The Birthday Boys
10 best books like The Birthday Boys (Beryl Bainbridge): Girl, Woman, Other, Big Sky, Akin, Wakenhyrst, A Month in the Country, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, The Teahouse Fire, Cassandra at the Wedding, The Pumpkin Eater, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
| Author | Bernardine Evaristo |
| ISBN | 0241364906 |
Joint Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2019
Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories...
Jackson Brodie, ex-military police, ex-Cambridge Constabulary, currently working as a private investigator, makes a highly anticipated return, nine years after the last Brodie, Started Early, Took My Dog.
Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village, in the occasional company...
| Author | Emma Donoghue |
| ISBN | 0316491993 |
A retired New York professor's life is thrown into chaos when he takes a young great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother's wartime secrets in the next masterpiece from New York Times bestselling author Emma Donoghue.
Noah Selvaggio is a retired chemistry professor...
| Author | Michelle Paver |
| ISBN | 1788549562 |
1906: A large manor house, Wake's End, sits on the edge of a bleak Fen, just outside the town of Wakenhyrst. It is the home of Edmund Stearn and his family – a historian, scholar and land-owner, he's an upstanding member of the local community. But all is not well at Wake's End. Edmund dominates his family...
| Author | J.L. Carr |
| ISBN | 0940322471 |
In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside...
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
| Author | Margalit Fox |
| ISBN | 0062228838 |
In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist...
| Author | Ellis Avery |
| ISBN | 1594489300 |
"Like attending seasons of elegant tea parties—each one resplendent with character and drama. Delicious.”—Maxine Hong Kingston
The story of two women whose lives intersect in late-nineteenth-century Japan, The Teahouse Fire is also a portrait of one of the most fascinating places...
| Author | Dorothy Baker |
| ISBN | 1590171128 |
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra,...
| Author | Penelope Mortimer |
| ISBN | 0747518874 |
4.5 stars rounded up
I must admit I haven’t read anything by Mortimer before and on the evidence of this book I should have. It is about a woman in a downward spiral and is an acerbic and humorous (in a very bleak way) comment on marriage, gender relations and being a woman being controlled by men (husbands...
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
| Author | Julia Strachey |
| ISBN | 1903155274 |
This was absolute rubbish. Wicked too. The story was that although her wedding was but a few hours off, the bride couldn't make up her mind whether she should get married or run off with a previous lover, a dithering sort of person whose job took him on great adventures abroad. He had just turned up again...
