Books like The English Patient — picked by fans

This is my candidate for the Great American Novel. Read it for its storyline and its fascinating chapters on whales. Along the way, you’ll encounter discussions about race, religion, friendship, and the virtuous life.

Some of my students ask, “Why does Melville digress so much?” My response: persist in reading this work. What at first seems extraneous becomes vital. You’ll discover a masterpiece.

I bought this because 1) I loved Le Petit Prince, 2) I had no idea that de Saint-Exupery was a pilot and disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944, and 3) I thought it might give me a window into what my own late dad found in flight and that it might bring me closer to him in a way.

I was not prepared for the excruciating, almost sacred, tenderness of his thoughts on the nature of earth and sea, war, life, death, and the entire human enterprise. If your spirit has ever yearned or fluttered at such thoughts, there is salvation in these essays. Wow! His final essay on Barcelona and Madrid is luxurious beyond words. It took forever to finish it because I regaled myself on every sentence.

We often feel alone when we experience change and transitions, but Saunders’s book reminds me that we’re all on the journey of life together.

President Lincoln can’t let go of his young son, Willie, when the boy dies of typhoid fever. Willie, too, is holding on: lingering in the after-death world, he’s convinced his parents are going to come get him. He’s surrounded by people who are also in bardo (the state between death and rebirth), trapped in denial and attachment. When they accept the reality of their situation, the characters are liberated from their suffering.

This book has deepened my understanding of how—both individually and collectively—we struggle against loss, but it’s possible to let go and move forward. 

I was still at school when I came across Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and was absorbed into the world of ancient Greece.

I knew then what was missing from history lessons: any sense of being there, of feeling emotion for the characters, of being gripped. I went on to read all her books and took to philosophy and Platonism because of them.

When I put the book back on the library shelf, I made a vow: let me do for others what this author has done for me.

The question of how to portray a historical atrocity like slavery in a work of fiction is obviously monumental. Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Colson Whitehead, and John Keene have approached this with consummate brilliance by writing the experience and subjectivity of enslaved and formerly-enslaved people. Johnson, however, focuses on the perpetrators: the men who engage in and profit from the capture and trafficking of other human beings. As in Mantel’s novel, the choice of the protagonist is key. Rutherford Calhoun is a ne’er-do-well free Black man from New Orleans who runs away on a ship to escape debts and engagement to a woman whose love he hasn’t done much to deserve. It turns out this ship is bound for Africa to collect a cargo of people, members of the Allmuseri tribe, an ethnicity Johnson invented for his fiction. But along with the people, they are also collecting something much more… show more.

When recommending Geraldine Brooks’ multi-layered and intricately crafted March, another book must always be mentioned. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction rooted in Alcott’s classic novel that’s been read and loved for centuries. The March of the title is Jo March’s father in Little Women. In real life, his name was Amos Bronson Alcott. And he was the father of Louisa May Alcott. Brooks tells March’s fictitious story masterfully and with great historical acumen. Her depictions of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are truly historic. Geraldine Brooks is not a historian. Her husband Tony Horwitz was. In Brooks’ case it seems that to fall in love with a historian is to fall in love with history as well. March is the beautiful proof.

I love this book because it is a war novel without a single battlefield or battle, except the one for Siegfried Sassoon’s sanity. I became fascinated by WWI as a teenager. I can’t say why this war caught my imagination, but it did, and that fascination has continued for my whole life.

I gobbled up books, movies, and history about the war, and I especially loved the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, a noted poet and war hero who publicly refused to continue fighting in 1917. When I re-read his poetry fifty years later, I found a kinship with that refusal and the boys around me who were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.

I was a dreamy, romantic teenager, which is why Sassoon’s words pierced my heart: “Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.” Oh! How I cried over his poems… show more.

I had my doubts about reading this because, well… Tudor history.

I love Mantel’s work but…another trot through Henry VIII’s marriages and murders? I wasn’t sure it was for me. But within moments of opening the book, I was away with Mantel and Thomas Cromwell.

Even the title, Wolf Hall, demonstrates her gift. It was the name of the Seymour family’s seat, and the book never takes us there—but it was Jane Seymour who replaced Anne Boleyn and gave monstrous Henry his heir. The title hangs over the action, echoing, Man is wolf to man.

Mantel’s Cromwell is complex, often kind as well as ruthless, but Mantel herself said that she presents only one possible view of him. Read it and make up your own mind!

Some odd 1950s social attitudes caught me by surprise when I re-read this much-loved book from my past (what are those bruises all about?). Don’t let this put you off this wonderful story of courage and hardship as Jean Paget, an ordinary woman is swept up in the Japanese invasion of Malaya, faces terrible hardships in her group of female prisoners. Starving and sick, they are helped by an Australian, Sgt Joe Harman, also a prisoner, but his kindness results in the most terrible retribution. To say more would ruin the shock of this fabulous story, but I guarantee that Joe Harman will have your heart by the end of the book.

Propaganda is truth; truth is propaganda. We live in an Orwellian world, the world of “alternative narratives” – blatant untruths that are like a twisted mantra tormenting objectivity until it is beaten into submission.

When I first read 1984, I knew Orwell was not predicting the future but describing the past and the betrayal of a socialist revolution by Stalin. But the hideous truth is that Orwell’s depiction of the "evil Soviet empire" is now the new reality, east and west, where tyranny and authoritarianism distort reality to the point where people feel powerless to oppose.

Resist, and the system will get you. Accept, and you will live a life of a deluded soulless husk. You choose!