Here are 100 books that The Connellys of County Down fans have personally recommended if you like
The Connellys of County Down.
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Like many readers, I am drawn to stories of vengeance. Stories of someone seeking revenge have a built-in tension and narrative drive. But as the saying goes, when you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. Yes, these tales seldom go smoothly. The consequences of this and the violence that ensues are what I wanted to explore in my latest novel, but several books on my shelf make fascinating stories out of this desire for revenge.
The first of a trilogy about backwoods Florida criminals and the man who wants to leave his life behind, this book shows Post’s talent for real emotion and pathos in the middle of the chaos of a full-on thriller.
Judah Cannon is a man with morals and a will to do the right thing, but he also comes with skills and experience to bring the fight to those who have wronged him. And, of course, any great protagonist needs a great antagonist, and Post writes them as well as anyone. Sister Tulah is a villain for ages.
Judah Cannon is the middle son of the notorious Cannon clan led by Sherwood, its unflinching and uncompromising patriarch. When Judah returns to his rural hometown of Silas, Florida after a stint in prison, he is determined to move forward and live it clean with his childhood best friend and newly discovered love, Ramey Barrow. Everything soon spirals out of control, though, when a phone call from Sherwood ensnares Judah and Ramey in a complicated web of thievery, brutality and betrayal.
Pressured by the unrelenting bonds of blood ties, Judah takes part in robbing the Scorpions, a group of small-time,…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Growing up in Scott, Louisiana, I didn’t know that everyone else in the United States did not get Mardi Gras off from school and work. I thought everyone knew some French. Crawfish boils were a natural, expectable part of every spring. South Louisiana is a world unto itself. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate my heritage, my Cajun lineage, and the sometimes-befuddling ways we Louisianians look at that world. Between conversations with elders, reading historical documents, and even looking at land transfer maps, I’ve become even more grounded in what being from this little wet corner of the world means.
When I grow up, I want to write like Tim Gautreaux.
I read this book about five years ago, and it was like I’d just started reading all over again. I felt seen. Gautreaux found the soul of South Louisiana, distilled it, and somehow made it make all the sense in the world. His characters breathe.
I closed the book and stayed in his fictional town of Crapaud. Anytime I am lonesome for my home state I just need to read any one of these stories.
ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017
Containing twelve new stories and nine classics from previous collections, Signals is Tim Gautreaux at his best. Effortlessly conjuring the heat and humidity of the author’s beloved South, these stories of men and women grappling with faith, small town life, and blue-collar work are alternately ridiculous and sublime. For both longtime fans and readers lucky enough to encounter him for the very first time, Signals cements Gautreaux’s place as an American master.
I'd like to claim that my expertise in these matters stems from the fact that I am a supernatural entity—and a funny one at that. But my origin’s more mundane; when I was growing up on a corn & soybean farm miles outside of a rural village, I became a voracious reader. I was always intrigued by writers who could explore a world outside the bounds of reality and do it with style. Over the years, I’ve been a short-order cook, a corn detasseler, a summer camp counselor, a college professor, and a middle-grade author, and I’ve learned that you can find a little magic anywhere if you look hard enough.
I loved Ellen Raskin’s much-lauded The Westing Game when I was nine years old, but I never got around to reading her 1974 middle-grade book Figgs & Phantoms, until recently. It’s a weird and whimsical story about family and grief with a magical realist touch.
Once a month, Mona Lisa Newton stands on the shoulders of her diminutive Uncle Florence Figg and dons a cloak to form the “Figg-Newton giant” so they can reach the rare not-for-sale books on the top shelf of a local bookstore. Their family has its own private mythology, including a version of heaven called Capri, and when a death occurs, Mona is determined to follow the clues and find it.
The text and illustrations manifest Raskin’s wry sense of humor, though some of the book’s mature themes might be too much for younger readers.
From the Newbery Award-winning author of THE WESTING GAME, more clever riddles and wordplay, clues to be found, and mysteries to be solved!
A Newbery Honor book
The Amazing Dancing Figgs! While Mona hates all the attention her eccentric relatives bring to her in town, there is one Figg family member she likes: her Uncle Florence, the book dealer. But Uncle Florence keeps hinting that he's going to find his way to Capri, the Figg family heaven. And that means leaving Mona behind. Can Mona find Capri before it's too late, or will she learn that things are seldom what…
Olivia Thrift, a.k.a. the superheroine Captain Fantastic, is excited to be meeting fellow Canadian superheroines for the first time. However, when their gathering is violently interrupted, it quickly becomes a savage fight against evil.
