Books like The Paper Palace — picked by fans

I love Cape Cod and I was fortunate to live on the edge of the sea between 1997-2003. Skillfully written by one of America’s greatest writers of the natural habitat, it transports you to a place. It reminds me of what it felt like to live far out in Cape Cod on the North Atlantic at its furthest reach on the east coast of the United States. Living there for several years and spending time in nature with the sea, beach, dunes, and my bicycle, I learned to love its moods, wildlife, and great sense of mystery. I totally identified with this man’s extraordinary experience and how it was years ago. A wonderfully descriptive book that helps you experience with all your senses what it’s like to live next to the sea alone. 

I was immediately hooked by this brilliant novel because of its unusual omniscient narrator, the Grim Reaper. Death, stressed out by the surfeit of “clients” he must deal with during World War II, reveals himself to be a sensitive narrator who sees everything. He especially keeps his eye on a young German girl, her loving foster parents, and the Jewish man they hide and protect.

I fell in love with these characters as they struggled with moral decisions, wartime hardship, danger, and tragedy. Despite the realistic portrayal of German life during WWII, I found this book to be an uplifting read. 

Maria Mitchell, raised as a Nantucket Quaker, was the first woman to discover and name a new comet, no easy task in the 1840s when women were not meant to study astronomy, let alone when her only instrument was a small telescope on an island roof. Brill takes artistic license with Mitchell’s story, adding nuance and detail likely outside the scope of her research, and delivers a riveting tale of a woman determined to live her dreams, no matter how high the barriers to achieving them.  

When I want to be astonished by the fierce and tender realities of the natural world—which is pretty much always—I read the late poet Mary Oliver. These are immersive essays by a writer who infused the very act of observation with a sacred energy—in her own words, “attention is the beginning of devotion.”

The essays are alive with animal life and soar with Oliver’s signature, forthright voice. In one essay, she rescues an injured gull. In another, she forages the eggs of a snapping turtle for dinner. Oliver humbly witnesses and partakes of the mystery and turns companionably to her reader with stirring questions: “Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?”

No one does family dysfunction in beautiful places like Maggie Shipstead.

In this novel, she sweeps us to a fictional island in New England (I imagined Martha’s Vineyard), and into the Van Meter family who, for all their wealth, have the communication skills of elementary school kids at recess.

Part comedy of manners, part dramatic exploration of our very human obsessions and anxieties, you’ll want to read this book with a lobster roll and a gin and tonic nearby.  

While not perhaps a “romance” novel in the established-formula sense, this book is achingly romantic. This epic story truly focuses on the gradual development of the two protagonists’ relationship and how time travel both created and challenged their love. This book ignited my passion for magic-realism romantic novels and remains one of my top books of all time.

I adore the contrast of romantic love between two seemingly destined souls and the brutality of some events caused by Henry’s uncontrolled time travel. There’s also the tricky angle of the age gap (only sometimes, depending on where Henry and Clare are in their lives, but it is occasionally extreme), which the author doesn’t shy away from. And I confess this is probably the book that made me sob the most!

I have never read a book that captured quiet pain the way A Little Life does.

I loved it because it understood the kind of wounds people carry silently—the ones that don’t heal cleanly, the ones we learn to live around. I saw pieces of myself in the way Jude moves through the world: careful, watchful, loving deeply even when he feels unworthy of being loved.

This book didn’t give me comfort; it gave me recognition. It reminded me that survival isn’t loud or heroic—it’s slow, painful, and often invisible. I couldn’t stop reading because it felt like someone finally wrote down the things I thought no one saw.

It stayed with me long after I closed the pages.

The Pact was one of those books that made me want to become a writer. Picoult captured a controversial topic amongst young lovers and friends, and she did it with compassion and heart. I felt in my bones…I need to write a book like that. And that’s what I strive to do: to make readers feel. To make them think. To leave them wondering: what would I do in a similar situation? And mostly, opening their eyes to all the different sides to a single story, and seeing themselves…and the growth that’s possible. The Pact tells a great story, but the complexities of our lives are the real takeaway. 

Originally published in 1966, this charming illustrated tale continues to sell briskly. Written by the neighbor of a Cape Cod doctor who finds a quail egg abandoned in his yard and warms it with a table lamp until it hatches, it tells of how Robert, as the bird (later discovered to be female) is dubbed, imprints on “his” adopted family, who quickly realize that “far from having a bird in captivity, we were helplessly and hopelessly ensnared and enamored.” What follows is an interspecies love story between the “highly sociable,” housetrained, telephone-answering, sauerkraut-devouring fluffball and the humans she never ceases to beguile.

Golden Age mystery aficionados know Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s humorous Cape Cod mysteries, but they may not be familiar with the even more hilarious—in my opinion, anyway—mysteries she wrote as Alice Tilton.

A friend lent me Tillton’s The Left Leg. As soon as I’d read its last page, I was on the hunt for the rest of them.

Beginning with a Bash is the first in Tilton’s series starring Leonidas Witherall, a boys’ school headmaster, radio detective story writer, and dead ringer for William Shakespeare.

These mysteries read more like capers, with Witherall ricocheting around Boston as he stumbles over corpses, eludes gangsters, dons disguises, and deals with impudent children and persistent dogs. Guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.