The Rec League: Mary Stewart

The Rec League - heart shaped chocolate resting on the edge of a very old bookOur community at the Bitchery is full of warm & fuzzy moments and as the person who puts together the Books on Sale posts, sometimes we get some kickass, budget-endangering comment threads. For example, KateB alerted us to a mega Mary Stewart sale!

You can view Mary Stewart’s ebook editions, sorted from low to high prices, all of which are $3.99 or lower, at this Amazon link.

Here are some Stewart recs from that particular comment thread.

No, the Other Anne:

Airs Above the Ground and The Ivy Tree are particular favorites. I also love Touch Not the Cat. Really you can’t go wrong with anything Mary Stewart, though!

Vicki:

I think my favorite might be The Ivy Tree. Currently re-reading MoonSpinners, the book is better than the movie. Gosh, I read all of these between eight and 13 years old, did not get all the sub-text and still loved them. Love them all now, too.

PamG:

Personally, I favor This Rough Magic and back in the day, when I first read Mary Stewart, I loved Wildfire at Midnight. Her later romantic suspense–post Touch Not the Cat–seemed a little bland to me, but the rest of it was golden.

Do read the rest of the comments for more recommendations, and please let us know which books the Bitchery should be during this awesome Mary Stewart sale!

Comments are Closed

  1. Ash says:

    I’ll be the first to say I haven’t actually heard of or read any of Stewart’s books before this post and I’ll be missing out on that party no more! Also, those covers are gorgeousssss! Thanks for this!! 😀

  2. Dorothea says:

    Madam, Will You Talk? is so much a part of my youthful days I ceased to think of it as a book one could buy: I absorbed it through my pores and metabolized it deep within me. I could probably recite it word for word even now. Thanks to this post, I will be able to confirm my memories: Click! Click! Click!

    Thank you!

  3. Carol S says:

    Amazing new covers — and I love that they are not the “typical” romance covers (not that there is anything wrong with them). Maybe they will entice some new readers to give Stewart a try….

  4. Milly says:

    Her series on Merlin sparked a lifelong obsession with all things King Arthur and Camelot. That series, The Crystal Cave, was my 13 year old escape. It was because of her i went on to read Thomas Mallory. I remember our school librarian literally hopping for joy as I began to discover classics because of Mary Stewart.

  5. Julie B. says:

    Nine Coaches Waiting is wonderful and my favourite book of hers although you won’t find any duds in her entire catalogue. A wonderful writer who can paint a scene so beautifully and vividly. A true icon of the genre.

  6. Sandra says:

    BTW, the e-books are also available at B&N and Kobo. This is AFAIK, the first time they’ve been available in digital in the US.And I’ve been looking for them for years, because my 50YO paperbacks are falling to pieces. The collection also includes Wind off the Small Isles, which I don’t think was ever released here, so a new Stewart for me to read.

    I read The Moon-Spinners when I was in 5th grade and was hooked. Stewart was the reason I expanded my reading from mysteries to gothics and eventually Georgette Heyer. (I was also a big Haley Mills fangirl. The movie has just about nothing in common with the book other than the title and setting. And it’s pure Disney fluff, but with Haley Mills [and young Peter McEnery].)

    Madam, Will You Talk and Airs Above the Ground are my first go-to’s when I need a Stewart fix, but you can’t go wrong with hardly any of the pre-Merlin books. I don’t care for the romance in The Ivy Tree, because I’m not a fan of Jane Eyre and Rochester. But it works great as an unreliable narrator book.

  7. Hope says:

    Was mine the only entry from the other thread that didn’t get migrated here?

    Anyway, here it is again: My faves: My Brother Michael, Wildfire at Midnight, Madam Will You Talk?, Airs Above the Ground. I second PamG with later novels being not nearly as good as the earlier ones. I hate to say this, but in spots they are actually kind of awful. Like the one where the heroine is a scifi author who is writing a book about a secret civilization on the other side of the sun. ????

