Here are 100 books that Sprinkled fans have personally recommended if you like
Sprinkled.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
From when I first got lost in a book—I think it was Herman Wouk’s Winds of War—I discovered I really loved stories which thrust me into their world. From favorites like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I read to my kids, to Peter Benchley’s Jaws, I loved getting lost in the snowy world of Narnia or out in the water in the small boat with Brody. When I read any new author, I notice how well they paint the scene and how skillfully they describe the what and where of their tale. Does the story capture the details, idiosyncrasies, and nuances of this place and time? If it does, I’m in.
I love listening to Evanovich’s hilarious tales of Stephanie Plum’s misadventures as a wannabe bail/bondsman. These books are my wife’s and my favorite distraction on long road trips. While her mysteries may be thin, her characters are so real and her stories so crazy, I didn’t miss the whodunit. I included her in this August list because she captures the seedy side of Trenton, New Jersey, with amazing clarity, even while laughing at the place.
I picture myself riding in one of her cars—which she destroys regularly—along with her friend, the former ho, LuLu, hair flowing in the stinky wind blowing off deserted warehouses, sleezy girl joints and questionable car repair shops. This is the first in a series that is now at 31.
Stephanie Plum is down on her luck. She's lost her job, her car's on the brink of repossession, and her apartment is fast becoming furniture-free.
Enter Cousin Vinnie, a low-life who runs a bail-bond company. If Stephanie can bring in vice cop turned outlaw Joe Morelli, she stands to pick up $10,000. But tracking down a cop wanted for murder isn't easy . . .
And when Benito Ramirez, a prize-fighter with more menace than mentality, wants to be her friend Stephanie soon knows what it's like to be pursued. Unfortunately the best person to protect her just happens to…
She sells books, eats well, and has a very large brain. Criminals fear her.
Meet Beatrice Valentine, a larger-than-life bookshop owner with a penchant for three things in abundance—delicious Italian food, vino, and murder. For decades, she has sold used and rare books from her stylish-but-cluttered domain on New York…
Born and raised in New York City, my plans to become an artist got sidetracked by an interest in psychology. While in school, I graduated college, majoring in Fine Arts and Psychology, combining my two interests. I continued my education as a Graphic Designer at The School of Visual Arts. I worked as a freelance graphic artist for a while before starting a career in the creative arts therapies. While I enjoy a dark, brooding, suspenseful mystery, sometimes I need a little humor to round out those dark edges. Despite some bad things happening in the world, most people do silly, goofy, and often stupid things and you have to laugh.
How can a story about white supremacists, lottery tickets, and turtles make you laugh? In Carl Hiaasen’s Lucky You, murder and mayhem are the least of its treasures. Hiaasen’s style is witty, wildly humorous and with a keen eye for the obvious. He has a way of inhabiting his stories with colorful, bombastic characters who linger long after you turn that last page. He sets most of his stories in southern Florida, which only adds to Hiaasen’s unique setting and style.
From the author of STRIP TEASE and STORMY WEATHER, a lighthearted crime novel set in Florida. Two white-trash reprobates win a lottery jackpot of $28 million but are forced to share this amount with a third party. When they decide that this is not acceptable they set out to find the other winner and void her claim by violent means.
Born and raised in New York City, my plans to become an artist got sidetracked by an interest in psychology. While in school, I graduated college, majoring in Fine Arts and Psychology, combining my two interests. I continued my education as a Graphic Designer at The School of Visual Arts. I worked as a freelance graphic artist for a while before starting a career in the creative arts therapies. While I enjoy a dark, brooding, suspenseful mystery, sometimes I need a little humor to round out those dark edges. Despite some bad things happening in the world, most people do silly, goofy, and often stupid things and you have to laugh.
Though David Handler’s The Cold Blue Blood plays out much like a traditional whodunit, it has a dash of East Coast humor. The Berger and Mitry Mysteries have been one of my favorites for years. Handler’s strong descriptive style, unique characters, and colorful book titles always had me searching for the next installment. Handler’s main character, Mitch Berger, a New York City film critic, plays the perfect fish out of water, now living on a wealthy private island called Big Sister. A dead body in his garden introduces him to his other partner in crime, Lieutenant Desiree Mitry. This odd couple is both charming and disarming as they sleuth through the snobs of Big Sister.
