Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady. To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here, and subscribe to the newsletter here.
I am due with a baby at the end of this month, and anticipate many half-hour, middle-of-the-night reading sessions while feeding the babe. I would love to start a series that can keep my interest, isn’t too difficult to read in short bursts, and interesting enough it can keep me from the temptation of phone scrolling. I’m not a huge fan of sci-fi and typically lean toward fiction or historical fiction. I’d definitely be open to trying some mysteries or thrillers as well if you’ve got ideas!
Since you’re looking for a historical fiction series, you should get on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall books if you haven’t already, because they are just as good as everyone says. (Albeit perhaps a bit dense for midnight feeding sessions!)
I’d also recommend Nicola Griffiths’s Hild series, which has published two of a planned three volumes, Hild and Menewood. They tell the story of a teenage girl in medieval Britain who navigates court politics, intermittent war, and a shifting religious landscape on her journey to becoming Saint Hilda of Whitby, one of the kingmakers of her era. Griffith’s got a great touch for all the tactile details of living in preindustrial England — the food, the spices, the cloth, the herbs. One of the deep pleasures of these books is watching all the different religious sects of the Middle Ages jockey for recognition from kings who will follow any god who can get them a win.
If the Hild books start feeling too heavy, let’s turn to mysteries. Agatha Christie can be your friend here, as can Dorothy Sayers; they both have detective series that go on forever without any appreciable dip in quality. For something more modern, Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache detective novels are beloved and, not for nothing, are known for really good food writing too.
I want to dive into more contemporary fiction, but struggle to find writing that appeals to my Dickensian and Dostoyevskian sensibilities. I want character-driven. I want beautifully sculpted sentences. I don’t want romantasy, I want Heathcliff. I want Jane in the red room and the Demeter at Whitby. I want to hear the beat of the heart under the floor boards. I want to visit José Arcadio Buendía at the tree. I want to see the things fall apart and to know both war and peace. I’m willing to cross the genre wilderness and dive into any culture, but the writing and characters have to grab me. I have found contemporary authors I love — Anthony Doerr, Amor Towles, and Kazuo Ishiguro, for example. I know there are others, please help me find them!
I can respect 19th-century taste. The contemporary author who writes the most plush, Dickensian sentences I know of is Sarah Parry. Start with her novel The Essex Serpent, which brings a contemporary psychoanalytical lens to a lurid Victorian fantasia of a plot about a massive sea serpent terrorizing a small town.
It’s a very rich, textured, Crime and Punishment-in-couture kind of a book.
For your Slavic cravings, the novelist Elif Batuman has a degree in Russian literature and titled her debut novel The Idiot after Dostoevsky. It’s a much more constrained, specific novel than its inspiration, and it may or may not be to your taste, but it’s worth looking at regardless. Finally, my friend (and former Vox colleague) Tara Isabella Burton has a PhD in theology from Oxford, and she thinks a lot about both sin and Dostoevsky in her novel Social Creature. It’s a very rich, textured, Crime and Punishment-in-couture kind of a book.
John McPhee is my all-time favorite author — I haven’t read anything by him that I haven’t liked. Alas, he is very old. What are some similar fairly current narrative nonfiction books?
Have you read David Grann? He wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, which Martin Scorsese used as the source material for his 2023 movie, and last year’s The Wager, about an 18th-century naval voyage that turned into a nightmarish shipwreck. He’s got an impeccable eye for how to structure a nonfiction story like a novel — famously, he modeled Killers of the Flower Moon on Absalom, Absalom! with its layers of perspective allowing revelations to accumulate slowly, like layers of earth.
I also have my eye on Sophie Elmhirst’s forthcoming book, A Marriage at Sea, which tells the story of a couple who were lost at sea for 118 days in the 1970s. It won the Nero in the UK when it came out there last year, and when I read the first chapter, I had trouble putting it down. It comes out in the US in July.
