Here are 100 books that The Heart of the Matter fans have personally recommended if you like
The Heart of the Matter.
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I am a professor of history who specializes in the United States and the Cold War. A large part of my job involves choosing books that are informative, but that the students will actually want to read. That means I often select novels, memoirs, and works of history that have compelling figures or an entertaining narrative. After more than twenty years of teaching, I’ve assigned many different books in my classes. These are the ones that my students enjoyed the most.
I was immediately drawn to the suspense of this book. The novel begins at the Berlin Wall, where British intelligence agent Alec Leamas helplessly watches as East German guards murder his colleague.
As I followed the elaborate British plan to get revenge on an East German official, I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something. When I finally got to the end, I realized that I had been duped—much like many of the characters in the novel.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Our Kind of Traitor; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston.
The 50th-anniversary edition of the bestselling novel that launched John le Carre's career worldwide
In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse-a desk job-Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered…
Journey to an unnamed mountainous country in central Europe at the end of the Great War. Enter Citizen Orlov, a simple fishmonger and an honest, upright citizen, who answers a phone call meant for a secret agent and stumbles into a hidden…
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
Okay, this brilliant book doesn’t quite fit with the others. But I had to include it because; 1) I couldn’t write this list without including a Canadian book; and 2) it’s one of my favourite books. Richler’s Barney is every bit as compelling a tragic character as the others I mention here, but he’s written with Richler’s sly, caustic wit.
He’s the lovable rogue who fritters away all three of his wives, including love-of-his-life Miriam, while being accused of killing his best friend. Amidst Richler’s sly critique of the modern world, we witness Barney’s slow descent into dementia and desolation. The ending, however, fits this sardonic novel like a glove and left me with a big smile on my face.
Before his brain began to shrink, Barney Panofsky clung to two cher-ished beliefs. Life was absurd, and nobody ever truly understood any-body else. Even his friends tend to agree that Barney is 'a wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a pen-chant for violence and probably a murderer'. But when his sworn enemy threatens to publish this calumny, Barney is driven to write his own memoirs, rewinding the spool of his life, editing, selecting and plagiarising, as his memory plays tricks on him - and on the reader. Ebullient and perverse, he has seen off 3…
Requesting that I justify my credentials as a misfit, eh? Okay, then. I personally differ from almost everyone around me in many ways, but most notably with respect to faith, sexual arousal, and use of the intellect. I’ve always sought to cultivate and nourish my spiritual side, but faith-based Western religions never resonated with me—I instead cobbled together a discipline encompassing yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, and Ahimsa—which has served me for over half a century. From the earliest age, sexual arousal has involved scenarios where one person cedes power and the other wields it. And I have always obsessed about any bit of minutia my brain happened to seize upon.
In this classic, heart-wrenching novella, the misfit character is Lenny—a gigantic, strong, but intellectually challenged migrant worker in California in the 1930s. Despite being faithfully chaperoned by his lifelong friend George, who tries his best to keep Lenny out of trouble, it seems fated that trouble will inevitably find Lenny. And when it does, Lenny—who is in truth a huge, confused child in a world of rough, unforgiving men—pays the ultimate price.
This story resonates especially strongly with me because I had a younger brother, now deceased, who was severely intellectually challenged.
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.
Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie have nothing in the world except…
Annie Kurtz joins the Marines, deploys to Afghanistan, and has to make a split-second decision. She can follow her orders. Or she can follow her conscience. Nick Willard is a journalist who has pined for Annie since they were in prep school together. While doing his job, he discovers what…
In the 1960s, inspired by the civil rights and antiwar movements, the women's and environmental movements, and the counterculture, I became an activist and political organizer. Eventually, I called myself a revolutionary and helped found a militant underground organization. Out of anger and youthful naiveté, and being in too much of a hurry to think clearly, I made some superficial choices and did some things I now regret. Ever since, I have been hypersensitive to the nuances and contradictions in what motivates people to become radicals and to flirt with—or embrace—violence as a legitimate action.
A badly disciplined, poorly educated gang of young Nepalis, part of a separatist guerrilla insurgency, reminded me of my militant leftist former comrades.
If the Nepali boys' self-image borrowed from action-hero films, ours took inspiration from political tracts (and movies), perhaps more literate but no less cartoonish. (A real insurgency in Nepal, in the 1980s, failed. Ours, in the U.S. in the 1960s and '70s, failed too.)
The guerrillas provide one of the novel's interconnected story lines and sympathetic sets of characters. The place is a dreamily lush Himalayan locale. But the "inheritance," the legacy of colonialism—class division, poverty, alienation—renders it grim and all of its inhabitants' dreams perpetually frustrated.
