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
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.
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
Are These Famous Book Characters Autistic? A Reader’s Guide
Plus the one autistic character you've never heard of — but should absolutely meet. If you've ever finished a novel and immediately Googled "is [character name] autistic?" — you're not alone. In fact, you're part of an increasingly large group of readers who recognise neurodivergent traits in fictional characters, even when the author never uses the word. It's a fascinating corner of book culture. Some authors deliberately write autistic characters without labelling them. Others insist … continue reading
Books for Men Going Through a Divorce
If you're a man going through a divorce — or recently out the other side — you've probably noticed that most of the advice out there isn't aimed at you. The self-help shelves are full of books about "rediscovering your feminine power" and "healing your inner goddess," which is lovely but not enormously helpful when you're eating cereal at 11pm in a flat that stinks of paint. The books on this list won't tell you how to fix your marriage. That ship has sailed, and frankly, it was probably … continue reading
The Best 1980s Time-Travel Novels (For Readers Who Miss the Mixtape Era)
If your heart still lives somewhere between a tape deck and Teletext, this list is for you. This isn't a vague roundup of time travel novels — this is specifically about books that drop you into the 1980s, or close enough to smell the hairspray. Walkmans, Top of the Pops, pre-internet Britain, and the quiet ache of wondering what you'd do differently if life handed you a do-over. I've split the list into three sections: modern British nostalgia (the bittersweet do-over novels), international … continue reading
Books With Autistic Characters: 40+ Fiction Recommendations
If you're searching for books with autistic characters, fiction featuring neurodivergent protagonists, or novels that portray autism with honesty and emotional depth, you're in the right place. This guide curates over forty reader-recommended books across genres — literary fiction, romance, YA, fantasy, cosy mysteries, and contemporary novels. Some characters are explicitly autistic; others are widely understood to be neurodivergent based on how they think, feel, and move through the world. … continue reading