The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
10 best books like The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (Julia Stuart): Something Missing, A Guide to the Birds of East Africa, Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth, Findus and the Fox, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady, The Widower's Tale, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English, Mrs Queen Takes the Train, The Bee-Loud Glade, The Dog who Came in from the Cold
| Author | Matthew Dicks |
| ISBN | 0767930886 |
A career criminal with OCD tendencies and a savant-like genius for bringing order to his crime scenes, Martin considers himself one of the best in the biz. After all, he’s been able to steal from the same people for years on end—virtually undetected. Of course, this could also be attributed to his...
| Author | Nicholas Drayson |
| ISBN | 0547152582 |
For the past three years, Mr. Malik has been secretly in love with Rose Mbikwa, a woman who leads the weekly bird walks sponsored by the East African Ornithological Society. Just as Malik is getting up the nerve to invite Rose to the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball (the premier social occasion of the Kenyan calendar),...
| Author | Lisa Napoli |
| ISBN | 0307453022 |
Lisa Napoli was in the grip of a crisis, dissatisfied with her life and her work as a radio journalist. When a chance encounter with a handsome stranger presented her with an opportunity to move halfway around the world, Lisa left behind cosmopolitan Los Angeles for a new adventure in the ancient Himalayan...
| Author | Sven Nordqvist |
| ISBN | 1903458870 |
My small charge Leo had all the Findus and Petson books, but they were in Russian, translated from the originals, in Swedish.
We loved these books, and because there are pictures on every page I had no difficulty 'reading' the story.
I decided to get an English version, as a present,...
| Author | Elizabeth Stuckey-French |
| ISBN | 0385510640 |
This lively, intricately plotted, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly touching family drama combines the wit of Carl Hiaasen with the southern charm of Jill McCorkle.
Seventy-seven-year-old Marylou Ahearn is going to kill Dr. Wilson Spriggs come hell or high water. In 1953, he gave...
In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy...
| Author | Natasha Solomons |
| ISBN | 0316077585 |
At the outset of World War II, Jack Rosenblum, his wife Sadie, and their baby daughter escape Berlin, bound for London. They are greeted with a pamphlet instructing immigrants how to act like "the English." Jack acquires Saville Row suits and a Jaguar. He buys his marmalade from Fortnum & Mason and...
| Author | William Kuhn |
| ISBN | 0062208284 |
An absolute delight of a debut novel by William Kuhn—author of Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books—Mrs Queen Takes the Train wittily imagines the kerfuffle that transpires when a bored Queen Elizabeth strolls out of the palace in search of a little fun, leaving behind a desperate team...
| Author | Steve Himmer |
| ISBN | 0984510583 |
Meet Finch, a corporate drone and blogger who invents words and imaginary lives, but none as surreal as the life he's about to lead as a decorative hermit. Meet Mr. Crane, an eccentric billionaire whose whims and moods change as often as the landscape outside his employee's cave. Join them both as they...
| Author | Alexander McCall Smith |
A second merry romp with the Corduroy Mansions characters. McCall Smith's books are such gentle reads that I kind of feel like I'm floating in a warm tub of quirky humanity. I especially like the occasional splashy observation about life that he throws in. This time William French, failed Master of Wines,...
Hope McNeill has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for years, but this is the first time she's been able to bring along her pug, Max (without sneaking him in in her tote bag). The occasion is a party for an Animals in 19th-Century Art exhibit, but the evening ends badly when a small but important painting...
| Author | Thomas Trofimuk |
| ISBN | 0385529139 |
A man arrives at an insane asylum in contemporary Spain claiming to be the legendary navigator Christopher Columbus. Who he really is, and the events that led him to break with reality, lie at the center of this captivating, romantic, and stunningly written novel.
Found in the treacherous...
| Author | John Pipkin |
| ISBN | 0385528655 |
Woodsburner springs from a little-known event in the life of one of America’s most iconic figures, Henry David Thoreau. On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods—an...
| Author | Rebecca Hunt |
| ISBN | 1400069408 |
July 1964. Chartwell House, Kent: Winston Churchill wakes at dawn. There’s a dark, mute “presence” in the room that focuses on him with rapt concentration.
It’s Mr. Chartwell.
Soon after, in London, Esther Hammerhans, a librarian at the House of Commons, goes to answer...
| Author | Rosecrans Baldwin |
| ISBN | 1594487634 |
By turns funny, charming, and tragic, Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel takes us inside the heart and mind of Dr. Victor Aaron, a leading Alzheimer's researcher at the Soborg Institute on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Victor spends his days alternating between long hours in the sterile lab and running...
Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show
| Author | Frank Delaney |
| ISBN | 1400067839 |
January 1932: While Ireland roils in the run-up to the most important national election in the Republic’s short history, Ben MacCarthy and his father watch a vagabond variety revue making a stop in the Irish countryside. After a two-hour kaleidoscope of low comedy, Shakespearean recitations,...
When Norman Huntley and Henry Beddow, sheltering from the rain in a dismal Irish country church, placate the sexton by telling him that they knew of his beloved pastor (now departed), there is no reason to suppose that there is any harm in the invention. It is purely for their own amusement that they create...
| Author | Carolyn Parkhurst |
| ISBN | 0385527691 |
From the bestselling author of The Dogs of Babel comes a dazzling literary mystery about the lengths to which some people will go to rewrite their past.
Bestselling novelist Octavia Frost has just completed her latest book, a revolutionary novel in which she has rewritten the last chapters...
Bill Warrington's Last Chance
James King's acclaimed debut novel is a rich multigenerational saga that soars with compassion and insight into the pain and joy of family life. Confronted with a diagnosis that threatens his most cherished memories, Bill Warrington-a monumentally stubborn ex-Marine-hatches a daring scheme to...
| Author | Gita Nazareth |
| ISBN | 0982560508 |
Brek Cuttler, a young lawyer, new mother, and wife of a popular television news reporter, dies unexpectedly and, arriving in heaven, learns she has been chosen to join the elite lawyers who defend souls at the Final Judgment. Yet Brek longs for her lost life, and the cause of her death remains a mystery....
In this hilarious and ultimately moving memoir, comedians and real-life married couple Annabelle Gurwitch and Jeff Kahn prove that in marriage, all you need is love—and a healthy dose of complaining, codependence, and pinot noir.
After thirteen years of being married, Annabelle and...
| Author | Kate Racculia |
| ISBN | 0805092307 |
A sudden death, a never-mailed postcard, and a long-buried secret set the stage for a luminous and heart-breakingly real novel about lost souls finding one another.
The Darby-Jones boardinghouse in Ruby Falls, New York, is home to Mona Jones and her daughter, Oneida, two loners and self-declared...
I liked this better than its prequel. I was a little more accumstomed to the author's dry humor, I like his use of words, and the book had a more definitive ending.
A favorite quote from the Irish priest: "...one of the few disadvantages of a long life is that so much knowledge is heaped upon my head...
| Author | Eugene Linden |
| ISBN | 0452284112 |
In The Octopus and the Orangutan, Eugene Linden takes readers on another unforgettable journey into the minds and hearts of animals, going beyond our everyday encounters with animals at home and in the zoo in a wide-ranging collection of real-life anecdotes.
The Octopus and the Orangutan...
Revisions of Goodloe Byron
Nathan First is a childlike biographer, making barely enough from his writing to survive. His only source of contact with the outside world is his sister, whose recent marriage has left Nathan to his own devices.
Moved by a paltry obituary that he reads in the paper, Nathan sets out to compose his...
