Here are 100 books that The Complete Novels of Jane Austen fans have personally recommended if you like
The Complete Novels of Jane Austen.
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I love Jane Austen’s novels. I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 14, but it’s far too long ago to remember when I first read the others, and I’ve now read them all many times. I’ve also always been a singer, and I learned the piano when I was young, so I immediately noticed the music in the novels. I started writing about it seriously in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that her music collection was still around and started making concert programs out of it. The new book brings all these things together.
This book tells us more about what Jane Austen looked like in real life than any drawing does. I love how Hilary Davidson delves into every possible piece of evidence for what she wore and provides illustrations from contemporary drawings and actual bits of clothing that survive.
Some of them actually belonged to Austen–like her turquoise ring and topaz cross, her lace shawl, and her brown silk pelisse. How amazing is it to see these items that Austen herself wore and to see the evidence that she was over 5 foot 6 inches tall!
Hilary Davidson delves into the clothing of one of the world's great authors, providing unique and intimate insight into her everyday life and material world
What did Jane Austen wear?
Acclaimed dress historian and Austen expert Hilary Davidson reveals, for the first time, the wardrobe of one of the world's most celebrated authors. Despite her acknowledged brilliance on the page, Jane Austen has all too often been accused of dowdiness in her appearance. Drawing on Austen's 161 known letters, as well as her own surviving garments and accessories, this book assembles examples of the variety of clothes she would have…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I love Jane Austen’s novels. I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 14, but it’s far too long ago to remember when I first read the others, and I’ve now read them all many times. I’ve also always been a singer, and I learned the piano when I was young, so I immediately noticed the music in the novels. I started writing about it seriously in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that her music collection was still around and started making concert programs out of it. The new book brings all these things together.
There are more comprehensive biographies of Jane Austen, but I love this one, which charts the relationship between Jane and her favorite brother, Henry. He was a banker for a while but also a soldier and became an Anglican minister.
E.J. Clery has done tons of research but she also writes beautifully and brings it all together into a moving and fascinating story that shows a new side of Jane Austen. I discovered that Jane didn’t just stay home writing and embroidering but often went to London and stayed with her brother and his wife (their cousin Eliza). They went to the theatre together, they had parties, and she met French aristocrats who’d escaped from the Revolution.
When it was announced that Jane Austen would appear on the new GBP10 note in 2017, few were aware that a GBP10 Austen banknote already existed - issued by her favourite brother. Handsome, clever and enterprising, Henry Austen founded a bank business and charmed his way into the top rank of aristocratic society before going spectacularly bust in the financial crash of 1816. He left an enduring legacy, however, for it was Henry who supported Jane's dream of becoming a published author.Literary critic and cultural historian E. J. Clery presents a radically new vision of the much-loved novelist, revealing how…
I love Jane Austen’s novels. I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 14, but it’s far too long ago to remember when I first read the others, and I’ve now read them all many times. I’ve also always been a singer, and I learned the piano when I was young, so I immediately noticed the music in the novels. I started writing about it seriously in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that her music collection was still around and started making concert programs out of it. The new book brings all these things together.
Kathryn Sutherland is a professor at Oxford, but that doesn’t mean her writing is dry and dusty. I find her one of the best guides for why Jane Austen is such an enduring success. She’s written a few books about Austen.
I chose this one because it explains where Austen fits in cultural history: what books she read and how she has influenced writers, dramatists, filmmakers, and everyone else ever since. It also tells the story of how her novels came into being, physically–as manuscripts and as printed books.
Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen's Textual Lives. offers a new way of approaching and reading a very familiar author. One is a history of the transmission and transformation of Jane Austen through manuscripts, critical editions, biographies, and adaptations; a second provides a conspectus of the development of English Studies as a discipline in which the original and primary place of textual criticism is recovered; and a third reviews the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the twentieth century. Jane Austen can be discovered in all three. Since her rise to celebrity status…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I love Jane Austen’s novels. I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 14, but it’s far too long ago to remember when I first read the others, and I’ve now read them all many times. I’ve also always been a singer, and I learned the piano when I was young, so I immediately noticed the music in the novels. I started writing about it seriously in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that her music collection was still around and started making concert programs out of it. The new book brings all these things together.
John Wiltshire brings a perspective to Jane Austen’s novels that is old and new. I am in awe of how he can take a passage from one of her novels and dive deeply into it, finding worlds of meaning in the familiar text. He writes beautifully and eloquently about these hidden depths.