And, when Olivia suddenly loses her powers, will she be able to set things right when…
Growing up I was fanatical about football - playing, watching, reading and talking about it. I was also a little obsessed with its numbers, and apparently liked to recalculate league tables and goal differences in my head as the results came in on the BBC vidiprinter. Fast forward to University in the 1980s - a time when studying football’s business aspects was not common - I wrote my dissertation on the ‘Capital structure of Scottish football’. A Scottish perspective has remained present in much of my work, and I hope it also allows a little more distance when reflecting on the success and challenges faced by football in England.
The individual at the heart of this book, the legendary football manager, Brian Clough, had no shortage of either.
However, what is extraordinary about this book is that it introduces the reader to an entirely different version of Clough than the one we are most familiar with from the media.
It is a remarkable and scarcely credible story, one which is moving, and which highlights the kindness of the man, his family, and of many of the then players and employees of Nottingham Forest.
It also reminds us just how distant football, its clubs, and its star players and managers, have become from their people in recent decades.
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2022
Craig Bromfield was just 13 years old when Brian Clough, on a whim, took him and his older brother Aaron in.
They came from Southwick, a depressed area of Sunderland, where they lived with their abusive stepfather, and from where they longed to escape. After initially meeting Clough while out begging for money, Clough later invited the brothers to stay at his house. From there a relationship formed which would see Craig living with the Cloughs for nine years, where he was a first-hand witness to the many…
I’m Gen X, through and through. And because I grew up in that (glorious?) time before social media, I didn’t have the worry that my messy-woman missteps would be exposed online. But the trade-off to keeping my mistakes as private as possible was that I often felt like I couldn’t live boldly. So now I’m fascinated by the ways other women handle the messier aspects of their lives: the obsessions and frustrations, the secrets we all keep, the duality we choke down. I want to know what we’re each quietly starving for, what’s driving us when we strip away social expectation and are left to sit with our gnawing hungers.
One of my favorite things about this book is how Chung effortlessly weaves the human experience with the magical, braiding in Korean folklore and science as she goes. The women in these stories are feeling their way through their worlds, both everyday and fantastical, stumbling through love, family, duty, loss, and talking dolls.
Chung’s stories are infused with an emotional numbness that feels so familiar to me, a shadow side I recognize in myself, too. This only made my heart break harder when each story ended, exposing all the different bones of womanhood. I always have that sense of Yes, that’s just it when I read her writing.
From the author of Sea Change comes a short story collection that explores Korean American womanhood, bodies, animals, and transformation as a means of survival.
"The stories hit, each one, and land with such seeming perfection. Chung's book sits next to my all-time favorite story collections by masters of the craft: Karen Russell, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, George Saunders, and Ted Chiang."—Morgan Talty, award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez
Equal parts fantastical—a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an…
I’ve always been sensitive to my material environment, discerning the spiritual and emotional effects of light, color, and sound in everyday life, like our clothes and homes and also in nature. However, for years, I lived in my head. I’d relegated my body and intuition to the sidelines. For two decades, I built a career in visual art, but it took the mid-life collapse of everything I’d wanted to find my way back to the authenticity of those early sensibilities, charting an artist’s way home. The creative life is not just for artists. It sustains our humanity in times of darkness and is the source of our brightest future.
I grew up in the suburbs of a big city in an Italian American family that valued the “American Dream.” The path to success was marked by academic achievement and financial gain. These were among many tacit beliefs and stories, right alongside what it means to be in a marriage and to have children, that led me on a decades-long journey straight into the mid-life collapse of all I’d worked towards.
Frangello’s account of conditions, events, and an underlying, perilous terrain of female identity and romantic ideology treads so close to my own experience of catastrophic relational collapse and betrayal. As in my own life, the crisis extends backward and forwards in time, unearthing the buried ground on which I inadvertently founded my dreams and built my life. This book is a lens that reframed my history and refocused my future.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month
"A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced,…
Of the 918 Americans who died in the shocking murder-suicides of November 18, 1978, in the tiny South American country of Guyana, a third were under eighteen. More than half were in their twenties or younger.
The authors taught in a small high school in San Francisco where Reverend Jim…
I was raised in middle-class America by a strong woman and an alcoholic. I survived an abuser when I realized that I was the answer to my problems. I write about tough subjects but am an eternal optimist who believes a strong spirit will always ensure a happy ending.
A coming of age story – for a fourteen-year-old who’s discovered she’s gay, her inadequate mother, her severely autistic younger sister, and a reclusive, distant older man and his dog.
The protagonist is the doer of the family who refuses to give in to poverty and give up to allow her sister to be institutionalized. What one determined soul can do when she refuses to give up.
I love stories that resolve in a happy ending, despite facing seemingly hopeless odds.
Fans of Mark Haddon, Mitch Albom and Alice Sebold will love this remarkable, moving story about family and the many forms this can take by Richard & Judy bestselling author Catherine Ryan Hyde.