    I think I started with the Disney movie. The book and the movie are not the same but the movie is cute and the book is very good. Stewart was a natural progression for me, though, after my grandmother had turned me on to Victoria Holt, Dorothy Eden and Phyllis Whitney.

  8. Judith says:

    Mary Stewart was a big inspiration for my travel dreams as a teenager. I now leave near Evian, and have been to Delphi, Crete, Vienna, England, Scotland, the south of France… all thanks in part to Mary Stewart. And everywhere, I recognized her settings, and the talent with which she described them, so that even though I was seeing them in a later era, they still seemed familiar. She was amazing, and I loved everything she wrote. I can still remember lines I first read 50 years ago (Great-Aunt Harriet’s ruby like Woolworth’s last word on my finger)

  9. Hazel says:

    Nine Coaches Waiting and Thornyhold are my absolute favorites!!

  10. Hazel says:

    I also love The Gabriel Hounds – the setting (Lebanon) was so awesome.

  11. Dorothea says:

    The Gabriel Hounds squicked me out a bit because the love interest was a cousin, wasn’t he? Same reason I can’t swoon over The Grand Sophie. But that is a personal hang-up, I know that first-cousin marriages are just fine for others.

  12. Darlynne says:

    *contented sigh* That’s all I have to happily say about Mary Stewart’s books, except she was the spark for my travel bug.

  13. Nancy F says:

    so so happy these are digital finally. I’ve been waiting years to carry her novels around with me. My favorite is Nine Coaches Waiting. Her books started me on romance.

  14. Ooh, I am ON THIS. I have a warm place in my heart for Touch Not the Cat, the first Stewart I can remember reading. And I have several others of hers in paperback.

    Also GOODNESS those covers. I love them. I may be doing a sweep through buying these digital editions on the strength of those covers alone. <3 <3

  15. Mary Stewart is the best. It’s hard to pick a favorite of hers.
    On the other hand, I do have to say that even she, fabulous writer that she was, could write a dud. I really do not like Thunder on the Right. It’s not just that it’s the only book she wrote in third person. It just doesn’t… work. And, all right, I was not especially impressed with Rose Cottage, because she set up an expectation at the beginning (who is the heroine’s father?) and then by the end of the story no one cared what the answer was.
    But even so, her worst books are better than most of the books I’ve read. She has an amazing ability to put the reader there in the scene.
    If I had to pick a fav, I would probably say Airs Above the Ground. It was the first book of hers that I read. (I was still young enough to pick it up because there was a horse on the cover.)

  16. Sofia D says:

    I’ve just been turned back into the 13 year old girl from 1963. I discovered Mary stewart in my school library and Nine Coaches Waiting was the first book I read. She has a very special place in my heart.

  17. Kerry D. says:

    Airs Above the Ground and Touch not the Cat.

    And pout, the sale seems to be limited to US/Canada. Go shopping in my name, ladies! I would if I could.

  18. Emily A says:

    I tried to read The Ivy Tree and really didn’t like it. Among my other problems with it, I found it was too confusing. It’s written in the first person and it’s a story about two people who look alike and identity mix-ups and confusion. The narrator (whose head we’re in) is the person with all the identity problems so I found that all very confusing.

    That being said I’ve never read or tried to read any others and I know lot of people who love her books. Certainly some people love The Ivy Tree. Other people have recommended the Nine Coaches Waiting as their favorite and a good first book of hers.

  19. Even if you’re not interested in the books, please click to see the covers. Holy Classic European Tourism Poster, those are SPECTACULAR. I went for one, bought three, the covers are so amazing.

  20. Lil says:

    I wish I had never read Mary Stewart’s books so I could read them all for the first time. I can remember the joy of finding there was a new one.

    I think my favorite is Nine Coaches Waiting, which reminds me that I also liked the fashion for taking titles and epigraphs from Jacobean drama.

  21. Susan says:

    My top 5 favorites: 1) Thornyhold, 2) This Rough Magic, 3) Wildfire at Midnight, 4) The Gabriel Hounds, and 5) Touch Not the Cat. Thornyhold is what Lauren Willig calls a house book, where the house and what it represents is central to the story. That book is such a comfort read to me. I want that house, the Aga stove, Hodge the cat. . .

