The Bibliophile's Compass

1906  Caesar & Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw In a cheeky nod to Shakespeare’s towering reputation, Shaw reinvents two of his historical characters but sets his own play in a period predating both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. 1917  In the Zone by Eugene O'Neill 2016 The Book of Endless Sleepovers by Henry Hoke "In his atmospheric debut, Henry Hoke maps the wild country of adolescence, the murky realm of childhood and its mysterious stirrings, where the names of cities are always changing along with our own, as we swap them for those of our favorite characters: The Hardy Boys or Huck Finn or Peter Pan. A land where pet bunnies are eaten by owls in the night and cats change owners at their own will. The Book of Endless Sleepovers is beguiling and evocative and sometimes sad. It is not to be missed." -Kate Durbin, author of E! Entertainment 2023 The Reformatory by Tananarive Due A gripping, page-turning “masterpiece” (Joe Hill, #1 Ne...

  1905  Mrs Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw It tells the story of Mrs. Kitty Warren and her daughter Vivie, as they struggle to come to terms with the truth of Mrs. Warren's occupation. Vivie, a successful graduate of Cambridge University, is shocked to discover that her mother is a wealthy madam, and is forced to reassess her own choices in life and the values she holds dear. In the end, the two are able to reconcile their differences and come to an understanding that Mrs. Warren's profession is not something to be ashamed of. 1996 Home Again by Kristin Hannah A moving, powerful novel about the fragile threads that bind together our lives and the astonishing potential of second chances 2025 Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World by Anne Enright From one of our most distinguished literary voices, a defining essay collection blending personal reflection with urgent political writing and wide–ranging cultural criticism.

  1998 Another World by Pat Barker (UK) (Check my book chapter on Another World) In a touching novel of memory and loss, Nick tries to keep the peace in his disintegrating family while comforting his grandfather, a proud, intelligent man who lies dying on the other side of town. 2019 Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson ( My Review ) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ From the New York Times bestselling author of The Family Fang, a moving and uproarious novel about a woman who finds meaning in her life when she begins caring for two children with a remarkable ability. 2020 The Magpie Society: One for Sorrow by Amy McCulloch and Zoe Sugg A STUDENT FOUND DEAD ON THE BEACH. A WEB OF UNANSWERED QUESTIONS. SOMEONE POISED TO STRIKE AGAIN. 2024 The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny The 19th mystery in the #1 New York Times-bestselling Armand Gamache series. 2024 The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins (UK) A masterful novel that is as page-turning as it is unsettling, The Blue Hour r...

1726  Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (Ireland) A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read 2021 Treacle Walker by Alan Garner ( My Review )  ⭐⭐⭐⭐ An extraordinary, “playful, moving, and wholly remarkable” (The Guardian) coming-of-age novel filled with myth and magic from one of England's greatest living writers. Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize 2021 Medusa  by Jessie Burton (UK) A dazzling, lyrical YA retelling of Greek myth, from Jessie Burton, internationally bestselling author of The Miniaturist and The Muse. 2025 The White Octopus Hotel  by Alexandra Bell (UK) Journey to a magical hotel in the Swiss Alps, where two lost souls living in different centuries meet and discover if a second chance awaits them behind its doors. 2025 The Black Wolf by Louise ...

2011 Collected Folk Tales by Alan Garner (UK) The definitive collection of traditional folk tales, selected and retold by the renowned Alan Garner. 2015 The Familiar, Volume 2: Into the Forest  by Mark Z. Danielewski The Familiar, Volume 1 Wherein the cat is found . . . The Familiar, Volume 2 Wherein the cat is hungry . . . A "novel [which] goes beyond the experimental into the visionary, creating a language and style that expands the horizon of meaning . . . hint[ing] at an evolved form of literature.” 2020 Memorial by Bryan Washington A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love. Winner of the 2021 Stonewall Book Award Longlist for Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Longlist for 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize

1659 Crusoe starts establishing a semi-permanent habitation 2021 Bournville by Jonathan Coe (UK) A wickedly funny, clever, but also tender and lyrical novel about Britain and Britishness and what we have become

Title : Academy Street Author : Mary Costello Publication Year : 2014 Rating : ⭐⭐⭐💫 Pages : 179 Source : Book Genre : Literary fiction, Historical fiction Awards : Winner of the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year Award; The Irish Book of the Year in 2014. Opening Sentence : It is evening and the window is open a little. Academy Street follows the life of Tess, an Irish woman, from her childhood in the 1940s through her immigration to the United States and eventual return to Ireland in the 2010s. The novel chronicles her journey through decades marked by loss, displacement, and quiet endurance. Told in a series of brief vignettes, the story traces Tess’s life with a restrained, unsentimental voice that avoids embellishment or melodrama. As a reader, I found myself appreciating the understated tone and brevity of Costello’s writing. Tess’s passive approach to life, while at times frustrating, felt tragically authentic. The narrative’s simplicity allows for moments of genuine ...

1902  The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky 2011 Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (UK) It is a memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. Lambda Literary AwardWinner, 2013 2024 Little Fortified Stories by Barbara Black In Little Fortified Stories, award-winning writer Barbara Black conjures a microcosm of characters that defy convention.

