100 Books Like The Pleasure Garden

This is perhaps the best-known and most obvious choice illustrating Nature’s healing powers. Mary, an orphaned girl, moves in with an estranged, reclusive uncle on his isolated English estate. Lonely and bereaved, Mary spends her days exploring both the house and extensive gardens, when one day she discovers a secret garden, locked away behind a wall.

This garden, tucked away and neglected for many years, is the key to Mary’s healing. Through quiet deliberation, she begins to bring the garden back to life and, in turn, finds new life in herself. The healing of the uncle is perhaps the most mystical scene in the book for me, brought about by a quiet moment beside a trickling stream, where he has an epiphany of heart healing. I find the book’s mixture of nature and mystery beguiling.

I count this book by Elizabeth Von Arnim as one of my all-time favorite books to read and re-read again and again. The setting is the medieval castle of San Salvatore, which stands on a hilltop over a picturesque sunny bay in Italy is absolutely gorgeous. The author skillfully makes the setting come alive. 

But it is the characterization that really shines here with a group of random women who holiday together on a whim, strangers who must see beyond their initial impressions of one another, only discover as much about themselves as they do about the others.

The first thing to say is that this is an absolute tome of a book – really heavy and certainly not something to take on your commute. But it’s well worth the arm strain. Packed with glorious pictures of gardens across the world it seduces with glimpses of beauty as yet undreamed of and provides new angles on gardens already visited. As a result of this book, I have my sights firmly set on the renaissance extravaganza that is Villa D'Este in Italy, on the romantic Jardins du Prieuré d’Orsay in France and on the naturalistic Arboretum Kalmthout in Belgium. 

Anyone with an interest in gardens will want to visit Beth Chatto’s famous garden outside Colchester in Essex. What you’re unlikely to be able to do, unless you live locally, is to visit several times over the course of a year. This book, beautifully photographed by Rachel Warne, permits you that pleasure, allowing you to see how the garden changes through the seasons and enabling you to identify interesting plants you might like to try in your own plot. Stipa barbata and Ranunculus acris ‘Sulphureus’ are two of my favourite discoveries.

I’m embarrassed that I only read this book recently because it’s a wonderful engagement with ancient evidence to create a vision of Roman Britain. Evaristo uses the burial of the so-called Spitalfields Lady – a woman buried in a sarcophagus with scallop shell decorations and a rich range of grave goods – to create Zuleika, a lively girl who lives with her Nubian parents in Roman London; in blank verse, the story follows her life from being married off as a child bride to catching the eye of the emperor Septimius Severus. Evaristo mixes historical detail with contemporary slang and references, bringing her vision of London under a multi-cultural Roman Empire vividly to life.

I picked up this book years ago at my local library by chance, if you believe in chance—which I do not. At that time, I had no idea the narrative of a historical romance could stretch back to Iron Age times, or that I could lose myself in the characters who populated the legends I love. For years, I’d been listening to Celtic music. In Patricia Finney’s wonderful story, I heard that music in the everyday world she created. I discovered how it feels to drive a chariot. Quite possibly, I revisited a past life. I will be forever grateful this book came into my hand.

Ray Laurence begins this wonderful book with the bold view that the passions of first-century Rome were more developed than those of earlier times. Examining the connections between pleasure and power in the imperial household; the role pleasure played in art and landscape; and what really went on in the Roman baths, the resulting account is as wide-ranging as it is surprising.

Most Ancient Roman biographies are about men.

This is mainly because there is much less information about Roman women than men. As in many ancient societies, Roman women were not considered equal to men, and did not hold positions of power or authority.

Writing by Roman women themselves is also rare. But modern biographers and historians are attempting to redress the balance. This book is part of the Women in Antiquity series, and tells the life story, as much as can be known, of a formidable woman.

Fulvia was married to and widowed by two powerful Romans before her third marriage to Mark Antony. She was a huge influence on him, and a power in Rome in her own right, wielding authority in Antony’s name, even when he was in the east, gallivanting with Cleopatra.

Another vital source for my Mark Antony series, this book is a great read about… show more.

This well-illustrated and highly readable book (available in hardback and paperback) is a comprehensive discussion of archaeological evidence for sacred buildings in late Iron Age and Roman Britain: ranging from grand Classical public sanctuaries, such as the temple of Claudius at Colchester, to rural, more intimate shrines, such as the temple dedicated to Apollo Cunomaglus at Nettleton in Wiltshire. Many sanctuaries, particularly in south-west England, seem purposefully to have been built within a day’s walk of each other and (sometimes, perhaps) within sight of one another, and it is tempting to see these ‘chains of sanctity’ as pilgrim routes, akin to the Camino trails of southern France and northern Spain. Reconstruction drawings in this book cause the ruins of Roman Britain’s shrines to spring into life, and make it easy to imagine what it must have been like to visit and worship at these holy places. The finds, also, tell… show more.

A great read that will take you through the whole story of Carthage from its Phoenician beginnings to the destruction by Rome and beyond. Context and details on the whole story of Hannibal and also the history of one of the most important cities from the Ancient Mediterranean.