Here are 100 books that The Edwardians fans have personally recommended if you like
The Edwardians.
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As a writer, wife, and mom, I love reading novels and memoirs about women who are navigating parenting, relationships, and careers simultaneously. My favorites are those that make me laugh out loud while presenting a relatable picture of all this juggling act entails. Smart and witty heroines who approach life with a can-do spirit and the ability to laugh at themselves as the world tosses one curveball after another their way capture my heart every time.
It’s hard to match Nora Ephron’s wit and wisdom. In this novel, which mirrors events from the novelist and screenwriter’s real life, cookbook writer Rachel Samstat learns that her husband is cheating on her while she’s pregnant. Even as her life is falling apart, Rachel maintains her sense of humor while dropping the “everything is perfect” routine and speaking her mind.
In this tale of love and loss, Ephron serves up hilarious and heartbreaking moments in equal portions alongside mouthwatering recipes.
If I had to do it over again, I would have made a different kind of pie. The pie I threw at Mark made a terrific mess, but a blueberry pie would have been even better, since it would have permanently ruined his new blazer, the one he bought with Thelma ... I picked up the pie, thanked God for linoleum floor, and threw it' Rachel Samstat is smart, successful, married to a high-flying Washington journalist... and devastated. She has discovered that her husband is having an affair with Thelma Rice, 'a fairly tall person with a neck as long…
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…
I’m a French-born, London-based novelist and food writer. As an author, I have nurtured my voice at the kitchen counter, where I find language loosens up and as a reader, cookbooks, food memoirs, and novels sit in one pile on my bedside table. Food is never not political and I find that its depiction is a wonderful narrative tool, for plot development with the setting of a meal or to portray a character through ingredients for examples. The relationship between food, culture, and writing is something I also explore with my podcast, book club, and culinary community The Salmon Pink Kitchen. Happy reading, and bon appétit!
If you enjoy a long novel, gossip, and the dark side of life, then look no further.
Based on the true story of the women whom Truman Capote called ‘his swans,’ and who deserted him after he had published an indiscreet short story about their lives in Esquire, Swan Song is filled with socialite glitters and cocktails. From meals eaten on planes to the high-end restaurants of New York City, food and drinks are key to the novel’s development.
My personal highlight is the account of Babe Paley’s last meal, which was served after her funeral and which she had organised herself while being ill with lung cancer. ‘The luncheon to end all luncheons,’ as writes Greenberg-Jephcott, is a wonderful example of how the description of a meal can portray a character brilliantly.
WINNER OF THE McKITTERICK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSBORO BOOKS GLASS BELL AWARD
'Sparkling' GUARDIAN 'Fascinating' RED 'Remarkable' WOMAN AND HOME 'Astounding' EMERALD STREET 'Glamorous' IRISH TIMES 'Scandalous' DAILY MAIL 'Spellbinding' SUNDAY EXPRESS ___________________________
To the outside world, they were the icons of high society - the most glamorous and influential women of their age. To Truman Capote they were his Swans: the ideal heroines, as vulnerable as they were powerful. They trusted him with their most guarded, martini-soaked secrets, each believing she was more special and loved than the next...
My name is Joy Gerken pen name Joy M., Lilley. I live in Kent, England with husband Michael and our three rescue cats. We have four children, six grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. I began writing in 2013 after retiring from a long nursing career. My list is multi-genre, I like to both read and write books from all genres. It broadens my horizons and helps me focus more clearly on my own writing. I recommend all five books to you as I have enjoyed the reading of them all.
This is a glorious read that supplies verve, love, and heart. Two siblings are still living with their mother in their fifties in poverty and isolation. There is a serious risk of the inability to cope following their mother's demise. Music is a theme running throughout this charming story of resilience, and the survival instinct.
The two find they are living on the fringes of society, however, the ending proves that light can be spun from darkness.
Named a Best Book of the Month by Entertainment Weekly, PopSugar, Bustle, Chicago Review of Books, PureWow, a Best Book of Summer by Daily Beast and one of Good Housekeeping's Best Books of 2021
"Full of dramatic twists and turns right up until its moving, beautiful end." —NPR Books
At fifty-one years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
I’m a French-born, London-based novelist and food writer. As an author, I have nurtured my voice at the kitchen counter, where I find language loosens up and as a reader, cookbooks, food memoirs, and novels sit in one pile on my bedside table. Food is never not political and I find that its depiction is a wonderful narrative tool, for plot development with the setting of a meal or to portray a character through ingredients for examples. The relationship between food, culture, and writing is something I also explore with my podcast, book club, and culinary community The Salmon Pink Kitchen. Happy reading, and bon appétit!
