100 Books Like Woman at Point Zero

This book gave me a reminder of faith that neither time nor distance can ever impede upon two individuals destined for each other. Sometimes, what is said–or rather not said at all–doesn’t exactly portray the truth of someone's intentions or feelings.

Even though I know the ending, I’ll pick this book up every year or so and still find myself wondering how Anne and Wentworth will ever reconcile. But alas, Austen knocks it out of the park once more.

The great Chinese British powerhouse writes about her childhood in a poor coastal village in post-Mao’s China where she’s made to live with her grandparents and life is rough and hard, especially for a girl. It’s a very atmospheric tale, that paints a vivid picture of this incredible society. It’s also a Cinderella story, about a suffering child that, thanks to incredible stubbornness and stamina, rises up to become one of the twelve (out of a million or so) applicants that are accepted into the Chinese Film School in Beijing each year. She later moves to England and her descriptions of the west are super fresh and priceless.

Germans have been in love with Italy since always, a love that found its culmination with Goethe’s famous Italienische Reise in 1816. It’s a love that lasts forever, for it’s a love that never finds fulfillment. Germans are like the stuffed up straight guy who’s in love with a lively beauty above their level, that is Italy; they’re forever stuck in the moment of enchantment, they can never grasp or really fathom their love, let alone turn it into a real affair or just begin to understand this incredible woman. Promising young German writer Strauss takes up residence in the famous Via Corso in Rome (close to Casa di Goethe), and tries to make his moment come alive under the heavy burden of history. Maybe not as urgent or dramatic as the other four books, but still here we have a one man-boy against all of Rome, all of our… show more.

The only work of fiction on the list, Nobel Laureate Kurt Hamson’s Hunger (1980) was a game changer for modern literature.

Firmly anchored in the point of view of the narrator, we journey painfully with a man, a writer as a matter of fact, on the way down into the depths of meaningless, despair, and hunger. Adapted into several films, the story reflects how little society values the intellectual capital of people it perceives as the dregs and describes in detail the effects of starvation on the human mind.

A worrying and unsettling read, Hunger remains the best work of fiction ever written about destitution.

In early 2016 I stayed in Kochi, Kerala, in the south of India, working on a novel. There I came across the local bestseller Goat Days by the Bharein-based Indian author, Benyamin, and was totally blown away. It's a powerful tale of a young Indian worker named Najeeb Muhammad, who, like many of his countrymen, goes to work in Saudi Arabia, dreaming of earning some money for his family back home. His dream turns into a nightmare when he is taken as a slave to a remote desert farm where he has to take care of the goats and dwell among them. He is forced to live alone in the desert with all its hardships, sandstorms, heat, and general dryness, treated like an animal by his Saudi master. Still, hope prevails. This is one of the ultimate "me-against-the-world" books. Its strength is underlined by the fact that it's banned in… show more.

This book is responsible for me missing my tube stop on my way to work so as you can imagine I found it a riveting read.

Michelle Styles is a well-known romance writer who has written a number of Viking-era romances. I enjoyed this one in particular, because I loved the main character, Dagmar Kolbeindottar. She is a warrior, not a lover, or so she thinks – until she is captured by the Celtic warlord, Aedan Mac Connal, who has been commanded by her father, under duress himself, to bring her back.

Her father then forces her to make a choice and marry – and she choses Aedan, hoping he will refuse her. Cue misunderstandings, passionate trysts, and an ending that is truly satisfying, as well as brilliant atmosphere and creation of characters including doughty Dagmar.

Anyone who has spent any time in the world of journalism can recognise the flawed but ultimately lovable character of Thorn Marsh, Marika Cobold’s main character, who like far too many reporters, myself included, is far too often concentrated on her work rather than on living in the real world of human relationships.

Journalistic ethics should define us and our work, but Thorn falls from grace (or rather crosses a line). When her paper is taken over, she is placed on a mid-week supplement and is pushed for heart-warming clickbait. She actually makes up a story about an angel appearing on the Heath, crossing many a journalistic line in doing so.

Cue a tale about love, honour, loyalty, and how to pick yourself up when you’ve done wrong – and had wrong done to you. I loved Thorn. Hopefully she will reappear in another novel by Marika Cobbold one day… show more.

There is a shelf in the hallway full of battered books by women I read when I was a student and shortly afterwards – the books that I read and gave me those shivers of recognition – of feeling that this writer is speaking directly to me.

At some point some other young feminist must have told me, read this. And I did, and I can still remember certain passages that I read and re-read and sometimes copied out in my spidery handwriting to act as my mantras, then and now.

It’s a call to arms, it’s a passionate beating of the female breast, it’s the making of the heroine that we all need as women – Britain’s first feminist who spoke for quirky females everywhere when she wrote in a letter to her sister Everina, “I am not born to tread in the beaten track.”

But this is digression,… show more.

One of the first novels using a picaresque story-telling technique, this novel set the standard for the style—one I soon adopted. Good stories, some spicy for the day, are told in a logical progression, which gave rise, methinks, to Twain and certainly me. Great vignettes told un-attached but somehow part of a progression. 

Nell Kimball was the least educated of the prostitute authors I read but also the most colorful. And the only one who didn’t feel trapped in the profession. Like Josie Washburn, Nell couldn’t find a publisher for her memoir when she looked for one in 1932. She was 78 years old and reportedly in dire straits financially. Nell had started in the “trade” in St. Louis at the age of fifteen in 1867 and worked as a prostitute and then as a madam, lastly in New Orleans’s famed Storyville red-light district, until it was shut down in 1917. Nell died in 1934. Her book was finally published by Macmillan in 1970.

I’m grateful that Madeleine, Josie, and Nell were fortuitous enough to pen their stories, to record a first-hand account of an era that we otherwise would not be privy to in such a personal way.