Here are 100 books that The Shell fans have personally recommended if you like
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Steven A. Cook is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for the Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S. Middle East policy.
I read Maalouf's book many years ago and it remains one of the best books I have ever read about identity. It helps that he is a gifted writer and that Maalouf's story is so compelling.
Origins, by the world-renowned writer Amin Maalouf, is a sprawling, hemisphere-spanning intergenerational saga.
Set during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, in the mountains of Lebanon and in Havana, Cuba, Origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maalouf's paternal grandfather, Boutros. Why did Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, travel across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gebrayel, who had settled in Havana?
Maalouf is an energetic and amiable narrator, illuminating the more obscure corners of late Ottoman nationalism, the psychology of Lebanese sectarianism, and the dynamics 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…
Sam Dagher is a Lebanese-American journalist and author with more than 15 years of experience reporting on the Middle East and its people. He has lived in Baghdad, Beirut, and Damascus and worked throughout the region. Sam has been committed to telling the region’s stories from the ground up and in the process shedding new light on the root causes of war, extremism, and migration.
Damascus-born Nizar Qabbani, a lawyer by training, abandoned a career in diplomacy in the late 1960s to become one of the Arab world’s most beloved poets. Both his sensual and political poems carry seeds of defiance, rebellion and a quest for liberation from autocratic institutions and rigid social norms. This edition reproduces Qabbani’s own handwritten text of the selected poems.
This translation of Nizar Kabbani's poetry is accompanied by the striking Arabic texts of the poems, penned by Kabbani especially for this collection. Kabbani was a poet of great simplicity - direct, spontaneous, musical, using the language of everyday life. He was a ceasless campaigner for women's rights, and his verses praise the beauty of the female body, and of love. He was an Arab nationalist, yet he criticized Arab dictators and the lack of freedom in the Arab world.
I began studying Arabic language in middle school in Utah. While I was in university, I read history and politics to understand what was happening in Israel and Palestine, and widened my interest to the entire Middle East. The major question that compelled my interest was how things have changed in the region and why.
I was fortunate to live in Iran, Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt and to travel through much of the Middle East. During my time in these countries, I saw warning signs of political trouble, the involvement of the US, and the Arab Awakening of 2011. Change in the region has brought much that is good, but it has come in many areas at a high cost.
Syria probably suffered the most from the fall-out of the Arab Spring. It is estimated that around 656,500 died through March of 2025* and around 130,000 died in government prisons**.
Wendy Pearlman, a political scientist, writes about the Syrian Civil war as Bashar al-Assad with the strong backing of the Baathist military and secret police fought to put down civil opposition to his rule as hundreds of thousands of unarmed citizens throughout the country took to the streets demonstrating for freedom, human rights, and a voice in their government. In return, the Assad forces decimated the country, bombing city after city, and holding tens of thousands prisoner in unspeakable conditions.
Pearlman concentrates on the human scale of the conflict, writing persuasively of the opposition to the state’s forces. She relates testimonies of individuals from different occupations and backgrounds. These narratives range from a few lines to pages and express the…
Reminiscent of the work of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an astonishing collection of intimate wartime testimonies and poetic fragments from a cross-section of Syrians whose lives have been transformed by revolution, war, and flight.
Against the backdrop of the wave of demonstrations known as the Arab Spring, in 2011 hundreds of thousands of Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom, democracy and human rights. The government's ferocious response, and the refusal of the demonstrators to back down, sparked a brutal civil war that over the past five years has escalated into the worst humanitarian…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
Sam Dagher is a Lebanese-American journalist and author with more than 15 years of experience reporting on the Middle East and its people. He has lived in Baghdad, Beirut, and Damascus and worked throughout the region. Sam has been committed to telling the region’s stories from the ground up and in the process shedding new light on the root causes of war, extremism, and migration.
