Books like The Galaxy, and the Ground Within — picked by fans

Like many people, I’d heard so much about this classic that I was braced for disappointment the first time I read it.

But no, du Maurier’s rich, atmospheric prose gripped me from that famous first line. While I agree about the power of the iconic cast, such as the infamous Mrs. Danvers, I feel that the setting itself is just as powerful a character. I especially love du Maurier’s way of personifying the setting, so that things such as trees, and plants, and buildings come alive with malevolence.

The opening pages, for example, immediately fill you with unease despite the narrator talking about nothing more than the driveway leading up to the house on the estate! From the woods that “crowded, dark and uncontrolled” and the beeches with “white naked limbs” to the hydrangeas “rearing to a monster height without a bloom, black and ugly” and the nettles that “choked… show more.

An elegant mystery set in a near-to-partly-cloudy future. In the wake of some sort of apocalypse, communities have rebuilt.

In the Coast Road region, a sustainable civilization based on careful attention to quotas and mutual regard would seem an idyll of peaceful coexistence.

And yet. Enid is an investigator, called upon at times of uncomfortable questions.

She and her partner are called to look into a suspicious death. The buried realities encountered reveal a less-than-ideal picture of communities coping with things that do not fit with their presumptions.

A quiet mystery built atop a fascinating portrait of What Comes Next. I was drawn to the characters, the situation, but most especially the questions hovering just outside the confines of the story.

My mother has a service dog, and I’ve inherited a disability or two. The heroine in The Spare Man didn’t let her dog or her physical limitations stop her. She even used them to her advantage when she could.

I also loved how the book was an old-school Nick and Nora style murder mystery told in the far future on a space cruise ship. The author mixed those genres like she was mixing a tasty cocktail.

It was glorious fun from first page to last. And like all the stories on my list, it showed how much a hero can shine, no matter what gender or lack of gender she is, no matter how big or how small, what sort of personality or capability she has. It might be more of a mark of courage for a hero to find a friend than storm a castle, but that’s okay because… show more.

A quantum physicist encounters the world outside science.

A touching collection of essays by one of the best science writers today, Rovelli examines the interface of critical thinking, science, and life as lived daily by ordinary humans.

Rovelli has become one of my favorite science writers, but it is his humanity on display in these pieces. 

Everywhere I went in Iran in 1998 and 2002, there were huge wall paintings of martyrs who had been killed in the war against Iraq (1980-88). Mass attacks led to appalling casualties.

I returned a vicarious Iranian patriot. Christopher de Bellaigue, who speaks good Farsi, took me far deeper into post-revolutionary society in his numerous conversations with individuals from many different milieux, including two who had fought and survived the war.

I regard him as the best guide to the temper of contemporary Iran and the reasons for the fall of the secularizing regimes of the shahs (not least the sudden order in 1936 for women to cast aside the chador, which is likened to an order to go out topless in the west). 

A formerly comfort-seeking Brit takes a very difficult walk around Baja and learns a lot about himself, and of course, about this “desert place.”

What’s not for me to like in a story like that? There is adventure and struggle, but also plenty of humor, and the thread that binds it all together is the author’s dawning love for a land that became his special place.

Mackintosh is still living much of the time in Mexico and has written five more books about Baja, burros, beer, and even dogs, but this adventurous paean to the peninsula will always have a special place in my heart, because I read it when I was newly in love with Baja myself.

On the face of it, this seems like a straightforward book. Magris traces the geography of the Danube from Furtwangen or Donauschingen in southern Germany to the Black Sea, and in so doing surveys the history of the regions through which it passes. That would be a bold enough project in its own right, but the book itself is so much more than this and is one that I’ve returned to many times since I first stumbled across it fifteen years ago. The riverine structure of the book sweeps the reader from prehistory to the twentieth century and back again, individual eddies linger on intriguing episodes – the building of the cathedral tower at Ulm, the significance of the Iron Gates – and then we’re off again on another evocative description of the river or aside on the forgotten history of Mitteleuropa. A terrific read.

I don’t really get why Joe Bennett isn’t more famous as a travel writer. The Briton passes through the world with a detached cynicism that results in sheer hilarity. If that’s not enough, this book has a thread: the challenge of hitch-hiking around New Zealand, his adopted homeland. A country that had a cameo part to play in my own Outback truck driver mission. A country with which I have a love-hate relationship. (I love its beauty and old-world charm; I hate it because I’m South African and its rugby team is too keen on beating mine.) Like me, Bennett’s first impressions of the Antipodes came from dead-of-night sports broadcasts. Like me, Bennett wrote about how (in)accurate those were in his book. I think we’d get on…

In November 1849, Gustave Flaubert and his friend Maxime du Camp hired a boat and crew in Alexandria, Egypt and set off on a three-month trip up the Nile. At that time a trip on the Nile was still an extremely unusual and exotic adventure for Europeans. This book comprises Flaubert's letters to his mother and his friends back home in France. Flaubert was a man who deeply disliked his own country, had a longtime love of things oriental, was interested in the baser aspects of humanity, and was capable of writing to in a letter to a friend that women generally confused their cunts (his word) for their brains and thought the moon existed solely to light their boudoirs. 

You'll find here Flaubert's amusing descriptions of Egypt's bazaars, temples, and people, as well as his graphic and honest (possibly even exaggerated) descriptions of his sexual experiences in Egypt's numerous… show more.

In some travel writing, animals may be mentioned only in passing and are poorly observed, not so in this superbly written, sumptuous book. It is rich with icy imagery or steamy tropical atmosphere but there is humour, and how impressive that this successful wildlife cameraman and talented writer is so self-effacing. He seriously underplays the risks he faces, like his instructions if bitten by a seal on Bird Island: ‘Clean out the wound as much as you can with a scrubbing brush… and hope it is nowhere important… if it is really bad we’d have to radio for a ship to come and get you, but that could take weeks.’

Brilliant from beginning to end. I was totally immersed.