Here are 61 books that The Hired Man fans have personally recommended if you like
The Hired Man.
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I grew up dreaming of other worlds, both real and imagined. I’ve since had the great fortune of living in Angola, Bangladesh, Gambia, Italy, Malawi, Mozambique, Myanmar, and Tanzania—each country as fascinating to me as the next. Yet there’s so much more of the world I want to experience! This is why I love novels that immerse me in the history and culture of foreign lands. By entering the hearts and minds of characters with different life experiences than myself, I feel a sense of connection that expands my own worldview. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
This heartwarming, multigenerational drama about the Korean community in Japan swept me into another time and place. Born and raised in a poor fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea, Sunja makes an impulsive decision in the pursuit of love that transforms the trajectory of her life.
Thoughtful, resilient, and fiercely independent, Sunja was a relatable character whom I desperately wanted to see thrive. I felt her heartache when she left her beloved Korea and shared her indignation at the discrimination she and her family experienced in Japan. Expertly crafted and keenly observed, Pachinko shows us how history and politics shape the lives of ordinary people, often for generations to come.
* The million-copy bestseller* * National Book Award finalist * * One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017 * * Selected for Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club *
'This is a captivating book... Min Jin Lee's novel takes us through four generations and each character's search for identity and success. It's a powerful story about resilience and compassion' BARACK OBAMA.
Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja…
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, The Golden Land digs deep into the complexities of family history and relationships.
Etta Montgomery is a Boston-based labor lawyer coming to terms with the love and loss she experienced as a teenager during a 1988 family reunion in Burma. When Etta’s…
I am the product of a love triangle—an unusual one, between a French Holocaust survivor, an African student from France’s colonies, and a black GI. My parents came of age during really turbulent times and led big, bold lives. They rarely spoke about their pasts, but once I began digging—in the letters they exchanged, in conversations with my grandmother and aunts, with their childhood friends—I realized that all three had witnessed up close so much of the drama and horrors of the twentieth century and that what they had lived together merited being told. My parents’ love triangle is at the heart of my love of love-triangle stories.
This is so much more than a love triangle story that I hesitate to reduce it to merely that. The novel explores interracial relationships, “blackness” in both an African and an African-American context, and the ways in which those worlds collide, etc., etc. At its broadest, the book describes the story of the Nigerian diaspora writ large. But at its core, this is the story of a love triangle—the sort of story I love most.
(I grew up a bit of a mama’s boy, and in our household, we loved love stories…)
As in Ishiguro and Jones, cited above, and in Garcia Marquez, noted next, the characters here submit to pressures and make difficult choices—as thoughtfully as they can, under the circumstances. And those choices have life-changing consequences that the characters eventually come to regret.
Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria. Self-assured Ifemelu heads for America. But quiet, thoughtful Obinze finds post-9/11 America closed to him, and plunges into a dangerous undocumented life in London.
I grew up dreaming of other worlds, both real and imagined. I’ve since had the great fortune of living in Angola, Bangladesh, Gambia, Italy, Malawi, Mozambique, Myanmar, and Tanzania—each country as fascinating to me as the next. Yet there’s so much more of the world I want to experience! This is why I love novels that immerse me in the history and culture of foreign lands. By entering the hearts and minds of characters with different life experiences than myself, I feel a sense of connection that expands my own worldview. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
Set in Baghdad in 2002, this book introduced me to a part of the world that I knew little about. The novel is written as a braided narrative of three interconnected women—Huda, Rania, and Ally—each harboring their own secrets and lies as they navigate life under Sadaam Hussein’s authoritarian regime.
I found myself holding my breath as the three women’s lives became increasingly entangled and endangered. This compelling and suspenseful novel asks how much we are willing to compromise our values in order to protect the people we love. I enjoyed reading it and learned a lot about Iraq in the process.
“Breathtaking…Riveting and profound! I adored this book!” —Ellen Marie Wiseman, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan Collector
“A deeply involving and important novel by a master storyteller.” —Susan Wiggs, # 1 New York Times bestselling author
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
In this moving, suspenseful debut novel, three courageous women confront the complexities of trust, friendship, motherhood, and betrayal under the rule of a ruthless dictator and his brutal secret police. Former foreign correspondent Gina Wilkinson draws on her own experiences to take readers inside a haunting story of Iraq at the turn of the millennium and the impossible choices…
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, The Golden Land digs deep into the complexities of family history and relationships.
