Here are 20 books that The Garden Against Time fans have personally recommended if you like
The Garden Against Time.
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In his most exhilarating novel yet, William Boyd transports you to the vibrant streets of sixties London, as an accidental spy is drawn into the shadows of espionage and obsession . . .
'William Boyd once again brings to the spy novel his particular storytelling genius. The result is brilliant fun' MICK HERRON
'Wonderfully ambiguous with notions of twisted reality and uncertain memory' ANN CLEEVES
'A wonderfully intricate novel of espionage and elegant skulduggery' JOHN BANVILLE
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An accidental spy. A web of betrayals. A mystery that will take you around the world . . .
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
'Just as a cello's voice is divided across four strings, each with its own colour and character, this is a journey in four parts, in search of four players and their instruments...'
In Cello, Kate Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pal Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic - and ultimately fatal - concert…
Although I’m an academic by training, I secretly struggle with heavy nonfiction tomes (think: massive histories of long-ago countries). I start reading these with the best intentions but quickly get sleepy, bored, or both, setting them aside and instead picking up a novel, which I’ll immediately devour. That’s why I love memoiristic, hybrid work so much: writing that pairs the intimacy of fiction with the information buffet of nonfiction, where you learn without realizing you’re learning. These books feel like a conversation with a close friend who is intelligent, thought-provoking, and passionate about various subjects—what could be better than that?
I read Olivia Laing’s bookat the height of my own loneliness: isolated, in lockdown, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part memoir, part art history, part cultural criticism, the book managed to be both intimate and expansive—just what I needed as I sat by myself in front of a computer, anxiously refreshing virus graphs.
I became absorbed by the lives of Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, artists I’d heard of but knew nothing about, and by the various aspects of loneliness I’d never previously considered. It’s the perfect example of the type of hybrid writing that I find truly magical.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
#1 Book of the Year from Brain Pickings
Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub
A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring.
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Queer rights in the United States are fragile at best. The Lavender Scare is still within living memory. Our elders who survived the AIDS crisis remember so many youths who never got to grow old. Obergefell v. Hodges is but a decade on the books. Trans rights are constantly under attack.
Small wonder, then, that a certain pressure exists within the queer community to not air our own dirty laundry. When it feels like we are under fire from all sides, any amount of scandal or internal dissent seems like it could doom us all.
A relationship between two women can be a beautiful life-long partnership. And it can, just like any heterosexual relationship, turn into an ugly saga of abuse, gaslighting, and infidelity.
We have all heard stories about, for, and by battered women. The concept of a controlling, or even abusive, girlfriend or wife is terribly cliché.
'Ravishingly beautiful' Observer 'Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative' Irish Times 'Provocative and rich' Economist 'Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you've ever read' Esquire 'An absolute must-read' Stylist
WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and…
Although I’m an academic by training, I secretly struggle with heavy nonfiction tomes (think: massive histories of long-ago countries). I start reading these with the best intentions but quickly get sleepy, bored, or both, setting them aside and instead picking up a novel, which I’ll immediately devour. That’s why I love memoiristic, hybrid work so much: writing that pairs the intimacy of fiction with the information buffet of nonfiction, where you learn without realizing you’re learning. These books feel like a conversation with a close friend who is intelligent, thought-provoking, and passionate about various subjects—what could be better than that?
As someone of mixed heritage interested in how race, culture, and history intersect differently for different groups of people, I was immediately hooked by Cathy Park Hong’s book. Her examination of the Korean-American experience and all of the privileges and disadvantages of her race and position in society resonated hugely with me.
But, almost more importantly, I found her essays thought-provoking, funny and wide-ranging. Stand-up comedy? Check. The 1992 LA riots? Check. The Beatles? Check. I’ve reread it multiple times and have recommended it to everyone I know.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY 2021
A New York Times Top Book of 2020
Chosen as a Guardian BOOK OF 2020
A BBC Culture Best Books of 2020
Nominated for Good Reads Books of 2020
One of Time's Must-Read Books of 2020
'Unputdownable ... Hong's razor-sharp, provocative prose will linger long after you put Minor Feelings down' - AnOther, Books You Should Read This Year
'A fearless work of creative non-fiction about racism in cultural pursuits by an award-winning poet and essayist' - Asia House
'Brilliant, penetrating and unforgettable, Minor Feelings is what was missing…
As a longtime host of The Moth, I know the power of personal storytelling. During the early days of the pandemic, I decided to write down all my favorite family stories so my kids would always have them. But how? I knew I didn’t want to write it chronologically or as a series of separate stories. After months of experimenting, I stumbled upon a format that let me pick and choose which stories I wanted to tell but also weave disparate family members together. I was greatly inspired by the books on this list, and I hope you are too!
This is an incredibly intimate and thought-provoking book that marries the story of the author’s relationship and pregnancy with her partner, along with history, philosophy, and even critical theory. What makes the book so fascinating is how quickly she’s able to shift between these different modes of writing.
So, one minute, she’s talking about being a parent, and in the next paragraph, she’s revisiting how the philosophical approach to child-rearing evolved over the 20th century. It really shook me out of thinking a memoir had to be approached one way or be just one thing.
