The Dead School
10 best books like The Dead School (Patrick McCabe): Timescape, Night Boat to Tangier, Girlchild, The Spellcoats, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina, Cart and Cwidder, Drowned Ammet, The Inheritors, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey, The Descent of Man
| Author | Gregory Benford |
| ISBN | 0553297090 |
The Coolness—
• This book won the Nebula in 1980! Pretty cool for it and the author, Gregory Benford. It would have been nice for Hilary Foister to share in the credit, though, considering she supposedly co-wrote this with Benford.
• It deals with tachyons! (once in a while)
•...
| Author | Kevin Barry |
| ISBN | 0385540310 |
In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen — Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs — sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are...
| Author | Tupelo Hassman |
| ISBN | 0374162573 |
Rory Hendrix is the least likely of Girl Scouts. She hasn’t got a troop or even a badge to call her own. But she’s checked the Handbook out from the elementary school library so many times that her name fills all the lines on the card, and she pores over its surreal advice (Disposal of Outgrown Uniforms;...
| Author | Diana Wynne Jones |
| ISBN | 0064473155 |
The Spellcoats is one of the first books I ever read by Diana Wynne Jones and is still one of my favorites. With her tenth published novel, she demonstrates a maturity that marks the rest of her career; as good as her previous works are, with The Spellcoats she plays with first person limited POV and the clash...
Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina
| Author | Robert Graves |
| ISBN | 0679725733 |
Miracles do happen ask Claudius the unread historian the idiot, the clown, as his family perceives him, the people also yet becomes Emperor ( one of the best too) of the Roman Empire... These events unfold with the assassination of his mad nephew Caligula, the Praetorian Guard needs a ruler or else they...
| Author | Diana Wynne Jones |
| ISBN | 0064473139 |
For centuries, Dalemark has been a land divided by the warring earldoms of the North and South. Now, with the help of the Undying, the mysterious gods of Dalemark, four extraordinary young people -- from the past, present, and future -- must join forces to reunify their beloved land. When Moril inherits...
| Author | Diana Wynne Jones |
| ISBN | 0064473147 |
Diana Wynne Jones doesn't make the worldbuilding too easy to follow. I remember reading in her collected non-fiction writings that she found that children made the leaps her books require much more easily than adults do. So I try to think like a child when I read her work (it sort of pleases me, the way people...
| Author | William Golding |
| ISBN | 0156443791 |
When the spring came the people - what was left of them - moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. What the people...
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey
| Author | Simon Armitage |
| ISBN | 0571249884 |
In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain,...
| Author | Grayson Perry |
| ISBN | 0241236274 |
Grayson Perry has been thinking about masculinity - what it is, how it operates, why little boys are thought to be made of slugs and snails - since he was a boy. Now, in this funny and necessary book, he turns round to look at men with a clear eye and ask, what sort of men would make the world a better place, for...
| Author | Edna O'Brien |
| ISBN | 0452274524 |
O'Brien builds a puzzle, but once the pieces are all in place, she doesn't offer a solution. To do so would be trite. What she succeeds in doing is make clear the complexity of Ireland by giving her characters the space they need to become known and thus to become sympathetic. Not every single character...
| Author | Kim Stanley Robinson |
| ISBN | 0312890370 |
2027: Southern California is a developer's dream gone mad, an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls. Jim McPherson, the affluent son of a defense contractor, is a young man lost in a world of fast cars, casual sex, and designer drugs. But his descent into the shadowy underground of industrial...