In a 2019 interview with NPR, Etaf Rum—the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York—said one of her struggles in writing the book was the fear that she was in a way confirming stereotypes about Arabs and Middle Easterners, including “oppression, domestic abuse, and terrorism.” Thankfully Rum overcame these struggles to deliver a courageous, beautiful, and incredibly authentic debut novel that follows the lives of three generations of Palestinian-American women trying to find their voices and identities within the confines of patriarchal and conservative milieus. In a way, the struggles of Rum and her characters mirror the battles that young people throughout the Middle East have been waging against tyranny and oppression since the start of the Arab Spring in 2010.
"Sometimes heroism is loud and dramatic. Other times, it is daring to listen to that quiet voice within and having the courage to follow it. In this story, we see inside the lives of three generations of Palestinian women living in America, struggling and suffering to hear that voice. Etaf Rum has done a great service by sharing these voices with us." -Shilpi Somaya Gowda, New York Times Bestselling Author of SECRET DAUGHTER and THE GOLDEN SON
Three generations of Palestinian-American women living in Brooklyn are torn between individual desire and the…
I’ve always been drawn to stories about daughters coming home to complicated mothers and the unfinished versions of themselves they left behind. As an immigrant who moved from India to the U.S. at thirteen, and now as a physician and mother, I live in that in-between space where past and present, duty and desire constantly collide. Reading great novels that explored these tensions was the spark that pushed me to start writing my own. I gravitate toward books where family love is real but messy, home is both refuge and trigger, and women are allowed to be imperfect, angry, tender, and still deeply human.
In this essay, Roy writes about her relationship with her mother, Mary, with a mix of sharp honesty and tenderness.
I love how she captures a daughter’s push-and-pull between rebellion and devotion, irritation and gratitude. It’s a reminder that our mothers can be both our fiercest critics and our fiercest protectors—and that understanding them often means revisiting the stories we’ve told ourselves for years.
My goal as a writer is to revive lost women’s stories through historical fiction. After co-authoring several historical novels, our last mystery set in Renaissance Rome, we decided to set the sequel in Venice. When we decided to split amicably before finishing that novel, I had spent so much time researching Renaissance Venice that I instantly knew I wanted to set my first solo novel there and focus on girls and women whose stories are so frequently lost to history. So began a quest to learn everything I could about the females of 15th and 16th-century Venice, leading me toward both academic and fictional works of the era.
This evocative novel tells the story of a Jewish midwife making her way in a very Christian Renaissance Venice. Along with all Jews confined to the ghetto at night by doge’s decree, Hannah is not permitted to help Christians with her medical knowledge. However, when her husband is taken to Malta and sold as a slave, Hannah finds that certain laws can be broken, for the right price.
Not since Anna Diamant’s The Red Tent or Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book has a novel transported readers so intimately into the complex lives of women centuries ago or so richly into a story of intrigue that transcends the boundaries of history. A “lavishly detailed” (Elle Canada) debut that masterfully captures sixteenth-century Venice against a dramatic and poetic tale of suspense.
Hannah Levi is renowned throughout Venice for her gift at coaxing reluctant babies from their mothers using her secret “birthing spoons.” When a count implores her to attend his dying wife and save their unborn son, she is…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I've always loved reading to myself and others. I've been an English teacher for years. I love sharing good books and have the reputation of being a good resource, especially for moms with children. I’m happy to share everything from memoirs and history books to classics and children’s picture books. Walking through a library or a bookstore is a favorite activity, so finding not only new books but excellent books about books is always a treat. I love to understand what makes a book work well as a story, thus books that delve into the richness of a story through personal narrative or literary criticism have been favorites to keep on my shelves.
I loved reading Jessica Hooten Wilson’s insights into the eight novels she recommends in her book. Jessica asks the age-old question “how do we become better people?” but then posits we need to enlarge the question to “how do we become holy people?” She also says we need to enlarge our imaginations in how we seek the answers. She examines the main characters of eight different modern books and what we can gain from them. Some of the books she recommends areBook of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Kristin Lavensdatter by Sigrid Unstead, That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis, Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston, and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. I really enjoyed the deep dive into some books I already loved.