The Inheritance of Loss is Kiran Desai's extraordinary Man Booker Prize winning novel.
High in the Himalayas sits a dilapidated mansion, home to three people, each dreaming of another time.
The judge, broken by a world too messy for justice, is haunted by his past. His orphan granddaughter has fallen in love with her handsome tutor, despite their different backgrounds and ideals. The cook's heart is with his son, who is working in a New York restaurant, mingling with an underclass from all over the globe as he seeks somewhere to call home.
For more than half a century, I have been writing books and articles about America’s past, with most of my work focusing on 20th-century political history. I believe that, except in the 1850s, which led to a bloody civil war, Americans have never been more divided. Although I have always believed in objectivity in my work, I share Leo Tolstoy’s belief that history is ultimately a form of moral reflection, that a conversation with the past might do more than inform us about what people have said and done; it might help make decisions about how we should live.
In 2004 I gave a presentation to a University of Adelaide faculty seminar on the need for historians to reclaim the “narrative” as a way of reaching a larger reading audience without resorting to “flourishes of the imagination.” Several sociologists and historians strongly disagreed, but a soft-spoken participant eloquently came to my defense.
At the reception that followed, my defender introduced himself as “John Coetzee.” Awestruck, I realized this was the 2003 Nobel Prize Winner, J.M. Coetzee, and I felt a bit like a starstruck fan of a rockstar as I told him that, for years, I had assigned this book to my class in African American history.
Set in an unnamed colonial outpost, the story is an allegory narrated by an unnamed “magistrate” who task is to control the darker skinned “barbarians” beyond the gates. Its very mythical nature allows Coetzee to explore the universal: the way in which…
A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, now a major motion picture starring Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp
For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire whose servant he is. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he finds himself jolted into sympathy with their victims—until their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war finally pushes him into a quixotic act of rebellion, and thus into imprisonment as an enemy of the state.
Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee’s third novel, which won the…
I was a child of empire myself, which can have uncomfortable associations. In my case, this came with a sense of guilt as I grew up in apartheid South Africa, and while still a young man, I felt compelled to leave. Thus disconnected, I became a wanderer in Asia and the Far East, developing an enduring love of India. Africa drew me back as a foreign correspondent when the independence of Zimbabwe appeared to herald a new age of hope. I returned to report too from my homeland after Nelson Mandela’s release. At bottom, my interests – and I’m never sure where they will go next – have always been unpredictable.
It is a novel out of Africa and one that anticipated the end of the empire with relish. Although raised on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, Lessing was always a rebel, and her debut work took an astonishingly bold line in exploring the doomed relationship between a white farmer's wife and a black servant.
The employer is vindictive and racist yet also a hapless dependent and, ultimately, a victim.
The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing's first novel is a taut and tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in South Africa during the years of Arpartheid.
Set in Rhodesia, 'The Grass is Singing' tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush and viciously abuses the black South Africans who work on their farm. But after many years, trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny house, the lonely and frightened Mary turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding.
What if the greatest threat to Western civilization did not come from outside—but from within?
Cold Monster is a political and geopolitical thriller about power, manipulation, betrayal, cowardice, and freedom. Behind governments and public events, hidden networks pursue their own agendas while individuals are forced to choose between resistance, complicity,…
I've had a life-long passion for birds and African wildlife that developed from a very early age, spending countless hours on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. At various times I've had a totally compulsive obsession for birds and have chased rare and endangered birds around the planet for my long-standing TV series Nikon’s Birding Adventures TV. My love for elephants is equally as strong and I produced an award-winning conservation film in 2018 entitled Last of the Big Tuskers that features the plight of the world’s last remaining 20 or so super-tusker elephants. I'm a conservation fanatic and love exploring the links between local people and wildlife.
This is one of the most comprehensive books on African elephants I have ever read. It covers a huge variety of topics and is a compilation of stories and studies from a collection of authors, conservationists, and scientists. I particularly like the mixture of personal stories and scientific information. An absolute “must-read” for anyone with a deep interest in elephants and a desire to get involved in their conservation.
The Africa-wide Great Elephant Census of 2016 produced shocking findings: a decimated elephant population whose numbers were continuing to plummet. Elephants are killed, on average, every 15-20 minutes - a situation that will see the final demise of these intelligent, extraordinary animals in less than three decades. They are a species in crisis.