If you’re looking for a novel that will make your mouth water with flavours and cravings, then Elisa Shua Dusapin is the writer you need. From the supermarket’s chilled section to hot pots of noodles, the pages of this short novel are an explosion for the senses. But the descriptions of the food are not only delicious, they also serve the purpose of the plot in this novel set over the course of one summer in Tokyo, about identity, loneliness, and language.
The Pachinko Parlour is translated from French into English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins and will be published in the UK on 18th August 2022.
From the author of Winter in Sokcho, Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
The days are beginning to draw in. The sky is dark by seven in the evening. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Women’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long.
It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko, in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents’: daydreaming, playing Tetris, and listening to the sounds from the…
I am a forty-five-year career educator, sharing my classrooms with students from primary school through graduate programs in creative writing. What I love most in every classroom I enter is sharing the books and stories and poems I love with my students. The best days: when I’m reading one of my favorite parts of the book out loud to the group and I look up and they laugh or gasp, or I look up and see their eyes full of joy. If it’s my own work I’m reading from, all the better!
Ah, these juvenile narrators: they think they know it all. Lucille Odem has it all figured out. She can fix her broken family and heal her parent’s broken hearts—because of course she can. For me, the pleasure of a great young adult narrator is watching as even the smartest of these smarty pants comes to learn that we all have blind spots and that it’s often the things we can’t see or don’t know that are the most important part of the equation. What a sweet book this is.
At the age of seventeen, Lucille Odom finds herself in the middle of an unexpected domestic crisis. As she helps guide her family through its discontent, Lucille discovers in herself a woman rich in wisdom, rich in humor, and rich in love.
I have been hiking up mountains all my life. From Long’s Peak in Colorado to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire to the Cairngorms in Scotland to the Laugavegur in Iceland, I have always drawn strength and inspiration from thin alpine air. As a midwesterner, when I can’t go to the mountains, I love finding new stories about them, particularly on the page. I wrote Above the Fire in 2020 during the pandemic, when I desperately wanted to leave home and climb something. But quarantine and family responsibilities meant I had to do the next best thing, by setting a novel in the mountains instead!
So many stories of the mountains are about bravado, grit, or conquest. Yet I go to the mountains for beauty and connection. Those are values that the Italian writer Paolo Cognetti prizes. His gentle novel uses the mountains as a setting for the relationship between two people.
The book chronicles a lifetime of friendship between a pair of boys who grow apart over the years. For a time, their shared history in the outdoors and love of the alpine is enough to maintain a connection. And then life intervenes. Yet the steady majesty of the Italian Alps remains a constant. I took my novel’s epigraph from this book: “It was impossible to convey what it feels like up there to those who have stayed below.”
*The book that inspired the film The Eight Mountains*
For fans of Elena Ferrante and Paulo Coelho comes a moving and elegant novel about the friendship between two young Italian boys from different backgrounds and how their connection evolves and challenges them throughout their lives.
“Few books have so accurately described the way stony heights can define one's sense of joy and rightness...an exquisite unfolding of the deep way humans may love one another” (Annie Proulx).
Pietro is a lonely boy living in Milan. With his parents becoming more distant each day, the only thing the family shares…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
I’m a Chinese Vietnamese American author who writes about the Asian girls I never saw in books as a kid. Growing up in Southern California, I was part of an Asian community that was extremely diverse—a reality that was rarely reflected in American pop culture. For years, I longed to see messy, flawed, fully humanized Asian characters in all different kinds of stories, not just the typical child-of-immigrant narratives. As a result, I now spend a lot of time thinking about representation (whether I want to or not!), and I’m always looking for writers who pull it off with nuance and realism. I hope you’ll find these books are great examples of that.
There isn’t another young adult book out there that makes me feel as seen asLucy and Linh, alternately titled Laurindain its native Australia.
It was the first novel I’d ever come across with a Chinese Vietnamese protagonist, and the details about her life as the daughter of working-class refugees really hit home.
That the prose is impeccable, the social observations incisive, and the themes not at all didactic (the main character Lucy makes plenty of mistakes) instantly turned me into an Alice Pung superfan.
From an author Amy Tan calls “a gem,” this is a witty, highly acclaimed novel that’s “part Mean Girls, part Lord of the Flies” (The Bulletin, Starred review) about navigating life in private school while remaining true to yourself.