    But, this excludes the Merlin books, which are in a class of their own. I haven’t revisited them in years but, lordy, I LOVED those books back in the day, particularly the first one.

  22. Kate says:

    My mom loved her books and I eventually discovered them for myself in college, though I had also adored the Haley Mills films (being a giant fangirl). I don’t think I can pick a favorite, and will echo what some of the others have said in that the ones written at the end of her life lack the spark of her work from the 50s-mid 70s. Even though I adore the original midcentury paperback covers, these new editions are beautiful.

    My mom was also a reader of Helen MacInnes’ romantic suspense but everything I tried to read by her made me angry because the heroine always seemed to need help from the men.

  23. Touch KateB says:

    Oh,you guys… I just binge purchased “Madame, Will You Talk?”, “Touch Not the Cat”, “Thornyhold” and “This Rough Magic” ON TOP OF “Nine Coaches Waiting.”

    I’ve got a lot of Gothic romantic mystery/suspense in my future!

  24. KateB says:

    I don’t know what autocorrect disaster managed to put Touch in my name :-\

    Apologies.

  25. Anne-Maree says:

    I adored her Merlin books and they triggered a lifelong interest.
    But in her romances – the Gabriel Hounds.
    But they are all fabulous.

  26. I just yoinked every single one of those new cover ebook editions on my Kobo account, yep.

    Mary Stewart comfort reads sound like a splendid idea to me now that we’re moving into stormy weather here in the PNW!

  27. No, the Other Anne says:

    I’m a little embarrassed at just how excited I am to be in this featured thread, but it is my actual birthday today. I can’t think of a better (however inadvertent) present from the Bitchery than a dedicated post about one of my all-time favorite authors. Mwah, mwah, I love you all! *raises glass, slightly tottering already*

    Despite my advanced years, my glamorous, world-travelling, could-have-been-a-Mary-Stewart-protagonist godmother still sends me a check every year, which I am totally going to blow on ALL THE MARY STEWART TITLES I can get my hot little hands on.

    @Sandra, thank you especially for mentioning The Wind of the Small Isles, which I hadn’t been able to find previously!

  28. shel says:

    I picked up Nine Coaches Waiting to try.

    If you’re picky on your metadata (raises hand), my file from Kobo Canada does NOT use the travel poster style, despite that cover being shown in the store.

    If you want to fix that yourself in Calibre, I grabbed the cover from https://www.hodder.co.uk/

  29. Kate says:

    Wow. The release of her books on kindle coincided with a credit from apple. I bought everything. Now I am binge reading. And I so want a cigarette. I stopped smoking, but most of the heroines have a cigarette to tide them through moments in the books. I want to sit in a taverna, or a classic ruin, or a hillside in Greece and have a smoke with an intense hero.
    I can’t believe how much sexual tension Stewart conveys in just a sentence or two. I am having such a glorious time re-reading these.
    I went through a similar rush when Elizabeth Cadell’s books were released on kindle. This is a happy, happy day.

  30. Lisette says:

    And I bought them all. I’m particularly fond of This Rough Magic. Mary Stewart is the cause of my Shakespeare infatuation (in most of the books I remember reading she prefaced each chapter with a quote: for Magic she used The Tempest). I love that I can finally have copies that aren’t falling apart and will finally get a chance to read books I couldn’t previously find. Yay!!!

  31. Gloriamarie says:

    do not buy the kindle version of The Ivy Tree as someone has changed part of the story lone and it is NOT the original version.

    The Ivy Tree is one of my very favorites by Stewart and the changes distress me.

  32. Cristie says:

    Mary Stewart is the reason I re-discovered romance a few years ago and the reason I was able to survive grad school. I read all of her books at that time and considered them my primary source of self-care. Also thanks to her books I discovered other wonderful authors like Susanna Kearsley and Georgette Heyer. My Brother Michael is my favorite book ever and Simon Lester, the hero from that book, is my measure for all other romance novel heroes.