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’ve loved weird horror from a young age, and that passion only grew as the years went on. It all started when I was ten, and I got an anthology of classic horror for my birthday. Inside I read The White People by Machen, Cast the Runes by MR James, and The Colour Out of Space by Lovecraft, and I was hooked. Ever since then I chased that same thrill of the horror that is so out there and strange it just breaks your brain and changes you inside out. I have a feeling I’ll be chasing that obsession until the end of my days.
A very dark turn in my list, indeed. A hole opens up in their apartment, who knows who or why? It doesn’t matter. They dub it the funhole, and would do what any of us would do, and start sticking things inside of it. Things get dark, fast.
If you want to be up all night, unable to sleep, give this book a whirl.
Kathe Koja's classic, award-winning horror novel is finally available as an ebook.
Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as…
I’m a cultural anthropologist with a passion for exploring how we humans make meaning of the wonderful, terrible, startling, often-absurd existence in which we find ourselves. My research has taken me from NYC’s underground occult scene to the conflict-resolution strategies of Central Peru; from circus performers in Portland, Maine, grappling with their physical potential, to a comedy club in Berlin where I set out to discover the secret sauce for evoking “collective joy” amongst strangers.I am drawn to artistic works that mix genres and defy categorization… and thus have a penchant for alienating editors, librarians, and bookstore owners who struggle to identify on which shelf my books belong.
The Dead Ladies Projectfollows Crispin’s inner and outer journey across Europe following her suicide attempt. As a way of trying to make sense of her own fragile condition, Crispin researches the lives of other artists who also fled abroad in order to find themselves.
I first read The Dead Ladies Project while researching my own hybrid memoir. It was a revelation and an inspiration, this elegant weaving of Crispin’s personal story with the stories of those she imagines traveled a similar path as herself, both geographically and emotionally.
At this time of overly curated, highly sanitized social media depictions of our lives, Crispin’s unflinching humanity is not just brave, but like water poured on arid soil.
When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she's still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender. The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey-but it's also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who…
I’m a cultural anthropologist with a passion for exploring how we humans make meaning of the wonderful, terrible, startling, often-absurd existence in which we find ourselves. My research has taken me from NYC’s underground occult scene to the conflict-resolution strategies of Central Peru; from circus performers in Portland, Maine, grappling with their physical potential, to a comedy club in Berlin where I set out to discover the secret sauce for evoking “collective joy” amongst strangers.I am drawn to artistic works that mix genres and defy categorization… and thus have a penchant for alienating editors, librarians, and bookstore owners who struggle to identify on which shelf my books belong.
Love it or hate it, this is a truly unique book. Slater presents herself as the ultimate unreliable narrator, describing her life-long struggles with epilepsy, only to reveal that her diagnosis is a lie. (Or is it? Apparently, even she is not sure.) Which makes the experience of reading Lyinga slippery head trip. One becomes easily absorbed in Slater’s evocative prose and haunting descriptions, only to be reminded a sentence later that it may all be complete BS.
Some readers might be turned off by what is, admittedly, a bit of a mind fuck. Me, I’m fascinated by it. Lying offers the opportunity to vicariously inhabit a mind not quite tethered to truth… thus forcing readers to contemplate our own relationship to Truth.
In this powerful and provocative new memoir, award-winning author Lauren Slater forces readers to redraw the boundary between what we know as fact and what we believe through the creation of our own personal fictions. Mixing memoir with mendacity, Slater examines memories of her youth, when after being diagnosed with a strange illness she developed seizures and neurological disturbances-and the compulsion to lie. Openly questioning the reliability of memoir itself, Slater presents the mesmerizing story of a young woman who discovers not only what plagues her but also what cures her-the birth of her sensuality, her creativity as an artist,…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a cultural anthropologist with a passion for exploring how we humans make meaning of the wonderful, terrible, startling, often-absurd existence in which we find ourselves. My research has taken me from NYC’s underground occult scene to the conflict-resolution strategies of Central Peru; from circus performers in Portland, Maine, grappling with their physical potential, to a comedy club in Berlin where I set out to discover the secret sauce for evoking “collective joy” amongst strangers.I am drawn to artistic works that mix genres and defy categorization… and thus have a penchant for alienating editors, librarians, and bookstore owners who struggle to identify on which shelf my books belong.
Volume 1 of Nin’s series is my rainy day read when I don’t want to leave the house but still want to feel connected to humanity. It’s sleepy. There’s no real plot. What drama occurs takes place primarily within the author’s mind as she reflects upon what it is to be an ambitious writer (specifically, an ambitious femalewriter) in 1930s bohemian Paris. There is plenty of Eros in it—most famously her relationship with Henry and June Miller. But, again, this remains primarily within the author’s mind, acting as further fodder in her quest to uncover her truest emotional core.
**What exactly is the difference between a “memoir” and a “diary”? Please write to me via my website if you have thoughts on this.
The acclaimed author details her bohemian life in 1930s Paris—including her famous affair with Henry Miller—in the classic first volume of her diaries.
Born in France to Cuban parents, Anais Nin began keeping a diary at the age of eleven and continued the practice for the rest of her life. Confessional, scandalous, and thoroughly absorbing, her diaries became one of the most celebrated literary projects of the twentieth century. Writing candidly of her marriages and affairs—including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller—Nin presents a passionate and detailed record of a modern woman’s journey of self-discovery. Edited and…