1659 Crusoe ends salvaging items from the wreck 2023 Pay As You Go by Eskor David Johnson New to town and delusionally confident, Slide imagined himself living in a glossy building with doormen and sweeping views of the skyline. Instead he's landed in a creaking, stuffy apartment with two roommates: a loping giant who hardly leaves his room, and a weight-obsessed neurotic who keeps no fewer than forty-seven lamps throughout the house, blazing at all hours. A finalist for the 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize 2024 The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (UK) A masterful, page-turning examination of the minutiae of life, The Land in Winter is a masterclass in storytelling - proof yet again that Andrew Miller is one of Britain's most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart. Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025

2007 The Ghost by Robert Harris (UK) The Ghost is a 2007 political thriller by the best-selling English novelist and journalist Robert Harris. In 2010, the novel was adapted into a film, The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, for which Polanski and Harris co-wrote the screenplay. 2014 The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk The Nobel Prize–winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe. Nike Award Jury prize Nike's Audience award Shortlisted for the Angelus Award Winner of the International Booker Prize Longlisted for The National Book Award

1941  Candle in the Wind by Maxwell Anderson Adrift in the Caribbean, wrecked against a reef, stranded alone on an island with someone who called himself Mike Scott--Samantha tried desperately to recall the events that had brought her to such an impasse. 1992  The Sisters Rosensweig by Wendy Wasserstein Wasserstein writes of three Jewish middle-aged sisters-Sara, Gorgeous, and Pfeni-who come together in London to celebrate Sara’s birthday. Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award. 2024 Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson ( My Review )  ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Benjamin Stevenson returns with a Christmas addition to his bestselling, “deviously good fun” (Nita Prose), Ernest Cunningham mysteries. Unwrap all the Christmas staples: presents, family, an impossible murder or two, and a deadly advent calendar of clues. 2024 How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?  by Anna Montague A funny and moving novel about love, loss, and new beginnings found on an ...

2018 An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky Each disparate object described in this book―a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific―shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Winner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize Longlisted for the International Booker Prize. 2025 Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen The award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. 2025 I Am Cleopatra by Natasha Solomons (UK) From the internationally bestselling author of Fair Rosaline comes a captivating historical novel—a powerful retelling of the life of one of the most beguiling and misrepresented female figures in history, Cleopatra. 2025 Psychopomp & Circumstance  by Eden Royce Shirley Jackson and Nebula Award finalist...

1955  The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien (UK) The awesome conclusion to The Lord of the Rings—the greatest fantasy epic of all time 2014 Red Dog by Willem Anker Red Dog is a brilliant, fiercely powerful novel - a wild, epic tale of Africa in a time before boundaries between cultures and peoples were fixed. 2024 About Charlie  by J M Langan (UK) Emma is a lost soul, seeking solace with anything that will help her forget, drowning her pain to blur the edges of reality in the backdrop of 1990s London.

Title : Katabasis Author : R. F. Kuang Publication Year : 2025 Rating : ⭐⭐⭐💫 Pages : 559 Source : audiobook @storytel.tr Genre : Fantasy, Dark Academia Opening Sentence : Cambridge, Michaelmas Term, October. The wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class, when she ought to have been lecturing undergraduates about the dangers of using the Cartesian severance spell to revise without pee breaks, Alice Law set out to rescue her advisor’s soul from the Eight Courts of Hell. I’ll admit, I might be swimming against the current here, but as a card-carrying member of academia, Katabasis felt like an all-too-familiar fever dream. The opening chapters had me nodding in recognition—finally, someone capturing the glorious chaos (and, let’s be honest, the exquisite toxicity) of academic life. The setting might be fantasy, but the depiction of conference-room purgatory and departmental intrigue was so spot-on I almost checked for citations. The blend of sharp humor with a dark, bro...

1833 MS Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allan Poe ( My Review )  ⭐⭐ 1847  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (UK)  ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre has dazzled generations of readers with its depiction of a woman's quest for freedom. 2021 Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. Booker Prize Finalist 2025 The Surgeon by John Nicholl When an eminent surgeon is arrested for murder, he knows he didn’t do it. He knows what it’s like to feel a person die on his operating table, but he didn’t inflict the wounds that ended the life of the girl they say he killed.

1869  The League of Youth by Henrik Ibsen It features a protagonist Stensgaard, who poses as a political idealist and gathers a new party around him, the 'League of Youth', and aims to eliminate corruption among the "old" guard and bring his new "young" group to power. 1910  Howards End by E. M. Forster (UK) Interplaying characters from three very different families, Forster beautifully defines the conditions of class, culture, gender roles and politics that were prevalent in the years before World War I, sensitively exploring themes of connection, the seen and the unseen, and the essential proportion of inner and outer life. 2019 The Perfect Son by Freida McFadden Erika Cass has a perfect family and a perfect life. Until, one quiet evening, two detectives show up at her front door. 2022 Demon Copperhead  by Barbara Kingsolver A brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to matu...