One of the unusual things about Wiltshire as a literary scholar is that he is also an expert on health and psychology. But he doesn’t psycho-analyze Austen or try to diagnose her at a distance: he uses words and phrases and even punctuation in the novels to look beneath the surface of the narrative at the moods and relationships they reveal.
In this major study, leading Austen scholar John Wiltshire offers new interpretations of Jane Austen's six novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818). Much recent criticism of Austen has concentrated on the social, historical and intellectual context of her work, but Wiltshire turns attention back to Austen's prose techniques. Arguing that each of Austen's works has its own distinct focus and underlying agenda, he shows how Austen's interest in psychology, and especially her treatment of attention and the various forms of memory, helped shape her narratives. Through a…
Have you ever done something on a whim and fallen in love with it? That was how I found Old Norse literature. I was taught the Norse language by reading the prose and poetry of medieval Iceland. In reading their literature, I discovered a rich, vibrant society filled with complex, passionate people. Here were doomed romantics, poets, and philosophers–along with chieftains and priests facing complex political and religious change. I undertook a PhD to study their literary craft. I hope, if nothing else, that my novel might encourage readers to go off and read the sagas themselves. And, if I am really lucky, they may just enjoy my stories too.
Where did J.R.R. Tolkien get his ideas? This book will provide some insight.
I fell in love with the Lord of the Rings when I was 12 when the first Peter Jackson film came out in 2001. It put me on the path to learning more about his works and his inspiration. Elves, dragons, and magical rings? Tolkien got much of it from Old Norse literature, and the Saga of the Volsungs has it all. Based on Viking Age poems, it is filled with myth, legend, and human drama and follows the story of Sigurd, the dragon slayer who is fundamentally changed after a meeting with one of Odin’s Valkyries.
For all of its myth-making, I love this book because of its very human elements: princely jealousy, unrequited love, and how greed corrupts.
The epic Viking Age stories that inspired J. R. R. Tolkien and Wagner's Ring cycle
Written in thirteenth-century Iceland but based on ancient Norse poetry cycles, The Saga of the Volsungs combines mythology, legend and sheer human drama. It tells of the cursed treasure of the Rhine, a sword reforged and a magic ring of power, and at its heart are the heroic deeds of Sigurd the dragon slayer, who acquires magical knowledge from one of Odin's Valkyries. One of the great books of world literature, the saga is an unforgettable tale of princely jealousy, unrequited love, greed, vengeance and…
I always want to be where I am not. This was why I read sci-fi and fantasy as a child. This was why I left the country of my birth and became a professional nomad. This is why I am spellbound by mountains I will never climb and oceans I will never dive into. Imagination can take you everywhere. It took me to the academy, where speculative literature became my scholarly field, and to the publishing world, where I am now getting ready for the launch of my eighth novel. When you are at home nowhere, you are at home everywhere–including on the summits of impossible mountains.
I love ghost stories. But I am rather tired of old houses with creaky furniture. The strangest and most dangerous monsters lurk in the wilderness, in the remote and inaccessible corners of the natural world. And what is more remote and inaccessible than Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, located on the border between Nepal and India?
I have always admired those mountain climbers of the past who, with inadequate equipment and minimal knowledge, braved the unknown dangers of the heights. Paver’s beautifully written novel is a historical mystery and a ghost story at one, whose final twist is as vertiginous as the pinnacle of the sacred mountain.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I grew up on science fiction: I was obsessed with Star Trek as a child, and as I got older, my love for space, aliens, and time travel spilled over into my taste in books. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy showed me that science fiction could be funny, and The Time Traveler’s Wife showed me that it could be romantic. But why not both at once? As a lifelong passionate reader, and now an author of two novels and counting, I love seeking out books that cross, blend, and transcend genres, as well as writing my own.
Fraimow combines a con-job storyline, a space diaspora setting, a 1920s aesthetic, and an unexpected sapphic romance, and somehow, it all works. I found myself totally immersed in the fragile glitz of New Monte, a kind of Monaco-in-space clinging to a satellite, where debutantes wear breathers as fashion accessories and extravagance masks the threat of scarcity.
