Here are 100 books that The Me List fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve heard many stories from friends who, as adults, discovered that the person they always believed to be their mother or father was not, and saw what it did to their sense of self. I became fascinated by the how and why a family would perpetuate such a lie, and it made me wonder about the difference between a secret and a lie, and if there is one. This set me off writing novels about family secrets, and reading many more. I enjoy exploring what such devastating news does to a person, and to the entire family, once the secret is discovered.
This story grabbed my heart, sometimes clutching it in pain, sometimes bursting with pleasure.
This is a family saga I will long remember. I love a book with gorgeous prose that makes me stop and re-read. Napolitano’s sentences and phrases, metaphors, and similes did that. I wanted to savor the words, like rich dark chocolate, on my tongue.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward comes a poignant and engrossing family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole?
“Hello Beautiful is exactly that: beautiful, perceptive, wistful. It’s a story of family and friendship, of how the people we are bound to can also set us free. I loved it.”—Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
When my children were 1, 3, and 5, my husband and I adopted two teenage boys. Suddenly, I was a mom to five, trying to keep my head above water. I turned to other women for advice, friendship, and compassion. While bonding over our chaotic lives, I found stories. My friends offered new perspectives on my world. I learned that every woman is living life on her own terms, and no two tales are the same. This is the magic of listening to another woman. I'm passionate about telling these stories so we can all see the world from a unique perspective and look at our situations with new understanding.
I love this book because it features three vastly different women in three very different family environments. Devin, a soon to be single mom, Caroline, a wife of an abusive husband and Maggie, a wife and mother in a family where she holds no value.
Even though these women and their situations couldn’t be more different, they find solace in one another, proving that sometimes family is what you make. I read this book while in my high school years, and it captured my attention and turned me into a devoted women’s fiction reader.
They're back and stronger than ever! Pre-order CITY GIRLS FOREVER, the new Patricia Scanlan novel, out Spring 2025.
*** THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING AUTHOR ***
Whatever life holds, friends come first...
Devlin: Blonde, beautiful, rich and spoilt. The world is hers for the taking until she encounters the suave, seductive and very married Colin Cantrell-King. A rat, who lies, cheats and uses women until he tires of them. Her life is turned upside down and then the unthinkable happens. Caroline: Fat, frumpy, needy and terminally shy, she's terrified of being left on the shelf. The she meets Richard cold, reserved…
When my children were 1, 3, and 5, my husband and I adopted two teenage boys. Suddenly, I was a mom to five, trying to keep my head above water. I turned to other women for advice, friendship, and compassion. While bonding over our chaotic lives, I found stories. My friends offered new perspectives on my world. I learned that every woman is living life on her own terms, and no two tales are the same. This is the magic of listening to another woman. I'm passionate about telling these stories so we can all see the world from a unique perspective and look at our situations with new understanding.
I love this book for a few reasons. 1.) I love a book where the location becomes a character in and of itself. This book takes place in the San Yuan Islands of Washington State, a location that is near and dear to my heart as I grew up in the area. I spent most of my childhood roaming the shores and popping into the little boutique shops dotting the islands.
The vivid descriptions of the landscape brought me back to those days. 2.) I loved the way this story focuses on a mother/daughter relationship that isn’t the typical “happy family” dynamic. A sprinkle of romance and a touch of culinary had me turning the pages until the very end.
“Heartfelt, heartwarming, joyful, and uplifting. You can't go wrong with a Rachel Linden book.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber
After a day of unrivaled disappointments, a promising young chef finds every bite of food suddenly tastes bitter. To save her career, she travels to the Pacific Northwest to reconnect with her estranged mom, and discovers a family legacy she never suspected in this delicious novel from the bestselling author of The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie.
American chef Georgia May Jackson has one goal—to run her own restaurant in Paris. After a grueling decade working in Parisian kitchens,…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
When my children were 1, 3, and 5, my husband and I adopted two teenage boys. Suddenly, I was a mom to five, trying to keep my head above water. I turned to other women for advice, friendship, and compassion. While bonding over our chaotic lives, I found stories. My friends offered new perspectives on my world. I learned that every woman is living life on her own terms, and no two tales are the same. This is the magic of listening to another woman. I'm passionate about telling these stories so we can all see the world from a unique perspective and look at our situations with new understanding.
