What Cathy Read Next...

Nonfiction November 2025

Nonfiction November is an annual challenge hosted by bloggers Liz at Adventures in Reading, Frances at Volatile Rune, Heather at Based on a True Story, Rebekah at She Seeks Nonfiction and Deb at Readerbuzz designed to celebrate all things nonfiction. Helpfully, there are a series of weekly prompts to guide your posts.

This week’s prompt is hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading who invites us to pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. I’ve come up with three pairs and, for good measure, there’s a link between the final two pairs.

My first pairing is M. R. James: An Informal Portrait by Michael Cox, published by the Oxford University Press in 1983, and Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James, published in 2011. Cox’s biography of Montague Rhodes James, the celebrated author of ghost stories, describes his early life and his time as dean and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and later as provost of Eton College. It also provides a picture of society and especially the academic world of the time. Collected Ghost Stories contains all of James’s published ghost stories, including many that have been adapted for television. (In 2024 Mark Gatiss, who has been responsible for some of the recent adaptations, presented the BBC Four programme, M. R. James: Ghost Writer.)

My second pairing is Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life by Samantha Ellis and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Take Courage is the author’s personal journey into the life and work of a woman she believes has been sidelined by history, overshadowed by her older siblings. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne’s second and final novel, is the story of Helen Graham, a mysterious woman who arrives at Wildfell Hall with her young son, seeking refuge from a dark and painful past. Helen’s secret diary reveals her struggles to break free from her destructive marriage to Arthur Huntingdon. Anne’s depiction of alcoholism and debauchery was considered shocking at the time but the novel is now considered to be one of the first feminist novels.

My final pairing is Daphne du Maurier’s nonfiction work, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë and her most famous novel, Rebecca. In her biography of Branwell, du Maurier describes how, unable to deal with the failure to sell his paintings or get his books published, he retreated into alcohol and laudanum resulting in his early death. (It has been suggested that Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is loosely based on Branwell.) In Rebecca, a shy young woman (who is never named) falls in love with handsome widower Maxim de Winter and agrees to marry him. When they arrive at her husband’s home, Manderley, she feels overshadowed by his beautiful first wife, Rebecca, (perhaps in the same way Branwell felt overshadowed by his sisters) who died in mysterious circumstances, and is intimidated by Manderley’s sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers.

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Books I Enjoyed that Were Outside My Comfort Zone. Although I’m not afraid to step outside my comfort zone from time to time, I generally stick to my favourite genres. I’d have had to go back years to find ten books to fit the topic so I’ve decided to repeat a version of last week’s topic – Ten Random Books From My Bookshelves – using books on my Kindle. I rarely keep ebooks once I’ve read them so these are all unread, selected at random. (Ironically, a couple of these probably are out of my comfort zone.) Links will take you to the full book description on Goodreads.

Sealskin by Su Bristow – Donald is a young fisherman, eking out a lonely living on the west coast of Scotland. One night he witnesses something miraculous, and makes a terrible mistake.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray – The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman.
The Mangle Street Murders (The Gower Street Detective #1) by M.R.C. Kasasian – 1882. Queen Victoria may sit on the throne and Robert Peel’s bobbies walk the street, but London is still haunted by the spectre of Spring-heeled Jack.
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn – 1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family.
The Curse of the House of Foskett (The Gower Street Detective #2) by M.R.C. Kasasian – 1882. Sidney Grice once had a reputation as London’s most perspicacious personal detective . But since his last case led an innocent men to the gallows, business has been light.
Lost For Words by Stephanie Butland – Loveday Cardew prefers books to people.
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate – Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat.
The Death of Mrs Westaway by Ruth Ware – When Harriet Westaway receives an unexpected letter telling her she’s inherited a substantial bequest from her Cornish grandmother, it seems like the answer to her prayers.
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich – When law student Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is asked to work on a death-row hearing for convicted murderer and child molester Ricky Langley, she finds herself thrust into the tangled story of his childhood.
A Kind of Light by H.R.F. Keating – Two stories, two journeys into the darkness…