Lucy is a bit of a pushover, but she’s ambitious and smart, and she has just received the opportunity of a lifetime: a scholarship to a prestigious school, and a ticket out of her broken-down suburb. Though she’s worried she will stick out like badly cut bangs among the razor-straight students, she is soon welcomed into the Cabinet, the supremely…
I don’t think I’m alone in considering cults and those who join cults fascinating, but I’ve also always found it frustrating when non-fiction accounts or documentaries focus on the logistics of how the communes operate rather than finding out the why. Why do people join a cult, why do they stay, why do they follow increasingly erratic and dangerous instruction? For me, researching cults for my new novel The Sleepless – about a commune whose disciples believe that sleep is a social construct – was about finding out about the characters, the individuals, who are drawn into organisations which often ask you to relinquish that self-same sense of individuality.
This is a novel about a young woman, the titular Nina, escaping from a Maoist cult and it’s a terrifically absorbing and engrossing tale.
What makes it unique is that it’s as much about the protagonist reclaiming, or even forming, her own identity as it is about the cult that she’s wrestling herself free from. Both the storyline and the form of the book itself involves the reader in that journey into freedom. An excellent and under-rated book.
Winner of the Saltire Literary Award Fiction Book of the Year
'Literary gold . . . Morrison has published his masterpiece' Sunday Times
'Sensational. Like nothing I've ever read. A tour de force' Ian Rankin
Nina X has never been outside. She has never met another child. Nina X has no books, no toys and no privacy. Nina X has no idea what the outside world is like. Nina X has a lot to learn.
Nina X has no mother and no father; she has Comrade Chen, and Comrades Uma, Jeni and Ruth. Her closest emotional connection is with the…
Growing up, I hardly ever saw books written by people who looked like me, about people who looked like me. When I did, the Asians were often side characters, typecast as nerds (and not in a good way). I didn’t get to see Asians being “cool” kids, and I definitely didn’t see them as love interests. When I went to a performing arts boarding school, it was the first time I wasn’t the only Asian student in my class, and it was life-changing. I think if I had had these books when I was a kid, it would’ve been easier to be confident about who I was.
I fell for this book because of its lyrical sentences, multiple narratives uncovering long-buried secrets, and exploration of the tensions and traumas of family, friendship, romantic love, and the immigrant experience. The people in this novel are all memorable and well-developed—even the adults, which can sometimes be hard to come by in YA books.
I was swept up in the world of the high-pressure Cupertino suburbs, and I love that nearly all the characters were Asian American. It also didn’t hurt that it’s narrated by a talented and troubled teen artist.
"Picture me madly in love with this moving, tender, unapologetically honest book."—Becky Albertalli, #1 best-selling author of Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
Danny Cheng has always known his parents have secrets. But when he discovers a taped-up box in his father's closet filled with old letters and a file on a powerful Bay Area family, he realizes there's much more to his family's past than he ever imagined.
Danny has been an artist for as long as he can remember and it seems his path is set, with a scholarship to RISD and his family's blessing to pursue the…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
My novel Venice Beach—like the five books I recommend here—has been classified as a “coming-of-age” novel, a classification that I have no quarrels with as long as it’s understood that coming-of-age is not regarded simply as a synonym for “adolescence” or “being a teenager.” The coming-of-age years—generally defined as between ages 12 and 18—are so much more than a period of life wedged between childhood and adulthood. Coming of age is a process, not a block of time; it is a hot emotional forge in which we experience so many “firsts” and are hammered, usually painfully, into the shapes that will last a lifetime.
Bruiser is only nine years old, younger than most “coming of age” protagonists, but his anxiety-ridden family life in a Manhattan apartment has aged him. His father is a philanderer who rarely is home and often physically abusive when he is; his mother is a deeply depressed poet. Bruiser spends most of his time running around his Upper West Side neighborhood with a make-shift gang of older boys—and has the bruises to show for it, hence his nickname—or hiding at the bottom of the clothes hamper when his parents are going at it. He befriends a 10-year-old girl, Darla, who lives across the courtyard with her drug-addled mother and who convinces him to run away with her. Their journey, which takes them first to West Virginia in search of Darla’s father and eventually to North Carolina, is the book’s magic. Both kids are pre-puberty, so it’s…
After spending another morning hiding in the clothes hamper eavesdropping on his miserable parents, Bruiser realizes it's time to change his life. It's New York City during the late 1970s, and in the middle of a chilly autumn night he takes to the open road with Darla, a kindred spirit who lives across the alleyway. Their flight from the mounting tensions of home -- an adventure dotted with frightening episodes and surprising revelations -- is a journey in search of liberation and emotional truth.
This is Bruiser's tale in his own words, captured by first-time novelist Ian Chorao with uncanny…
