Here are 100 books that There Your Heart Lies fans have personally recommended if you like
There Your Heart Lies.
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As a Rhode Islander, I didn’t have to do too much research to write Ready, Set, Oh. I was born in Providence, and I grew up in Cranston, a suburb outside the city. After graduating from a local high school, I studied at Brown University and after years of living in different cities, fifteen years ago I settled in Providence with my family. I adore this place—we have vibrant neighborhoods, gorgeous beaches, plenty of history, and a surprisingly lively literary scene. I assembled this list to draw attention to some great but under-recognized books set in Rhode Island, either by Rhode Islanders or writers with significant connections to the Biggest Little.
After Clay Blackall loses his brother to suicide, he lights out for Twinrock, a decaying mansion perched on an island in Narragansett Bay, where he attempts to retrace his brother’s steps in his final days and hours. Winter’s quirky novel unfolds from multiple points of view. In addition to Clay, there is Vinco Vincenti, a failed author who has taken to impersonating the actor Judge Reinhold, and Alix Maus, an adjunct college instructor burdened by her past. All of them have ties to Clay’s lost brother. But the star of the show is Twinrock itself—a fictionalized version of Clingstone, the mysterious mansion that can still be seen off the coast of Jamestown, RI. Fans of writers like Robert Coover will enjoy Winter’s stylish prose, which convincingly evokes the bohemian atmosphere of the 1980s on Providence’s East Side.
[A] heartbreaking novel about the devastations of severed attachments.” —NPR
For Clay Blackall, a lifelong resident of Providence, Rhode Island, the place has become an obsession. Here live the only people who can explain what happened to his brother, Eli, whose suicide haunts this heartbreaking, hilarious novel–in–fragments.
A failed actor impersonates a former movie star; an ex–con looks after a summer home perched atop a rock in the bay; a broken–hearted salutatorian airs thirteen years’ worth of dirty laundry at his school’s commencement; an adjunct struggles to make room for her homeless and self–absorbed mother while revisiting a scandalous high…
Alice Wilson wants children; her husband, Dan, doesn’t. So Alice "accidentally" gets pregnant, trusting that Dan will eventually go along—and he seems to, at first. But as their marriage falls apart, Alice realizes that, even from the beginning, Dan has cruelly used small criticisms and belittling comments to undermine her…
As a Rhode Islander, I didn’t have to do too much research to write Ready, Set, Oh. I was born in Providence, and I grew up in Cranston, a suburb outside the city. After graduating from a local high school, I studied at Brown University and after years of living in different cities, fifteen years ago I settled in Providence with my family. I adore this place—we have vibrant neighborhoods, gorgeous beaches, plenty of history, and a surprisingly lively literary scene. I assembled this list to draw attention to some great but under-recognized books set in Rhode Island, either by Rhode Islanders or writers with significant connections to the Biggest Little.
This compulsively readable novel by Cape Cod native and television writer Kepnes (7th Heaven, The Secret Life of the American Teenager) begins in a New Hampshire middle school where nerdy Jon and sweet Chloe are best friends united against the provincial attitudes of their small town. Everyone is shocked when John is kidnapped and given up for dead. Years later he turns up in Providence, where he has been kept in a coma by a rogue neuroscience professor who wants to transform him into the monster of The Dunwich Horror by Providence’s own, ambivalently celebrated H.P. Lovecraft. When John learns that he now has terrifying powers that put him at odds with everyone he loves, he sets out to find the professor whose recklessness got him into this mess—and maybe saved his life.
*** From the bestselling author of YOU, now a major Netflix TV series *** 'Compelling' Observer With her trademark flair, precision eye for detail and acerbic wit, Caroline Kepnes brings the suspense thriller to a whole new level with PROVIDENCE - a dark story of death, loss, horror, redemption and the love that binds us all.
In 2008, 13-year-old Jon Bronson disappears on his morning walk to school. After even his parents give him up for dead, only his best friend, Chloe, remains certain that he would come back.