2022 Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson ( My Review )  ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out. 2023 Tremor by Teju Cole A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis. Winner of The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award 2023 The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell (UK) A wild story of female friendship, language, and power, from France to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment: a historical novel like no ot...

1913  Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (Ireland) The Pygmalion of legend falls in love with his perfect female statue and persuades Venus to bring her to life so that he can marry her. But Shaw radically reworks Ovid’s tale to give it a feminist slant: while Higgins teaches Eliza to speak and act like a duchess, she also asserts her independence, adamantly refusing to be his creation. 1922  The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (UK) The Waste Land is a 434 line poem presented in five-parts, written by T. S. Eliot; considered by many to be one of the greatest poets in history. 1950  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (UK) Four siblings step through a mysterious wardrobe and into the magical Narnia, a once-peaceful land now frozen in snow and stone by the cruelty of the evil White Witch. Only the return of the Great Lion, Aslan, can put an end to the White Witch’s tyranny and restore peace. But for winter to meet its death and spring to come again,...

1924  Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton 1937  To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway The dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair. 2017 Dog Logic by Thomas Strelich and Tom Strelich Hertell Daggett discovers a lost civilization living under his failing pet cemetery. Well maybe not lost so much as just, misinformed -- they've been living beneath the pet cemetery due to some bad information they got back in 1963 about the end of the world, and were unaware that the world had wobbled on without them. Hertell finds a whole new life and whole new purpose as he lovingly leads his cherished duck-and-cover civilization into the glorious, mystifying, and often dismaying modern world. What cou...

1843 Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences by Edgar Allan Poe ( Review )  ⭐⭐ 1892  Arthur Conan Doyle publishes " The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes " collection of 12 stories originally published serially in "The Strand Magazine" 1926  Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne (UK) Since 1926, Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends—Piglet, Owl, Tigger, and the ever doleful Eeyore—have endured as the unforgettable creations of A.A. Milne, who wrote this book for his son, Christopher Robin, and Ernest H. Shepard, who lovingly gave Pooh and his companions shape. 2021 Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles (UK) Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind. Winner of the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction ...

Title : My Friends Author : Fredrik Backman Publication Year : 2025 Rating : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Pages : 436 Source : audiobook @storytel.tr Genre : literary fiction, coming-of-age Opening Sentence : Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans. I’m usually skeptical about best-seller books and tend to approach them with a bit of a reverse bias. But sometimes, you pick up a book and from the very first paragraph, you just know it’s going to be something special—and you’re absolutely right. This was one of those rare books for me. It captures everything I love about books (tragedy and humor) and dislike about people (teenagers). The story centers around an irresistibly annoying yet endearing teenager, teetering o...

1962  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee A bitter marriage unravels in Edward Albee's darkly humorous play—winner of the Tony Award for Best Play. 2011 All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami The novel follows Fuyuko Irie, a freelance proofreader in her mid-thirties who lives alone, over the course of about eight months. 2020 The Once and Future Witches  by  Alix E. Harrow In the late 1800s, three sisters use witchcraft to change the course of history in this powerful novel of magic, family, and the suffragette movement. Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Fantasy Novel 2022 You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures. 2025 The Picasso Heist by James Patterson  and Howard Roughan Everyone want...

2021 Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers (UK) Set in 1957, the novel follows Jean Swinney, journalist for a local newspaper who investigates the claim of a woman who says her daughter was the result of a virgin birth. Longlisted for The Women's Prize For Fiction

2022 The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore by Jasmine Sawers A goat begins to grow inside a human heart. The rightful king is born a hard, smooth seashell. Supernovas burst across skin like ink in water. Heartbreak transforms maidens into witches, girls into goblins, mothers into monsters. Hunger drives lovers and daughters, soldiers and ghosts, to unhinge their jaws and swallow the world. Drawing inspiration from a mixed heritage and from history—from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen to the ancient legends of Thailand, from the suburbs of Buffalo, New York to the endless horizon of the American Midwest—Jasmine Sawers invents a hybrid folklore for liminal characters who live between the lines and within the creases of race and language, culture and gender, sexuality and ability. The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore is equal parts love letter to the old tales and indictment of their shortcomings, offering a new mythology to reflect the many faces a...

Title : Life After Life Author : Kate Atkinson Publication Year: 2013 Rating : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Pages : 622 Source : Book Genre : literary fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, Postmodern Awards : Winner of the 2013 Costa Book Award; Shortlisted for the 2013 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, Walter Scott Prize (2014), Waterstones Book of the Year (2013); Longlisted for Andrew Carnegie Medal (2014) Opening Sentence: November 1930. A FUG OF tobacco smoke and damp clammy air hit her as she entered the café. She had come in from the rain and drops of water still trembled like delicate dew on the fur coats of some of the women inside. A regiment of white-aproned waiters rushed around at tempo, serving the needs of the Münchner at leisure – coffee, cake and gossip. How often do you come across a novel where both the writing style and the story are truly captivating? This is one of those rare books with an unusual premise that draws you in. While some might cat...