Books like The Red Earl — picked by fans

The best tale and totally mesmerizing story of the confidence-man Felix Krull, who developed the art of subterfuge and deception to a phenomenal degree.

Escaping from a childhood of poverty he eventually rose to mingle with the highest echelons of European society. Helped by being young and good-looking Krull was irresistible to women, of which he was not slow to take advantage.

This chameleon-like quality enabled him to adapt to countless situations and to pursue his career as a highly gifted swindler impervious to the conduct and morals of normal humankind.

When, eventually, the Marquis de Venosta makes him a proposal he cannot refuse - his world changes.

A bewitching experience.

For me this is undoubtably the best biography of Francis Bacon.

It illuminates in detail the life of my mysterious and exotic neighbour, who lived only a stone's throw away over the wall from my flat in Manson Place, South Kensington, in the early 1960s.

Bacon's early struggles, to eventually becoming the lauded and celebrated genius in later life, encompass in this fascinating account, a plethora of characters from both high and low life, a cavalcade of lovers, an addiction to gambling and drinking spanning Soho to Tangier, with sojourns in Paris and the South of France on the way. He religiously painted in the mornings.

Many of the episodes and vignettes are unforgettable and a valuable insight into the machinations of the 'art world' in the 20th century.

This compelling and exhausting portrait of the artist, born in Dublin to Anglo-Irish gentry in 1909 and living to the age… show more.

The best story, most engrossing of all and set between the wars, is about the unlikely friendship that developed between the fifty-one-year-old spinster, Edith Olivier and the young artist Rex Whistler thirty years her junior.

Edith Olivier (a cousin of the actor Laurence Olivier) became devoted to Rex, as muse and most fervent supporter, thus transforming both of their lives.

Her home, the Daye House on the Wilton Estate, became a sanctuary for Whistler and the gaiety and fun of the period is perfectly evoked by the author, with a cast of friends and acquaintances that bring it to life in the most engaging manner.

Rex Whistler, perhaps best known for his mural for Lord Anglesey at Plas Newydd, had a glittering and successful career, cut short by his sudden death at the age of thirty-nine, killed by a mortar bomb on the 18th July 1944.

Edith was devastated and… show more.

The Irish writer Colm Toíbín is one of our greatest novelists.

The Magician, a fictional biography of the German writer Thomas Mann, is a madcap family epic. So immediate are Toíbín’s portraits of Mann, his wife, and his children that one thinks one knows them. But Toíbín also offers a brilliant portrait of Mann as a writer.

We get inside his mind as he writes about his unfulfilled erotic desires. But perhaps what is most compelling for me is Toíbín’s portrait of Germany in the 1930s. Mann fled Germany for Switzerland in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor, and eventually moved to the U.S. He was one of the few ex-pat German writers to speak publicly against the Nazis.

What is most impressive is how Toíbín examines, through Mann, what made Germany susceptible to Nazism. I have not read it more subtly and more compellingly explained.  

The best thing a book about an artist can do is to encourage children to make art, too. That’s what award-winning author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh does in this innovative biography of Diego Rivera, one of the most famous painters of the 20th century. Tonatiuh focuses on how Rivera dedicated himself to telling the history and stories of people and places he knew and loved in Mexico by capturing their images. Taking this book to the next level, Tonatiuh then asks his young readers what stories this painter would bring to life today and encourages them to create new images that the world needs to see.

This is one of those books that I started and couldn’t stop until I finished reading.

It’s a charming, romantic, jet-setting story about two strangers who win a radio contest for a trip around the world. The only problem? The two couldn’t be more different.

With all the favorite elements of a second chance (and forced proximity) romance story, set against the international and every-changing backdrops (from Sydney to Mexico City to Mumbai and more!), readers fall head-over-heels for Dylan and Jack’s relationship.

Heartfelt and deeply moving, Wanderlust made me yearn for a chance to travel the world (and maybe start entering more radio contests!).

This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.

I enjoyed how this story takes an everyday person that we can all relate to, and with one urge of curiosity, she is easily sucked into a dangerous world of crime and murder.

Throughout her story, she finds herself investigating unseen and unknown by dangerous people. She herself may be unaware of any danger until she dives further into her curiosities. And within it all, there is a slow and natural element of romance.

I appreciate Moreno-Garcia’s characters for their realness and natural way of moving through the story. 

Valeria Luiselli dissects the odd systems and networks of our world’s cities and reveals in their hidden corners and corridors strange and magical identities. Luiselli’s essays further interrogate a city’s relationship to the bodies, cultures, artifacts, and languages that inhabit its spaces. In the essay, “Flying Home,” Luiselli journeys to Mexico City, the place of her birth, and, staring out of her airplane window, considers the city’s layout from this great height. This act of “mapping” according to her extraordinary vantage (suspended in flight), allows for a greater, incantatory meditation on our various perceptions of “home,” and how said perceptions depend as much on the imagination and on ephemeral memories as they do on reality.   

I’ve tried several times to understand the Mexican Revolution, with its cast of martyrs and rouges scrambling in a violent tornado of noble intentions and bloody treachery. Nava artfully demonstrates his chops as a writer by paring this seemingly incomprehensible sweep of Mexican history into an accessible and compelling narrative.

His characters are complicated and nuanced—Nava gives us no easy answers—and we watch them flail for salvation and fleeting promises even as society collapses around them.