Four years later, Jon returns with no memory of anything after…
As a Rhode Islander, I didn’t have to do too much research to write Ready, Set, Oh. I was born in Providence, and I grew up in Cranston, a suburb outside the city. After graduating from a local high school, I studied at Brown University and after years of living in different cities, fifteen years ago I settled in Providence with my family. I adore this place—we have vibrant neighborhoods, gorgeous beaches, plenty of history, and a surprisingly lively literary scene. I assembled this list to draw attention to some great but under-recognized books set in Rhode Island, either by Rhode Islanders or writers with significant connections to the Biggest Little.
This novel-in-stories follows a quartet of friends—Dub, Rollo, Rye, and Gio—as they party, fight, love, and occasionally even consider leaving Rhode Island. Gio, the group’s storyteller, observes, comments, and guides the reader through a hard-edged world of race and class oppression. Guns and drugs flood Gio’s world, but these forces are offset by bonds of family, friends, and friends who become family. Never has the overlooked town of Pawtucket been so lovingly portrayed, and I’ll not soon forget Holmes’ mouthwatering descriptions of Portuguese Catholic feast days in East Providence. A keen observer of toxic masculinity, Holmes shows how misogyny holds this group of young men together while it also holds them back.
Four young men struggle to liberate themselves from the burden of being black and male in America in an assured debut "as up-to the-minute as a Kendrick Lamar track and as ruefully steeped in eternal truths as a Gogol tale" (Kirkus, starred review).
Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as black men in America. With potent immediacy and bracing candor, this provocative debut follows a decade in the lives of…
Alice Wilson wants children; her husband, Dan, doesn’t. So Alice "accidentally" gets pregnant, trusting that Dan will eventually go along—and he seems to, at first. But as their marriage falls apart, Alice realizes that, even from the beginning, Dan has cruelly used small criticisms and belittling comments to undermine her…
As a Rhode Islander, I didn’t have to do too much research to write Ready, Set, Oh. I was born in Providence, and I grew up in Cranston, a suburb outside the city. After graduating from a local high school, I studied at Brown University and after years of living in different cities, fifteen years ago I settled in Providence with my family. I adore this place—we have vibrant neighborhoods, gorgeous beaches, plenty of history, and a surprisingly lively literary scene. I assembled this list to draw attention to some great but under-recognized books set in Rhode Island, either by Rhode Islanders or writers with significant connections to the Biggest Little.
In this baker’s dozen of stories, Jean McGarry reprises favorite topics—tight-knit families, fraying loves, intimations of mortality. A native Rhode Islander with ties to Providence’s blue-collar Irish community, McGarry paints the state and its inhabitants in shades as tender as they are unsparing. McGarry’s great theme is decline: Everything that starts out promising invariably goes bad. Steeped in this worldview, her characters are lively and quick with an insult—even when they’re confronted by experts who presume to know them better than they know themselves. One mordant example: A therapist finally gets a breakthrough with a tough-to-reach Rhode Islander. The patient feels relief, and the therapist urges him to attend sessions more regularly. “You’re at it again,” the patient remarks. “Save your advertisements for someone else.”
The stories of Ocean State roll over the reader like a wave. Family pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves-Jean McGarry puts us in life's rough seas with what the New York Times has called a "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise" hand.
I’ve always been fascinated by the 1930s. In Britain, the decade was haunted by troubling memories of the Great War and growing fears of a more terrible conflict to come. In other words, it was a decade dominated by geopolitics. After more than 30 years as a journalist for the Reuters news agency, I’ve learned that geopolitics will never leave us alone. My novel is the first in a series of stories examining what geopolitics does to ordinary people caught in its grip. This selection of fiction and nonfiction titles is a fascinating introduction to what the poet WH Auden called ‘a low dishonest decade’.
If the First World War was the brooding background to 1930s Britain, the Spanish Civil War was the tragic conflict at its centre. Thousands of British volunteers went to Spain to fight, overwhelmingly on the Republican side. Meanwhile, the British government’s dogged adherence to a non-intervention agreement was slowly starving the Republicans of military aid.
