Here are 79 books that The Inheritors fans have personally recommended if you like
The Inheritors.
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I’ve been an avid reader and a professional writer my entire life—from writing for newspapers, magazines, and television to developing, producing, and writing award-winning projects for TV and film and writing best-selling fiction and nonfiction. My experience as a journalist, author, screenwriter, and producer has always interested me in headline news, historical subjects, and modern-day topics and issues that resonate with humanity. In doing so, I’ve consciously decided to create projects and share stories that entertain, inspire, educate, and uplift with themes that revolve around faith, family, hope, healing, forgiveness, timeless friendships, enduring romances, and the wondrous mysteries of life.
A slice of historical fiction, this novel delves into the horrors faced by a young Jewish girl, Sarah, who, during WWII Paris, is arrested with her family by the French police. Sara locks her young brother in a cupboard in the family’s apartment, thinking she’ll be returning in a few hours.
The book alternates between Sarah’s life and the life of a middle-aged journalist, Julia, living in Paris 3 at the start of the 21st Century with her French husband and daughter. After discovering a family secret tied to Sarah’s story while researching an article about the roundup of the Jews in Paris during the war, Julia becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Sarah, especially in connection to her sense of guilt over her family’s potential role in the tragedy.
I love this book because I love historical fiction and family mysteries. The period of WWII holds many…
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that…
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…
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.
This is a hugely ambitious and moving novel and one of my all-time favorite reads. The character, Owen Meany, is a tiny man with a shrill, piercing voice who believes he is God’s instrument.
For me as an author, one of the most striking and memorable aspects of this novel was the ingenious and perfectly executed plotting of the story’s grand finale—absolutely mind-boggling the way John Irving pulled it off.
'Marvellously funny . . . What better entertainment is there than a serious book which makes you laugh?' Spectator
'If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.'
Summer, 1953. In the small town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, eleven-year-old John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany are playing in a Little League baseball game. When Owen hits a foul ball which kills John's mother, their lives are changed in an instant.
I’m an accidental historian, one that stumbled over a love of history in spite of myself. In school, history was all just dates and places—not the kind of thing to inspire a kid that loved stories about people, not dusty old battles. But then a funny thing happened on the way to an English degree. A few history electives suddenly seemed way more appealing than another round of Austen, and led me to a BA History with Distinction. The first half of the twentieth century is a favorite period, but I say bring on the Renaissance and Viking ships too!
This book is a gut punch of straight-up prose that reads like pure poetry. The story begins during the convulsions of the American Civil War, and tracks a line directly from the 1860s to the 1950s. This is no dry history lesson though. Presidents and generals don’t rate a mention and the heroes are ordinary people. And that’s where the novel shines: it proves that profound thoughts can be expressed in plain language, and the author delivers them here with powerful simplicity. A Shout in the Ruins is an absolute gem of a story that should not be missed.
The Sultanate of Oman overlooks one of the most strategic waterways in the Middle East: the Strait of Hormuz. Sharing the guardianship of the Strait with Iran, Oman's position is of key importance to the security of the entire Gulf, which holds a large portion of the world's oil resources. In a 1970 palace coup, Sultan Qaboos ibn Sa'id overthrew the repressive and reclusive rule of his father and embarked on a program of modernization. Oman became one of the success stories of the developing world, instituting a modern educational system, creating a modern infrastructure, becoming an oil exporter, and…
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…
I’m an accidental historian, one that stumbled over a love of history in spite of myself. In school, history was all just dates and places—not the kind of thing to inspire a kid that loved stories about people, not dusty old battles. But then a funny thing happened on the way to an English degree. A few history electives suddenly seemed way more appealing than another round of Austen, and led me to a BA History with Distinction. The first half of the twentieth century is a favorite period, but I say bring on the Renaissance and Viking ships too!
