Here are 64 books that Thirteen Chairs fans have personally recommended if you like
Thirteen Chairs.
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I began my career with children as a preschool teacher and then as a pediatric nurse. In retirement, my love for kids and children's literature has led me to write stories that make kids laugh, feel loved, and inspire a sense of joy and wonder in the world. I especially love stories where animals, especially dogs, birds, and even fireflies are the main characters and tell the story. And, I believe that part of appreciating the world and making it a better place is celebrating cultural diversity. That's the theme of City Market! There's just no substitute for reading to children. The benefits are truly endless and will last their whole life long.
The simplicity of the story and the collage illustrations are perfect for the youngest children. They will connect with Peter's experience of having to share something he values very much. They will experience how Peter works through his feelings with the help of a loving and supportive family. This is one of the first preschool books that I found to feature an African American family.
From the Caldecott Medal-winning author of The Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats, Peter's Chair is a picture book classic about a sibling rivalry.
Peter, the hero of many of Ezra Jack Keats' award-winning books, has a new baby sister. When she arrives, his parents paint his old baby furniture pink for the new baby. There's only one thing they haven't painted yet, though: his little blue chair. He'll do whatever it takes to save it-even run away! This is a gentle and reassuring story about sibling rivalry and a perfect gift for any family expecting a new baby.
A hair-raising, side-splitting supernatural adventure!
In the idyllic town of Pine Port, Kelsey was on the cusp of realizing her dreams. In weeks, she'd clasp her high school diploma and beauty license. Or so she thought, until her life took a supernatural detour, far removed from the ordinary path she'd…
I’m Rashin Kheiriyeh, born in Iran to a mother who was an artist. From a young age, I adored picture books and spent hours doodling and crafting stories for my paintings. This early passion for art and storytelling drives me to explore themes of nature, change, and emotional connections in my work. With around 100 children’s books published globally, I draw on personal experiences and cultural heritage to create engaging, meaningful stories. My expertise in illustrating and writing allows me to connect with readers through vivid imagery and heartfelt narratives, making me especially attuned to themes of hope and transformation in literature.
This book beautifully portrays the themes of family, resilience, and the value of hard work. The story follows a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother as they save coins to buy a new, comfortable chair for their home after a fire.
It captures the warmth and love of their close-knit family and the significance of working together towards a common goal. Vera B. Williams' vibrant illustrations and heartfelt narrative convey a sense of hope and determination, making it a touching reminder of the importance of family support and the joy found in even the simplest of comforts.
This classic and heartwarming picture book was written and illustrated by the celebrated Vera B. Williams and was named a Caldecott Honor Book by the American Library Association.
"A tender knockout. It's rare to find much vitality, spontaneity, and depth of feeling in such a simple, young book."—Kirkus Reviews
Vera Williams tells of a young girl who, along with her waitress mother, saves coins in a big jar in hopes that they can someday buy a new chair for their apartment, the kind of chair her mother deserves after being on her feet all day in the Blue Tile Diner.…
I have been researching and writing about cocktails for over two decades. My first book, The New Cocktail Hour, appeared in 2016 and I have since written seven more books pairing mixed drinks with topics such as classic movies, vinyl music, the DC Comics universe, Westerns, and travel. Cocktails are truly global concoctions, invented by using tea from the Far East, sugar from the Caribbean, liquor from Europe, and citrus from the tropics. The best books about mixed drinks transport us to a worldly state of mind wherever we are.
Longtime New York City bartender Brian Bartels makes for an erudite and humorous guide to American cocktails as he surveys the country state by state. Chock full of quotes and quips, plus offering a stunning array of obscure drinking facts along with local lore, the book is not just an amble but a true tour de force. The United States of Cocktails makes for the perfect drinking companion to simply pop open and browse for a drink to make tonight, or to read cover to cover. Educational and transportive, Bartels’ charm keeps readers returning to this impressively researched tome.
An exploration of the beloved cocktails, spirits, and bars that define each state in America
The United States of Cocktails is a celebration of the cocktail history of every state in America. After traveling around this great nation and sampling many of the drinks on offer, cocktail authority Brian Bartels serves up a book that is equal parts recipe collection, travelogue, historical miscellany, bartender's manual, and guide to bar culture today-with bar and drink recommendations that are sure to come in handy whether or not you are crossing state lines. Delving into the colorful stories behind the creation of drinks…
A spy school for girls amidst Jane Austen’s high society.
Daughters of the Beau Monde who don’t fit London society’s strict mold are banished to Stranje House, where the headmistress trains these unusually gifted girls to enter the dangerous world of spies in the Napoleonic wars. #1 NYT bestselling author…
A large part of my career has been devoted to foreign affairs. Edgar Snow, Negley Farson, and others whom I read as a young man kindled my interest. I have reported from overseas and at one point developed a specialty in reporting connections between American communities and events overseas. I have published a number of foreign correspondents’ memoirs that were buried in achieves or have been out-of-print and ignored. Most recently I wrote a history of foreign reporting. So, one can say that I have made a career of enjoying books like these.
