Here are 72 books that The 13-Story Treehouse fans have personally recommended if you like
The 13-Story Treehouse.
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As an author who has narrated my own audiobooks, I’ve realized that it is an art and a joy to perform books aloud. I wanted to offer this list to inspire more people to read aloud to one another. It’s one of the most bonding experiences I’ve had with my husband and children.
Performing my Orchid audiobooks has been such a rewarding experience. I loved revisiting my characters and having one final time to enjoy my stories from beginning to end. The narration process allowed me to experience my books fresh, from a reader’s point of view. The good news is that everyone can experience this joy. Pick your favorite book and share it out loud!
This is the first book my husband and I read aloud to each other.
It’s a complete joy to immerse into a story with your loved one. Something about acting out the scenes for another person prolongs the enjoyment of the tale.
The rabbits and the threat to their warren felt incredibly real. We passed time during long drives and meals to keep binging this classic book. We loved the characters so much that we named our first cat after the clever hero rabbit, Hazel.
Although the book was published in 1972, the message about human development’s impact on wildlife is still relevant today.
One of the best-loved children's classics of all time, this is the complete, original story of Watership Down.
Something terrible is about to happen to the warren - Fiver feels sure of it. And Fiver's sixth sense is never wrong, according to his brother Hazel. They had to leave immediately, and they had to persuade the other rabbits to join them.
And so begins a long and perilous journey of a small band of rabbits in search of a safe home. Fiver's vision finally leads them to Watership Down, but here they face their most difficult challenge of all .…
4.5 billion years ago, Earth was forming - but nothing could have survived there…
From Cells to Ourselves is the incredible story of how life on earth started and how it gradually evolved from the first simple cells to the abundance of life around us today. Walk with dinosaurs, analyse…
After reading The Princess Bride, I fell in love with William Goldman’s style of narration, with his frequent interjections, clarifications, and asides. The feel I got from the author speaking directly to me transformed simple third-person narration into engaging storytelling. From then on, I sought out books using this style and have built a small library in all genres deploying this unique voice. I’ve found it most common (and most effectively deployed) in fantasy, but there are also numerous examples elsewhere in the literary world.
One of the most popular children’s book series of the twentieth century, all of the books in the series feature the author speaking directly to the reader, detailing past events, reminding the reader of personality traits of the characters, and providing the reader with background details about the world the reader finds themselves in.
More so than the other books on the list, it’s clear the voice is that of C.S. Lewis though, rather than a seemingly separate narrator.
Don’t miss one of America’s top 100 most-loved novels, selected by PBS’s The Great American Read.
Experience all seven tales of C. S. Lewis's classic fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, in one impressive paperback volume!
Epic battles between good and evil, fantastic creatures, betrayals, heroic deeds, and friendships won and lost all come together in this unforgettable world, which has been enchanting readers of all ages for over sixty years.
This edition presents the seven books—The Magician's Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The…
I'm an author from New Zealand, who writes fiction and non-fiction for adults, but I'm also an accidental children's book writer. Accidental? I never thought I would write books for children, but the then 10-year-old in our family demanded a children's book, and the popular Elastic Island Adventures series was born. I always remember how much joy I got from discovering books as a child, so I'm interested in books that are fun for children but encourage creativity and literacy. I love when books are so enjoyable that children don't realize how much they are learning, where they can enjoy exploring the 'theater of the mind'.
The Just series is by a New Zealand author and is perfect for slightly older children, 11 to 14 years.Just Keep Going is an engaging read with delightful characters and wonderful messages about the environment and the importance of friends and family, with a main character who proves to be resourceful, caring, and brave. It's the perfect blend of real life and fantasy, encouraging the theater of the mind to get children positively thinking about many issues.
Becky always loved visiting her dad in New Zealand until she returns during the pandemic.
Now he’s got a baby with her new stepmum and everything has changed. Worse still, her windsurfer hasn’t arrived yet, so there’s nothing for her to do but wait for Mum who is stuck overseas.
Then Becky finds a strange stone at Whale Bay and her luck changes. She makes new friends, joins an environmental group, borrows a windsurfer, and has several close encounters with a bottlenose dolphin who simply won’t leave her alone.
But what is wrong with the dolphin? Is it trying to…
The summer holidays have finally arrived and Scout can’t wait for her adventure in the big rig with Dad. They’re on a mission to deliver donations of dog food to animal rescue shelters right across the state. There’ll be dad-jokes, rock-collecting, and a brilliant plan that will make sure everyone’s…
I'm an author from New Zealand, who writes fiction and non-fiction for adults, but I'm also an accidental children's book writer. Accidental? I never thought I would write books for children, but the then 10-year-old in our family demanded a children's book, and the popular Elastic Island Adventures series was born. I always remember how much joy I got from discovering books as a child, so I'm interested in books that are fun for children but encourage creativity and literacy. I love when books are so enjoyable that children don't realize how much they are learning, where they can enjoy exploring the 'theater of the mind'.