The story sounds like legend: three young girls flee their captors and survive a thousand-mile trek across the Australian desert. Sadly, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fenceis all too true. It traces the real-life journey of Molly, Gracie, and Daisy, three Aboriginal Australian children forcibly removed from their families in 1930, part of a racist government strategy to wipe out Aboriginal culture. It’s an amazing tale of survival, but what really inspires me is Molly’s story after that fateful journey: her refusal to give in to a system bent on crushing her. Remarkably, almost a hundred years later, her fight for human rights still echoes in the headlines of today.
I’m a fan of many kinds of stories, but the novel is my favorite form. I love most genres, especially historical and literary. My favorite reads are sagas, not to escape life but rather to experience more of life, immersing myself in a sweeping yet intimate journey into someone else’s world. In my favorite fiction, the protagonists are women or girls who discover their power. Not superpowers, but the real deal: intelligence, compassion, courage. The secret sauce is when an author accomplishes this without a wink—without the heroic woman becoming a caricature of unexpected masculinity or precious femininity. I want novels about women with potential as unlimited as men.
The Earth’s Children series fully immersed me in Stone Age Europe, thanks to Jean M. Auel’s nerd-level research. But what hooked me was her protagonist: Ayla, a courageous, spiritually gifted, neurodivergent genius. Though Ayla’s a white Cro-magnon, and I’m a Latina Homo sapiens, I relate to this fish out of water.
In this book, she’s wildly different from the Neanderthals who adopt her, echoing my own family experience. Ayla’s unique problem-solving skills also set her apart, sending her careening between loneliness and leadership. What excites me most about her journey is that the demands of the Ice Age give her more opportunities to explore her potential than many modern women. I recommend starting with Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla’s origin story, which stands on its own.
This novel of awesome beauty and power is a moving saga about people, relationships, and the boundaries of love.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
Through Jean M. Auel’s magnificent storytelling we are taken back to the dawn of modern humans, and with a girl named Ayla we are swept up in the harsh and beautiful Ice Age world they shared with the ones who called themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear.
A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous land until she is found by…
Having grown up in a low-income neighborhood of housing projects as the son of bohemian artists, I always had a keen interest in understanding why some people got ahead while others floundered. Being a sociology professor at Princeton only got me so far. I had to get another Ph.D. in biology to understand that it was not nature or nurture that makes us who we are but the combination of our unique genetic inheritance and our particular social circumstances. The books I recommended all tackle the question of nature and nurture from one angle or another. Hope you enjoy them and learn as much as I did reading them.
Who wouldn’t want to know where we came from and how we got here? The new science of ancient DNA has upended so many notions about our past that we had held dear.
I loved how Reich—a leader in this field—explained this new science so accessibly and with great stories to boot. Everything I knew about human history was wrong!
The past few years have witnessed a revolution in our ability to obtain DNA from ancient humans. This important new data has added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up remarkable surprises.
The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations living today are mixes of ancient ones, and often carry a genetic component from archaic humans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising…
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 was first a biologist, working with endangered species. Then I switched and spent fifteen years making nature documentaries with people like Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough. Then a humpback whale breached onto me when I was kayaking, this led to a life-changing adventure culminating in my becoming involved in efforts to use AI to translate the communications of whales! I wrote about this for my first book. My great passion was always reading and in becoming a writer I get to go deeper and more playfully into my favorite parts of filmmaking – following heroic and fascinating people on their adventures, reading hundreds of complicated scientific papers, and finding ways to connect these.
This was one of those books that as I got past the halfway point I became sad as I realised I was heading towards the ending.
Set in prehistory, this book follows a young apprentice shaman making his way in a small hunter-gatherer band. I've never read a book that does such a good job of helping me live in my mind outside of our modern civilsation and with something approaching the view of the rest of the living world that our ancestors may have had.
'Vivid and beautiful . . . Astonishing' - Guardian
'A thrilling journey through an age of ice and stone - one of Kim Stanley Robinson's best!' - Greg Bear
An award-winning and bestselling SF writer, Kim Stanley Robinson is widely acknowledged as one of the most exciting and visionary writers in the field. His latest novel, 2312, imagined how we would be living 300 years from now.