Vincent Sheean’s memoir, published in 1935, stands out because it established a genre of memoir writing by foreign correspondents and because of its high literacy value.
“It has now been 30 years or more since Vincent Sheean wrote his Personal History,” commented Saturday Review of Literature editor Norman Cousins commented years later. “Many of the foreign correspondents have tried to convey the same sense of an intimate, interactive relationship with events and people that gave such luster to Sheean’s book.”
Sheean’s still-young career had spanned the globe for Europe, to North Africa and the Middle East, to the 1920s revolution in China, to the Soviet Union. His story was about himself insofar as it described how the news felt to him.
The events he witnessed proved the most important of the period in which he lived.
Sheean went on in a similar fashion after the book appeared, displaying almost…
Very slightest of wear to the cover, pages nice and clean, no writing or highlighting. Slightly spotting on all edges. A very nice copy. All our books are individually inspected, rated and described. Never EX-LIB unless specifically listed as such.
Since adolescence I’ve written scripts, stories, and songs. For ten years I wrote songs and sketches for NPR’s Morning Edition as “Moe Moskowitz and the Punsters.” Among my young-adult novels, my favorite remains Alex Icicle: A Romance in Ten Torrid Chapters, a literate howl of romantic obsession by an over-educated and under-loved madman. I think my funniest comedy novel is Who’s Killing the Great Writers of America?that not only kills off some famous writers, but simultaneously parodies their style. And, of course, Stephen King ends up solving the whole crazy conspiracy. I taught writing for many years, and I’m pleased to report that my students taught me more than anything I ever taught them.
While the prose style of Act One is a little fussy, florid, and overly eager to impress, this is still a moving, funny, and emotional biography of a talented, ambitious young man who is determined to make his mark as a Broadway playwright. And, at the end, when he single-handedly turns his out-of-town failure (co-written with George S. Kaufman) into a hit, you want to stand up and cheer.
Moss Hart's Act One, which Lincoln Center Theater presented in 2014 as a play written and directed by James Lapine, is one of the great American memoirs, a glorious memorial to a bygone age filled with all the wonder, drama, and heartbreak that surrounded Broadway in the early twentieth century. Hart's story inspired a generation of theatergoers, dramatists, and readers everywhere as he eloquently chronicled his impoverished childhood and his long, determined struggle to reach the opening night of his first Broadway hit. Act One is the quintessential American success story.
Having taught college courses on and written books about theatre, film, and popular music for over forty years, I have great respect for those who write about the popular art form known as musical theatre. As a theatergoer, I've watched the Broadway (and Off-Broadway) musical develop, change, and sometimes decline. It seems musicals are more popular today than ever before; they certainly are more diverse. I grew up with the traditional Rodgers and Hammerstein model and have seen musicals take on new forms over the years.
It is an exciting art form that deserves to be written about.
If you are looking for a highly opinionated and passionate account of the Broadway musical and the changes it has undergone over the decades, this book is for you. Grant does not pull his punches and the general tone is one of despair at the decline in the quality of musicals. But the book is well researched and offers many provocative ideas which the die-hard musical fan will find fascinating. It's the kind of work that you want to read after you have a solid knowledge of American musical theatre and you want to have your traditional ideas challenged.
Winner of the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award (2005)Many of today’s Broadway shows, from Rent to The Lion King, have become commercial hits, but do they have the cultural importance or the dramatic and musical artistry of such enduring productions as Oklahoma!, Show Boat, or Kiss Me, Kate? Mark N. Grant traces the transformation of singing and melody, libretto and lyric writing, dance rhythms, sound design, and choreography and stage direction through three distinct eras: the formative period (1866–1927), the golden age (1927–1966), and the fall (1967 to the present). He explores how and why the unsophisticated genre of pre-1927 musical comedy…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
As a screenwriter I’ve always enjoyed noir stories, whether books or movies. Stories where the characters are not your squeaky-clean “good guys.” I like to see “ordinary” people; people who are flawed (like all of us), or maybe with a shady past, who are swayed or manipulated by dire circumstances into doing something they would not ordinarily do. I enjoy stories with unique, interesting characters that are not your run-of-the-mill private eyes, and whose moral compass might be a bit off. I particularly like stories where characters are forced to become investigators because of a situation they are thrust into, whether by accident or by their own dubious actions.