Mitch Berger, a top film critic with a major New York newspaper at a surprisingly young age, has become almost a recluse since his wife died one year ago. He spends his time secluded in his apartment or in the dark recesses of a screening room. Although he continues to dazzle moviegoers and the film elite with his criticisms, his editor and good friend is alarmed about him. As a scheme to pull him out of the doldrums of his grief, she gives him a non-film assignment - to do a color story on the wealthy and social homeowners on…
She sells books, eats well, and has a very large brain. Criminals fear her.
Meet Beatrice Valentine, a larger-than-life bookshop owner with a penchant for three things in abundance—delicious Italian food, vino, and murder. For decades, she has sold used and rare books from her stylish-but-cluttered domain on New York…
Born and raised in New York City, my plans to become an artist got sidetracked by an interest in psychology. While in school, I graduated college, majoring in Fine Arts and Psychology, combining my two interests. I continued my education as a Graphic Designer at The School of Visual Arts. I worked as a freelance graphic artist for a while before starting a career in the creative arts therapies. While I enjoy a dark, brooding, suspenseful mystery, sometimes I need a little humor to round out those dark edges. Despite some bad things happening in the world, most people do silly, goofy, and often stupid things and you have to laugh.
The first time I read David Rosenfelt’s Andy Carpenter series, I immediately thought that Groucho Marx had moved to North Jersey, gone into law, and adopted a rescue dog. Rosenfelt’s reluctant lawyer hero goes at his oddball cases with a collection of even odder associates. Dry, witty, and a little self-effacing, Rosenfelt’s style brings to life a cast of characters that made me reluctant to put his books down. I started the series with the third book, Bury the Lead, first but quickly caught up. The first book in the series is Open and Shut. Mystery and animal lovers will find a place in their heart and funny bone.
Defence attorney Andy Carpenter has been successfully avoiding taking on new cases until his sometime friend and newspaper owner, Vince Sanders, calls and asks him for a favour. Daniel Cummings, Vince's star reporter, is being used as the mouthpiece for a serial killer. He has been cooperating with the police but Vince wants to make sure both the newspaper and Daniel are protected. Andy thinks the case be a piece of cake...until Daniel is found unconscious in park next to the killer's latest victim. Daniel claims he intended to stop the murder but the police arrest him. Now, with the…
I have created art from an early age. Years later, my studies in civil engineering allowed me to combine my love for the arts with my belief in an orderly world. Meanwhile, reading and writing have always been my favorite pursuits. While collaborating as an editor with other authors, assisting them in their writing endeavors, in 2014, I wrote and published my first book. Sharing my writing on Instagram gave birth to the idea of my first poetry book, something like, published in 2018. Since then, two more poetry collections have been published: A TriAngle in 2019 and something like in reverse in 2020.
Women are misunderstood. I’ve heard it many times, so have you. Fewer things are more frustrating than voicing concerns and not truly being heard. Or trying to express yourself, but not finding the right words.
“HER” is collection of poems that has become an inspiration for many women and a guide for many men. Women are praising this book because EVERY woman can see a reflection of herself and her heart on these pages. Originally written from the perspective of a man trying to help other men get a clue, this short and simple read has become a go-to for…
A thing I love about detective stories is that, from the moment they were probably invented by Edgar Allen Poe in 1841, authors have been playing with the form. Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue begins with a display of Dupin’s ratiocinative powers, and detective stories do often involve a protagonist reasoning through clues and red herrings on the way toward the resolution of a central mystery. But the kinds of “clues” we use to make sense of (or make peace with) the world are varied, and the mysteries that obsess us are vast—as illustrated over and over again in this mutable genre.
In classical detective fiction, the story of the crime is like a puzzle, and piece by piece, clue by clue, we arrive at the big picture. Subdivision is, in some ways, a classic puzzle mystery (it even involves a puzzle!)—except it doesn’t start at a crime scene. It starts with a woman arriving at a guesthouse in the surreal and Kafkaesque Subdivision where she now lives. She can’t remember why she is there or really anything from her past. Unlike more classical detective fiction, she is not a guide; I followed her—tracking, assembling, interpreting—but when certain elements of the real (maybe) slid into focus, they did so mostly despite her. I couldn’t put it down, and notwithstanding its fairly cerebral tone, I cried at the end.
An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse's owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life.
Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a…
I had always wanted a grand adventure and I’ve always loved reading about epic journeys. When I was a teen, I read an article in National Geographic about walking the Appalachian Trail and thought, I need to do that. I grew up in an outdoorsy family and married a man who loved the outdoors even more. But we never got to an adventure until we were empty nesters. In our late fifties we decided to walk 1400 miles from the cold North Sea to the warm Mediterranean on the legendary long-distance trail the GR5. After finishing our epic journey, I needed to share my love of European walking with others.
Wanderers is not a memoir. Andrews, who is a professor of literature in the UK, presents ten chapters on ten famous women writers who also walked.
I found it interesting to learn how some of the women left town before dawn to walk so that they would not be seen. Society at that time felt it was not safe for a woman to walk by herself. I was amazed at some of the distances that they walked; for example, in the early 1800s Ellen Weeton walked 35 miles in a day.
I found the interconnection of walking to help writing and writing about walking fascinating. I will return to read this again and again.
Now in B-format paperback, this book describes ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter - who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England - to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. Offering a…
My love for strange women began with a love of the tomboy, growing up in the ‘80s and 90’s with characters like Pippi Longstocking and George from The Famous Five. They’re young women who broke the rules of decorum or gender presentation—and they just always seemed to be having a lot more fun. Or at least more interesting experiences. This love of rebels and unruly women has stuck with me, and I think our depiction of women like this has become deeper and more varied. I just love a character who’s a bit of an odd duck, is irrepressible or voracious, or just plain messy. Nice is boring—give me the chaos.
This book kicked off my obsession with stories about young women who are trying to make sense of all the versions of themselves they have inside and weighing up which one to present to the world at any given time. The protagonist, Ruth, is an American living in London who works at a department store, spritzing perfume during the day, watching all the people go past, and trying to understand how the other young women who work there seem so self-assured. This is not a plot-driven book so much as a character study of a character who doesn’t know who she is yet.
Kate Zambreno’s writing is absolutely gorgeous. She creates a distance between Ruth—the ‘green girl’—and the world, like she’s looking through a window and can see people inside talking but not understand what they’re saying. At the same time, I recognized myself in Ruth,…
With the fierce emotional and intellectual power of such classics as Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, Kate Zambreno's novel Green Girl is a provocative, sharply etched portrait of a young woman navigating the spectrum between anomie and epiphany. First published in 2011 in a small press edition, Green Girl was named one of the best books of the year by critics including Dennis Cooper and Roxane Gay. In Bookforum, James Greer called it "ambitious in a way few works of fiction are." This summer it is being…
My passion started as a personal quest in my twenties, struggling with my relationship with my own mother. When my daughter was born, I knew that I could not repeat the difficult dynamics between my mother and I. What started as a personal quest to understand the underlying dynamics between mothers and daughters quickly grew into a professional quest. Today, I have worked as a mother-daughter therapist with thousands of mothers and daughters of all ages and from different countries and cultures and have developed the Mother-Daughter Attachment® model that helps therapists and mothers and daughters uncover the hidden dynamics in their relationship and create a roadmap for change.
Patriarchy has silenced women for generations, and in my first book, I uncover how women have been taught to “play nice” and be “care-givers” rather than “care-receivers.” Uncovering women’s emotional reality, I expose the culture of female service and how no one is looking after mothers, not even mothers themselves. This book provides exercises to help women claim their voice, needs, and rights in all of their relationships.
"The Silent Female Scream" teaches "how to believe that as a woman you have the right to be heard, valued and respected, and to know that anything less is just not okay." Through case studies and discussion, the author exposes that women's sense of self-worth and entitlement to speak their needs, especially in relationships, is an area that feminism has ignored to its peril. By looking at the legacy of emotional silence that many women have inherited from long before grandmother's day, she warns that emotional silence damages the mother-daughter relationship, women's relationships with themselves and each other, and their…
We had money for a while when I was a kid in the Midwest and then, suddenly, we did not. I watched my world of opportunity change dramatically almost overnight, and my mother struggle to redefine herself as not only a mother but now also a breadwinner. It took time for me to understand that the questions I was asking then about gender and access to money weren’t unique to my life, or the lives of Midwestern white women; they got at some grand-scale problems that people had been writing about for a long time about gender and capitalism. Those are the works that helped me formulate my own memoir.
Writers are not generally supposed to publicly acknowledge books that track too closely to their own, but of the spate of autobiographical books by women about property ownership that came around at the same time as my book, Levy’s stood out for its intellectual honesty and consideration of the meaning of home. Haunting.
Fearless and essential - the highly anticipated final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography'
Following the international critical and commercial success of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. It resumes and expands Levy's pioneering examination of a female life lived in the storm of the present tense, asking essential questions about womanhood, modernity, creative identity and personal freedom. From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, Real Estate is a memoir and a manifesto…