'A smashing read and left me feeling so positive about human nature' -- ***** Reader review 'An absolute joy to read' -- ***** Reader review 'Beautifully written' -- ***** Reader review 'Fantastic' -- ***** Reader review 'Catherine, you've done it again. Another awesome read that will stay with me' -- ***** Reader review 'A page-turner' -- ***** Reader review ********************************************************************************************************* WHAT IF THE FAMILY YOU NEED ISN'T…
I have been writing all my life, but was never able to find my voice until I had my daughters. It was for them I wrote “Wrightsville Beach”. I wanted to show them what a good relationship should look like and how their decisions make a difference in where they will go. I want my readers to relive that feeling of falling in love and to be sent in unexpected directions, as life so often does to us. I want you to enjoy it so much, you don’t want to put the book down until it’s finished and once you do, to sit and reflect on it, savoring the feeling it has left behind.
This book is part of a series, but this particular one captured my heart. Cara’s niece, Linnea, is like Jess in so many ways. Having just graduated college, she joins the turtle team that works with the turtle hospital, learns to surf, and of course, falls in love. She also sets out to find her own calling and when she does, it requires sacrifices she did not know she would have to make. It is the pain we all feel when we discover our path does not align with those we love. Mary Alice Monroe has such a strong connection to nature and it comes through in all her books, particularly here when she describes life at the beach and those turtles, oh, those turtles...
The New York Times bestselling author and “skilled storyteller who never lets her readers down” (Huffington Post) returns to her beloved Beach House series with this “authentic, generous, and heartfelt” (Mary Kay Andrews, New York Times bestselling author) tale of new beginnings, resilience, and one family’s enduring love.
Cara Rutledge returns to her Southern home on the idyllic Isle of Palms. Comforting in its familiarity, it is still rife with painful memories. Only through reconnecting with family, friends, and the rhythms of the lowcountry can Cara let go of the past and open herself to the possibility of a new…
I'm an Australian who fell in love with Africa in my 30s. I've now written 20 thrillers set in Africa and several non-fiction biographies. My wife and I have travelled extensively on the continent and now spend at least half our lives in Africa, and the remainder in Australia. I'm passionate about Africa's people, wildlife, and fragile natural environment. While my books focus on some of the continent's problems – especially the illegal trade in wildlife – I'm a sucker for a happy ending and find no shortage of positive, inspirational people on my travels who serve as the inspiration for the good guys and girls in my stories.
Douglas Rogers, a Zimbabwean journalist living in the US, tells the true story of how his elderly parents survived a harrowing period in the African country's history when former President Robert Mugabe's supporters were invading and claiming white-owned farms. Rather than fleeing, Rogers' parents transformed their backpackers' lodge into a have for a wildlife disparate group of hookers, spies, soldiers, and refugees. It's hilarious and harrowing and proof that in Africa, truth is stranger than fiction! By the way, Zimbabwe is now a beautiful, peaceful country to visit and an excellent safari destination.
Thrilling, heartbreaking, and, at times, absurdly funny, The Last Resort is a remarkable true story about one family in a country under siege and a testament to the love, perseverance, and resilience of the human spirit.
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of white farmers living through that country’s long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the United States. But when Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim white-owned land and Rogers’s…
LOT 16 WAS NEVER TO BE SOLD. Generations pass and the estate’s directive is overturned.
Situated on a grassy hilltop overlooking a lake and wildlife preserve, the 30-acre parcel is perfect for Nora and Dex. They’ll escape their city’s rising crime, build a home with an amazing view, work remotely,…
Science is still assumed to be a ‘male’ subject in which women are a minority. I should know—I was one of those women when I worked as an astrophysicist. But there have always been women in science and their stories are fascinating, whether told in nonfiction or in fiction. Fiction is ideally placed to convey the emotions behind the scientific processes and the way in which human interactions and relationships influence what happens in the lab.
How would it change society if women had access to artificial wombs? I was gripped by the premise of this book and the way in which the author explores all the different ramifications of a technology developed by a woman scientist who has now become a recluse from society.
In lesser hands, the concept of external ‘pouches’ in which fetuses are grown might easily have become a straightforwardly dystopian SF novel, but Helen Sedgwick (a former scientist herself) is very careful at balancing the pros and cons and ensuring each character is well-rounded so that I felt drawn to them all, no matter what their views.
What if anyone could have a baby? A boldly original and unforgettable novel from a rising star.
Now we have equality. Now we've outgrown our biology. With FullLife's baby pouch, women are liberated and men can share the joy of childbearing. Holly's whole family knows the benefits, but Eva doesn't believe society has changed for the better and Piotr has uncovered a secret behind FullLife's glossy facade. What separates them may just bring them together, as they search for the truth about FullLife and each face a truth of their own.
