Seven top books that take you places

Originally from Ballarat, Australia, Tobias Madden now resides in New York City with his husband, Daniel, and their Cavoodle, Ollie. Madden worked for ten years as a performer, touring Australia and New Zealand with musicals such as Mary Poppins, CATS, and Guys and Dolls. In 2019, he edited and published the Underdog anthology and co-wrote the cabaret show Siblingship. Madden’s debut novel, Anything But Fine, was published in 2021, and was awarded the Australian Association of Family Therapy’s Book Award for Older Readers, was shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year for Older Readers, was named one of Better Reading’s Top 50 Kids Books (2022), and was included on Bank Street College of Education’s list of Best Children’s Books of the Year (US, 2023). His second novel, Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell, was published in 2022 in Australia and 2023 in the US.

Madden's third YA novel, Wrong Answers Only, is out now in Australia and the US!

At The Nerd Daily the author tagged "seven books that will take you to extraordinary places," including:

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

If you like the sound of marble statues but you’d like a little more star-crossed gay romance thrown in, why not head back to Greece and spend some time with our dear friends Achilles and Patroclus? This book will make you feel like you’re sipping wine and breaking bread with the Grecian armies as they lay siege to Troy. Oh, and you’ll be crying the whole time. I should probably mention that…

Read about another entry on the list.

The Song of Achilles is among Costa B. Pappas's eleven books that are contemporary retellings of classic titles, Bethanne Patrick's twenty-five best historical fiction books of all time, Mark Skinner's nineteen top Greek myth retellings, Alexia Casale's top eight titles sparked by the authors' work life, Allison Epstein's eight queer historical fiction books set around the world, Phong Nguyen's seven titles that live halfway between history & myth, The Center for Fiction's 200 books that shaped two centuries of literature, Sara Stewart's six best books and Nicole Hill's fourteen characters who should have lived.

My Book, The Movie: The Song of Achilles.

--Marshal Zeringue