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Rosie Blau's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Rosie Blau recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Rosie Blau's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Grace Williams Says It Loud

The doctors said no more could be done and advised Grace's parents to put her away. On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, Grace, aged eleven, meets Daniel. Debonair Daniel, an epileptic who can type with his feet, sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. A deeply affecting, spirit-soaring story of love against the odds. less
Recommended by Rosie Blau, and 1 others.

Rosie BlauThis is a fantastically weird subject for a book. It’s about a girl called Grace who is born with birth defects and then gets polio, which leaves her with a useless arm, which she takes to calling Nelson. She is put into an institution and visited occasionally by her family. It’s set in 1950s Britain which is the one thing I would say is not great about it. We don’t really get a sense of the... (Source)

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2

Union Atlantic

The eagerly anticipated debut novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist You Are Not a Stranger Here: a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the twenty-first century.

At the heart of Union Atlantic lies a test of wills between a young banker, Doug Fanning, and a retired schoolteacher, Charlotte Graves, whose two dogs have begun to speak to her. When Doug builds an ostentatious mansion on land that Charlotte's grandfather donated to the town of Finden, Massachusetts, she determines to oust him in court. As a senior manager of Union...
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Recommended by Rosie Blau, and 1 others.

Rosie BlauHe’s an American writer and this is his first novel. This is as close as we get to a financial crash novel. There have been a few attempts but I don’t think we’ve got the great novel of the financial crash yet. This is very good, though. It tells the story of Doug, who had an alcoholic mother and an impoverished childhood, and he joins the navy to get away from all that. There’s a fantastic... (Source)

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3

The Imperfectionists

One of most acclaimed books of the year, Tom Rachman's debut novel follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters and editors of an English-language newspaper in Rome. less
Recommended by Rosie Blau, Robert Cottrell, and 2 others.

Rosie BlauIt’s the story of a newspaper founded in Rome in the 1950s and we see the lives of 11 different people who work on the paper. It’s just fantastic. (Source)

Robert CottrellThe book is a fictional history of the International Herald Tribune. All the characters are clichés of one sort or another, by intention. (Source)

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4

The Still Point

At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood. A hundred years later, on a sweltering mid-summer's day, Edward's great-grand-niece Julia moves through the old family house, attempting to impose some order on the clutter of inherited belongings and memories from that ill-fated expedition, and taking care to ignore the deepening cracks within her own... more
Recommended by Rosie Blau, and 1 others.

Rosie BlauThis is a tremendously assured debut. It’s the story of Julia who is the great-great-niece of an Arctic explorer. She’s got quite a bit of money and doesn’t have to work very much, so she’s decided to write the story of this great-great-uncle, Edward Mackley. There are two parallel stories, his story and hers, and what we realise as the book goes on, is how much of what he did, and the stories... (Source)

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5

The Spider Truces

Against the vividly described background of 1980s rural Kent, this moving portrait of a father-son relationship shifts effortlessly between evoking utterly convincingly the terrors and joys of adolescence and the complicated pleasure and pain of becoming an adult. Ellis is obsessed by the spiders that inhabit the crumbling house where he lives with his dad, his older sister and great aunt Mafi - and also by a need to find out more about his mother, whose death overshadows the family's otherwise happy existence. Ellis a quirky soul; awkward and sensitive, out of place most of the time, funny,... more
Recommended by Rosie Blau, and 1 others.

Rosie BlauI don’t know, actually. I don’t know very much about him. It says in the blurbs that Tom Connolly is a film-maker and that he lives in a remote corner of the Rother Valley in East Sussex. In fact, it’s published by Myriad, which is a tiny publisher, and I’m delighted that they did publish this. I don’t think it got a lot of press and I don’t think there have been any interviews with Tom Connolly.... (Source)

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