How do we become better people? Initiatives such as New Year's resolutions, vision boards, thirty-day plans, and self-help books often fail to compel us to live differently. We settle for small goals--frugal spending, less yelling at the kids, more time at the gym--but we are called to something far greater. We are created to be holy.
Award-winning author Jessica Hooten Wilson explains that learning to hear the call of holiness requires cultivating a new imagination--one rooted in the act of reading. Learning to read with eyes attuned to the saints who populate great works of literature moves us toward holiness,…
I am a linguist and a Christian (a Catholic), with a lifelong passion for clear understanding. I have spent my life, over many decades, searching for the shared human concepts because I believe these concepts give us the key to open the meaning of what people say (in different languages) and of what Jesus says in the Gospels. In the process, I have published some thirty books engaging many disciplines. Three of them deal directly with Christianity: What Did Jesus Mean? (OUP 2001), What Christians Believe? (OUP 2019); and The Nicene Creed in Minimal English: Why Christianity Needs Universal Human Concepts (Palgrave 2025).
This is another big book that my autistic grandson read aloud to me, with enthusiasm, when he was still in his teens.
It is St Paul’s acclaimed biography “by his greatest living interpreter” (so says historian Tom Holland, the author of Dominion). It is a gripping adventure story, following Paul from Tarsus to Rome (“Three times I have been beaten with rods, once I was stoned; three times I have been shipwrecked, a night and a day I have been adrift at sea”) as well as a journey into Paul’s mind and heart.
I loved the scholarship, the narrative mastery, the outer and inner drama of St Paul’s life, so vividly, empathetically, and thrillingly offered to the reader.
As a pastor, I thought I had to be a put-together person. Sure, I was allowed to have problems, but I wasn’t really allowed to struggle. Then I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I thought I was alone. I thought I’d have to leave the ministry. I was wrong. I needed to find other people who struggled, though. Through other books, I was able to find them. These books have helped me in my journey so, so much, and if you struggle with depression, I hope it helps with your journey, too!
We’re all broken in so many ways. This book presents a number of letters to different kinds of broken people. Have you been rejected? Are you scared? Are you alone? There are letters here that will touch your heart. They touched mine! I found someone who could speak poetry into my darkness and make me know that I was not alone. Reynolds also points to real hope, so that even in darkness, I could see a shining light.
“The world is broken. I am broken. And my need is dire.”
This stark revelation is the path to divine surrender. Our courage has a chance to flourish when we reach a point where we have no control and nothing to lose.
In a series of letters, Rebecca Reynolds uses imagery to breathe truth to the lonely, the weary, the restless, and afraid. If you feel the ache of brokenness, you will be refreshed by the source of all courage illuminated in these pages. God is available and wants to join you, in the midst of any mess. You can…
I've always loved reading to myself and others. I've been an English teacher for years. I love sharing good books and have the reputation of being a good resource, especially for moms with children. I’m happy to share everything from memoirs and history books to classics and children’s picture books. Walking through a library or a bookstore is a favorite activity, so finding not only new books but excellent books about books is always a treat. I love to understand what makes a book work well as a story, thus books that delve into the richness of a story through personal narrative or literary criticism have been favorites to keep on my shelves.
This is the perfect book of books lists for me, as Sarah Clarkson is a kindred spirit but also more well-read than I am. I loved reading about her life of reading and her journey of discovering books. She loves many of the books I have loved, and because of this, I could then find books I had to discover. This is a cozy, happy read, with a list of books I was glad to agree with or search for at the local library.
When you hear a riveting story, does it thrill your heart and stir your soul? Do you hunger for truth and goodness? Do you secretly relate to Belle’s delight in the library in Beauty and the Beast?
If so, you may be on your way to being a book girl.
Books were always Sarah Clarkson’s delight. Raised in the company of the lively Anne of Green Gables, the brave Pevensie children of Narnia, and the wise Austen heroines, she discovered reading early on as a daily gift, a way of encountering the world in all its wonder. But what she…
