Books like The Fulcrum Files — picked by fans

I read this book as a young teenager and as soon as I finished, I started reading again. I’ve since learned that the best thing we can do as authors is to make readers feel like they are not just reading but actually living the story, and in hindsight that’s why it made such an impression.

I could easily imagine myself sailing around the world, just like this other sailing kid who was only a few years older than me—and who had already achieved a lifelong dream. 

I loved this book because it combined a fast-paced story, historically accurate sailing ships, and a healthy dose of (accurate) maritime history. I’ve read it several times, and I still wish I could pick it up for the very first time and not know what was going to happen next. Best of all, there are six more books that follow this one! 

I loved this book because it fictionalized a “real” sailboat race around the world: what was then called The Whitbread, rebranded as the Volvo Ocean Race and now known as The Ocean Race.

The characters are true to life and the sailing details are both right and thrilling. I would not want to race around the world (or even across my local waters) with any of them, but their quirks and willingness to push the boundaries make for a rollicking story. 

I loved the descriptions of the sailors who pioneered a singlehanded, non-stop sailing race around the world—especially as I’m watching the 2024-25 Vendée Globe race.

So much has changed since the 1968 race covered by this book, but the human grit required to meet such an incredible challenge remains. 

We are coded as homo sapiens to look at each other. To observe, study, analyse our fellow creatures. One of the reasons I’ll never live in the country is that I’ll miss observing urban life. 

This is such a simple book with a simple premise. Perec recorded everything he saw while sitting at a café on a Parisian square over three days. When I lived in Paris in the 1990s, I had a dog-eared French version of this book and I dutifully went to the same place. Not to record my own observations but to try and see things that Perec might have seen twenty years prior.

A city-dweller regards their city. This book is at once nothing and yet it is everything about urban life. I found in Perec a comrade in arms. The romantic in me insists on believing that the seeds for my later urban observations lie… show more.

Long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia and pro-Russian forces tried to reclaim Ukraine through armed conflict after it declared independence in 1991. More than 500,000 people died in consecutive wars from 2014, among them Volodymyr Pavliv, a soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces who died of shrapnel wounds in 2017. His sister, Olesya Khromeychuk, a historian, scholar, and director of the Ukrainian Institute of London, narrates her brother’s death in this meditation on grief and war.

As a memoirist, she reveals the nuances of her brother, at once patriotic, brave, complicated, and difficult. Her reflections on his splintered life add color and humanity to a flawed yet loved brother. Her portrayal of her own and her family’s grief is tender and wrenching. However, given her unique stature as a Ukrainian historian, this most personal book about the human cost of war also serves as a study of… show more.

Conventional histories give the French a free pass concerning the causes of World War I: the French leadership is commonly described as being literally out-of-touch (on a battleship coming back to France). Schmidt’s brilliant archival research shows that the French were fully aware that the Austrians were going to issue an ultimatum to the Serbs and encouraged the Russians to support a Serb refusal and a Russian military attack on Austria. (My addendum: the French plan is a mirror image of the Russian plan – the French would tie down the Germans in the West and the Russians hordes would overwhelm the Germans in the East.)

A bit of a cheat, this one. It’s probably my favourite French novel, precisely because it is timeless and seems to ignore everything about French history. I don’t think there’s one mention or symptom of the Revolution, no scar of the First World War, no French over-intellectualizing. It’s just nature and humankind going head-to-head in a brutally realistic, but starkly beautiful, Provençal landscape. By the way, I don’t like the English title – Regain means regrowth, the first signs of recovery. Personally, I’d prefer a title like Signs of Life. And this novel is all about a tiny hamlet in southern France that is on the verge of death. Only one man of working age remains amongst the ruined houses; the fields are fallow; there are no women. Then a tinker comes through, dragging his unwilling, abused femme with him. She catches the lone male peasant’s eye, cosmic chemistry occurs,… show more.

This is a first-person account of life in the trenches in France and Belgium in WW1. It’s actually a difficult read in places because his writing style is quite unusual and by no means eloquent, but once you get used to it, it’s truly intriguing. He wrote the book with a pencil on exercise books after the war, probably to try and exorcise his demons. It wasn’t until his family found it and took it to a publisher that his story came to light, a very frank and occasionally morbid description of war at its very worst but an essential read.

I love this group of very different women from Smithfield College who band together amid the Great War and set sail to nurse in war-torn France. 

Armed with good intentions but few practical skills and little knowledge of what they’re getting into, nothing is as they imagined—not the lodging, the lack of welcome, the unimagined obstacles, or the many differences in personalities that challenge them. Still, they buckle down to learn critical skills by doing, overcome countless obstacles while surviving dangerous characters and circumstances, work through their own personality clashes and prejudices, and accomplish more than they or anyone expected. 

The gift and beauty is that in banding together to accomplish the impossible they develop deep and lasting friendships. Band of Sisters is rich in inspiration desperately needed in our time.