Here are 11 books that The Proof of My Innocence fans have personally recommended if you like
The Proof of My Innocence.
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Warren Ellis of Nick Cave's band the Bad Seeds has written one of the most bizarre and stand out memoirs of 2021. At a concert in 1999 Ellis saw the star Nina Simone stick her gum on her grand piano and launch into a performance. Afterwards Ellis crawls to the stage and retrieves and treasures the gum. He has it cast in silver for display in a Nick Cave exhibition, with a version cast by Ann Demeulemeester the fashion designer. The book's photographs trace the gum's various incarnations. A touching memoir in which Ellis muses about creativity, family and friendships in often hilarious moments.
THE TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER A GUARDIAN, TELEGRAPH, THE TIMES, IRISH TIMES, SUNDAY EXPRESS, ROUGH TRADE, MOJO, CLASH, ROLLING STONE, UNCUT BOOK OF THE YEAR
From award-winning musician and composer Warren Ellis comes the unexpected and inspiring story of a piece of chewing gum.
FEATURING AN INTRODUCTION BY NICK CAVE
I hadn't opened the towel that contained her gum since 2013. The last person to touch it was Nina Simone, her saliva and fingerprints unsullied. The idea that it was still in her towel was something I had drawn strength from. I thought each time I opened it some of…
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…
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1984 production of Richard III was so iconic that I was aware of the late Antony Sher’s star turn without ever having seen it – his use of crutches to augment and elongate his limbs creating the indelible image of a giant, malevolent spider.
Sher’s contemporaneous acting journal and sketchbook, republished on the 20th anniversary of the play’s premiere, is similarly extraordinary, charting his journey through rehearsals and into performance and revealing him to be as talented a writer as he was an actor – and a skilful artist and caricaturist to boot. Sher’s later diaries of playing Falstaff and Lear contain the same mix of confidence, insecurity and self-deprecating humour, and, taken together, represent a fitting memorial to an actor some will know best, not entirely inappropriately, from his playful cameo as Will Shakespeare’s quack Bankside shrink in Shakespeare in Love.
Anthony Sher's mesmerizing performance as Richard III, for which he won the Standard Award for Best Actor of 1985, was warmly received by both critics and audiences. This book records the making of this historic theatrical event. It follows the events of a year in the life of Anthony Sher, both as the character and himself. The text is interspersed with the author's own personal sketches.
I started keeping a daily journal when I received one for my ninth birthday, and, as they say, the rest is history. Into my twenties, there was nothing I loved more than sitting down to write and write`. It was a way to understand my feelings, and it was also a way to make sense of the world in all its beauty and bewilderment. There seemed to be magic and attempted connection everywhere! And so I became a lover of writing that focused on humans playing out their lives in a world at once surreal and real in an attempt to make sense of the extraordinary.
I love the mixture of realism and creepy surrealism in this collection of short stories. I especially admire how Enriquez ties these together so that the surreal elements feel linked to the reality and current events of the protagonists’ lives.
I love that each story centers on complete women with all their obsessions, compulsions, fears, wild senses of humor, and sometimes unusual desires. For me, it is exhilarating, entertaining, and impactful. One of my favorite stories is about a woman who repurposes her uterine fibroid in a one-of-a-kind way—just imagine!
Mariana Enriquez's A Sunny Place for Shady People is her first story collection since the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, the occult and the macabre, the stories explore love, womanhood, LGBTQ counterculture, parenthood and Argentina's brutal past.
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…
The author must be commended for telling a gripping story through the accounts of unlikeable characters. The fun lies in piecing together the truth from multiple accounts of events, which are documented in various media, including letters, audio transcripts, a hotel guest book and more.
From 'one of the UK's most interesting authors' (Kirkus Reviews), Patricia Highsmith meets White Lotus in this surprising and suspenseful modern gothic story following a couple running from both secretive pasts and very present dangers while honeymooning on a Greek island.
Still reeling from the chaos of their wedding, Evelyn and Richard arrive on a tiny Greek island for their honeymoon. It's the end of the season and a storm is imminent. Determined to make the best of it, they check into the sun-soaked doors of the Villa Rosa. Already feeling insecure after seeing the 'beautiful people,' the seemingly endless…
Writing a new John le Carré novel when you are not John le Carré would be a daunting task for any author. Maybe even more so when he happened to be your dad. But Nick Harkaway has risen impressively to the challenge. Karla’s Choice is a return to the murky labyrinthine world of international Cold War chicanery and espionage. Murder, betrayal, deceit, clandestine ops and geopolitics - George Smiley and the Circus are back. It’s as if John le Carré never left us.
A gripping new novel set in the universe of John le Carre's most iconic spy, George Smiley, written by acclaimed novelist Nick Harkaway
Set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in the George Smiley saga, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Nick Harkaway's Karla's Choice is an extraordinary, thrilling return to the world of spy fiction's greatest writer, John le Carre.
It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West's spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only…
It is 1899 and a conceited narrator Evelyn Dolman has recently married Laura a beautiful, younger and rich woman. From the beginning we know that trouble is brewing with Laura's indifference. On their honeymoon in Venice, Evelyn meets and becomes obsessed with Francesca whose brother claims to have been at school with Evelyn. The brother and sister bring Evelyn into a detective story plot following the disappearance of Laura who the police imagine to be murdered by Evelyn. Heavily influenced by Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, Venetian Vespers keeps the reader guessing right until the end.
