Here are 100 books that The Land in Winter fans have personally recommended if you like
The Land in Winter.
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Over a long lifetime, I’ve been intrigued to observe many variations on the themes of marriage, widowhood, divorce, and adultery among my friends, patients, and clients. The majority of marriages are probably happy, but these are not usually very interesting to write about, so marriages in fiction often involve some kind of conflict which leads to a more or less satisfactory resolution. I am a retired doctor, originally from England, and now living in New Zealand with my second husband, to whom I have been married for over 40 years.
This sophisticated, darkly humorous, and quirky short novel, translated from the French, is unlike anything else I have ever read.
The narrator is still obsessed with her husband after many years of marriage. She smothers him with devotion, and her demands for proof of his love eventually go too far. The story becomes quite farcical in places.
I suspect some readers would hate this book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
In this suspenseful and darkly funny debut novel, a sophisticated French woman spends her life obsessing over her perfect husband-but can their marriage survive her passionate love?
"One of the most daring, provocative, unnervingly intimate thrillers I've read in years. Few writers besides Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith can evoke domestic unease with such sangfroid; fewer still can make it such delirious fun." -A. J. Finn, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Woman in the Window
At forty years old, she has an enviable life: a successful career, stunning looks, a beautiful house in the suburbs, two healthy children, and…
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…
Over a long lifetime, I’ve been intrigued to observe many variations on the themes of marriage, widowhood, divorce, and adultery among my friends, patients, and clients. The majority of marriages are probably happy, but these are not usually very interesting to write about, so marriages in fiction often involve some kind of conflict which leads to a more or less satisfactory resolution. I am a retired doctor, originally from England, and now living in New Zealand with my second husband, to whom I have been married for over 40 years.
I loved the television play based on this novel, and the novel itself is equally good as a sensitive but somewhat mordant commentary on marriage, widowerhood, wartime memories, and the English class system.
I found it amusing in parts but also quite sad, and empathized with both main characters—two men who had served in WW2 as squadron leader and sergeant, respectively. They meet fifty years later in the Tonbridge Wells hospital when both their wives are dying, and develop an unlikely friendship.
First published in 1992, A Rather English Marriage tells of Roy Southgate and Reginald Conynghame-Jervi, who have nothing in common but their loneliness and their wartime memories.
Roy, a retired milkman and Reggie, a former RAF Squadron Leader, are widowed on the same day. To assuage their grief, the vicar arranges for Roy to move in with Reggie as his unpaid manservant. To their surprise, they form a strange alliance, based on obedience, need and the strangeness of single life. Then Reggie meets Liz, a vibrant but near-bankrupt woman of irresistible appeal, while Roy and his son's family grow gradually…
Over a long lifetime, I’ve been intrigued to observe many variations on the themes of marriage, widowhood, divorce, and adultery among my friends, patients, and clients. The majority of marriages are probably happy, but these are not usually very interesting to write about, so marriages in fiction often involve some kind of conflict which leads to a more or less satisfactory resolution. I am a retired doctor, originally from England, and now living in New Zealand with my second husband, to whom I have been married for over 40 years.
I’d describe this novel as bittersweet. While readable and humorous, it touches on profound questions about marriage, family and religion.
The narrator is the neglected wife of a country vicar who is totally absorbed in the service of his church. The frustrations of her domestic life and the foibles of the ladies of the parish are closely observed and gently parodied. The monotony is broken, and things become more serious, when a chance encounter leads to a total reassessment of the marital relationship.
'Here is the absolute truth about love, told with wisdom, heart and humour. So clever, funny and life-affirming' Meg Mason
'Funny and heartbreaking, immersive and thoroughly satisfying' Nina Stibbe
There are already three of us in this marriage. I'm not sure there is room for a fourth . . .
Ann is a reluctant Vicar's wife. She tries her best but her husband only has eyes for God, her son is asking questions she struggles to answer, and it is all too easy to displease the congregation. It may only be a matter of time before she makes the headlines…
A tragicomic novel about the toxic relationship between two couples who first met at medical school and whose paths cross again many years later.
Charlotte is married to Henry, a retired consultant pathologist. She abandoned her own medical training after a harrowing experience left her emotionally…
Over a long lifetime, I’ve been intrigued to observe many variations on the themes of marriage, widowhood, divorce, and adultery among my friends, patients, and clients. The majority of marriages are probably happy, but these are not usually very interesting to write about, so marriages in fiction often involve some kind of conflict which leads to a more or less satisfactory resolution. I am a retired doctor, originally from England, and now living in New Zealand with my second husband, to whom I have been married for over 40 years.
This book, published in the 1870s, is sometimes considered the best English novel ever written.
It is a monumental work, and while I found it very impressive, I have to admit that reading the long and detailed text felt heavy going at times.
Set in a provincial town with a large cast of characters, it depicts a middle-class way of life very different from that of today, and addresses various social and political questions of the time. One major theme is the psychology of marriage as analysed through the relationships between two ill-matched couples.
Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Henry James described Middlemarch as a 'treasurehouse of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece…
I have always been fascinated by human behaviour since going to a school where we were told there was a right and a wrong way to do everything. That never felt right to me – human beings are much bigger than that! I studied Counselling and Therapy at Norwich City College in the 1990s and later specific courses on Transactional Analysis. Many years on, I am still learning…
This isn’t the easiest of reads, but it is the Real Thing – the work of the man who discovered the Triangle itself.
I love its density and the fact that I can come back to it over and over again and find new ideas. Dr Karpman’s long experience as a working therapist speaks out from every page.
I love to travel, write, and work in film and TV. My thoughts about how technology is changing people mixed with love for the Mojave Desert drives the story in my first novel, Edna in the Desert. Most of the desert has cell phone service but you can still lose it for stretches. Occasionally, there's a house in the middle of one of these expanses, and I always wondered what a teen living there would do without the usual modern distractions.
The title appeals to me, and the list of books I love is overwhelming. I’m rounding out my recs with this out-of-print, self-help book published in 1939 that I came across it in a second-hand bookstore. You can open the guide to almost any page and find something simple and deep, or if not, old phraseology like, Preventing Unwholesome Behavior Due to Tedium, is amusing. Technology may be changing the way people meet and how we process information, but we have most of the same emotional needs as before.
I became interested in the relationship between the mind and the brain around the age of 8. It was at this age that I decided to become a neuroscientist. Years later, I completed a bachelor's degree in psychology and then a doctorate in neuroscience. I’ve spent part of my research career in neuroscience at the University of Montreal. I have also been affiliated with the University of Arizona (Tucson). My groundbreaking work on the neurobiology of emotional self-regulation, consciousness, and spiritual experiences has received extensive international media coverage and numerous awards. I am one of the main proponents of a postmaterialist paradigm for the new science of mind/consciousness.
Irreducible Mind is an insightful collective volume written by scientists about the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.
In this work, the authors examine several rogue phenomena (e.g. psychological automatisms and secondary personality, genius-level creativity, extreme psychophysical influence, NDEs, 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced) that cannot be accounted for by materialist (physicalist) theories.
These authors further demonstrate that these phenomena are more easily explained by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations.
Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level…
All of us bear the scars of emotional wounds, as complex psychology beats at the heart of all relationships. I’ve personally survived the betrayal of a parent, the loss of a child, emotional abuse, and life with an addict who could look me in the eye and lie. These themes resound in my stories. Literature is a safe place to explore and heal our own traumas through the dramatic interactions of our characters. My witch killer is not just “crazy” he’s unraveling a complex psychological past. In standing with our heroes as they meet and conquer evil, in its many guises, we find our way to healing our own trauma.
Once upon a time in the deep woods, a kind woman invited twelve family members and friends to Thanksgiving dinner. But not burning the turkey became the least of her worries. Wolf at the Dooris a kick-ass nightmare, a ghoulish debut novella that will keep you sitting rigid in bed with your eyes and ears wide, long after its done. You may never walk in the woods again. How will our hero save her dinner guests from becoming the main course for two brutally vicious werewolves who just happen to be the neighbors? How well do you know the couple next door?
All Charlotte Deerborn wanted was a nice Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends. Too bad for her no one else wanted to be there. By the time the turkey is carved, old grievances, bad behavior and crass remarks have transformed her dinner party into a disaster. And then a werewolf shows up to do some carving of its own.
Wolf at the Door, winner of the 2022 Global Book Award gold medal for horror, is a fast-paced, absurdist take on modern creature horror, levering humor and action to highlight how one family comes to grips with what really matters in…
I'm a journalist and a historian who writes about how American evangelicals are complicated. I was trying to explain Left Behind in graduate school and I talked and talked about the theology in the book—all about the doctrines of the rapture, the antichrist, and the millennium. Then my professor said, “But it’s fiction, right? Why is it fiction? What are people doing when they read a novel instead, of say, a theological treatise?” I had no idea. But it seemed like a good question. That was the spark of Reading Evangelicals. But first, I had to read everything I could find about how readers read and what happens when they do.
I’m cheating a little here, but I made the rules and there’s a little clause in the rules I made that says I can break them as long as I announce that I am breaking them. Herewith, I announce.
This isn’t a book about readers. It’s a book about watchers—specifically the Dutch audience for the soap opera Dallas. But this book is so good and so wild, it changed forever the way I think about “reception,” including reading. I recommend this book all the time and if you want to understand the freedom and creativity of readers, you have to read it.
Dallas, one of the great internationally-screened soap operas, offers us first and foremost entertainment. But what is it about Dallas that makes that entertainment so successful, and how exactly is its entertainment constructed?
Documentary Comics are this genre of comics in which you can make a community visible, denounce a crime or expose yourself to the world. Being able to dialogue with the world while dialoguing with the reader is amazing. The elements you have to take into account the things you can hide in the silence of a drawing, compelling the reader to read again, to find the easter egg about that thing you really want to talk about. The ways of telling the truth in drawings. All those things are the things that I love about documentary comics.
This is not a best-seller graphic novel, you don’t see this book on every bookstore shelf. I discovered it because of Nina Mickwitz’s Documentary Comics. I ordered it from the library network that we had at my grad school. My degeneration is a Jewel of a book in many senses, it is a sincere book, a dialogue that goes through many channels: the images drawn, the text typed, and the way the book was made. The shifting in the line makes you think about the process and the author not just as a character but as a person experiencing the world from certain conditions and telling you about that experience.
How does one deal with a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease at the age of forty-three? My Degeneration, by former Anchorage Daily News staff cartoonist Peter Dunlap-Shohl, answers the question with humor and passion, recounting the author's attempt to come to grips with the "malicious whimsy" of this chronic, progressive, and disabling disease. This graphic novel tracks Dunlap-Shohl's journey through depression, the worsening symptoms of the disease, the juggling of medications and their side effects, the impact on relations with family and community, and the raft of mental and physical changes wrought by the malady.
