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Nick Groom's Top Book Recommendations

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

1
Black Roses is a poetic sequence written in the voice of Sophie Lancaster.

Twenty-year-old Sophie was attacked in a Lancashire park in 2007 and died several days later. The ferocity of the assault caused distress and outrage when reported by the international media and led to the creation of the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity opposed to all forms of hatecrime and victimisation.

The radio broadcast of Black Roses won the BBC Radio Best Speech Programme of 2011 and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry.

One-third of all profits from the...
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Recommended by Nick Groom, and 1 others.

Nick GroomSimon Armitage’s poetry sequence Black Roses is heart-rending. In these poems, he comes close to articulating the anguish that so many people felt about the appalling murder of Sophie Lancaster in 2007″ (Source)

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2

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings

'I took it: - and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me!'

Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) launched a fascination with drug use and abuse that has continued from his day to ours. In the Confessions De Quincey invents recreational drug taking, but he also details both the lurid nightmares that beset him in the depths of his addiction as well as his humiliatingly futile attempts to renounce the drug. Suspiria de...
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Recommended by Nick Groom, and 1 others.

Nick GroomIn the Confessions of an English Opium Eater, you can’t always distinguish the dreaming passages from the more mundane accounts of his life. This is what makes the book so enticing (Source)

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3

Zofloya, or The Moor

`Few venture as thou hast in the alarming paths of sin.' This is the final judgement of Satan on Victoria di Loredani, the heroine of Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), a tale of lust, betrayal, and multiple murder set in Venice in the last days of the fifteenth century. The novel follows Victoria's progress from spoilt daughter of indulgent aristocrats, through a period of abuse and captivity, to a career of deepening criminality conducted under Satan's watchful eye. Charlotte Dacre's narrative deftly displays her heroine's movement from the vitalized position of Ann Radcliffe's heroines to... more
Recommended by Nick Groom, and 1 others.

Nick GroomThis is a novel about murderous and vile Venetians, and their attempts to slake their almost bestial lusts (Source)

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4

Collected Ghost Stories

"I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mold, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own..."
Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James was an eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge. His classic supernatural tales draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and nighttime settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses, remote inns, ancient churches or the manuscript collections of...
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Recommended by Ramsey Campbell, Nick Groom, and 2 others.

Ramsey CampbellM R James is arguably the greatest master of the English ghost story. His stories are considerably grimmer and grislier than ghost stories had been up until then. (Source)

Nick GroomThis is the only literature that gives me nightmares (Source)

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5

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil... more

Michael ArringtonShelley wrote this book as a teenager, and most of us read it in high school. Often credited as the first science fiction novel. You can read just about any political viewpoint you want into the book, and there are strong undertones that technology isn’t all good. But what I get out of it is the creativeness that can come with solitude, and how new technology can be misunderstood, even perhaps by... (Source)

Adam RobertsBrian Aldiss has famously argued that science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s novel, and many people have agreed with him. (Source)

Adam RobertsBrian Aldiss has famously argued that science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s novel, and many people have agreed with him. (Source)

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