The Man in the Wooden Hat
10 best books like The Man in the Wooden Hat (Jane Gardam): The Levant Trilogy, The Truth of the Matter, The Old Romantic, Chalcot Crescent, Bone China, The Homecoming Party, The Midnight Choir, Cooking with Fernet Branca, The Art Of Losing, The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris
| Author | Olivia Manning |
| ISBN | 0141186453 |
As Rommel advances in wartorn Egypt, the lives of the civilian population come under threat. One such couple are Guy and Harriet Pringle, who have escaped the war in Europe only to find the conflict once more on their doorstep, providing a volatile backdrop to their own personal battles. The civilian...
| Author | Robb Forman Dew |
| ISBN | 0316013307 |
Agnes Scofield, the heroine of Dew's lovely,low-key period piece, can join Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Bridge at the teatable of exquisitely etched literary matrons. A respectable Ohiowidow with three grown children, Agnes is beginning to carve out anindependent middle-aged life for herself (which includes...
| Author | Louise Dean |
| ISBN | 1999856562 |
An Oprah Book of The Week.
Meet Ken. He's obsessed with death, planning his own funeral and desperate to die in the bosom of his family. Unfortunately for Ken, that's the last place his family wants him.
His oldest son Nick left home over twenty years ago and reinvented himself. At forty,...
| Author | Fay Weldon |
| ISBN | 1848872682 |
Dystopia! Feminism! What more do I need!
No, really. What more do I need? Because this was missing something.
Parts of this book were incredibly awesome. The fact that it's an alternative universe version of the life of a sister Weldon never had is appealing to me, so appealing. Let's...
| Author | Roma Tearne |
| ISBN | 0007240732 |
An epic novel of love, loss and a family uprooted, set in the contrasting landscapes of war-torn Sri Lanka and immigrant London. Grace de Silva, wife of the shiftless but charming Aloysius, has five children and a crumbling marriage. Her eldest son, Jacob, wants desperately to go to England. Thornton,...
| Author | Carmine Abate |
| ISBN | 1933372834 |
It is Christmas Eve. Sitting on the steps of the village church in front of an enormous bonfire lit in celebration of the season, a father and his son exchange stories. The father speaks of life as an emigrant from Italy, in perpetual limbo between departure and return, between France and his home. The...
| Author | Gene Kerrigan |
| ISBN | 1933372265 |
A sophisticated crime story of contemporary Ireland, The Midnight Choir teems with moral dilemmas and Dublin emerges as a city of ambiguity: a newly-scrubbed face hiding a criminal culture of terrible variety. Small-time criminals have become millionaire businessmen, the poor are still struggling...
| Author | James Hamilton-Paterson |
Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany, where he whiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions — including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur of the book's title....
| Author | Rebecca Connell |
| ISBN | 0007300360 |
For a first novel ‘The Art of Losing’ is quite a stunning achievement. A murder mystery of sorts, the plot produces a few twists and builds to a climax where the revenge factor became more muted and the ‘end-end’ was an up. Towards that ultimate point the author’s language became increasingly...
| Author | Leïla Marouane |
| ISBN | 1933372850 |
Once again, I found myself at the conclusion of the evening with my plans all awry, the girl - Nadja? Yasmina? Djamila? - fled into the night on the feeblest of pretexts. It is for the best, Mohamed, said the voice in my right ear. Why don't you call your mother? But I ignored the eight messages that were still...
| Author | Jenn Ashworth |
| ISBN | 1906413061 |
This deliciously creepy and insinuating novel, Jenn Ashworth's debut, is the story of Annie Fairhurst - as told by this fascinating, contradictory and wholly unreliable character herself. We meet Annie, who is seriously overweight and struggles to interact with others, as she moves - alone - into...
| Author | Caryl Férey |
| ISBN | 1933372885 |
As a child, Ali Neuman ran away from home to escape the Inkatha, a militant political party at war with the then-underground African National Congress. He and his mother are the only members of his family that survived the carnage of those years and the psychological scars remain.
Today,...
The long anticipated novel from the author of the short story 'In Another Country', which inspired the Oscar/Academy Award nominated film, #45Years.
Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer
resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing
together...
| Author | Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt |
| ISBN | 2226181075 |
Pour guérir d'une rupture sentimentale, un homme se réfugie à Ostende, ville endormie face à la mer du Nord. Sa logeuse, la solitaire Emma Van A., va le surprendre en lui racontant l'étrange histoire de sa vie, où se conjuguent l'amour le plus passionné et un érotisme baroque. Superbe mystificatrice...
| Author | James Scudamore |
| ISBN | 0099523841 |
As a child Ludo is plucked out of the shantytown where he was born and transported to a world of languid, cosseted luxury. Now twenty-seven, he works high above the above the sprawling metropolis of São Paulo for a vacuous 'communications company'. But this is not his world, and this is not a simple rags-to-riches...
| Author | Milena Agus |
| ISBN | 1609450019 |
But what do we really know about other people? In this international bestselling novel, a young unnamed Sardinian woman explores the life of her grandmother, a romantic, bewitching, eccentric figure, and a memorable literary creation. Her life has been characterized by honor and fierce passion,...
| Author | Linda Ferri |
| ISBN | 1933372877 |
Cecilia tells the story of a young woman's search to find her place in a world that is rife with social upheaval and religious conflict. Born ito a noble Roman family in the second century, under the rule of the last of the "five good emperors," Marcus Aurelius, Cecilia seeks knowledge with the urgency...
| Author | Anthony Powell |
| ISBN | 0006540562 |
Such a long journey! We first met Nick Jenkins in school, as a teenager with a keen interest in the affairs of others and a rather reclusive, shy temperament. Now he is in his late sixties, and hopefully he has some wisdom to impart from all the events he witnessed, from all the people he has met and from...
| Author | Ioanna Karystiani |
| ISBN | 1933372982 |
The moment of reckoning has come for Captain Mitsos Avgustìs. After twelve years at sea it is time to go home to the Island on which he was born: home to his wife Flora, his two daughters, his son, a granddaughter he has never met, and Litsa, his lover from all those years ago; a modern-day Penelope awaiting...
Dublin, 1899. On a foul night in a troubled city, lawyer Joseph Radcliffe watches the execution of a young Irish rebel. Radcliffe, together with his black American comrade Benjamin Pierce, has made a living defending the toughest cases in Dublin, but is haunted by the spectre of his defeats, the loss...
After the appalling losses suffered during World War One, three of its survivors long for peace, unaware that its aftermath will bring different, but still daunting, challenges.
Katy trained as a mechanic during the war and cannot bear to return to the life of drudgery she left behind. A trip to...
| Author | Bea Davenport |
| ISBN | 1909878618 |
It's the summer of 1984 and there is a sense of unease on the troubled Sweetmeadows estate. The residents are in shock after the suspicious death of a baby and tension is growing due to the ongoing miners' strike.
Journalist Clare Jackson follows the story as police bungle the inquiry and struggle...
| Author | Barbara Pym |
| ISBN | 1559212640 |
Barbara Pym is a master at capturing the subtle mayhem that takes place in the apparent quiet of the English countryside. Fifty-something sisters Harriet and Belinda Bede live a comfortable, settled existence. Belinda, the quieter of the pair, has for years been secretly in love with the town's pompous...
