Books like The Secret Hours — picked by fans

It always seemed unfair to me that not only do we get just one life, but we only get to live it once. So I fell in love with this novel from the moment I read its premise: Ursula Todd is born and dies and is born again… and again… and again.

I love that she doesn’t remember her previous lives except as vague intuitions that help her avoid making the same mistakes twice–and I also love that avoiding those mistakes often means she makes other (often fatal) mistakes. I found this book funny, moving, and thought-provoking, but what I love most about it is the way its down-to-earth, realistic style allowed me to fully inhabit the impossible conceit at its heart. 

I loved that this book’s inciting incident is the toppling of a many-tiered wedding cake of a British royal couple. The cause? The immature tussling of a prince and the U.S. president’s son? (Adults, mind you. They’re adults) And because of that, they have to pretend to be friends, pals, buddies.

And as with most fake-relationship-themed books, the fake friendship soon turns into real love. Even though both Alex and Henry are outrageously advantaged individuals, I saw them as people—people in love—and not as a representation of their class.

Perhaps the thing I love most about McQuiston’s writing is the idealism and hopefulness she brings to the story. The obstacles Alex and Henry must overcome are literally international and yet, she can boil their love down to the simplest of gestures—and make it seem realistic.

This book takes a comic yet piercing look at espionage. 

Jim Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Cuba, is recruited by MI6 out of desperation and fabricates his spy reports. He invents agents, sketches of weaponized vacuum parts, and absurd clandestine plots—all to keep the money coming and satisfy his daughter’s extravagances.

What makes the novel shine is its satire of the spy apparatus—how credulity, vanity, and bureaucratic inertia turn fiction into danger. Greene balances light humor with real human stakes: financial strain, moral compromise, a man pretending to be something he is not. Even decades after its writing, Our Man in Havana remains sharp, funny, and deeply relevant in its critique of power, truth, and illusion.

This is both your main course and palate cleanser. Absolutely riveting!

As the title of this book indicates, Lily Sergueiew was a double agent during World War II. She volunteered to become a spy for the Germans although she never intended to fulfill that role. She was determined to fight the Germans in her own way – as a double agent in the employ of the British. Sergueiew kept a diary of her activities from when she first approached the Germans until she quit working for the British in late June 1944. After the war, Sergueiew used her diaries to write a memoir in French. Before her death in 1950, she translated her memoir into English, and most of it was published posthumously in France in 1966 and in England in 1968. I recommend this book because it provides insight into why a young woman would choose to fight against the Germans who occupied her beloved France, the training that she… show more.

Nowhere is the phrase "stranger than fiction" more appropriate than in describing Agent Zigzag. Charming British conman Eddie Chapman turned himself into one of the best double agents his country ever produced. But for whom was he really working? None of his handlers seemed to be sure. His squirming loyalties allowed him to keep a family and a mistress, to remain alive despite interrogation by both sides, and earn an Iron Cross from Germany's Abwehr and a pardon from MI5 for blowing up a British factory. I was astonished by this tale, and left wondering if Chapman, in the end, just worked for Chapman.

Apart from viewing the late Paddy Ashdown as perhaps the best Prime Minister Britain never had, I also know him as an under-recognised author of gripping Second World War books. The community of WW2 researchers is mutually supportive; knowledgeable colleagues have been immensely helpful to me over the years, and I recall helping Paddy with some information for one of his books. Several of them are worth reading, but here he tells the true stories of three men who pitted their wits against each other in the treacherous milieu of wartime France. The stakes were measured in lives, betrayals, and deaths.

I loved this novel for its savage intelligence and frank exploration of the problems of inhabiting a body while trying to live a “life of the mind.”

Protagonist Dorothy is an adjunct English professor whose ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage are not so much the subject of this book as a metaphor for Dorothy’s life in general: her hopes have not materialized, and her nonstop thoughts rarely lead to action. Readers who have struggled to claw their way up the academic ladder (particularly those who’ve spent a lot of time at the bottom of that ladder) will especially enjoy this book.

Be prepared for visceral descriptions of Dorothy’s body—of all that it produces, and all that it fails to produce.

I’d never heard the term “epistolary novel” prior to reading Michael Kun’s The Locklear Letters, but was immediately smitten with the concept of telling a story solely through a series of letters and/or emails sent by the narrator.

This sequel follows the same template and the same protagonist a decade down the line. I liken it to finding a boxful of letters and using them to piece together a hilarious comedy of errors. Maybe you’ll keep digging and find an older box later, or maybe the archivist kept orderly annals, allowing you to move forward through the years.

Sequencing doesn’t matter, but the written words will leave you in stitches. 

After 608 days, Maggie is single again and almost 30–two things that give cause for concern and reflection. Thankfully, Maggie takes no blame for either thing happening and plows on, determined to find the pearl in the gritty oyster her life has become.

I laughed, but I also found myself filled with sad recognition of how we all too often set goals we’ll never score, only to find that halfway home is where the heart is.

I love this story for getting kids excited to bake cookies!

I read this book to my kids before heading into the kitchen to bake homemade chocolate chip cookies just like the little mouse in the story. Just be sure to have a cold glass of milk on hand to go with the cookies! The kids love to pretend they're little mice while enjoying the cookies and see who can take the teeniest, tiniest bites of their cookies!

This book is also great for: discussing the idea of a full-circle story arc; introducing the idea of pairings; learning about cause/effect; and practicing memory recall with questions such as what happened first in the story, next, etc.