Books like The Brontes — picked by fans

I first read this many years ago and it has stayed with me. Every so often, I return to it in order to immerse myself in its wonderful prose and insights. It combines travelogue with biography, detective work with a probing inner exploration and is both an account of a physical journey and a remap of the writer’s imagination. He begins with his homage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey and describes his own trek over the Cevennes. He starts out with the idea that he will be a poet and finishes his walk having been led "far away into the undiscovered land of other’s men and women’s lives. It led towards biography."

It is the turning point of his life and for the remainder of the book – as he hunts down his subjects which include Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Gerard de Nerval, and Gautier – he goes… show more.

I fell in love with this author’s exploration into the hypothesis of drug-induced time travel written by one of our great English authors, skillfully weaving psychology with science and historical fiction. In it, Dick Young is persuaded by a friend to try a new drug. Dick likes where it takes him, and each time takes more and more. A classic case of addition but the story awakened in me a passion for asking what if… that later turned into a greater passion for the unexplained and paranormal in all its forms, in turn leading me to question whether re-incarnation, deja-vu, ghostly visitations or time travel were possible, and if so, how.

This is a novel all about second chances.

I read it for the first time in a Jane Austen class I took in college, because it gave me an excuse to read all her novels. I fell immediately in love with this one.

We all know, in real life, second chances are not a given. This novel so heartbreakingly and beautifully describes what comes after “the end” and a way that ending is able to be changed as the two central characters have grown older and wiser, and then learn more about one another over the course of its pages.

I love the yearning in this novel—it is off the charts! I carry the hope in this novel with me. And the Roger Michell film adaptation is divine!

Most romance readers know that this story is about a run-down villa in Tuscany and a heartbroken heroine (Frances Mayes) struggling to build a life after her divorce. But read the book for the beautiful descriptions of the countryside, the delicious food and wine, and the gorgeous accounts of village life—the markets, the frescos, the fading sunlight!

This memoir is not just a restoration journey; it’s a book about finding yourself. 

Talk about feisty women who advance against tremendous odds! Despite the stultifyingly constrained life of “almost-poor” women in early Victorian England, out in the moor country, the three Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) slip around the rules, their father, and manage their wayward but beloved brother—all while being determined to become writers—and solve the occasional murder that happens in their neighborhood. Great period details and fascinating information about these three remarkable sisters, along with a great mystery read. This is the first book in the series.

Taken together, the four novels in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet form a sprawling, semi-fictional account of corruption and brutality within the notorious West Yorkshire Police force. Each instalment has a different protagonist, including both police officers and civilians, with the first, 1974, centred around an ambitious junior reporter who, while investigating a series of child murders, stumbles upon a shocking conspiracy involving the police and a local business magnate. Written in a terse, noir-infused style that brilliantly conjures up both its period setting and location, 1974 is one of the darkest and most unnerving crime novels ever written – one in which hope is an illusion and the ethos of the bad guys is ably summed up by the unforgettable line: “This is the North. We do what we want!”

When Peter Robinson passed away in 2022, he had written 28 novels in the Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks series.

Robinson needs no introduction here, but I have included him on this list because he sets these novels in a fictional town in the Yorkshire Dales, close to where I grew up, and also because he was very encouraging to me personally when I wrote my first Joe Romano novel.

Whereas the books are very much mainstream crime novels, they also have a literary quality to them. He manages to achieve a fine balance between genre fiction and a more literary style. You often forget that you’re reading crime at all.

The series was also made into TV series (DCI Banks) starring Stephen Tompkinson, which ran for five series, and really captures the essence of the books.

My copy of this book is battered, dog-eared, and creased from the sheer number of times I’ve read and re-read it. It’s an absolutely glorious family saga, recounted by Ruby who narrates her own conception in the first chapter and takes us back through generations weaving together all the different stories that lead up to the events of her own life. It’s brilliantly funny and heartbreaking and it skewers the oddities and dysfunction of family relationships so perfectly. Characters wrestle with their grief, they deny it and suppress it and it rears up to overwhelm them but ultimately they find their way through. I’m with them every step of the way, unable to put the book down whenever I pick it up again…and again! 

As a writer I look to Crombie’s Constable Duncan Kincaid/Sergeant Gemma James series for guidance on how to have your characters grow professionally and personally, to age and experience the kind of changes people go through in real life. I recommend book one of the nineteen in the series, A Share in Death, because it sets up the relationship between the two detectives.

This is a title from Reginald Hill’s long-running and beloved Dalziel and Pascoe detective series. It was the first one I read—and still my favourite, which I re-read every so often.

The story is set in the North Yorkshire Moors, which are brought vividly to life not only by the descriptions of the deep valleys—the famous dales—that are unique to the area, but also by Hill’s vivid depiction of the Yorkshire people. He lived and worked in the area himself, and he really captures the dialect, manners, and attitudes of the locals, often with lots of dry wit and humour.

I loved feeling like I was really transported there, sitting in the pubs, getting to know the locals and their history and approach to life. I also love the way the setting is both beautiful and sinister, with the idyllic dales concealing a cold case murder and dark secrets from… show more.