Today in Bookish and Literary History, September 19

1651 Robinson Crusoe runs away to sea and is promptly shipwrecked

1654 Robinson Crusoe and Xury escape from Salé.

1983 The Burning Book by Maggie Gee (UK)

A variation on the family saga. Two English working families, the Ships and the Lambs, shop-keepers and railway-workers, try to live their own lives, interrupted by two world wars and the threat of a third.

2019 The Confession by Jessie Burton (UK)

When Elise Morceau meets the writer Constance Holden, she quickly falls under her spell. Connie is sophisticated, bold and alluring – everything Elise feels she is not. She follows Connie to LA, but in this city of strange dreams and 1980s razzle-dazzle, Elise feels even more out of her depth and makes an impulsive decision that will change her life forever.

2022 Freida McFadden’s Never Lie

Newlyweds Tricia and Ethan are searching for the house of their dreams. But when they visit the remote manor that once belonged to Dr. Adrienne Hale, a renowned psychiatrist who vanished without a trace four years earlier, a violent winter storm traps them at the estate… with no chance of escape until the blizzard comes to an end.

2023 Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

The novel is historical fiction, set during the American Civil War.

• Pulitzer Prize Winner
• Longlisted for The National Book Award in Fiction

2023 Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

A Saturday in 1978 in Florida: In the middle of the night, a man breaks into a female student dormitory. He goes from room to room and kills several residents. He will soon be known as one of the most famous serial killers in the USA. But he was observed committing his crime.

• An Edgar Award Finalist for Best Novel
• A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist

2023 Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.

2023 The Old Haunts by Allan Radcliffe (UK)

In spare, evocative prose, Allan Radcliffe tells a wistful coming-of-age story and paints a tender portrait of grief in all its complexities.

2024 Somewhere Else by Jenni Daiches

Somewhere Else is an epic generational novel about womanhood and Judaeo-Scottish experience across two World Wars, the creation of Israel and the fall of the Berlin Wall. A novel which explores today’s most difficult and urgent questions, not least of which: how to find identity in displacement

2024 All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles (UK)

Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite.