Here are 30 books that Time of the Child fans have personally recommended if you like
Time of the Child.
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A wonderful character-driven novel covering many years in the intertwined lives of a half-dozen characters, set in Italy and the U.S., involving a small-time movie actress, a would-be hotel owner in Italy, their quick meeting in 1962 and another decades later. It is therefore a love story but an oddly interrupted one, filled with interesting and frequently hilarious characters (the town's local Communist has a rifle but his wife has used it to stake up her garden plants). It even includes an amusing cameo by Richard Burton, fleeing from his duties while filming CLEOPRATRA and unwittingly putting in motion the events of the story in several lives. He thinks CLEOPATRA is a weird movie, by the way.
The #1 New York Times bestseller—Jess Walter’s “absolute masterpiece” (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author): the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 and resurfaces fifty years later in contemporary Hollywood.
The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet. Hailed by critics and loved by readers of literary and historical fiction, Beautiful Ruins is the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962...and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
Two American women are born in the same year in New York. Jennie becomes the mother of Winston Churchill and Sara, the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is history at its best seen through the close relationship of mothers and sons. How destiny triumphs when 2 mothers are born in New York about the same time and their sons are destined to save the world in WWII.
A captivating dual biography of two famous women whose sons would change the course of the 20th century—by award-winning historian Charlotte Gray.
Born into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become the mother of Winston Churchill) refused to settle into predictable, sheltered lives as little-known wives to prominent men. Instead, both women concentrated much of their energies on enabling their sons to reach the epicenter of political power on two continents.
In the mid-19th century, the British Empire was at its height, France’s…
A poetic Southern voice explores how the power of the dead lives on in us. Love surpasses even death. This touched me deeply as so many friends have passed away recently. And death does not kill the love.
"This beautifully written novel, with its complicated, stubborn characters, will haunt you long after the last page." -Margot Livesey, Author of The Boy in The Field
The death of Donald Ray in a freak car accident becomes the catalyst for the release of passions, needs, and hurts. Clayton's discovery of dead Donald Ray upends his longtime emotional numbness. Darlene, the seventeen-year-old widow, struggles to reconnect with her late husband while proving herself still alive. Soon Clayton and Darlene's bond of loss and death works its magic, drawing them into an affair that brings the loneliness in Clayton's marriage to a…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
A great, epic wonder of a book, one of my favorite novels ever. I just read it again after many years to see how it held up, and it is still as I remembered it. It is both a fictional biography of Sir Walter Ralegh and of the Age of Elizabeth. Ralegh himself is a prodigious figure, an adventurer, scholar, privateer, explorer, and courtier, and possibly beloved of Queen Elizabeth I.
The plot, insofar as it is relevant, has Ralegh in the Tower waiting to be executed by the paranoid and jealous King James I. But the story is really Ralegh's recollections of his life. In one particular scene, he tells his son Wat all the changes he has seen in his long life, and it is as fine a summation of the age of Elizabeth as one is ever going to see.
A meticulous re-creation of Elizabethan England that forms a trilogy with The Succession and Entered from the Sun. Here the author delves into the story of Sir Walter Ralegh's fall from favor for alleged conspiracy against James I. Garrett transports the reader to a world of cunning, intrigue, and colorful abundance.
Niall Williams's book is balm for an ailing soul and a gift to readers. The title might suggest a saccharine, feel-good novel, but it is not. Christie, the book's big-hearted catalyzing character utters the title phrase precisely when he is thwarted in love, indicating that happiness is not a state but a state of mind. When tragedy arrives at the end, Christie, with difficulty, is still able to find the fullness of life.
But the narrator, 16-year-old No, is otherwise the main character of the book. From the perspective of sixty years hence, Noel recounts the life-changing events of 1960, when the rains suddenly stopped, spring felt like summer, and both Christie and electrification came to the western Irish village of Faha. The story is told recursively, in what I read as the great Irish oral storytelling tradition. Don't be put off by the slow start. The plot takes hold…
Shortlisted for Best Novel in the Irish Book Awards
Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
From the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain
'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times
'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone' Irish Independent
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it…
I have been hiking up mountains all my life. From Long’s Peak in Colorado to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire to the Cairngorms in Scotland to the Laugavegur in Iceland, I have always drawn strength and inspiration from thin alpine air. As a midwesterner, when I can’t go to the mountains, I love finding new stories about them, particularly on the page. I wrote Above the Fire in 2020 during the pandemic, when I desperately wanted to leave home and climb something. But quarantine and family responsibilities meant I had to do the next best thing, by setting a novel in the mountains instead!