Here is another book where the setting acts as a main character in the novel. I gobbled up the references to wine, cheese, and the Napa Valley as though I was sitting on the sun-soaked porch with the characters. But the backdrop of the Napa Valley, as stunning as it is, pales in comparison to the lessons three generations of women learn from each other as the story unfolds.
This story made me want to understand women's roles as heads of families and how those roles are changing from generation to generation.
From acclaimed author Jamie Brenner comes a stunning new novel about three generations of women who discover that the scandalous books of their past may just be the key to saving their family's future.
For decades, the Hollander Estates winery has been the premier destination for lavish parties and romantic day trips on the North Fork of Long Island. But behind the lush vineyards and majestic estate house, the Hollander family fortunes have suffered and the threat of a sale brings old wounds to the surface. For matriarch Vivian, she fears that this summer season could be their last—and that…
Much laughter is born out of sadness. Humor can be a way to cope or even reinvent our realities in ways that bring relief—and release. There's a misconception that “serious literature” should be humorless; crack a smile and you’re a fraud. However, the worlds and characters that emerge from this way of thinking do not ring true to me. Who among us hasn’t joked to help deal with sorrow? Or to satirize the outrageous? Or simply because life--however brutal—is also sometimes funny? The more a writer allows laughter to intermingle with tears, the more I believe in the story, and the more I enjoy it. That is why I wrote a “funny-sad” novel, The Australian.
Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, children without mothers, traverse air-conditioned buildings and desert landscapes, strewn with symbols and signs of mortality—from the preservation of those teetering on the brink of death at a nursing home to a wildlife museum full of taxidermies; and these teenagers are orbited by agitated, confused adults who seem wholly unaware of the strangeness—and messages—defining their lives. Joy Williams is a master at dark humor in literary fiction, and The Quick and the Dead is one of her finest achievements.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert.
Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults.
I come from a long line of women who are survivors. Survivors of transportation, imprisonment, assault, poverty, illness. In all of them was a clawing determination to endure. My ancestors were not shrinking violets; they bore their pain with dignity, used their voices and their hopes for a better future to boost the next generation of girls to a better life. I am the recipient of their courage. I believe this is how our sisterhood should roll. What we fight for today, what we give a voice to, should not have to be fought for again. It is this passion that drives my work, my reading, and my life.
A group of women who seemingly had it all discover that there is more to life than the imposed dream of home, family, and a well-appointed kitchen. I really enjoyed the premise that a book club can become a place where one doesn’t just offer polite reviews of the text but a space for the exploration of ideas.
These women were on the periphery of social upheaval and could have very easily submerged themselves into suburban obscurity. But a book awakens them, shakes them up, spurs them on, and ultimately shows them the way to voice a more genuine version of themselves. I love the humour, the realism, the connection, and the growing realisation that together, women can really change the world.
USA TODAY BESTSELLER * SOUTHERN INDIE BESTSELLER * A BRENDA NOVAK BOOK GROUP PICK * GLOSS BOOK CLUB PICK * THE GIRLFRIEND BOOK CLUB PICK * A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 (SheReads) * Margaret never really meant to start a book club . . . or a feminist revolution, for that matter in this bold and plucky novel from New York Times bestselling author Marie Bostwick.
"Ideal for fans of historical fiction and those who enjoyed Bonnie Garmus's Lessons in Chemistry." --Library Journal, starred review
"Readers will cheer." --Kirkus
"Perfect for those who love book club, nostalgia for the…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
My life, in particular, has been a series of challenges to overcome, from an attempted kidnapping at age eight to surviving breast cancer (twice!) before the age of forty-five. I believe in a world of equal opportunity, but I know the pursuit of happiness takes hard work. As a general contractor in the male-dominated construction industry, I’m well aware of gender biases in our world and the dedication it takes to overcome them. However, the struggle empowers us all, and even small victories inspire us to overcome adversity. Life is a survival story, and art imitates life. So I crave, read, and write novels starring empowered women.