Set in the seventies, a sexy female celebrity journalist sets out to find the reason for the break-up of a singing/comedy duo alá Lewis and Martin and uncovers a gruesome murder. Full of sex, drugs, and behind-the-scenes entertainment business debauchery, this story is told in a masterful way that is funny, frightful, suspenseful, and disturbing. A truly unique noir tale where no one comes away clean. Just how I like it. And written by my good friend and former employer, Rupert Holmes. The same guy that gave us “Escape, The Pina Colada Song” and the Broadway hit The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
O’Connor, a vivacious, free-spirited young journalist known for her penetrating celebrity interviews, is bent on unearthing secrets long ago buried by the handsome showbiz team of singer Vince Collins and comic Lanny Morris. These two highly desirable men, once inseparable (and insatiable, where women were concerned), were driven apart by a bizarre and unexplained death in which one of them may have played the part of murderer. As the tart-tongued, eye-catching O’Connor ventures deeper into this unsolved mystery, she finds herself compromisingly coiled around both men, knowing more about them than they realize and less…
I’ve always had a passion for wounded heroes and strong heroines. My earliest memories are reading books where the heroine saves the day. I’ve never wanted the heroine to need the hero in order to make her life complete. Even as a child, when my dad read me books at night—one of my favorite memories—I preferred stories where the heroine saved the day. As an adult, I’ve loved to read stories where the hero is brave enough to show his vulnerable side, and when I decided to become a writer, those were the books I wanted to write.
Another wounded hero book, but I’m choosing this one because not only is it one of my favorites from the series, but Lynn Kurland packs so much emotion into every page that I cry and laugh and live the book while I’m reading it and long after.
It’s time travel (but they always seem to bring chocolate with them ☺ ) and the love is so strong. Her stories are like catnip.
From Lynn Kurland, the New York Times bestselling author of the Nine Kingdom series.
Set near the Scottish border at a rugged castle on the edge of the sea, this is the story of a courageous lord who lost everything he held dear. Of a strong young woman willing to sacrifice everything for happiness. Two lost souls who find in each other a reason to live again, to laugh again, and to love for the first time...
I became very interested in this topic when I moved to Italy and met and married Andrea Meloni. I had never been particularly interested in wars and battles but, when he began to tell me about his very personal experience growing up in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, I was captivated and felt that his unique story was important. I, therefore, encouraged him to write his memoirs. My book is based on them, and so it is more his book than mine. However, I did extensive research to set his story in a coherent historical context.
Ruth Maier was a Jew born in Germany. Kristallnacht, an infamous Nazi pogrom, took place in 1938. Ruth was able to flee to Norway shortly thereafter.
She soon became fluent in Norwegian, finished high school, and began her university studies. However, the Germans occupied Norway in 1940. She, therefore, lived in constant fear of being arrested and kept a very detailed diary of how she lived through these two dangerous years. She was then arrested in 1942 at age 22 and deported to Auschwitz, where she was immediately put to death.
Ruth Maier was born into a middle-class Jewish family in interwar Vienna. Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, her world collapsed. In early 1939, her sister having left for England, Ruth emigrated to Norway and lived with a family in Lillestrom, near Oslo. Although she loved many things about her new country and its people, Ruth became increasingly isolated until she met a soulmate, Gunvor Hofmo, who was to become a celebrated poet. When Norway became a Nazi conquest in April 1940, Ruth's effort to join the rest of her family in Britain became ever more urgent.
Mal's older brother has disappeared into thin air. Laura's parents went away for the weekend and when she gives them a call, they have no idea who she is. In pursuit of answers, the teens become entangled with two others similarly targeted by a force they don't understand and now,…
I am the author of the Herringford and Watts mysteries, the Van Buren and DeLuca mysteries, and the Three Quarter Time series of contemporary Viennese-set romances. I am also the author of The London Restoration. My non-fiction includesDream, Plan and Go: A Travel Guide to Inspire Independent Adventure andA Very Merry Holiday Movie Guide. I live in Toronto, Canada.
Recalling Ibbotson’s personal experience of leaving Austria for England before Hitler’s Anschluss, The Morning Gift is a witty and warm marriage of convenience story between a witty and intrepid archaeologist, Quinton Somerville, and a brilliant professor’s daughter Ruth Berger. When Ruth is accidentally left behind in Vienna after her family has emigrated to England, Quin marries Jewish Ruth and protects her from oncoming Nazi occupation: under the condition that they will part ways when both are safely back in London. But Quin and Ruth continue to run into each other again and again and again. A deliciously Austrian-flavoured book. Ibbotson’s Viennese set-sequences and memories are a love letter to her city.
The Morning Gift is a beautiful, classic romance from much loved author, Eva Ibbotson.
Eighteen-year-old Ruth lives in the sparkling city of Vienna with her family, where she delights in its music, energy and natural beauty. She is wildly in love with the brilliant young pianist Heini Radik and can't wait until they are married.
But Ruth's world is turned upside down when the Nazis invade Austria and her family are forced to flee to England, and through a devastating misunderstanding she is left behind. Her only hope to escape Vienna comes from Quin, a young English professor, who unexpectedly…
