Here are 100 books that Twelve Days in May fans have personally recommended if you like
Twelve Days in May.
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I am a voracious reader of romantic fiction, and I’m always drawn in by books where time plays an important role. I love it when the characters have limited time and are on a countdown, or time is stretched out between their interactions, or when one single moment changes the course of their lives so completely. It always adds so much conflict and drama to a plot, as if time is a character in itself: it’s such a big thing in all our lives, but it’s also, in some respects, completely arbitrary. I love all these books because time and timing have such a big impact on the characters.
I loved the premise of this funny, charming romcom, where two babies are born on New Year’s Eve, one minute apart in the same hospital. Minnie is a feisty, lovable heroine, and when she meets Quinn again when they’re both thirty, the dynamic sets the pages on fire.
I loved how the book was sprinkled with star-crossed lovers, fate, and the sense of magic and things being meant to be.
The surrounding cast of characters is also brilliant, and I felt like I knew them all by the end. It’s so heartwarming and romantic, and a book that’s dusted with stardust.
Their lives began together, but their worlds couldn't be more different. After thirty years of missed connections, they're about to meet again...
Minnie Cooper knows two things with certainty: that her New Year's birthday is unlucky, and that it's all because of Quinn Hamilton, a man she's never met. Their mothers gave birth to them at the same hospital just after midnight on New Year's Day, but Quinn was given the cash prize for being the first baby born in London in 1990--and the name Minnie was meant…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am a voracious reader of romantic fiction, and I’m always drawn in by books where time plays an important role. I love it when the characters have limited time and are on a countdown, or time is stretched out between their interactions, or when one single moment changes the course of their lives so completely. It always adds so much conflict and drama to a plot, as if time is a character in itself: it’s such a big thing in all our lives, but it’s also, in some respects, completely arbitrary. I love all these books because time and timing have such a big impact on the characters.
I found this book so emotional: a book that deals with such difficult subjects and has heartbreak in it but is so uplifting, too.
Scarlet is killed in an accident and has to watch the people she loves deal with the aftermath. I thought Evie’s grief was so real, and I was desperate for her to find happiness again after losing her best friend. I am always drawn to a love story that seems impossible, and this one had me on the edge of my seat as Nate is drawn to Evie, but their happy ever after seems so out of reach.
I cried a lot but finished it full of joy and with a renewed desire to live life to the fullest.
This heart-wrenching read about friendship, love, and loss tells the story of a woman grieving the death of her best friend and learning to embrace a future she never imagined—perfect for fans of Rebecca Serle and Josie Silver.
One moment in time can change everything...
The day Scarlett dies, her hopes and dreams for the future die with her…or so she thinks. Because she’s still here—wherever here is—watching the ripple effect of her death on the lives of those she loved the most. She’d do anything to go back and join the living, especially Evie, her best friend who needs…
I am a voracious reader of romantic fiction, and I’m always drawn in by books where time plays an important role. I love it when the characters have limited time and are on a countdown, or time is stretched out between their interactions, or when one single moment changes the course of their lives so completely. It always adds so much conflict and drama to a plot, as if time is a character in itself: it’s such a big thing in all our lives, but it’s also, in some respects, completely arbitrary. I love all these books because time and timing have such a big impact on the characters.
I felt every single emotion reading this book and felt as if I’d lived all the decades with Jen and Nick, who met as teenagers and soon became friends.
I love Sarra’s writing style, and I was fully invested in Jen and Nick from the very beginning, and found their complicated, messy relationship, which follows the most winding path, completely believable.
There was so much in this book that was unexpected, and by the end, I was a sobbing puddle of feelings. I know Jen and Nick will always stay with me, and I’m already looking forward to reading it again.
'A VERY special book. GORGEOUS, real believable and BEAUTIFUL' - Marian Keyes
London. Nine million people. Two hundred and seventy tube stations. Every day, thousands of chance encounters, first dates, goodbyes and happy ever afters.
And for twenty years it's been where one man and one woman can never get their timing right.
Jennifer and Nick meet as teenagers and over the next two decades, they fall in and out of love with each other. Sometimes they start kissing. Sometimes they're just friends. Sometimes they stop speaking, but they always find their way back to each other.
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
I am a voracious reader of romantic fiction, and I’m always drawn in by books where time plays an important role. I love it when the characters have limited time and are on a countdown, or time is stretched out between their interactions, or when one single moment changes the course of their lives so completely. It always adds so much conflict and drama to a plot, as if time is a character in itself: it’s such a big thing in all our lives, but it’s also, in some respects, completely arbitrary. I love all these books because time and timing have such a big impact on the characters.
I am a huge fan of an epic love story that spans years, and this book is one of the best I’ve read!
I laughed, cried, and swooned at the battle of wits between Becca and Charlie, and even though the book starts with such sadness, it is full of fun moments, sparkling dialogue, and real heart and emotion.
I loved being taken on such an intense, delicious rollercoaster ride of a romcom, and I want to press this book into everyone’s hands. It’s my favourite kind of will-they-won’t-they, and it’s such a satisfying, beautiful read.
'Some days I feel like I've lived more than one lifetime, so, couldn't we be right for each other this time around?'
Everyone is talking about this book:
'What an absolute page-turner!...keeps you guessing before pulling off THE PERFECT ending!' Anita
'Such a warm, lovely read with two characters you're desperately rooting for' Cesca Major, author of Maybe Next Time
'It's a total belter... I loved the slow burn and just the warmth and funniness of the writing. Was gagging for them to get it together' Kirsty Greenwood, author of Big Sexy Love
I am a lifelong art appreciator. When I connect with a piece of art, I want to know more about the art, the time period, and the artist. I read history and biography to learn facts, but when I want to experience the art at the heart-level, I dive into historical fiction. I'm especially interested in the connection between love and creativity. As a writer, I know firsthand that love is what fuels me. I love it when I encounter stories that show I'm not alone in this; others across history have also been inspired to create by their own great emotions, whether love or anger or something else.
Harriet Scott Chessman takes us into the world of Mary Cassatt's early Impressionist paintings through Mary's sister Lydia, whom the author sees as Cassatt’s most inspiring muse. Chessman hauntingly brings to life Paris in 1880, with its thriving art world. The novel’s subtle power rises out of a sustained inquiry into art’s relation to the ragged world of desire and mortality. Ill with Bright’s disease and conscious of her approaching death, Lydia contemplates her world narrowing. With the rising emotional tension between the loving sisters, between one who sees and one who is seen, Lydia asks moving questions about love…
I have lived in Gettysburg, PA, all of my life, so I’m drawn to historical fiction, especially the Civil War era. The 1860s is the perfect setting for the enemies-to-lovers trope, and I am lucky enough to be surrounded by history all of the time. In doing lots of research, I have found that enemies fell in love more often than you might think during the Civil War. I hope you enjoy this list of books that got me interested in reading and continue to keep my attention to this day.
My grandmother had this novel on her bookshelf, which is why I read it the first time, but I’ve read it over and over. This is my favorite classic love story that is not really enemies to lovers, but still has lots of emotion and conflict.
I love it because of the conflict and for its educational value in teaching about the French Revolution.
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"Vaguely she began to wonder ... which of these worldly men round her was the mysterious 'Scarlet Pimpernel,' who held the threads of such daring plots, and the fate of valuable lives in his hands."
In the early days of the bloody French Revolution, fleeing aristocrats are being captured and sent to the guillotine. But the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel - along with his band of English gentlemen - is outwitting the revolutionaries. Known only by his calling card, he arrives in disguise and smuggles the nobles…
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
As a child, I was captivated by Christmas's traditions, rituals, meaning, and magic, which always signaled a time for introspection and hope. These books capture all of that. For me, the holiday is a time to pause and reflect, and revisiting these works helps remind me of what is important in life and where we should be pointed, where our humanity lies.
I love this book because it shows the sentimental side of the lauded author known for gritty mysteries and psychological novels—of which I’ve read more than 100. (He published some 400 novels and sold 500 million books.)
It features his earmarked lean prose and affecting Parisian settings and characters. His example and thoughts on craft have greatly influenced my writing, including one key admonition he got from his literary colleague Colette: “Cut, cut, cut!”
Three seasonal stories set in Paris at Christmas, from the celebrated creator of Inspector Maigret.
