One Day plays a cruel little trick on you. It picks a single date, 15th of July, and checks in on the same two people once a year for two decades, until you know Emma and Dexter better than you know some of your own relatives. Then it does the thing it does, and you sit on the sofa making a noise you would rather no one heard. David Nicholls published it in 2009. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet on the night of their graduation from Edinburgh in 1988, fail to fall into bed in any tidy way, … continue reading
For Book Lovers
Reading lists, recommendations and bookish tangents for people who would rather be reading. Keith A Pearson's posts for fellow book lovers.
Famous Authors Who Racked Up Dozens of Rejections
There exists no lonelier document than a rejection letter. It's essentially a receipt for something you never bought. I know this not from receiving them, oddly enough, but from receiving nothing at all; when I posted my first novel to the literary agents of London in 2016, most couldn't rouse themselves to say no. More on that shortly. First, some comfort for anyone whose manuscript keeps boomeranging home: a tour of the famous books publishers turned down, confidently, repeatedly and, in … continue reading
Books Like The Time Traveler’s Wife (10 Love Stories That Refuse to Stay in One Decade)
The cruelty of The Time Traveler's Wife is that it makes you fall in love with two people who keep losing each other through no fault of their own. Henry vanishes mid-sentence. Clare keeps the light on. He reappears, naked and shivering, in the wrong decade and the wrong car park, and she builds a marriage around a man who treats the calendar like a faulty lift. Audrey Niffenegger published it in 2003, her debut, and somehow turned a premise that should read like a sci-fi gimmick into one of … continue reading
Books Like Replay by Ken Grimwood: 8 Time-Loop Novels for Anyone Who’d Like Another Go
There's a particular thought that creeps in around 2am, prompted by nothing more sinister than a lukewarm cup of tea and a Facebook message from someone you last spoke to in Year 11. If you could replay your life from 18, knowing everything you now know, would you take the same A-levels? Marry the same person? Buy that house with the suspicious damp patch the surveyor reassured you about? That single question has powered a small empire of fiction. The novel where it all started, properly, is … continue reading
Best Books About a Stranger Who Changes Your Life: 12 Novels Featuring the Mysterious Helper
There's almost always someone like this. A neighbour who arrived with shepherd's pie the week of the funeral. A taxi driver who said something on the way back from the hospital you've never been able to file away. The bloke who turned up to fix a washing machine in 1992, ended up advising the lady of the house to leave her husband, drove off in a Ford Transit, and nobody ever saw him again. Most of us have a story like that, or know somebody who does. The stranger who arrives uninvited, says … continue reading
Books Like 11.22.63: 13 Novels for Stephen King’s Time Travel Fans
Few time travel novels carry the unique weight of Stephen King's 11.22.63. Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in modern Maine, discovers a portal at the back of a diner that leads precisely to 11:58 AM on September 9th, 1958. The diner's owner has used the portal for years with a single mission: stay in the past long enough to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald assassinating President Kennedy. When the owner falls ill, the mission passes to Jake. What follows takes nearly nine hundred pages. … continue reading
Time Travel Novels: The Ultimate Readers Guide
You're about to read another best-of-time-travel list. Welcome. Before you scroll, here's something worth knowing: most of these lists land in your search results from writers who've never plotted a time-travel novel. I have. Six of them, with another in the works. Over the past decade I've sold roughly a million books built on this premise, and across those years I've read perhaps a hundred others in the genre. That experience colours what follows. I hold strong opinions about which novels … continue reading
The Best 1990s Time-Travel Novels (For Readers Who Remember the Dial-Up Tone)
If your formative memories include the dial-up screech, the agony of taping the Top 40 off Radio 1 only for Mark Goodier to talk over the outro, and the strange social currency of owning a MiniDisc player nobody else had, this list is for you. This isn't a vague roundup of time travel novels. These are books that drop you into the 1990s, or close enough to taste the Sunny D and feel the static off a Findus Crispy Pancake. I've split the list into three sections: modern British nostalgia (the … continue reading
Best Midlife Crisis Fiction: 7 Novels for Anyone Quietly Doing the Maths
A few years back, I wrote a novel called A Page in Your Diary. It follows a man in his fifties who returns to his home town, discovers what became of the girl he dumped on a phone call from Exeter Uni in 1987, and gets handed a miraculous chance to go back to 1988 and steer her away from the catastrophe his younger self set in motion. I marketed it as time travel. Reading it back, the truth is closer: a midlife crisis story in costume. The trouble with writing about a man slowly suspecting he … continue reading
8 Books to Escape Reality for Midnight Library Fans
It's 10:47pm on a Tuesday. The school WhatsApp group has erupted over whether next week's cake sale should be nut-free or nut-aware. Someone's posted a passive-aggressive meme about parking by the Year 2 entrance. Your phone pings again. LinkedIn wants you to know a bloke you met at a conference in 2019 has just celebrated three years at a company you've never heard of. This is when you reach for a book. Not just any book. A proper one. The kind where someone sensible narrates you out of … continue reading
Books Like The Midnight Library: 10 Novels for “What If?” Readers
Everyone runs their own midnight library. You lie awake at 3am, staring at the ceiling, replaying the version of your life where you took the other job, married the other person, said yes when you said no, said no when you said yes. The books on the shelves stretch off into the dark, each one a life you didn't pick, each one looking, in the small hours, very slightly better than the one you ended up with. Matt Haig didn't invent that experience. He just wrote it down and sold ten million … continue reading
10 Novels for Men Going Through a Rough Patch
If you've landed on this page, there's a reasonable chance your life has recently taken an unscheduled detour into a ditch. And if that's the case, the internet has no shortage of advice for you. Type 'best books for men going through a tough time' into Google and you'll receive approximately four thousand recommendations for Atomic Habits, a book about Stoicism, and something by David Goggins involving ice baths and a lot of shouting. All very motivational. All about as comforting as a pep talk … continue reading