Etta Montgomery is a Boston-based labor lawyer coming to terms with the love and loss she experienced as a teenager during a 1988 family reunion in Burma. When Etta’s…
I grew up dreaming of other worlds, both real and imagined. I’ve since had the great fortune of living in Angola, Bangladesh, Gambia, Italy, Malawi, Mozambique, Myanmar, and Tanzania—each country as fascinating to me as the next. Yet there’s so much more of the world I want to experience! This is why I love novels that immerse me in the history and culture of foreign lands. By entering the hearts and minds of characters with different life experiences than myself, I feel a sense of connection that expands my own worldview. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
I found this novel about a young, widowed mother living through Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War both eye-opening and deeply touching. Having recently moved to Bangladesh myself, I welcomed the chance to learn more about my host country’s history while at the same time being transported into the fictional lives of Rehana and her two adolescent children, Maya and Sohail.
Tahmima Anam’s expert storytelling and razor-sharp observation made me feel as if I were right there with the characters, facing the same impossible choices but also experiencing the same unexpected moments of passion and beauty.
Spring, 1971, East Pakistan. Rehana Haque is throwing a party for her beloved children, Sohail and Maya. Her young family is growing up fast, and Rehana wants to remember this day forever. But out on the hot city streets, something violent is brewing. As the civil war develops, a war which will eventually see the birth of Bangladesh, Rehana struggles to keep her children safe and finds herself facing a heartbreaking dilemma.
If there was ever one word that seems to have changed the foundations of modern Britain it is the word 'Brexit': something that had seemed so antediluvian shifted from being impossible to becoming reality. I could not believe this was happening and I wanted to explore the influence of language in creating this reality. I decided to apply the approach I had originally authored known as Critical Metaphor Analysis to unravel the metaphors through which the arguments of Leavers and Remainers were articulated. In doing so I tried to tell the story of Brexit through its metaphors because the role of language itself is often overlooked in accounts of persuasion.
This is a book written in its own language: one that is derived from Old English. It is written from the viewpoint of a Saxon native, a freeman, whose liberty is threatened by the outside world, invaders who respect no moral laws. Through this method, we enter the minds of the protagonist – Buccmaster of Holland – and a worldview is constructed in which the local is in a shifting balance with external sources of power. The book demonstrates how our thoughts and worldviews are realised by, and dependent upon, the language through which they are articulated. Without explicitly intending to do so, it also provides insight into much of the psychology behind Brexit.
Winner of the Gordon Burn Prize 2014 and The Bookseller Industry Book of the Year Award 2015. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.
A post-apocalyptic novel set a thousand years ago, The Wake tells the story of Buccmaster of Holland, a free farmer of Lincolnshire, owner of three oxgangs, a man clinging to the Old Gods as the world changes drastically around him. After losing his sons at the Battle of Hastings and his wife and home to the invading Normans, Buccmaster begins to gather together…
I have always been interested in and captivated by horror and the darker genres, drawing and painting initially and later on as a writer. I am a full-time tattooist now but I still enjoy writing, and I produced several short stories as well as finished my vampire/Egyptian mythology novel Pharaoh during the coronavirus lockdown when I was unable to work in the tattoo studio. I still draw and paint, and it can be fun illustrating and producing artwork for my fiction, where sometimes one feeds off another.
An amazing and surprising read. When a madman is buried alive by five teenagers who take the law into their own hands, it is hardly a new idea for him to come back for revenge upon them. But Jim Brown takes it several stages further with more dark twists than you could possibly think of.
On the night of a raging electrical storm, a group of teenage boys gather on a secluded hill in Oregon to bury one of their own...alive. It isn't murder, because the "victim" is a willing participant. For sneering, knife-wielding punk Whitey Dobbs it's just a gang-initiation stunt. For the others, however, it's a carefully planned act of revenge – designed to give Whitey Dobbs the fright of his life. But even the best-laid plans can go wrong. And when this joke is over, nobody will be laughing...except maybe Whitey Dobbs.
Twenty-two years later, the events of that stormy night are…
I have been in various militaries for over 17 years and am proud of my service. Troubled Zen is my first foray into the publishing world and I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. I enjoy the ex-military hero-style action/ thriller novels because I find that I can understand their mindset and relate well with their characters. I found most were male, ex-special forces so I chose a female Explosive Ordnance Disposal member as I believe that there are plenty of aspects to investigate that can show how a woman can be equally tough, stubborn, ingenious, brave, and determined.
Bernard Cornwall’s series is an epic tale of a rifleman throughout the Napoleonic Wars. The action is loosely based on true events and grips me from start to finish. As with Reacher, he attempts to do the right thing and doesn’t mind bending the rules as he does it – so long as it helps to achieve the objective. This book seems to be the last in the series and puts Richard and Harper out to pasture as they deserve. Sharpe’s rise from the gutter is a constant reminder to keep trying and no matter where you come from, you have a chance to reach the top. His stubbornness is classic male behaviour and I’ve used some of that for my own character, Zenobia.