It is Christmas in Paris, but beneath the sparkling lights and glittering decorations lie sinister deeds and dark secrets...
This collection brings together three of Simenon's most enjoyable Christmas tales, newly translated, featuring Inspector Maigret and other characters from the Maigret novels. In 'A Maigret Christmas', the Inspector receives two unexpected visitors on Christmas Day, who lead him on the trail of a mysterious intruder dressed in red and white. In 'Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook', the sound of alarms over Paris send the…
I am the son of Irish rural immigrants who at the age of nearly eighty already occupies several vanished worlds myself: London in the 1950s and 60s, the old world of the European peasantry, and a time when the greatest war in human history was still a daily presence. I spent most of my life as an academic historian writing books for an academic audience. Then, to my surprise, at the tender age of seventy, I discovered that I could write prose that had a certain grace and dignity and which seemed to move people as well as inform them. So, I began a second career as what is called a “writer.”
This is French peasant life in its last days, a life rendered from the outside by one who became an insider.
Berger went to live and work among the peasants of the French south in 1962. This world, like that of Spain at much the same time, saw the death of the old peasantry. It is not a work of observation like Norman Lewis’s book but a series of fictional stories. It treats peasants as human beings, on an equal standing with all others in society. They have depth and gravity. Just like us all.
How awful most writing about peasants is. This stands out proudly from that awfulness.
With this haunting first volume of his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth relates the stories of skeptical, hard-working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of summer haymaking and long dark winters f rest; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvelous Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains, but an inexorable part of the lives of men who…
From early adolescence through my career as an English professor, I was deeply drawn to romance and romantic fiction as a form of pleasure, comfort, and hope. My new book is personal and intimate, not scholarly. Weaving together my expertise in the subject of romance fiction with the story of passionate love in my own life, my book Loveland: A Memoir of Romance and Fiction is about the experiences I've had, inside the culture of romance in which women are immersed. I have a view of passion that is not a conventional one as I trace a way forward for myself, and perhaps others as well.
A male author describing the adulterous passions of an unhappy woman, Flaubert tears into Madame Bovary as superficial and ridiculously narcissistic. Yet Flaubert was a terrific writer and also shows how empty and purposeless the restricted life of a middle-class woman was in his time–not poor enough to be preoccupied with surviving, but not rich enough to lead a glamorous life. It’s not like Emma Bovary can go to law school!
Flaubert’s dissection of Emma’s forbidden love life is brilliant. It’s downright painful to see Emma’s hopes and fantasies when the men in her life take what they want from her, and she pours all she has into them. I can relate.
Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. Its heroine, Emma Bovary, is stifled by provincial life as the wife of a doctor. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
France claimed me early, when I was a teenager. A French major, a Rotary scholarship year in the Loire Valley, and decades of return visits later, I'm still not done with this gorgeous country. Since retirement, my husband and I spend at least several weeks there every year, and in 2011, we lived in France for three months during an adult gap year. My third book, a novel set in Paris and Normandy, is the most recent evidence that France and her food, wine, culture, literature, art and landscapes, have never loosened their hold on me.
As a Francophile with a lifelong fascination with Jackie Kennedy, I felt that this book was written for me—and it delivered on every count.
Jacqueline in Paris follows a college-age Jackie through her junior year abroad in 1949, and the author gets both the woman and the moment exactly right. The Paris on these pages is beautiful but not romanticized. It is a city still visibly scarred by war, rebuilding itself with fragile dignity. That historical texture gives the story real weight.
What makes this a page-turner is how completely the author inhabits Jackie's inner life. You don't just observe her discovering Paris—you feel it alongside her, the enchantment and the disillusionment in equal measure. I finished it in two sittings and didn't want it to end.
"Captivating...Mah channels Kennedy and brings postwar Paris to life with exquisite detail and insight." -- People
From the bestselling author of The Lost Vintage, a rare and dazzling portrait of Jacqueline Bouvier's college year abroad in postwar Paris, an intimate and electrifying story of love and betrayal, and the coming-of-age of an American icon - before the world knew her as Jackie.
In September 1949 Jacqueline Bouvier arrives in postwar Paris to begin her junior year abroad. She's twenty years old, socially poised but financially precarious, and all too aware of her mother's expectations that she make a brilliant match.…
