The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

by G.B. Edwards

Sunset Song

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

I was that weirdo who adored every book I had to read in high school. Now, I’m that weirdo who seeks out the books teenagers in other countries have to read. And that’s how I discovered why Sunset Song was voted "the best Scottish book of all time.” Set in a northeastern hamlet called Kinraddie during the first two decades of the 20th century, it recounts the coming-of-age of bookish crofter’s daughter Chris Guthrie, and the passing-of-an-era of unmechanized farming. While Gibbon doesn’t write in dialect, he seeds his lilting prose with an abundance of Scots words so that you feel like you’re learning a new language by living among its speakers. (I checked my work with the glossary at the back.) Being significantly older than a teenager, I thought I knew how the story would unspool, but it twisted and untwisted my heart right up to the end. Sunset Song is rooted in a specific time and place but yields timeless, universal enjoyment.

Cold Comfort Farm

by Stella Gibbons

The Tortoise and the Hare

by Elizabeth Jenkins

The Feast

by Margaret Kennedy

Where Stands a Winged Sentry

by Margaret Kennedy

When it comes to the British Home Front during WWII, the Blitz gets all the attention. As a Blitz-Lit lover myself, I won’t deny its historical dazzle. But having just finished this diary, kept during the summer after Dunkirk—when Brits reasonably thought they could be invaded and even lose the war—I see why the “quiet” can be just as fascinating as the “storm.” A published historian, as well as a famous novelist at the time, Kennedy had a keen sense for detail, dialogue, and geopolitics. But she was also a mother to three children, and she discovered that the qualities that make her diary so compelling were not as practical as the staunch sentiments of her less “imaginative” fellow citizens. Her account has eerie echoes of the year we just endured: she penetrates the amorphous dread that arises when nothing too extraordinary is happening except History-with-a-capital-H. (And she manages to be really funny too.)

Minor Detail

by Adania Shibli

The Radetsky March

by Joseph Roth

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

by Joseph Roth

Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories

by Sarah Perry et al.