I rate Preston’s account of the war because he shows how the brutal civil conflict became a proxy battleground for international forces of right and left while Britain clung to non-intervention. London was in a genuine bind over Spain but ended up adopting a position that paved the way for the appeasement of Hitler, a policy many Britons saw as profoundly dishonest.
Paul Preston is the world's foremost historian of Spain. This surging history recounts the struggles of the 1936 war in which more than 3,000 Americans took up arms. Tracking the emergence of Francisco Franco's brutal (and, ultimately, extraordinarily durable) fascist dictatorship, Preston assesses the ways in which the Spanish Civil War presaged the Second World War that ensued so rapidly after it.
The attempted social revolution in Spain awakened progressive hopes during the Depression, but the conflict quickly escalated into a new and horrific form of warfare. As Preston shows, the unprecedented levels of brutality were burned into the…
I am a French writer of Spanish origin. My two grandfathers shared history with Spain’s darkest hours. My maternal grandfather was born in Barcelona and he was a teenager at the time of the war; just like Salvayre’s parents, he had to flee Spain as the bombs were hitting his city. My paternal grandfather, who was in his twenties at the time of the civil war, decided to fight for the “International Brigades” to defend Spain’s freedom. It is to honour their memory and one of the millions of men and women who suffered from those almost four decades of dictatorship that I wrote Blood Song, a historical thriller, the third installment in the Roy and Castell series.
The former French psychiatrist Lydie Salvayre won the prestigious Goncourt Prize for that brilliant novel about the Spanish civil war. Salvayre’s parents, who were Republicans, had to flee Franco’s regime, and we feel that her writing is sewn with emotion and memories. The two voices we hear echo perfectly that troubling period of Spanish history: the one of Salvayre’s own mother recounting her experiencing the civil war and the one of the French writer Georges Bernanos. A novel not to be missed.
Aged fifteen, as Franco's forces begin their murderous purges and cities across Spain rise up against the old order, Montse has never heard the word fascista before. In any case, the villagers say facha (the ch is a real Spanish ch, by the way, with a real spit).
Montse lives in a small village, high in the hills, where few people can read or write and fewer still ever leave. If everything goes according to her mother's plan, Montse will never leave either. She will become a good, humble maid for the local landowners, muchisimas gracias, with every Sunday off…
A lifetime of an obsession with Spain since a childhood spent on Miro’s farm in Montroig del Camp and just a short walk away from where Gaudi was born I have cooked, researched, battled, and fallen in love with this extraordinary country. Almost 40 years ago I bought a farmhouse in Arevalillo de Cega in the central mountains in Spain from where I have crisscrossed the country in the footsteps of Goya, the culinary genius Ferran Adria and in search of information for my biography on Gaudi – the God of Catalan architecture. Spain is an open book with a million pages, endlessly fascinating, contrary, unique, and 100% absorbing. I fell in deep.
As the Guardian correspondent in Madrid, Giles Tremlett’s book is a no-holds-barred deep investigation into the Spanish psyche and recent history and its uncomfortable relationship to the trauma of the Spanish Civil War. It is brave, provocative, deeply-researched but above all immensely readable.
Spaniards are reputed to be amongst Europe's most forthright people. So why have they kept silent about the terrors of their Civil War and the rule of General Franco? This apparent 'pact of forgetting' inspired writer Giles Tremlett to embark on a journey around Spain and its history. He found the ghosts of Spain everywhere, almost always arguing. Who caused the Civil War? Why do Basque terrorists kill? Why do Catalans hate Madrid? Did the Islamist bombers who killed 190 people in 2004 dream of a return to Spain's Moorish past? Tremlett's curiosity led him down some strange and colourful…
I'm a writer and journalist. I grew up in London’s Jewish community, and lived in Israel and Jerusalem for most of my life. I'm fascinated by the Mid-East region, its history, religions, music, cultures, and colors, and by Jewish history. As a result of my experiences as a soldier in the Second Lebanon War of 2006, and the Second Intifada of 2000-4, my focus on conflict became central to my work. After the 2006 war, I became a conflict reporter, and I've covered war and insurgency in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Israel/West Bank/Gaza for a variety of publications. I also like to focus on the ways war and conflict impact human lives.
