Bookshelf

Here’s a list of the books I’ve read since 2008. The ones I’ve particularly enjoyed are in bold as well as on a favorites list in my Amazon storefront.

I’m always looking for recommendations so feel free to leave a comment!

2024

My Lovely Wife: A Memoir of Madness and Hope by Mark Lukach
That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnis Garmus
Takeaway by Angela Hui
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (reading now)

2023

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
You Don’t Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine by Yeva Scalietska
Home is Not a Place by Johny Pitts & Roger Robinson 
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman
NightCrawling by Leila Mottley
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
The Banana Road by Andrea Montgomery
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Home by Amanda Berriman
And Now for the Good News… by Ruby Wax
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 

2022

The Address Book by Dierdre Mask
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Anxious People by Fredrik Blackman
(M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman by Pragya Agarwal 
London in Lockdown by Hoxton Mini Press 
Things My Son Needs to Know about the World by Fredrik Blackman
Male Tears by Benjamin Myers
The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
My Child and Other Mistakes by Ellie Taylor
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
Unofficial Britain by Gareth E. Rees 
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Right Here, Right Now: The Buffalo Anthology edited by Jody K Biehl
Why Mummy’s Sloshed by Gill Sims 

2021

Grand Union by Zadie Smith 
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne
New Yorkers by Craig Taylor
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Notes to Self by Emilie Pine
Lover’s Discourse by Xiaolu Guo
Weather by Jenny Offill
You’re the Business by Anna Codrea-Rado
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk 
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Poor by Caleb Femi
The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
What Happened? by Hanif Kureishi
Psychomachia by Kirsty Allison
Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley
Betty by Tiffany McDaniel
The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith 
The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel
You Will Not Have My Hate by Antoine Leiris
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig 

2020

Putney by Sofka Zinovieff
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran
My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud
A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May
The Best, Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk About Motherhood edited by Katherine May
Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy by Angela Garbes
Motherwhelmed by Beth Berry
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
The Freelance Mum by Annie Ridout
Motherwell by Deborah Orr
How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Inferno: A Memoir by Catherine Cho
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Half a World Away by Mike Gayle
I Am Not Your Baby Mother by Candice Brathwaite
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Girl by Edna O’Brien
In The Psychiatrist’s Chair: Official Biography of Anthony Clare by Brendan Kelly & Muiris Houston 
Life in Pieces by Dawn O’Porter
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Dominicana by Angie Cruz
Raising Girls in the 21st Century by Steve Biddulph

2019

The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica by Ian Thomson
Not Working by Lisa Owens
The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip Williams
Educated by Tara Westover
Saying Goodbye by Zoe Clark-Coates
Night Waking by Sarah Moss
Turbulence by David Szalay
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry
What We’re Told Not To Talk About: Women’s Voices from East London to Ethiopia by Nimko Ali
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Reservoir Tapes by Jon McGregor
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
Skint Estate: A Memoir of Poverty, Motherhood, and Survival by Cash Carraway
Hurrah for Gin by Kate Kirby
Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig

The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri
Why Mummy Swears by Gill Simms
Ordinary People by Diana Evans
The Cows by Dawn O’Porter
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont
A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman
Less by Andrew Sean Greer

2018

Little Black Book by Otegha Uwagba
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla
Mothers by Chris Power
Story of a Marriage by Geir Gulliksen
Why Mummy Drinks by Gill Sims
The Lonely City by Olivia Laing 

2017

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes
Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up by Xiaolu Guo
You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] by Andrew Hankinson

2016

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Start a Business for £99 by Emma Jones
The Beauty of the Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches From Syria by Janine Di Giovanni
In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George
This is London by Ben Judah
A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison
One of Us: The Story of a Massacre and its Aftermath by Asne Seierstad
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Red House by Mark Haddon
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara 
Honolulu by Alan Brennert
We Never Asked for Wings by by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well by Meik Wiking
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

2015

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
Moloka’i by Alan Brennert
Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki 

Wild Swans by Jung Chang
A Memoir of Childhood: This Boy by Alan Johnson
We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
Calm by Michael Acton Smith
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
Mindfulness for Worriers by Padraig O’Moran
Sane New World by Ruby Wax
The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
Thrive by Ariana Huffington
Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk
Paradise City by Elizabeth Day
Gut by Giulia Enders
It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario
Saving Safa: Rescuing a Little Girl from FGM by Waris Dirie
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Dideon
Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig
Deep South by Paul Theroux, Photos by Steve McCurry
Eat. Nourish. Glow. by Amelia Freer
We Are Water by Wally Lamb
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
All That Man Is by David Szalay

2014

Short Walks from Bogota by Tom Feiling
Village of Stone by Xiaolu Guo
Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
Spain in Mind: An Anthology, edited by Alice Leccese Powers
Capital by John Lanchester
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis
Moranthology by Caitlin Moran
Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide
How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran
Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

2013

The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War by Denise Chong
Style Feed: The World’s Top Fashion Blogs by William Oliver, selected by Susie Bubble
Paris Street Style by Isabelle Thomas & Frederique Veysset
Adventure Divas by Holly Morris
All Gone to Look for America by Peter Miller
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
The Divine Supermarket by Malise Ruthven
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Absolute Beginners by Colin Macinnes
The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