This magnificent book offers chapters written by the most prominent people in the realm of conservation and wildlife, among them researchers, conservationists, filmmakers, criminologists, TV personalities and journalists.
Photographs have been selected from among the world's best wildlife photographers, and the passionate Foreword is provided…
I am a South African historian of Russian origin, who has studied and taught African history since the late 1960s. For us, the Russians, Africa was then an alluring terra incognita of wild nature, adventure, human suffering, struggles, and tenacity. I have studied how Africa became what it is for 50 years and lived in it for 30. I have learnt a lot about it, but for me it is still a land of human suffering, struggles and tenacity, wild nature, and adventure, and it is still alluring.
There are thousands of histories of Africa, but only this one ties together environment, economy, demography, and society. In just 300 pages Iliffe presents Africa’s history from the birth of humankind to the mid-1990s. His history of Africa is the story of hardship and social adjustment in which population numbers are not just the result of variable, though mostly unfavourable, environmental situations, but a tool of survival and progress. This social adjustability, different as it may be from European patterns, allowed the continent’s people to build one of the greatest civilisations on earth. It carried them through natural disasters, invasions, the slave trade, and colonial brutalities, but it struggles with the present pace of demographic expansion – the result of modern medicine and globalisation.
In a vast and all-embracing study of Africa, from the origins of mankind to the present day, John Iliffe refocuses its history on the peopling of an environmentally hostile continent. Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, but during the last century their inherited culture has interacted with medical progress to produce the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. This new edition incorporates genetic and linguistic findings, throwing light on early African history and summarises research that has transformed the study of the Atlantic slave trade. It also examines the consequences of a rapidly growing…
I’ve always loved good literary fiction for the opportunity it provides to step into someone else’s life for a brief period. I’ve lived and worked intensely in the medical and health development field for over two decades in many beautiful parts of the great African continent. I’ve come to understand that we all go about our lives with similar goals, concerned with the same universal themes. What a joy it is to find great books by authors who know their African settings. Not only do the characters’ stories move me, but I learn and become more curious about the political history in the background.
Yusuf is a young boy, an indentured servant to an Arab trader, living in a cloistered environment amidst much he doesn’t understand. On a trading trip from the Swahili coast, through the foothills of Kilimanjaro, and on to Lake Victoria, he has the opportunity to see foreign wonders, learn how the trader negotiates, and see the attitudes of the Swahili traders toward the people from the interior, the relatively new Indian immigrants, and the German colonizers. The trip is brutal; descriptions are straightforward and realistic but the author never sensationalizes events. This is an important piece of the incredible variety in the mosaic of African culture and history. The honesty and authenticity the author provides make it clear what he has to offer the literary world and why he was awarded a Nobel prize.
Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, 12-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into the complexities of precolonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf's eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence.
You’re grieving, you’re falling in love and you’re skint. On top of it all, Europe’s going to Hell in a handcart. Things can’t get any worse, can they?
London, 1938. William is grieving over his former teacher and mentor, killed fighting for the Republicans in Spain. As Europe slides towards…
I’m not a genre purist. I adore combining classic forms in new and exciting ways to make stories that have never been told before. The novels on this list are like that. They refuse to obey genre rules. Detective fiction suggests our questions have answers. The truth is rational and we can discover it. The supernatural elements of occult fiction say otherwise. Human consciousness cannot comprehend the nature of reality. Our investigations fail to understand our lives—the best we can do is explain them away. When these perspectives collide, it can result in interesting ways to see the world, familiar but fresh, as we have never known it before.
I love the Jimmy Paz novels. I wish there were more of them. Gruber’s are the most conventional crime plots on my list—tightly-crafted, intricate, and intelligent. His detective is the archetypal hero: smart, resourceful, big-hearted, brave. But in this world, science and rational deduction are insufficient to solve the crime because reality is not just unknown. It is unknowable. This is the cardinal sin of the detective genre. Even worse, Gruber completely gets away with it. With forays into Siberian Shamanism and Santeria, Tropic of Night is as much an investigation of consciousness and perception as it is the hunt for a murderous warlock. When the orishas finally arrive for the climax, my hands trembled. I got some small inkling of what it means for the fear of god to be the beginning of wisdom.
Jane Doe had been a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she is nothing, a shadow. After faking her own suicide, she is living under an assumed identity in Miami, with a traumatised little girl to protect. Everyone thinks Jane is dead - or so she hopes.
Then the killings start: a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies the entire city. The investigating detective, Jimmy Paz, locates the witnesses to these events but they can recall almost nothing, as though their memories have been erased. As if a spell has been cast on them...
