Recommend me a beautiful book

[TheGirlOnTheLanding]

I've still got book vouchers from Christmas unspent - most unlike me, normally I would have been straight up to the bookshop hoovering up novels. But we recently did a serious declutter of books as we really needed the space and since then I've been trying to buy fiction on my Kindle to stop the house filling up again (and making the whole hand-wringing, heart-rending exercise completely pointless.)

So I've saved my Christmas vouchers to buy a special book, a lovely book - not necessarily fiction, although that's what I normally read. Something to pore over and savour and be glad to own in hard copy. Only thing is, when I've been to browse, Waterstones is full of two-for-ones and teetering piles of ideal book club reads and it seems loveliness is in short supply. So I think I may need to order it in, whatever it is.

Any suggestions?

I don't know about beautiful but at book club we just read Bloody Jude by Blanca Leigh - a new age 50 Shades - we all loved it as it offered two very erratic protagonists - a false sense of romantic chic lit 2 start then spiced with a more sinister domestic noir undertone... And let's not talk about the racier scenes! Was a hit at book club!
We read the free sample from Amazon first along with another few n then voted to download this one!!! We didn't regret it although not everyone loved it!!!!

If a bit of chic lit with a sprinkle of domestic noir is not for you, what about a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book? His books are always beautiful. Love in The Time of Cholera my favourite.

Enjoy!

Do you want something recently published, or would you prefer a beautiful edition of a classic?

If the Folio Society takes the kind of vouchers you have, you can find lovely editions there.

www.foliosociety.com/shop?gclid=CIuv68nku8wCFSQW0wodrmEIEg

Thanks LaLoca but the first really doesn't sound what I'm looking for at all, and GG Marquez I've read (his were among the books that were decluttered.)

I'm really looking for something that is a lovely thing, as well as agood read - something that works because it's in print in a way that an ebook can't.

Viking, that's exactly the kind if thing I'm after, thank you. I've no idea if they'll take book vouchers (will have to email them). For some reason I thought you had to be a member of the Folio Society rather than being able to buy individual volumes.

All my Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews.

Why not go for a 'picture book'? I have one that's about The Sound of Music and it has information about the film and interviews and film stills, but it also has photos of postcards the children sent home, bits of annotated scripts, concept drawings for costumes etc.

It really wouldn't work as an e-book, so maybe something like that?

84 Charing Cross Road
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
A gorgeous copy of a classic - Jane Austen would get my vote, or Neville Shute's A Town Like Alice.
Or a lovely cookery book - Madhur J's World Vegetarian is gorgeous.
A lovely children's classic - Ballet Shoes or Tom's Midnight Garden or something.

Have you read The Goldfinch? It's a book which stays with you and im glad I read it.

Also really enjoyed The Night Rainbow recently.

Drawing Blood by Molly Crabapple has lots of great illustrations and is a good read (artist's autobiography - maybe look her up first to see if it's right for you)

How about Carol Ann Duffy's hardback copy of Rapture - her collection of love poems? They're brilliant and the book itself is very beautiful. Poetry is good because you can return to it more often than you would a novel.

The snow child, Eowyn Ivey
Burial Rites, Hannah Kant

Or if you've never read it, Beloved by Toni Morrison is the most heartbreaking but stunning book I've ever read

Also, look at graphic novels, eg Polly Symonds' Gemma Bovery or Tamara Drewe, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Becoming Unbecoming by Una, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, all lovely books which need to be printed to work.

The Sleeper and the Spindle by Neil Gaiman is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty that has been beautifully illustrated by Chris Riddell

Wilma Cather's My Antonia is the one book I would save in a fire. The feeling of space and possibility I get from it makes it very special to me.
I'd nip back in for my Raymond Briggs collection if time allowed.

Ooh loads of lovely suggestions. Poetry and picture books are a great idea - I will take a look at those recommended. I pored over The Fox and the Star at Christmas and I'd like something like that only for grown-ups, if you see what I mean.

Oops. I really should have read the whole of the OP. My suggestion is just a beautifully written book, not an actual beautiful book...

Sorry!

Do you like Judith Kerr?
This is beautiful.

The Bedford Hours. Lovely to look at.

Yes to, My Antonia, had that on the name shortlist for my dd because of that book, but I have a husband

Something I read recently that would be good to have in a beautiful copy was The Luminaries as it has zodiac charts and maps in it and was slightly annoying to read on the Kindle as a result, but an exquisitely intricate book.

I would have Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, War and Peace, Middlemarch in nice hard copy editions.

We were liars by E.Lockhart. Beautifully written with a surprising and upsetting twist.

Persephone publishes beautiful paperbacks.
The Vagabond by Colette is the most beautifully written book I know - as long as you get the right translation. There's a terrible one on amazon by a American author which kills the book.

Perks of being a wallflower. And don't watch the movie, it was fucking dreadful.