I think I hold a bit of her in my heart.

The Moviegoer was the first novel I read which had little plot and a great deal of meaning. Basically, it’s about one man’s search for meaning in a world which values shallowness and consumerism above all else. It’s as relevant today as it was when written and the prose is amazing!

What’s so neat about this book is that it doesn’t just capture a light-hearted and moving glimpse into English academia; it provides glimpses into a man’s—an institution in himself—relationships with his wife, coworkers, and students.

I enjoyed the progression of time. Several generations of students interact with the aging, albeit the same, “Mr. Chips.”  There’s something neat about that.

This fine coming-of-age novel was originally published in two big red volumes. It's large and reads like an enormous European tapestry laid out in some cold castle museum, with vivid dyes and a thousand patterned intricacies to ponder. It was a literary sensation when it was published, a favorite of the young romantics of the WWI generation, and Mackenzie followed it up with several branching-off sequels. He writes with such vividry that the dusky London streets and country cottages in this book are fresh and living even now. This book affected a young F. Scott Fitzgerald so much that in the early drafts of Fitz's first novel, he actually copped the name of the protagonist of this book.

Finally, a campus novel with a female protagonist who’s also an undergraduate. Batuman does a wonderful job of immersing the reader in her main character’s point of view. And what a fascinating perspective she offers–I was so enthralled with her way of thinking and the amusing things she notices about the people and places around her!

The writing constantly surprised and engaged me while taking me along on the journey of Selin’s first year of college.