The Mulberry Empire

5 best books like The Mulberry Empire (Philip Hensher): The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Siege, The Amateur Marriage, A Necessary End

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

Author	Joshua Hammer
ISBN	1476777403

To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger...

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Author	Anne Tyler
ISBN	0449911594

Through every family run memories which bind it together - despite everything. The Tulls of Baltimore are no exception. Abandoned by her salesman husband, Pearl is left to bring up her three children alone - Cody, a flawed devil, Ezra, a flawed saint, and Jenny, errant and passionate. Now as Pearl lies...

The Siege

Author	Helen Dunmore
ISBN	0802139582

Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by The New York Times Book Review, The Siege is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental -- the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand -- but her focus is heartrendingly intimate.

One family, the Levins,...

The Amateur Marriage

Author	Anne Tyler
ISBN	0345472454

Anne Tyler would laugh, I'm sure, if she read these different reactions to this book. For isn't this her point in so many of her novels? How different we all are and how easily we misunderstand each other? How one person can hate what another loves so passionately? How easy it is to miss the point, get the...

A Necessary End

Author	Peter Robinson
ISBN	0330491636

Violence erupts at an anti-nuclear demonstration in Eastvale, leaving one policeman stabbed to death. At first there are over a hundred suspects, but then things narrow down to the people who live on "Maggie's Farm", an isolated house high on the daleside. Among the suspects is Dennis Osmond, a social...