Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.
This was a fun though hard one! Apparently I haven’t read anywhere near enough books with occupations in the title, so this list today is a Top Five.
Top Five Books With Occupations in the Title
The Governess Affair
Courtney Milan
Genre: Historical Romance
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
Published: April 21st, 2012
Review
Hugo Marshall earned the nickname “the Wolf of Clermont” for his ruthless ambition—a characteristic that has served him well, elevating the coal miner’s son to the right hand man of a duke. When he’s ordered to get rid of a pestering governess by fair means or foul, it’s just another day at work.
But after everything Miss Serena Barton has been through at the hands of his employer, she is determined to make him pay. She won’t let anyone stop her—not even the man that all of London fears. They might call Hugo Marshall the Wolf of Clermont, but even wolves can be brought to heel…
The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners
Seumas Milne
Genre: Non-Fiction – History – Politics
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Published: December 1st, 1994
Review
Margaret Thatcher branded the leaders of the 1984-85 miners’ strike the enemy within. With the publication of this book, the full irony of that accusation became clear. Seumas Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain’s miners’ union. There was an enemy within. It was the secret services of the British state, operating inside the NUM itself.
Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police
Donna McLean
Genre: Non-Fiction – True Crime – Memoir
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
Published: February 3rd, 2022
Review
“You live with someone for two years and then . . . they simply don’t exist.”
Over 40 years, two British police units acted undercover to infiltrate activist groups. At least 20 of those officers deliberately targeted women and entered relationships with them. One of those women was me. This is my story.
Men wrote the police files. They wrote the scripts and the headlines. Men wrote the court orders to make us anonymous and they will sit in judgement at the coming public inquiry. In a system that doesn’t see women, you have to fight to be heard. When they take your identity, you have to find your voice.
Learning the truth nearly destroyed me – but an accidental activist was born.
A voice at the centre of the Spy Cops scandal. The great love story of Donna McLean’s life wasn’t just built on lies, it was one. With an inquiry underway, Small Town Girl is a reclamation of a truth that was ruthlessly buried.
Anti-Social: The Secret Diary of an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer
Nick Pettigrew
Genre: Non-Fiction – Memoir
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
Published: July 23rd, 2020
Review
Anti-Social is the diary of a disillusioned local authority worker whose job it is to keep people happy, or at least away from each other’s throats. That’s hard enough at the best of times, but when your day features secret hoarders, violent disputes over dance music and litigious arms dealers, the total breakdown of local society is never far away. The only thing keeping it together are the chronically underfunded officers charged with patching the fraying threads of civilisation, and they have a hard enough time keeping themselves together. This is an urgent, timely but, most of all, hysterically funny memoir of a life spent working with the people society wants to forget and the problems that nobody else can resolve. This book will make you laugh, cry and boil with rage, all within a single sentence.
The City of Doctor Moreau
J.S. Barnes
Genre: Horror – Sci-Fi
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
Published: September 14th, 2021
Review
The island was just the beginning…
In H G Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Dr Moreau a shipwrecked traveller finds himself alone on an island ruled by a mad doctor and inhabited by creatures who are at once both beast and human. He escapes to civilisation only after the scientist is dead and the beast-men have taken absolute control. Yet this is not the end of the matter. The peoples of the island are not done with humanity. Now the conflict between the two has begun in earnest.
The City of Dr Moreau presents a sprawling history of the islanders, and an alternative vision of our own times. Spanning more than a century, criss-crossing across numerous places and many lives, we witness the growth of Moreau’s legacy, from gothic experiments to an event which changes the world. From the wharves of Victorian London to a boarding house with an inhuman resident, to an assassin on a twentieth-century train ordered to kill the one man who knows the truth to a diplomat whose mission to parley with beast-men will surely be her last, we follow secret skirmishes and hidden plots which emerge, eventually and violently, into the open.
A tribute to the genius of H G Wells from the author of Dracula’s Child, The City of Dr Moreau is a visionary new horror novel in the style of Wells’ creepiest and most enduring fictions.
As always, if you have any recommendations or favourite books with occupations in the titles, let me know!
Unwrapping Words 