The global bestseller Bernard Cornwell returns with his iconic hero, Richard Sharpe.
If any man can do the impossible it's Richard Sharpe . . .
Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe is a man with a reputation. Born in the gutter, raised a foundling, he joined the army twenty-one years ago, and it's been his home ever since. He's a loose cannon, but his unconventional methods make him a valuable weapon.
So when, the dust still settling after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington needs a favour, he turns to Sharpe. For Wellington knows that…
Like many readers, I am drawn to stories of vengeance. Stories of someone seeking revenge have a built-in tension and narrative drive. But as the saying goes, when you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. Yes, these tales seldom go smoothly. The consequences of this and the violence that ensues are what I wanted to explore in my latest novel, but several books on my shelf make fascinating stories out of this desire for revenge.
None of Guthrie’s characters are anyone you want to get on the wrong side of. Pearce, an ex-con and Edinburgh hard man, may be his most dangerous creation. Guthrie’s black humor is fully displayed in this novel of a man out for blood and bound to get it in ever more inventive ways.
The Scottish writer Guthrie is in danger of falling into obscurity, but several of his other evangelists and I are intent on not letting that happen. This book is a good place to start with his work; if you like it, you will have a world of dark pleasures waiting in his other books.
Has Pearce finally found his match? A time-served Edinburgh hard man, Pearce is still recovering from the recent loss of his mother in a stabbing incident in a post office robbery. He's invited by the dysfunctional Baxter family to protect their pregnant 16-year-old daughter from Wallace, her 26-year-old husband, a man with a penchant for killing family pets. Having found out that the baby's not his, Wallace has sworn vengeance. Pearce declines the job: he's no babysitter. But when Wallace kills Pearce's dog, he goes too far. Now it's personal. It's time to find out who the real hard man…
As a published author, Debra’s passion for fast-paced, unputdownable novels is unquenchable. She can be ruthless in her criticism, applying the rule, “three strikes and you’re out!” A firm believer that life is too short to read mediocre books, if she isn’t grabbed by chapter 3, she puts the book down and moves on. She wants a book to make her life better, she wants to feel excitement at picking it back up again, and burying herself in the characters and moods, twists and turns, of a great story. Her writing reflects this same trait, if her words won’t keep the reader totally engrossed, then she won’t write them.
Simon Kernick is a master at keeping the reader engaged. His books have an amazing pace, and you will 100% commit to the story. Relentlessmoves you seamlessly through an array of emotions, as you read. You feel desperately for the protagonist, willing him to escape his torment and tormentors. This book twists and turns and gallops you from the first page, right to the last. Prepare to feel exhausted!
John Meron, a happily married father of two who's never been in trouble, receives a phone call that will change his life for ever: his friend Jack Calley, a high-flying City lawyer, is screaming down the phone for help. As Meron listens, Calley is murdered. His last words, spoken to his killer, are the first two lines of Meron's address. Confused and terrified, Meron scoops up his children and hurries out of the house. Just in time. Within minutes, a car pulls up outside, and three men get out. It's clear that they're coming for him. He's being hunted and…
Like many people, The Lord of the Ringscaptivated me as a child. I read those books as well as The Hobbit half a dozen times before I was twelve, and a couple of times more since. What’s more, I was lucky enough to be nine when the first movie came out, which only furthered my childhood obsession. Though I’m less enthralled by the series now, the classic quest it represents still has a place in my heart. I’ve tried to reproduce the grandeur and adventure of that story in my writing, and I’ve found a good portion of it in the books I recommend below. May they take you on captivating new journeys!
Quest is in the name, and does it ever live up to it! As the culmination of The Farseer Trilogy, it does the previous books justice. The journey is arduous, full of twists and turns, and the reader feels every wound Fitz suffers. Yet as in every good quest, in the end, he achieves what he aims to do – though not in the way he expects, and at an unimaginable cost. This is Hobb at her finest, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
'Fantasy as it ought to be written' George R.R. Martin
The gripping finale to Robin Hobb's classic Farseer Trilogy.
With the king no longer living and the heir, Verity, missing and declared dead, Prince Regal has treacherously seized the throne.
Regal's torture has left Fitz more dead than alive, and more closely than ever bonded with his wolf. All who once loved him believe him dead: even Molly, now pregnant with his child. But he cannot go to her without placing her in terrible danger.
With nothing to lose, Fitz sets out for Tradeford, where Regal…