The Snow Leopard portrays a spiritual quest as much as a physical journey.
Peter Matthiessen went to the Himalayas in search of the elusive snow leopard in 1973. He relates his personal circumstances like a sledgehammer on the book’s third page, stating in matter-of-fact terms that his wife had just died of cancer. I will never forget reading The Snow Leopard at the outset of my own journey from Stockholm to the far north of Sweden, inside the Arctic Circle, where a friend and I were set to undertake a long backpacking trip to celebrate my 40th birthday.
This remarkable book was my companion and helped me understand that the mountains are not there to be conquered. To the extent they take notice of human beings at all, they exist to help us learn and grow: to discover what Matthiessen called “the common miracles,” like the satisfaction of a day…
'A beautiful book, and worthy of the mountains he is among' Paul Theroux
'A delight' i Paper
This is the account of a journey to the dazzling Tibetan plateau of Dolpo in the high Himalayas. In 1973 Matthiessen made the 250-mile trek to Dolpo, as part of an expedition to study wild blue sheep. It was an arduous, sometimes dangerous, physical endeavour: exertion, blisters, blizzards, endless negotiations with sherpas, quaking cold. But it was also a 'journey of the heart' - amongst the beauty and indifference of the mountains Matthiessen was searching for solace. He was also searching for a…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I believe that laughter is the best way into a person’s heart and also into their head. Life is beautiful, but it is also incredibly fragile. Satire and humor are effective ways to raise the level of awareness of destructive behaviors and/or controversial topics that are otherwise difficult or unpleasant to address. I think satire and humor make it easier to hold up a mirror and look critically at our own beliefs and our actions.
I’m a huge fan of satire, as I believe it can inform and make you think critically, as well as being wildly entertaining.
I think Catch-22 is one of the most perfect satires about the absurdity and tragedy of war. I’m not the fastest reader, but Heller’s dialogue, humor, and sharp observations of the human condition under the perversion of war had me turning the pages quickly.
Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage.
Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the…
The Remains of the Day brought me to tears. You can really feel the raw emotion and I felt very invested in the characters. 10/10, well done to Mr Ishiguro, he truly captured a moment in time, and a feeling I think many know all too well.
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available to preorder*
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's greatest writers. David Lodge, chairman of the judges in 1989, said, it's "a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance". This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Ishiguro's work has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on…
_____________________________ Beware the evil in the woods...
In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, an elderly servant tells stories of sorcery, folklore and the Winter King to the children of the family, tales of old magic frowned upon by the church.
But for the young, wild Vasya these are far more than just stories. She alone can see the house spirits that guard her home, and sense the growing forces of dark magic in the woods. . .
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…
I’m a South African journalist turned novelist inspired to write biographical historical fiction about trailblazing women. As a lover of nature, I’m particularly drawn to characters who love animals and the outdoors and who are driven by curiosity. I’m fascinated not only by individuals but also by my continent and its history. Nothing gives me greater joy than to write about pioneering women from history and the interconnectedness of all living things.
Few other books romanticize Africa the way this book does. A great deal has changed since it was published in 1937, but Danish author Karen Blixen’s whimsical account of her eighteen years in Africa remains enchanting.
I am particularly partial to the theme of determined, independent women living largely alone in remote places, enjoying the wonders of the natural world, and being adventurous and resourceful. I grew up on a farm in Africa and relate to the associated joys and challenges.
In 1914 Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya with her husband to run a coffee-farm. Drawn to the exquisite beauty of Africa, she spent her happiest years there until the plantation failed. A poignant farewell to her beloved farm, "Out of Africa" describes her friendships with the local people, her dedication for the landscape and wildlife, and great love for the adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton.