A SUNDAY TIMES AND TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR, SHORTLISTED FOR THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2025 FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SNOW AND THE SEA
Everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me. . . Winter 1899, and strange things are afoot. As the new century approaches, English hack writer Evelyn Dolman marries Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of a wealthy American plutocrat. But in the midst of a rift between Laura and her father, Evelyn's plans for a substantial inheritance look to be dashed.
Arriving in Venice for their belated honeymoon at Palazzo…
A fake date, romance, and a conniving co-worker you'd love to shut down. Fun summer reading!
Liza loves helping people and creating designer shoes that feel as good as they look. Financially overextended and recovering from a divorce, her last-ditch opportunity to pitch her firm for investment falls flat. Then…
I first found this unique novel while browsing at a brick-and-mortar counterpart to Shepherd, namely, Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. I reread it this year because I loved it so much the first time. I doubt there are many other winners of the Man Booker Prize that are less well-known or more laugh-out-loud funny. The Sellout is a satire, ultimately about the meaning of blackness and segregation in an allegedly post-racial America, written in sharp, biting, ecstatic, jive-articulate first-person prose. The narrator is an educated, beta male black farmer raising artisanal weed, square watermelons, satsumas, and other succulent fruit on a small farm in a ghetto section of Los Angeles County. His efforts to restore a sense of identity to his unceremoniously decertified city end up getting him charged with promoting slavery (unwillingly) and segregation (willingly) and violating several Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The book begins and ends with…
'Outrageous, hilarious and profound.' Simon Schama, Financial Times
'The longer you stare at Beatty's pages, the smarter you'll get.' Guardian
'The most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I've read.' New York Times
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
Born in Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father's racially charged…
As an undergraduate, I wanted to study the now defunct PPP (Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology) degree at Oxford, but applicants needed a maths background for the statistics element, and I was a literature major, so I studied Philosophy & Theology instead. Soon after, I fell in love with the philosophy of action, which I discovered via Alan R. White’s marvelous introduction to criminal law, The Grounds of Liability. As a philosophy professor who has since written several books about action and its explanation, I find it hugely important to read as widely as possible so as to avoid the tunnel visions of specialized philosophical theories.
While I had seen the film adaptation with Meryl Streep and Shirley MacClaine in my teens, I only came to read Carrie Fisher’s extremely funny autobiographical book at the recommendation of the writer Lou Sarabadzic, who rightly thought I’d be amused that the rehab clinic inhabitants are not so focused on not doing drugs as they are on doing not drugs.
Carrie and her friends spend thirty days talking and thinking of such things as quitting, stopping, committing to not doing drugs, not playing an instrument, giving it up, and ‘using up all the Not Cry.’ The whole thing made me re-think how human agency, willpower, and control work.
** THE NEW YORK TIMES-BESTSELLING CULT CLASSIC NOVEL ** ** In a new edition introduced by Stephen Fry **
'I don't think you can even call this a drug. This is just a response to the conditions we live in.'
Suzanne Vale, formerly acclaimed actress, is in rehab, feeling like 'something on the bottom of someone's shoe, and not even someone interesting'. Immersed in the sometimes harrowing, often hilarious goings-on of the drug hospital and wondering how she'll cope - and find work - back on the outside, she meets new patient Alex. Ambitious, good-looking in a Heathcliffish way and…
I’m a writer, journalist, satirist, and novelist. I’ve written humor and satire for McSweeney’s, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, The Belladonna, and other publications, often about subjects that make me angry, sad, or both. Sometimes I write as a way to process, to vent, and to make fun of myself. I wrote a humor piece called "Turn Your Princess Toddler Into a Feminist in 8 Easy Steps." The New York Times published it, and it went viral. There was so much interest in the piece it prompted me to start researching the topic of princess obsessed girls. That research became my nonfiction book – The Feminist’s Guide to Raising a Little Princess.
No living writer rivals Hillary Mantel in terms of sheer accomplishment and talent, so it might be annoying for us mortals to learn that on top of it all, she is also very, very funny. Fludd was a wonderful surprise for me after reading her previous works. A mysterious curate joins the parish of a small, bleak British and Catholic town whose priest has lost his faith and whose parishioners are wallowing in superstition. What could possibly go wrong? Mantel elegantly satirizes the eccentricities and harsh judgments of the religious townsfolk, while giving us a thoroughly pleasurable read about faith and love.
A novel featuring Fludd who investigates what happened to Lazarus, after he was raised from the dead. To follow up his search he impersonates a Roman Catholic priest. It is not immediately apparent that he is an impostor and he receives a curiously hostile reception.
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
I’m a writer, journalist, satirist, and novelist. I’ve written humor and satire for McSweeney’s, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, The Belladonna, and other publications, often about subjects that make me angry, sad, or both. Sometimes I write as a way to process, to vent, and to make fun of myself. I wrote a humor piece called "Turn Your Princess Toddler Into a Feminist in 8 Easy Steps." The New York Times published it, and it went viral. There was so much interest in the piece it prompted me to start researching the topic of princess obsessed girls. That research became my nonfiction book – The Feminist’s Guide to Raising a Little Princess.
This is a masterclass in satirical writing but also just in novel writing. Coe manages to combine a gripping narrative and murder mystery with a scathing indictment of Great Britain in the 80s, when venal wealth was king and the country lost its soul. This was one of those books where I felt like I learned so much, about British culture, politics, corruption, and a 1961 comedy horror movie that shares its name with the book title, but I didn’t notice it because I was having such a good time. There are so many layers to the plot – and inventive dimensions to the way the story is told - and it’s one of my favorite books of all time.
'Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving' - Guardian Telling the stories of the wealthy Winshaw family, WHAT A CARVE UP! is a riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes.
