Here are 88 books that The Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl fans have personally recommended if you like
The Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl.
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I’ve always been fascinated by books that explore the slow, painful unraveling of the human psyche. In part, I think because it’s something so many more of us either fear or experience (at least to some degree) than anyone really wants to admit—but it’s also just such rich material for literary unpacking. I also love books with strong, angry female protagonists who fight back against oppression in all of its forms, so books about pissed-off madwomen are a natural go-to for me. Extra points if they teach me something I didn’t know before-which is almost always the case with historical novels in this genre.
I love all of Sarah Waters’ works, but Fingersmith ranks among my most obsessively adored books of all time. I find it a near-perfect interweaving of meticulously researched historical fiction—penned with Dickensian flair and grace—and compulsively page-turning thriller, marked by brilliant and utterly unforeseeable plot twists that will leave you slack-jawed.
It somehow manages to be wickedly funny, poignantly tragic, powerfully feminist, and gratifyingly steamy all at once. I also loved the Korean film adaptation of it, The Handmaiden, which not only embraces Fingersmith’s anti-patriarchal themes but ingeniously weaves anti-colonialist elements into the by setting it in Japan-occupied Korea in the 1930s.
“Oliver Twist with a twist…Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story.”—The New York Times Book Review
Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.
One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man,…
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…
I write because I want to tell stories–and I also want to share great stories with others. An avid reader and writer of fantasy and speculative fiction, I have a love of the fantastic, the remarkable and the supernatural, which I have managed to sustain and develop alongside a successful working life in government and social administration. If you want to know about power–and what you need to wield it and control it, just give me a call. Great fantasy should tell universal truths, and sometimes, more difficult messages can be told more effectively using a supernatural metaphor. Telling those stories is what I do.
I first read Virginia Woolf’s book when I was in my late teens—and I was absolutely captivated by the idea of this incredible person who lives for hundreds of years, changes their gender, and gets to meet some of the most remarkable people in history. There is no explanation given as to why all this happens—and that really doesn’t matter; it just does, simply and beautifully.
It is a very playful book, which is one of the reasons I have always loved it so much. However, it is also an exceptional work of fantasy, doing what I believe a fantasy writer is best placed to do—shining a light on the everyday world and showing us hidden truths.
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'The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.'
Written for her lover Vita Sackville-West, 'Orlando' is Woolf's playfully subversive take on a biography, here tracing the fantastical life of Orlando. As the novel spans centuries and continents, gender and identity, we follow Orlando's adventures in love - from being a lord in the Elizabethan court to a lady in 1920s London.
I’m a historical fiction author (one novel published by Penguin, plus several Sherlock Holmes stories with Belanger Books) – and I read it avidly too, although many of the Victorian novels I love were considered frighteningly modern in their day. I’m fascinated by the 19th century as both reader and writer because of the incredible changes (social and technological) it saw, and the resulting dramas and tensions that emerged. Literacy and literary culture exploded during Victoria’s reign, but it was also a time of astonishing contrast: poverty versus huge wealth, outward virtue versus secret vice, prejudice and injustice (especially regarding women’s rights) versus struggles for social progress… sound familiar?
Angela Carter is famous for her sumptuous language, structural playfulness, genre-bending, and seductive, logic-defying plots – and if you like gorgeous lyricism, unforgettable characters, and magical realism (emphasis on the magical), you’ll fall in love with Nights at the Circus. In 1899, journalist Jack Walser meets six-foot-two circus aerialist Fevvers, “the Cockney Venus”. Raised in a brothel and a graduate of freak shows, she’s now a star of the Victorian stage – but are her wings real, as she claims? Walser becomes part of the circus in body and spirit, as, disguised as a clown, he follows Fevvers to St Petersburg and into the wilds of Siberia, where Fevvers must draw on all her cunning and strength to survive – let alone save Walser, too.
Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction
From the master of the literary supernatural and author of The Bloody Chamber, her acclaimed novel about the exploits of a circus performer who is part-woman, part-swan
Sophi Fevvers-the toast of Europe's capitals, courted by the Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse-Lautrec-is an aerialiste extraordinaire, star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover Fevvers's true identity: Is she part swan or all fake? Dazzled by his love for Fevvers, and desperate for the scoop of…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
This eclectic soiree of books is pretty symbolic of my reading taste – as long as it’s extraordinary, or larger than real life, I’m there for it. I moved to London when I was 22, to undertake my Masters at Shakespeare’s Globe, and after living in a small village, followed by a small university town, it really did feel like arriving at the centre of the universe. I love books that capture the way the spirit of London – its strange, anarchic, punkish, dangerous, and historic forms – can shape a woman into the person she is meant to be. That was what I wanted to capture with The Hourglass Factory’s heroine Frankie George.
