Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Five top novels inspired by Shakespeare

M.L. Rio’s debut novel is If We Were Villains. One of her five favorite novels inspired by Shakespeare’s plays, as shared at the Waterstones blog:
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel

Mandel won me over at the outset with her gorgeously imagined production of King Lear. But what kept me reading was the uncanny believability of her post-apocalyptic world. In the sparse landscape of what used to be North America before an epidemic wiped out most of the human population, a small band of traveling players brings Shakespeare to life for the small communities that have survived in the wilderness. The everyday trials of the actors (costume malfunctions and backstage romances) are more than familiar, and keep the story grounded in a world which is almost—but not quite—unrecognisable.
Read about another entry on the list.

Station Eleven is among Anne Corlett's five top books with different takes on the apocalypse, Christopher Priest’s five top sci-fi books that make use of music, and Anne Charnock's five favorite books with fictitious works of art.

--Marshal Zeringue