In this book, Javier Cercas, a Spanish journalist and novelist, sets off on a journey to discover the truth about his great-uncle, Manuel Mena, who was killed aged 19 at the Battle of the Ebro, during the Spanish Civil war. Cercas is a man of the center-left, but his relative was killed while fighting on the side of General Franco’s nationalist, anti-Communist and anti-democratic insurgency. This book is about the way that conflict and its memory remains present in families over subsequent generations, shaping subsequent lives in myriad ways, sometimes unseen. It is of particular value I think because of the way in which Cercas manages to examine his opposition to the cause with which his great-uncle served, and his deep sense of linkage to his relative, without ever compromising either.
Lord of All the Dead is a courageous journey into Javier Cercas' family history and that of a country collapsing from a fratricidal war. The author revisits Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to research the life of Manuel Mena. This ancestor, dearly loved by Cercas' mother, died in combat at the age of nineteen during the battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest episode in Spain's history.
Who was Manuel Mena? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment to the author, or a young idealist who happened to fight on the wrong side? And how should we judge…
I am an award-winning author and illustrator who works in a variety of genres, including Historical Fiction. When historical fiction is well done it conveys times and events as they were lived and breathed by real people. Historical fiction by diverse women tells the stories of those consistently left out of the “historical record.” Human life is rich and diverse, and the stories belong to all of us, not just those who have historically had the power to control the cultural narratives. As a writer and student of history, it has been my pleasure to explore characters that are not often represented, characters that are ordinary for their times, and extraordinary as well.
The Time of the Doves is one of my favorite books of all time for its intimacy, immediacy, and unusual descriptive power. Natalia, a young woman living in Barcelona around the time of the Spanish Civil war, paints for the reader a vivid and seamless picture of her life from the inside out—her loves and losses, survival, the confusion of a world broken by chaos and violence and put back together again by perseverance and tenderness. A short but unforgettable read that I return to again and again.
The Time of the Doves - by Mercè Rodoreda - is the powerfully written story of a naïve shop-tender during the Spanish Civil War and beyond, is a rare and moving portrait of a simple soul confronting and surviving a convulsive period in history. The book has been widely translated, and was made into a film.
Like the characters in this list, I am a stranger living in Spain. Well, not quite a stranger! Although born and raised in Oxford, UK, I shared a childhood with my Spanish grandmother, who couldn’t speak English and was almost completely deaf! So, from an early age, I became her translator. Over two decades, I have communed, collaborated, and sometimes collided with all manner of people and places in this country, and my all-consuming love for this nation has led me to investigate its history. The books I recommend here address issues that affect ordinary people in extraordinary times and have brought me great joy. I hope they will for you too.
This is like a stage play. Characters appear suddenly on set from left or right according to their political affiliations before dashing out on yet another quest in this troubled city on the brink of civil war. The Englishman is a naïve art expert whom I adored for his bumbling misjudgments, and there are other, sometimes bombastic, characters to love, too.
Mendoza manages a tricky balance between fact and fiction, between horrific truths and humorous observation. It is totally absorbing. I stayed up in the early hours to finish it!
"A funny, gripping and perfectly balanced blend of P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene" Independent
"Highly enjoyable read" Spectator
Anthony Whitelands, an English art historian, is invited to Madrid to value the collection of a Spanish duke. At a welcome lunch he encounters Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder and leader of the Falange, a nationalist party whose antics are bringing the country ever closer to civil war.
The paintings turn out to be worthless, but before Whitelands can leave for London the duke's daughter Paquita reveals a secret and genuine treasure, held for years in the cellars of…
