Today in Bookish and Literary History, October 1
1659 Crusoe starts to salvage items from the wreck
1868 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood.
1960 A Dance of the Forests by Wole Soyinka
It explores the themes of tradition, history, and the challenges of postcolonial Africa.
1985 Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter (UK)
Drawing on American history, literary legend, and folk tale, Angela Carter transports us to that shadowy country between fact and myth in this book of short stories.
1989 Daddy by Danielle Steel
Oliver Watson's world suddenly dissolves around him when Sarah, his wife of eighteen years, returns to Harvard to get her master's degree. Oliver is left on his own, with three children and a freedom he never wanted and doesn't completely understand. His family's needs and demands suddenly consume his life.
1994 When Lightning Strikes by Kristin Hannah
When a romance writer discovers that she’s magically entered her own novel, she must team up with the gruff, alluring protagonist to find her way back home.
2010 Ninth Building by Jingzhi Zou
It is a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi’s experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside.
2015 Slade House by David Mitchell (UK)
Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside.
2018 Dark Days by James Baldwin
Drawing on Baldwin''s own experiences of prejudice in an America violently divided by race, these searing essays - Dark Days, The Price of the Ticket and The White Man''s Guilt - blend the intensely personal with the political to envisage a better world.
2018 Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin
They've infiltrated homes in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of in Sierra Leone, town squares in Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. They're everywhere. They're here. They're us. They're not pets, or ghosts, or robots. They're real people, but how can a person living in Berlin walk freely through the living room of someone in Sydney? How can someone in Bangkok have breakfast with your children in Buenos Aires, without your knowing? Especially when these people are completely anonymous, unknown, unfindable.
- Longlisted for The 2020 Man Booker International Prize
2019 The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
A tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right
- Finalist for The Pulitzer Prize
- Winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize
- Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
- Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
- Winner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award
2020 Hansel and Greta: A Fairy Tale Revolution by Jeanette Winterson (UK)
Greta lives with her brother Hansel on the edge of a great forest - a forest in danger of destruction. GreedyGuts, their aunt, doesn't appreciate Hansel and Greta's plans to replant trees and save the forest. In fact, she thinks they're horrible little vegetarians. GreedyGuts doesn't give two hoots about nature. She favors luxury and living it up: eating, shopping and partying hard and so she hatches a plan to get rid of the meddling, do-gooder kids deep in the woods. With her trademark subversive and comic eye, Jeanette Winterson retells the classic tale of Hansel and Gretel.
Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym—aimer, to love—resonates on every page, a book powered by love in the larger sense.
- Shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award
- Finalist of the New Academy Prize in Literature
- Finalist Scotiabank Giller Prize
- Winner of the Prix du Grand Public—Salon du livre de Montréal
- Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
- Winner of the Grand Prix RTL-Lire
2020 Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey
An exquisitely readable, polyphonic novel of domestic drama and human connection set in and around a concentration camp in Germany during the second world war and its aftermath.
- Longlisted for The 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction
- Shortlisted for The Dublin Literary Award
2020 The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton (UK)
It's 1634, and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to Amsterdam to be executed for a crime he may, or may not, have committed. Traveling with him is his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, who is determined to prove his friend innocent. Among the other guests is Sara Wessel, a noblewoman with a secret.
2021 The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé
One Easter Sunday, Madame Ballandra puts her hands together and exclaims: “A miracle!” Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with gray-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumor, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground. From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand the meaning of his mission. Will he be able to change the fate of humanity? And what will the New World Gospel reveal? For all its beauty, vivacity, humor, and power, Maryse Condé’s latest novel is above all a work of combat. Lucid and full of conviction, Condé attests that solidarity and love remain our most extraordinary and lifesaving forces.
- Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023
2024 Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life by Alan Garner (UK)
A lyrical memoir of essays and poems from the Booker shortlisted author of Treacle Walker--a profound reflection on the creative journey and the influences that have shaped one of Britain's most beloved writers.
2024 The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden
Sydney Shaw, like every single woman in New York, has terrible luck with dating. She's seen it all: men who lie in their dating profile, men who stick her with the dinner bill, and worst of all, men who can't shut up about their mothers. But finally, she hits the jackpot.
2024 Kitten Heels by Maureen Cullen (UK)
Kathleen Gallagher is resourceful, brave and tireless — but fated to work in the bra factory like her mother. It’s 1962, and Kathleen resents her situation. She has to look after her three younger siblings whilst her mother works part-time; collect the wages from her absentee father; and sacrifice her social life for responsibilities she never asked for. When Kathleen’s grandmother dies, the entire family dynamic changes — leaving the relationship with her mother to suffer.
- Shortlisted for the Rubery Book Awards 2025
- Finalist in the People's Book Prize 2025
2024 Heir by Sabaa Tahir
Growing up in the Kegari slums, AIZ has seen her share of suffering. An old tragedy fuels her need for vengeance, but it is love of her people that propels her. Until one hotheaded mistake lands her in an inescapable prison, where the embers of her wrath ignite.
- Shortlisted for New Adult Book Prize
2025 Call of the Camino by Suzanne Redfearn
From the bestselling author of In an Instant comes a deeply moving novel following the transformative journeys of two women walking entwined paths on a legendary route across Europe a generation apart.
2025 As Long as You're Mine by Nekesa Afia
Beneath the glitter of 1930s Hollywood, dangerous secrets connect two generations of women in this atmospheric dual-timeline mystery about identity, sacrifice, and survival.
2025 I'll Follow You by Charlene Wang
For two best friends desperate to escape their dead-end town, a viral online persona becomes a dangerous game of control in a twisting psychological thriller about class, power, and identity.
2025 The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones by Lex Croucher (UK)
Casey McQuiston meets The Secret History in this unmissable dark academia fantasy from New York Times bestselling author Lex Croucher following former childhood best friends who reunite at magical boarding school after years, only to find themselves enemies on opposite sides of the ugly secrets hidden within the gilded walls.
2025 The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek
Intense, propulsive, and deeply human, The Winter Warriors is an stunning historical novel of Finnish heroism in the face of Soviet invasion.
2025 Dating After the End of the World by Jeneva Rose
There’s nothing like the undead to bring the living together in an action-packed and apocalyptically romantic genre-shattering novel by a #1 New York Times bestselling author.
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