There is everything to love about this novel! The King's Nightingale has it all – a feisty young heroine attempting to overcome terrible danger and injustice, sultans and sumptuous palaces, and a story about standing up against oppression, learning loyalty, and finding love. The story opens with Elowen and her younger brother being brutally seized by pirates from their peaceful village and suffering a terrible voyage that many others don't survive. Sold to a desert ruler who admires her beautiful singing voice, Elowen is given the title of the King's Nightingale. But she is determined to escape and rescue her brother and return home… Historical and inventive, this novel transports you to another world!
An epic fantasy by acclaimed author Sherryl Jordan, set in a land of sultans and kings, sumptuous palaces ... and slave markets. When Elowen and her brother are seized by pirates and sold, separately, in the slave market of a distant land, Elowen's enduring resolve is to escape, rescue her brother and return home.
Sold to a desert ruler who admires her sublime voice, Elowen is given the title of the King's Nightingale. Honoured by the king, and loved by his scribe, Elowen lives a life of luxury, until she makes a fateful mistake and finds herself sold to a…
I am a Minnesota writer of cozy mysteries and contemporary fiction. I love the magical and care deeply about nature, the environment, and what is happening due to climate change. My novel was a chance to combine both interests. I wrote the first draft of Up There during the pandemic. While we were locked down, I spent time with a character who could fly. But while she was free, I discovered she was still lost. I spent so much of that year walking in the woods—thinking about how our world is changing, how confusing it is, and how we all are a little lost in these times.
I am a sucker for characters who find themselves through books.
In this novel, a girl enters a contest to meet her favorite author and win the only copy of his latest book. But first, she has to go to a mysterious island and compete with a band of ruthless opponents. I was never quite sure of anyone in this book, but that is a good thing when you are going after your greatest wish. It keeps you on your toes.
This is not a story of “be careful what you wish for”; it is a “keep wishing” story.
Years ago, a reclusive mega-bestselling children’s author quit writing under mysterious circumstances. Suddenly he resurfaces with a brand-new book and a one-of-a-kind competition, offering a prize that will change the winner’s life in this absorbing and whimsical novel.
“Clever, dark, and hopeful . . . a love letter to reading and the power that childhood stories have over us long after we’ve grown up.”—V. E. Schwab, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Make a wish. . . .
Lucy Hart knows better than anyone what it’s like to grow up without parents who…
I’ve always adored stories of courageous, sometimes outrageous women who forge aheadinto the unknown, survive in strange lands in troubled times, pursue their career dreams. Like my favourite picks, I’ve relished my own adventures in distant countries (Libya, Czechia, Kyrgystan, Mongolia…), while always earning my crust from writing. From motivational research in Dublin and London, I switched to financial journalism in Holland, where I met and was inspired by ground-breaking journalist Nel Slis whose story I’ve told in my book Hellcat of the Hague. Now I’m settled in London to concentrate on my novels and short stories and be near my family, I hope you love these books too.
Award-winning novelist Molteno takes us on a mesmerising journey of discovery, tracing the origins of her fictional worlds. From the mountains of Tajikistan to remote parts of Africa, in small English towns or huge Indian literary festivals, she engages with people she meets and is inspired by them. Through these vignettes she threads reflections on the creative process—why we write, and what fiction does for us. Through Marion’s clear and involving writing, we encounter not one but several truly remarkable women, as she weaves the emergence of her writing life into her own much-travelled and absorbing story.
Award-winning author Marion Molteno takes us on a magical journey of discovery into the life of a writer and her readers.
From book events in small English towns to huge literary festivals in India and Pakistan, from the mountains of Tajikistan to remote parts of Africa, she traces the roots of the fictional worlds she has so brilliantly created in her novels.
Weaving through these vignettes are reflections on the creative process, her own and anyone's - her own journey as a writer, what fiction does for us, and the vital relationship between writers and readers.
With an ability to…
Floretta- the story of an old woman who discovers life beautifully anew thru the helping hands of a child. The chakra colors of dawn and twilight are woven through the pages as the cycle of life is magically composed. The subject of “heaven,” has the potential to open discussions with…
I’ve gone to France often during my life. I always buy books that look interesting while I’m there, mainly to keep my French in good shape. I tend to pick authors and subjects which catch my eye. Some get discarded, but most give a fascinating and often very different perspective on life than I find in English novels and essays.