And I fell in love with the characters: Ruthi, the cool, competent protagonist with a gift for wisecracks and a tender underside, and Sol, the chivalrous, sharp-suited, hoverbike-riding love interest, who develops from an intriguing antagonist into a fully-rounded human being who is Ruthi’s perfect match.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST ROMANCE NOVELS OF 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ruth Johnson and her sister Jules have been small-time hustlers on the interstellar cruise lines for years. But then Jules fell in love with one of their targets, Esteban Mendez-Yuki, sole heir to the family insurance fortune. Esteban seemed to love her too, until she told him who she really was, at which point he fled without a word.
Now Ruth is set on revenge: disguised as provincial debutante Evelyn Ojukwu and set for the swanky satellite New Monte, she's going to make Esteban fall in…
I teach and publish short stories, novels, and flash fiction. I’m also interested in the language people use to critique writing. Concepts (suspense, for example) can be helpful, but they often co-opt the imagination and become gold standards for what good fiction should be. In addition to the writer’s voice, I’m interested in the alchemy of the story, which is always greater than the sum of its parts. Right now, I’m writing a book called Accordion Fiction. It's about the shape and rhythm of stories—how they contract and expand like an accordion.
Brandt cuts through the mystique that “writing can’t be taught” and encourages writers to discover the creative and rational aspects of their consciousness—an approach that excites me as a writer and a teacher.
Brandt’s approach is useful for beginning writers and also for writers going through a dry period. I recommend it to all my students.
A reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande's creative writing classroom of the 1920s. Decades before brain research "discovered" the role of the right and left brain in all human endeavor, Dorothea Brande was teaching students how to see again, how to hold their minds still, and how to call forth the inner writer.
For the last 19 years, I have worked narcotics K-9s for a private company called Sherlock Hounds Detection Canines. I recently retired from the K-9 work, but over the years, I loved seeing how dogs solve crimes in real life. Not only do they help us solve crimes, but dogs have a way of reaching people and changing lives. Dogs are quite literally “man’s (or woman’s) best friend,” and because of that, they become the best partners for many characters in books. There’s nothing better than discovering a new K-9 series that depicts the real-life love and bond between K-9 and handler.
I love the Timber Creek K-9 Mystery series and Mizushima’s latest book was one of my favorites. As a retired K-9 handler, sometimes books with working dogs get facts wrong. I could tell that Mizushima put a lot of research time into each of her books. I love the fictional K-9, Robo, and Mizushima’s accurate portrayal of the bond between handler and dog.
Mattie Cobb, the main character, is intriguing and makes the reader cheer for her. The dashing veterinarian, Cole Walker, adds a little romance to the storyline. I would recommend starting with the first book, Killing Trail. While each book stands on its own, reading about the mystery of Mattie’s family makes the conclusion of Standing Dead even more thrilling.
From critically acclaimed, master thriller author Margaret Mizushima, comes the eighth installment of the award-winning Timber Creek K-9 mysteries.
“Tense and satisfying,” (JA Jance) Standing Dead is the perfect read for fans of CJ Box and Longmire.
Deputy Mattie Cobb and her sister, Julia, travel to Mexico to visit their mother, but when they arrive, they discover that she and her husband have vanished without a trace. Back in Timber Creek, Mattie finds a chilling note on her front door telling her to look for “him” among the standing dead up in the high country.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Worldbuilding is something I absolutely adore, and I have always wanted to see more fantasy in worlds created around a more modern thought process. Worlds that got away from the medieval and instead found inspiration in places like 1920s America or 1950s Mexico or anywhere with cars and motorcycles existing right alongside dragons. It’s what I try to write and its desperately what I want to read. Fantasy has so much more range than I think it is given credit for.
This book has one of the most refreshing and terrifying take on the concept of immortality that I’ve ever seen. I love it because of how it tackles policing, what it means to be a decent person, and how power unchecked will inevitably consume all it touches. Also, it’s extremely queer, and the prickly immortals were just too hard not to fall in love with.
Gideon the Ninth meets Black Sun in this queer, Maori-inspired debut fantasy about a police officer who is murdered, brought back to life with a mysterious new power, and tasked with protecting her city from an insidious evil threatening to destroy it.
The port city of Hainak is alive: its buildings, its fashion, even its weapons. But, after a devastating war and a sweeping biotech revolution, all its inhabitants want is peace, no one more so than Yat Jyn-Hok a reformed-thief-turned-cop who patrols the streets at night.
Yat has recently been demoted on the force due to "lifestyle choices" after…
