7 Books Like The Whale

Winner of the AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books!

"This is top-drawer science writing." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now.

Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It’s… show more.

Stepping into the Light explores how an actor's life experience is inextricably connected to the craft he develops and the roles he plays. Andy Robinson's life began with the loss of his father in World War II and the subsequent breakdown of his mother; and the book traces the intertwining of his life and work through seminal periods of recent theatre and film history.
Behavior and characters that were developed and played out as childhood survival strategies later found expression on stage and film as Robinson's apprenticeship and career took him to sixties' London, downtown New York experimental theatre, uptown,… show more.

'A beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history...funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes' Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
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1909. Spokane, Washington.

The Dolan brothers are living by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment.

But then Rye finds himself drawn to suffragette… show more.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted tale of a troubled Moscow printworks .

Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank’s wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation.

How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican… show more.

'This is one of Bainbridge's best books. The close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction' The Times

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE IN 1990

It is 1950 and the Liverpool repertory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan, a story of childhood innocence and loss. Stella has been taken on as assistant stage manager and quickly becomes obsessed with Meredith, the dissolute director. But it is only when the celebrated O'Hara arrives to take the lead, that a different drama unfolds. In it, he and Stella are… show more.

Rich and slim, the celebrated author Nancy Hawkins takes us in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London, where she spends her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher ("of very good books") and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington rooming house. Everywhere Mrs. Hawkins finds evil: with aplomb, however, she confidently sets about putting things to order, to terrible effect.