Now, with his new novel, he turns from our future to our past - to the Palaeolithic era, and an extraordinary moment in humanity's development. An emotionally powerful and richly detailed portrayal of…
I have three lifelong passions, the first was reading, then writing, and then archaeology/history. To this end I studied and trained as an archaeologist before I sat down and decided to write stories set in the past as a way of bringing it to life. Of course, there had to be an adventure, a bit of a mystery, and a dash of magic to bring it all together. The books on my list are just a few of those that I have enjoyed reading during my hunt to get to know the past in intimate detail – on my own time travelling journey.
Going even further back in time this book looks to the archaeological evidence and asks, what was life like in the very distant past, in deep prehistory?
Was it short, violent, and miserable as we are often led to believe, or is there a different story? Here Francis Pryor examines the evidence to test this question and finds that actually, much like today, life was complex and yet a place where home and hearth lay at the center of our ancestors’ lives.
Francis Pryor writes from the heart, with empathy and imagination. I found it an easy read given it deals with what can be very dry pieces of archaeological evidence. If you are interested in early prehistory, this is a must read.
In Home Francis Pryor, author of The Making of the British Landscape, archaeologist and broadcaster, takes us on his lifetime's quest: to discover the origins of family life in prehistoric Britain
Francis Pryor's search for the origins of our island story has been the quest of a lifetime. In Home, the Time Team expert explores the first nine thousand years of life in Britain, from the retreat of the glaciers to the Romans' departure. Tracing the settlement of domestic communities, he shows how archaeology enables us to reconstruct the evolution of habits, traditions and customs. But this, too, is Francis…
A dual citizen of Australia and the US, Christina Thompson has traveled extensively in the Pacific, including through most of the archipelagoes in Polynesia. She is the author of two books about Polynesia: a memoir of her marriage to a Māori man called Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All and a history of the ancient voyagers of the Pacific called Sea People. She edits the literary journal Harvard Review andteaches in the writing program at Harvard University Extension.
I like to think of Patrick Kirch as “Mr. Pacific Archaeology”—no one has written more, or more winningly, about Polynesian prehistory—and On the Road of the Winds is his introduction to the field. First published in 2002 and reissued in an updated edition in 2017, this elegant, eminently readable survey not only covers the history of archaeology in Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia but explains how the archaeological findings of the past half-century relate to discoveries in biology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, botany, and countless other fields.
The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the earth's surface and encompasses many thousands of islands, which are home to numerous human societies and cultures. Among these indigenous Oceanic cultures are the intrepid Polynesian double-hulled canoe navigators, the atoll dwellers of Micronesia, the statue carvers of remote Easter Island, and the famed traders of Melanesia. Decades of archaeological excavations, combined with allied research in historical linguistics, biological anthropology, and comparative ethnography, have revealed much new information about the long-term history of these Pacific Island societies and cultures. On the Road of the Winds synthesizes the grand sweep of human history in…
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…
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
Ever since deep-sea fishing vessels started to bring up artifacts and the bones of extinct land animals from the floor of the North Sea (UK), there has been a suspicion that a once-inhabited submerged land lay there. Named Doggerland, this land has now been investigated in more detail than any other. We know how people lived there, what the topography and vegetation were like, what animals roamed there. And we know that about 8000 years ago, Doggerland – the last land link between the British Isles and the rest of Europe – became submerged. A gripping and hugely compelling account.
This excellent book, which deserves a wide readership, reports on the work of the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project, which has been researching the fascinating lost landscape of Doggerland which until the end of the last Ice Age connected Britain to the continent in the North Sea area. It aims to make the findings available to a general readership, and show just how impressive they have been, with nearly 23,000km2 mapped. The techniques used to reconstruct the landscape are explained, and conclusions and speculation about the climate and vegetation of the area in the Mesolithic offered. It also tells the story…
