Book recommendations that support independent bookshops

What this page does

What can I search for on this page?

Books, by subject, period, mood, author or the kind of reading you are in the mood for. Describe what you want in a sentence rather than picking a genre. This page recommends the books themselves. If you want a bookshop to visit, that is a place, and the main search will find you one.

How do you know the books are real?

Every title is resolved against a book catalogue before it is shown to you, using Open Library and Google Books, and a recommendation we cannot resolve to a real edition is dropped rather than shown. That is the whole point of the step: a plausible sentence naming a book that does not exist is the easiest mistake for this kind of tool to make, and the hardest for a reader to spot.

Where do the buy links go?

Buy links go through Bookshop.org, which shares its profit with independent bookshops, or Booktopia for readers in Australia. We may earn a commission on those links. It does not affect which books are recommended: the recommendations are made before any link is attached.

Every one we list, by city

Search answers a described need. These list the lot, so you can look through them yourself.

Something else