The three main Pankhurst players in the Suffragette movement – Emmeline and two of her children, Christabel and Sylvia – all wrote accounts of the era. But Sylvia’s is arguably the most comprehensive and objective. The book starts out as a memoir of the Pankhurst family’s early life – their humble beginnings, their journey to political activism – and Pankhurst does not shy away from the gory details of militant suffragette activity. But she is also not afraid to chronicle divisions in the movement, both among the different factions of the WSPU, and between the WSPU and the Labour party, who eventually chose to support working men’s rights above those of women. Sylvia Pankhurst has emerged from the period as the most egalitarian of its heroines, after leaving the main WSPU branch to focus on the cause of working-class women. It’s a tome, but a worthy read.
“The Suffragette Movement - An Intimate Account Of Persons And Ideals” is a 1931 work by E. Sylvia Pankhurst. In this volume, Pankhurst aims to describe the events and experiences of the movement, as well as the characters and intentions of those involved. In this fascinating volume, Pankhurst shows the strife, suffering, a hope behind the pageantry, the rhetoric, and the turbulence of the time. Highly recommended for those with an interest in the British suffragette movement and worthy of a place on any every bookshelf. Contents include: “Richard Marsden Pankhurst”, “The Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement”, “Emmeline Goulden”,…
In my childhood in the 1960s, girls still read novels like Jane Eyre and Black Beauty, and one of my grandmothers was a Victorian herself, born in Scotland in the 1880s, so my connection to that time feels organic. Even today, a new Victorian novel is my idea of vacation reading. Victorian writers looked deeply into the hearts of their imagined characters, leaving us with a vivid record of a world that is now gone. These novels help us understand the past with all its flaws and problems, giving us a way to think about how far we have come, perhaps, even, how much farther we need to go.
Gissing is forgotten now because he was a realist working in romantic times. Fiction writers were the rock stars of Victorian England. New Grub Street explores the other side of the coin: the vast number of struggling writers who hankered after the fame and fortune that was never to be theirs. At the heart of the story are two friends, the pragmatic materialist Jasper Milvain and the talented but idealistic Edward Reardon. The modest success of one novel prompts Readon to marry, saddling him with an overwhelming financial burden that crushes his talent. Milvain values money over everything else in life at a time when everything else in life depends on money. I found Gissing’s hard-boiled novel touching because, without flinching, he shows the inner conflicts of people trapped by circumstance.
'Because one book had a sort of success he imagined his struggles were over.'
Scholarly, anxious Edwin Reardon had achieved a precarious career as the writer of serious fiction. On the strength of critical acclaim for his fourth novel, he has married the refined Amy Yule. But the brilliant future Amy expected has evaded her husband. The catastrophe of the Reardon's failing marriage is set among the rising and falling fortunes of novelists, journalists, and scholars who labour 'in the valley of the shadow of books'.
George Gissing's New Grub Street was written at breakneck speed in the autumn of…
I am less interested in what happens than in how and why—to me, that’s where the real suspense is. As a writer, I’m always bickering with traditional plot structures, which I love for their comfort and familiarity and then turn against when a story becomes too obedient to them. As a reader…well, sometimes I flip to the end to see where we’re going so I can slow down and enjoy the journey more. Anytime we think we know what’s going to happen is an opportunity for suspense, and challenges and rebellions to those familiar story arcs can be twists in their own right.
I read this book at the recommendation of a friend in her 80s, and its soft, sure steps delivered me somewhere moving, complex, and unusual. It opens with a newspaper article that has nothing to do with the start of the story and which I’d forgotten about by the end, not that it would matter if I hadn’t.
Another author might have given the same subjects an operatic treatment, but I loved how quietly it spoke. I still think about Jean, years after reading it, and wonder what she found in life after the story ended.
'A very fine book... It's witty and sharp and reads like something by Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner, without ever feeling like a pastiche' David Nicholls
'Perfect' India Knight
'Beautiful' Jessie Burton
'Wonderful' Richard Osman
'Miraculous' Tracy Chevalier
'A wonderful novel. I loved it' Nina Stibbe
'Effortless to read, but every sentence lingers in the mind' Lissa Evans
'This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. I honestly don't want you to be without it' Lucy Mangan
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I am a writer who will never give you a sad ending! I love books that reflect on life (the good and the bad) but that look for the positive in people. My experience has taught me that there is so much good to find—and as I explore in my debut novel, The Keeper of Stories, everyone has a story to tell. My first novel was published when I was 60, so I am also a believer that you should never underestimate anyone. And I love to see that reflected in books.
