Books like This Rough Magic — picked by fans

It starts with arguably the most famous first line any novelist has ever written, and I certainly couldn’t stop reading once I had absorbed that.

Rebecca is a classic for all sorts of great reasons. For me, the house is a character here. Manderley is as Gothic as I could ever wish for (and I LOVE Gothic).

Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, is one of the most sinister characters ever written. When this novel was first published (1938), certain subjects were pretty much taboo. In the light of today's increased awareness of people’s differing sexualities, I think it’s probably easier to understand her motives – not that it makes her any less scary.

For me, this is a masterpiece of storytelling that defies genre categorization and puts du Maurier firmly in my top favourite authors list.

I began reading Grimes in the 80s, but her books still hold up today, and this one establishes all of the cozy/Gothic things I love. Grimes has a gift for ironic humor, so even though she sets her books in a very cozy English village called Long Piddleton, she tends to satirize the residents and the narrow-mindedness of the provincial town.

In this way, she is similar to Agatha Christie, except that Grimes is much funnier. In this small town, Melrose Plant, a Lord by inheritance who has thrown off his title and tries to live a quiet life in the family manse, is a long-suffering, sane person in an often chaotic existence. He is continually terrorized by his “Aunt Agatha,” an American who married his uncle and refers to herself as “Lady Ardry,” although her late husband had no title. Their relationship is a source of great humor, but… show more.

I love this main character.

Ruth Galloway is independent, smart, and self-sufficient, and there’s a lot about her life that sounds ideal to me. She lives in a coastal landscape with her cat? Sign me up!

She’s also flawed and does not conform to traditional beauty standards—the perfect heroine for intelligent, insightful investigation of a clever mystery, and a developing love story. And that love story isn’t sappy and romantic. It’s plagued with troubles: fear of vulnerability, social roadblocks, and scars from past lovers.

Plenty to work through over the next fifteen books! Add in the mysterious Cathbad, scientist and druid, and the atmospheric wealth of the coastal wetlands and their ancient history, and this is a book, and a series, I never got tired of reading.

No one writes suspense like Ruth Ware! Her books are all compelling page-turners, and yes, she follows my magic formula. All of her heroines are young women who go from a stable existence to some sort of fish-out-of-water situation that creates suspense. In this book, the young narrator, down on her luck, decides to respond to a letter claiming she is an heiress. While she knows that the letter has been sent to her because she bears the same name as the real heiress, she decides to claim the family fortune, or whatever she can get, and then run away.

But when she is introduced to the mysterious family members and finds that there are skeletons in the ancestral closet, she starts to feel trapped. At this point, I am nestling in with the popcorn and Diet Coke because this is the evening’s entertainment. I love the way Ware pushes… show more.

When life gets a little too much I’d recommend a visit to Corfu in the 1930s with Lawrence Durrell. It’s a diary, semi-fictionalised, of a year living on the island, both a history and a personal evocation of one corner of the Mediterranean world – Corfu’s people, landscape, and history, woven through Durrell’s island idyll beside the most enchanting sea. Durrell hunts fish at night by lamplight, discusses philosophy in taverns, records the timeless cycles of island life – olive harvesting, grape gathering, village festivals, puppet shows, folklore, and superstitions –and sits by candlelight watching the moon rise over the sea, the night air ‘cool as a breath from the heart of a melon’. It’s bitter sweet.

Not crime although there are crimes in it. The narrative structure of the quartet was a major influence on structuring my trilogy. The first three present different versions of the same events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt before and during the Second World War. In Book 1, a self-absorbed, pretentious narrator, Darley, presents an account of an intense love affair. In book 2, Balthazar shows how ignorant he was about what was really going on about him. Mountolive widens the political context and shows both earlier narrators were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Book 4 manages to tease out yet more solutions to mysteries thought resolved.

Provence has inspired hundreds of books, but Lawrence Durrell captures better than most what he calls its 'real nature'. His book is both personal response (he lived for many years at Sommières, north of Nimes) and historical reflection, particularly on the Roman legacy – a legacy that includes wine and olive oil, perennial staples of the Provençal table. Although Caesar occupied the whole of France, nowhere is the Roman imprint more omnipresent than in Provence; living near Carpentras, we daily dreamed of finding our fortune in an ancient Roman coin, shining through the dust of a lonely track. Durrell's language is poetic, his imagery evocative: the 'Socratic austerity' of a game of boules, the 'felicity and eloquence' of Provençal skies. As a companion to Provence, Durrell is my pick.

Tracy Chevalier writes the novels I want to write! I’ve read just about all of them and was particularly excited to discover Burning Bright. Chevalier’s depiction of London in the early 19th century is masterful, and hugely inspiring for me. Burning Bright is a coming-of-age story that centers around two children’s interactions with the great poet William Blake. I met Tracy Chevalier at the Historical Novel Society Conference in Oxford where she made my day by graciously agreeing to accept a copy of my first novel The Towers of Tuscany which was heavily inspired by her novels and even insisting that I sign it! 

Shakespeare’s plays can be very funny, (many of my friends disagree with this, but I swear by the goddess of Renaissance puns it’s true!), and this is a light, fluffy book that deserves a place on any bookshelf because it embraces silliness and turns it right up to eleven. Our Will’s key predicament is something everyone who has ever written can relate to, being certain you have a literary masterpiece locked up in your mind if only you can be left alone long enough to make it magically appear on the blank page. 

Shakespeare’s Dog is the craziest Shakespearean book I’ve ever read. Not only is the young Stratford Shakespeare’s tale told by his dog, Hooker ̶ the dog speaks a kind of faux-Shakespearean: full of Elizabethan-esque vocabulary and syntax, Anglo-Saxon bawdry, new-coined usages of common words (“the wind flummoxed”; “I knelled the truth”). Moreover, Rooke must really know his dogs. Because the dog-viewpoint (a frustrated Shakespeare “bites his toenails”) seems right on the money. The struggle of a prodigy youth and his prodigy dog to escape the tawdry, shallow, raucous banality of provincial small-town life is told with vividness, wit, and pathos.