2012

Ox Travels introduced by Michael Palin
The Help by Katheryn Stockett 
Street Knowledge by King Ads
One Day by David Nicholls
Loco by John Binias
Ghosts by Daylight by Janine di Giovanni
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
An Idiot Abroad by Karl Pilkington
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author
The birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Starter for Ten by David Nicholls
The Sound of No Hands Clapping by Toby Young
A Street Cat Named Bob by James Bowen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Perfume by Patrick Suskind
The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 8 Edited by Lavinia Spalding
The Wonderbox by Roman Krznaric
The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot

2011

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
Butterflies in Bucaramanga by Tanna Patterson-Z
Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia by Gary Leech
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Sold by Patricia McCormick
The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Out of Captivity: Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle by M. Gonsalves, K. Stansell & T. Howes
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Hidden by Tomas Mournian
Twice Colombia: Adventure, Friendship, and Adoption in the Andes Mountains by Patricia Woodard
The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht
Even Silence has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle by Ingrid Betancourt
The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Jennifer Steil
Kosher Chinese by Michael Levy
Arresting God in Kathmandu by Samrat Upadhyay
The Disappeared by Kim Echlin
Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki and David Chadwick
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood by Michael Walker
Londoners by Craig Taylor 
Candy by Mian Mian

2010

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall

Are You Experienced by William Sutcliffe
Spices of Brick Lane by Forid Afzal Uddin
When Memory Dies by A. Sivanandan
White City Blue by Tim Lott
Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni

Madness Visible: A Memoir of War by Janine di Giovanni
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair
Honeymoon in Tehran by Azadeh Moaveni
Lovers in the Age of Indifference by Xiaolu Guo
Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone by K. Cain, H. Postlewait, A. Thomson

From There to Here: Sixteen True Tales of Immigration to Britain by various
Koolaids by Rabih Alameddine
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

My Colombia War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind by Silvana Paternostro
The Armies by Evelio Rosero
Viva South America – A Journey Through a Restless Continent by Oliver Balch
Mud: Stories of Sex and Love by Michele Roberts
Cockroach by Rawi Hage
Tales from the Town of Widows by James Cañón
The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 by Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Room by Emma Donoghue

Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

2009

White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart
The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam
Desert Children by Waris Dirie
The Place at the End of the World by Janine di Giovanni

Book of Peoples of the World: A Guide to Cultures by National Geographic
The White Masai by Corinne Hofmann
My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Sewing Circles of Herat by Christina Lamb
The Road Home by Rose Tremain
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

An Introduction to Social Anthropology by Joy Hendry
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
India by Sanjeev Bhaskar
The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
Rothko’s Red and Other Stories by Sue Hubbard
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science by Mary Roach
Cityboy by Geriant Anderson
One People, Many Journeys by Lonely Planet
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Chowringhee by Sankar
253 by Geoff Ryman

Her Feet Chime by Rumki Chowdhury
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

Home by Marilynne Robinson
The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels
Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi
One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories
The Scent of Dried Roses by Tim Lott
Bodies by Jed Mercurio

The Most Beautiful Woman in Town by Charles Bukowski
Dreams of Rivers and Seas by Tim Parks

Encyclopaedia of Snow by Sarah Emily Miano
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
Love Marriage by V. V. Ganeshananthan

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Human Love by Andrei Makine
No God in Sight by Altaf Tyrewala

The Company of Women by Khushwant Singh
Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

The Weekenders – Adventures in Calcutta edited by Andrew O’Hagan
Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal
6 Billion Others: Portraits of Humanity from Around the World by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

2008

The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall
We Lived with a Mountain by John McGourty
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Gou

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Man and Boy by Tony Parsons
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Editorial Design by Yolanda Zappaterra
The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt
A Hedonist’s Guide to Life
The Island by 
Victoria Hislop
Expat by Christina Henry de Tessan (editor)
Go Your Own Way by Christina Henry de Tessan, Ingrid Emerick, Faith Conlan (editors)

Down Under by Bill Bryson
This is for You by Rob Ryan
Life’s Too Fucking Short by Janet Street Porter
White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The Return by Victoria Hislop
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson
Tears of the Desert by Halima Bashir

Note: I receive a very small percentage of sales from links here and my Amazon storefront.

5 Comments

  • Reply
    Diana Mieczan
    April 1, 2014 at 12:22 pm

    This is the most amazing list ever! Thanks so much for all those recommendations:) Have a beautiful Tuesday, sweetie. xo

  • Reply
    A Harrods Hamper for a Bit of Breakfast Luxury | Little Observationist
    June 9, 2014 at 11:47 am

    […] Bookshelf […]

  • Reply
    Tina
    May 16, 2015 at 3:58 am

    I recommend ‘So Complicated’ by Rumki Chowdhury which has gotten five stars on Amazon. It is a chicklit that much more of a polished work than her first novel, and is refreshingly humorous!

  • Reply
    Colours & Character of Chelsea, London - Little Observationist
    March 16, 2016 at 9:48 am

    […] Bookshelf […]

  • Reply
    Chelsea Flower Show & Chelsea in Bloom - Little Observationist
    June 1, 2016 at 9:25 am

    […] Bookshelf […]

  • Leave a Reply

    This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.