Of course I was always going to pick one of my daughter’s novels! Two women of very different ages come together to save their local Lido. This is a book about community and the power of friendship. And if you like swimming it is definitely the book for you!
'Feel-good and uplifting, this charming novel is full of heart' LUCY DIAMOND
'Tender, thought-provoking and uplifting' DAILY MAIL
Meet Rosemary, 86, and Kate, 26: dreamers, campaigners, outdoor swimmers...
Rosemary has lived in Brixton all her life, but everything she knows is changing. Only the local lido, where she swims every day, remains a constant reminder of the past and her beloved husband George.
Kate has just moved and feels adrift in a city that is too big for her. She's on the bottom rung of her career as a local journalist, and is determined…
Social history has always been my passion: unless you know how people thought, felt and lived, even down to how they dressed and ate, it is often impossible to understand why they acted as they did. And no period is as fascinating to me as the inter-war years; after WW1, the greatest conflict the world had ever seen, the upcoming generations determined to break barriers, discard the last vestiges of what they saw as hidebound custom, to invent new, freer ways of writing, painting, dancing - and to have fun. And for most of this post-war generation, there was nowhere like Paris.
This novel perfectly captures the frenetic pleasure-seeking ethos of the youth of the English upper classes after the horrors of WW1- unsurpsingly, as it is written by one of them.
Evelyn Waugh was one of the Bright Young People, as they became known, who tore round London in sports cars, snatching at policemen’s helmets for the treasure hunts they loved.
Vile Bodies is both a celebration of the hedonism of the young and a warning to those who believe that their license to indulge is infinite, unquestionable and without consequence. A whole host of wonderful characters are introduced throughout Waugh's thought-provoking and satirical story, which follows protagonist Adam from the perils and pitfalls of being a gossip columnist to the trials and tribulations in attempting to secure his marriage to Nine Blount. Roll on an eccentric (verging on senile) potential father-in-law, parties as 10 Downing Street, high times at Shepheard's hotel, where the wine is always flowing (until your bill…
There are so many billionaire romances out there based in America, but as a Brit, there’s nothing quite like reading a contemporary romance based in London. The capital city of Great Britain, there are a great number of reasons why books here are simply to die for. The history, the culture, the mixture of communities, and the potential for passion – in my opinion, there’s no better place to escape to in a book. Even better if there are delicious characters to lose yourself with…
Only one night with a handsome stranger in London? This has been my dream forever, and once I read this blurb, I immediately one clicked.
Sandi Lynn made me feel like I was literally living this, and I found it almost impossible to drag my eyes away. I wanted this book to continue forever, and if you haven't read it already, you need to.
Have sex with a stranger in a foreign country. It was on my list. It was something I’d never done before and I wasn’t sure if I could go through with it. But I did. Don’t tell him anything about yourself. No names. No personal information. Nothing. It’s all about the thrill. The mystery man. Keep him a stranger. That one night was the best night of my entire life. He was sexy, intense, and made me feel things I had never felt before. The next morning, the thrill was over and he was gone before I woke up. What…
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
Back in the dark ages, before the internet and cell phones, the most common form of off-duty soldiers’ entertainment was reading. I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on, but I was always most excited to read fantasy and science fiction. If a book has a wild new world, magic, or tech, I’m in and usually can’t get enough. I remain a cross-genre reader to this day, but fantasy and science fiction always feel like home. Bonus points for dragons.
Listed as a ‘gas lamp’ fantasy, and me being a pre-Victorian/Victorian era London fan, I had to grab this one. It had a fresh twist on the mad scientist’s experiment went wrong, creating a superhero and a supervillain. I found that exciting. I loved how the main character (the hero) struggled to learn his abilities and limitations, all the while not knowing who the villain was or what he was up to. I enjoyed this master class on how to put your main character through the wringer. And the twist ending surprised me. Great stuff.
In this heroic gaslamp fantasy, superhuman abilities bring an adventurous new dimension to 1820 London, where an outlaw speedster and a master of illusion do battle to decide who will own the city.
Think being a superhero is hard? Try being the first one.
Will’s life is a proper muddle—and all because he was “accidentally” inflicted with the ability to run faster and leap higher than any human ever. One minute he’s a blacksmith’s apprentice trying to save his master from debtor’s prison. The next he’s accused of murder and hunted as a black-hearted highwayman.