This is an excellent series of essays on the small things in life which please the author. Some are more obvious than others, but all are described stylishly and with typical French humour and elegance. I confess that after reading it, I did my own—inevitably inferior—version. But it was an enjoyment just going through the process.
An enchanting celebration of life's small pleasures, this little book captures the French imagination and art of living a good life.
Each chapter features a small pleasure that is both uniquely Gallic and universal. From the smell of apples maturing in a cellar to the gentle whir of a bicycle dynamo at dusk to turning the pages of a newspaper over breakfast, to the joy of a snowstorm inside a paperweight . . .
Recounted with a lively, innocent curiosity about the little things that make life worthwhile, this is an unforgettable, absorbing read to be savoured at length by…
I have been moved by women’s stories that are buried in time (but not quite gone!) since I was a young girl. As a college student and now professor (I teach writing and gender studies), much of my work is focused on telling hidden stories for the first time and stories where the record needs correcting. This is probably to do with my childhood; I am the oldest daughter in a loving but difficult Irish-Catholic family where women were often shamed for many reasons. When I was 15, I read Sylvia Plath for the first time and knew—there was more to this story, and I meant to find it out.
Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes’s lovers in the 1970s, at the height of Sylvia Plath’s early fame. I arrived at her memoir as research for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, but I stayed because Tennant’s writing is so witty and clever, full of riotous anecdotes of her time publishing chic literary magazines in 1970s London (she tries to steal, and sell, a family snapshot of Princess Margaret, nude on a French beach, for seed money, which ends in hilarious disaster).
Tennant never descends into self-pity or high drama in describing the dark and mysterious Hughes, who believes a random fox on the road is his dead wife returning to him and tries to convince Tennant that frozen salmon at a third-rate London restaurant is fresh and delivering life force to him. Instead, she sneaks in the violence done to her by Hughes in moments drenched in myth…
Burnt Diaries is Emma Tennant's third volume of memoirs, set mostly during the 1970s, in which she lays bare the experience of her affair with Ted Hughes while she was editor of the avant-garde literary magazine, Bananas. Tennant's insights are engaging and honest - she offers perceptions of the writers that contributed to her magazine - from Angela Carter who was commissioned to write The Company of Wolves for it, to JG Ballard who was supportive of the magazine from its inception and wrote a story for each issue. Running a new literary magazine brought Tennant into contact with a…
I have always tried to find books that explain and explore my life stage. When I was a young mother of little babies, I read many books about early motherhood. When I was studying and travelling and working as a waitress, those topics were represented in my reading too. Now that I’m a woman writer in midlife, with growing children and an art practice, I’m keen to read books by and about women writers who evoke the joys and struggles of this period: aging, the tensions between freedom and responsibility, marriage and separation, ambition and desire.
This book is a bible for women in midlife. One of Levy’s ‘living memoirs’, it captures the author’s experience of leaving her marriage at fifty and remaking her life as a writer.
The pose is beautiful: spare and elegant. Importantly, the book explores how it is possible to create a life focused on artistic pursuit, children, and friendship, as opposed to romantic partnership, material wealth, and conservative notions of stability.
I reread it every year to remind myself of what is possible.
A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY WINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020
Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography'.
'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer _________________________________
'Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don't want to hold it together . . .'
The final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography', Real…
It’s Anny’s first day of middle school and, after years of being homeschooled, her first day of public school ever. In art, Larissa asks what kind of ESP is her favorite: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, or telekinesis? Tracy asks how she identifies: gay, straight, bi, asexual, pan, trans, or confused?
In the natural course as a young man, I became a husband and a father. I have four children and eleven grandchildren. Fatherhood has been the most difficult yet rewarding job of my life. You never stop being a parent. So, it was inevitable that this would become a subject of my writing. I have tried to be a compassionate caregiver and a positive role model to my children; you’ll have to ask them if I’ve succeeded. In my novel, I try to depict two fathers (and their two sons) as good yet flawed men, doing their best and finding their way. Just as all fathers do.
I didn’t think I could appreciate this memoir of a son searching for his imprisoned father in Gaddafi’s Libya until, suddenly, I did. This book showed me that the bonds between all fathers and their sons transcend things like nationality and religion. It is part of the core of what it means to be human.
I knew from the very first pages that the author would never again see his father, even as he tirelessly spends most of his adult life trying to. By extension, I understood that as much as we want to, we can never really know our fathers.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES' TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2016
The Return is at once a universal and an intensely personal tale. It is an exquisite meditation on how history and politics can bear down on an individual life. And yet Hisham Matar's memoir isn't just about the burden of the past, but the consolation of love, literature and art. It is the story of what…