I love a book rich with flawed characters; this one is full of them. Perrotta’s peek into the mundane life of a stay-at-home mother at war with her lot in life is delicious. Sarah once coined herself a feminist, and now, she’s wiping noses. It’s a struggle many mothers of little children face, and while most don’t go to the lengths Perrotta’s characters explore, it’s a valiant example of losing oneself for the sake of a higher calling: motherhood.
I first read this book at graduate school, with two babies at home. Perrotta taught me that exploring the human condition is necessary for connecting with readers. I’ve received many letters from readers citing that they connected with Veronica on the pages of Trespassing, and that’s the best accolade.
Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Tom Perrotta's The Wishbones and Joe College, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.
Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet…
I developed a strong interest in current events, especially politics, in high school. What the government does, or does not do, struck me as a vital piece of the puzzle in trying to explain why things are the way they are. That soon led, however, to seeing how the past continues to influence the present. No decade is more important than the 1960s for understanding our current political climate.
Lassiter presents a nuanced examination of how social and political conflicts in Richmond, Atlanta, and Charlotte during enabled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to resurrect the GOP from its 1964 electoral disaster through reliance, not on a “southern strategy,” as many pundits have long claimed, but rather on a suburban strategy that involved the complex interplay of race, class, and other factors.
The messages that enabled the GOP to gain traction in the suburban South, Lassiter emphasizes, worked across the nation. The South was not as different as many observers have long claimed. Lassiter also chronicles how these conflicts reshaped the Democratic Party in the South, as by the early 1970s more moderate figures such Jimmy Carter had supplanted the staunch segregationists of decades past.
Suburban sprawl transformed the political culture of the American South as much as the civil rights movement did during the second half of the twentieth century. The Silent Majority provides the first regionwide account of the suburbanization of the South from the perspective of corporate leaders, political activists, and especially of the ordinary families who lived in booming Sunbelt metropolises such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Richmond. Matthew Lassiter examines crucial battles over racial integration, court-ordered busing, and housing segregation to explain how the South moved from the era of Jim Crow fully into the mainstream of national currents. During the…
I’ve always been interested in art and architecture. I studied Fine Arts at CalArts. I’ve written three books on Mid-century home builders and designers, William Mellenthin, Jean Vandruff, and Robert Byrd, whose life and work in Southern California had gone mostly unnoticed during their lifetimes—with very little information written about them in the press. I spent three years on each book working with the families to uncover their lives and place in local history. This is information that would have otherwise been lost. When you research the life of one person in this profession, you inevitably learn about the life and work of others—some famous, some not.
D.J. Waldie’s writing reminds me of a Raymond Carver short story. His short, deliberate style draws the reader in immediately. You are hooked.
He walks to work. He lives in his parent’s original tract home, part of a planned development built in the 1950s in Lakewood, CA. It was the first one on the west coast. Waldie observes his friends and neighbors, the neighborhood, and its unique place in Southern California history.
After my parent’s divorce, my father lived in Lakewood and Long Beach, so I spent a lot of time down there when I was a kid. Does anyone remember Buffums department store?
Since its publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s. An intensely realized and wholly original memoir about the way…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I am a writer who has spent my entire reading life emersed in the past, reading everything from Russian literature, to nineteenth-century English, to early modern American. It’s no surprise I became a historical fiction novelist. The 1950s is one of my favorite eras to write about because of its complexity. The glamour of the Golden Age and the dark truths it represents make for compelling reads. I hope you love the list below as much as I do.
A character-driven novel with seemingly simple, captivating scenes that move at a thrilling clip. April and Frank, a married couple living in 1950s suburbia trying to survive their lives after WWII, are human and flawed.
At times, I despised and loved them simultaneously. It’s relationship at its ugliest and most passionate. The desperation they feel, their attempt at normalcy, and their desire to break away from it all, their angst and anguish, are timeless themes.
There’s a scene where they decide to give up their lives and move to Paris, and I thought, how many times I have done that? The novel, unlike its characters, is flawless.
Hailed as a masterpiece from its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright young couple who are bored by the banalities of suburban life and long to be extraordinary. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April's decision to change their lives for the better leads to betrayal and tragedy.