  33. I’m back, because I’ve just been reading Airs Above the Ground and IT IS SO GOOD. The first line: “Carmel Lacy is the silliest woman I know, which is saying a good deal.” And it went places from there! I had read almost all of her books when I was in high school, but I had forgotten her beautiful, beautiful sentences. Oh, so good. The description of the plane taking off from London to fly to Vienna was so beautiful – I think I shall read it for my next flight. Maybe I’ll be crazy enough to read it out loud … hmm. (And I started with this one because one of my best friends moved to Vienna and has actually taken one of her sons to visit the Spanish Riding School!).

  34. Gloriamarie @ #31: I’m told on Twitter that the text in these editions is apparently the UK text. I’ve got a copy of The Ivy Tree in print; I’ll be comparing!

  35. Danika says:

    Touch not the cat is a favorite for me. I seem to remember in The Gabriel Hounds that they were first cousins but also their fathers were identical twins.. wouldn’t that make them biologically half siblings . Still a good book.

  36. It’s interesting how much is different between the original UK version and the US version.

    For example, in the UK version of the Gabriel Hounds, the hero and heroine are first cousins.
    In the US version:
    Perhaps I should explain here that the relationship between Charles and myself was at once closer and more distant than that between ordinary cousins. For one thing, we were not first, but second cousins, with nothing nearer than a great-grandfather in common; for the other, we had been brought ; up together almost from birth, certainly from the time when i memory starts. I couldn’t remember a time when I had not shared everything with my cousin Charles.

    His father, Henry Mansel, had been the senior member of our—the English—branch of the family, the other male members being his cousins, the twin brothers Charles and Christopher. Christopher, the junior twin, was my father. Charles had no children, so when Henry Mansel and his wife met with a fatal sailing accident only a few months after the birth of their son Charles, my uncle took the baby to bring up as his own.

  37. Dorothea says:

    @Evelyn M. Hill:
    The difference between the two versions is really interesting. I read The Gabriel Hounds in the US in the 1970s and they were definitely first cousins, but perhaps there was enough negative reaction that later editions watered down the blood ties. Interesting that the UK readers might not have needed that.

    It is also interesting that so many people here say Nine Coaches Waiting is their favorite. My memories are not so fond (cliche-ridden Gothic?) but clearly I need to click and give it a second chance…And Airs Above the Ground?…and My Brother Michael?…There goes the rest of October, mmmm.

  38. gremlin says:

    Oh, yay! Touch Not the Cat is an old favorite I first read 30+ years ago and haven’t reread in a very long time. Since it looks like someone did the work to format the ebook nicely I happily bought it.

    I know I read her Camelot books (I still have those on a shelf too), and some of the other titles in the sale sound familiar enough I probably read everything I could find from her at the library at the time.

    I don’t remember it, but Thornyhold keeps pulling me back, so I may snag that too. [And oh yeah, forgot about my $2 from Apple!]

  39. Gloriamarie says:

    @Angela Highland (Korra’ti) wrote ” I’m told on Twitter that the text in these editions is apparently the UK text. I’ve got a copy of The Ivy Tree in print; I’ll be comparing!”

    I’ve already compared. In fact, I have two paper copies and neither of them says what my kindle version says is the reason Annabel left Whitescar.

    I am aware that British versions are often different for US audiences… just look at the way they dumbed down Harry Potter for the USA. But it never occurred to me that they would change Mary Stewart. There seems to be no reason to have done it since the reason Annabel gave her grandfather was a lie to cover up her real reason.

  40. Gloriamarie says:

    @Evelyn M. Hill, yes, in my copy of the Gabriel Hounds, which I bought when it first came out, yes, they are first cousins.

    Please don’t tell me that is changed in the kindle version!!

Comments are closed.

By posting a comment, you consent to have your personally identifiable information collected and used in accordance with our privacy policy.

↑ Back to Top