Books like The Foundling — picked by fans

This book is filled with fascinating facts about medieval medicine, surgery, humoural theory, disease, and diagnosis. But what is surprising is how many other aspects of the Middle Ages are covered through the theme of bodies.

We learn about strange creatures like blemmyae (who have no heads and faces in their chests) and cynocephali (dog-headed people), saints and relics, race relations and politics, manuscript manufacture, religion, literature, travel, eating habits, love, sexuality, and gender identity.

I love how the chapters are organized by body part, from head to feet, a clever approach I have never seen in a history book before. Hartnell demonstrates how the medieval past is "an uncanny place at once startlingly different from and strangely familiar to our own."

I still think about the elephant and his trainer years after reading this novel, and I sometimes reread it to visit with them again. There is something so charming, so vibrant about their relationship through all their adventures and dangerous intrigues at the Ottoman court.

I love to climb aboard the author's wonderful, evocative writing and let it carry me through stories peopled with fascinating places and characters. These stories have deep currents—love, devotion, rivalry, and the push and pull between religion and science.

Of course, the title leapt out at me from the bookshop shelf! And on reading the first page I fell in love with Shafak’s lyrical writing.

As I read further, I was drawn into the stories of love in many guises within its pages. I was intrigued by the way the author wove a modern narrative of a deeply unhappy American housewife with a story about the historical character, thirteenth-century Sufi poet, Rumi, and his friendship with wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz.

The story took me to a place and time far from mine and I learned about a very different culture—yet in its philosophical concerns and themes, not so different after all. And I really loved that both Shams and Rumi were storytellers so that the novel had layers of nested stories.

I fall in love with any book that can bring details of the setting and time frame to life in my mind. This one was a movie in my imagination of Lucrezia de’ Medici’s world in the 16th century, what we now call Italy, from beginning to end. 

The mystery of the story was mesmerizing. It was one of those novels that gives you a glimpse of the ending at the opening and keeps you guessing and rooting for the female protagonist. Once again, Lucrezia was the tenacious young woman everyone overlooked and underestimated, and the reader could not help but fall in love with her.

When I tell you I gasped at the end of this book, I am not exaggerating. I am not one to be surprised by books, but this one kept me guessing the entire time.

I was surprised multiple times throughout the book, and the complicated relationship between Anna and her aunt is fascinating from the very first page. I also really loved the worldbuilding and magic system as it is expertly woven into the story.

I find that many fantasy books have a magic system that is just there, but this one drives the plot.

I hadn’t thought seriously about the problem of rubbish, sewage, and waste disposal before reading Jackson’s work.

I think it’s important, even crucial, for a fantasy writer to know where the poop and detritus go in the societies they’ve built; it’s part of the worldbuilding that gives an imaginary culture enough weight and heft to convince a reader.

Plus, Jackson’s prose is always marvelously clean, concise, and dryly funny.

The Alex Versus series's world-building, magic, and plots are very complex and layered. This is some seriously well thought out urban fantasy. 

The main character, Alex, is basically an instant seer, able to see multiple consequences of diving left versus right, shooting someone, running, etc. He doesn’t always have time to evaluate his choices before having to make a decision. And often, there’s no out without loss or a high price to be paid. 

The back story is cleverly woven into the plot and is never boring. This series has one of my favorite side characters ever written—an arachnid with startling insight and wisdom. 

Dominic wrote two very good crime books in a short series before publishing Vine Street.

I am including Vine Street on my list because, although it’s set in London and is therefore not ‘regional’, it was one of the great crime novels of 2021-22 and deserves to become a classic. I read this book before it was published, and I knew, like everyone else, that it was something special.

The story spans almost a century, from the seedy streets of London’s Soho in the 1930s, until the present day. There are some really well-researched and vividly depicted descriptions of police investigations in the 30s, and just for that it’s worth a read. But there’s also a twisting, mesmerizing plot that takes us all the way to the present.

What really distinguishes Vine Street, though, is the writing itself, which seems to echo the rhythms of the 1930s jazz clubs, and… show more.

Before settling into the chronicle of the title character, this first entry in the Undertaker series (from the author of the much longer-running Edge books as well) follows a circuitous course involving an unfaithful wife and a vengeful husband. I won’t spoil the surprises along the way, but the Undertaker himself pushes the Western antihero to its limit. He’s all but emotionless, very nearly a sociopath, but with a certain competence and honor that gives him an appeal. (Even though he’s further saddled by the lame catchphrase ‘Bye-bye.’) I actually find his semi-autistic callousness more bearable than Steele’s more willful nastiness, since it seems the Undertaker was simply born the way he is, rather than choosing it.

You’ll recognize certain plot points from these books remixed into my book, though I found the Undertaker’s continued lack of character development a bit grating from one book to the next. That’s the… show more.

This is a gorgeous book to be savoured slowly.

It is suffused with music throughout (and the nerd within me loves the reoccurring literary motifs and phrases that definitely lend a musical quality to the book) and took me back to lazy summer days as a teenager when I first moved to London and the city felt wide open with excitement and possibility.

This is another love story, but one about community, family and the first loves that we learn from our parents.