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

The topic this week is Books with Character Names In the Titles.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher & Other Stories by Hilary Mantel – I enjoyed this collection of stories,  which are brooding, somewhat melancholic, dark, disturbing and full of sharp and penetrating observations – brilliant!

Dracula by Bram Stoker. Stoker used a variety of sources in telling his tale – folklore, myths and legends and historical facts, all blended together with his own inventions. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton – a beautifully told tale – a tragedy, signalled right from the beginning of the book, when the unnamed narrator first saw Ethan Frome and was told he had been disfigured and crippled in a ‘smash up’, twenty four years earlier. 

Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge – a dark story that turns child abuse on its head. It is an unsettling and chilling book, beginning as Harriet and her friend, an unnamed 13 year-old girl, run home screaming to tell their parents what had happened. 

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens – Drood has disappeared and cannot be found. The mystery remains unsolved. What did happen to Edwin Drood? Was he killed and if so was it by John Jasper, his uncle, obsessed with his passion for Rosa? We will never know.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo – This is a tragedy, like Shakespeare’s, a tale of political ambition and the destructive power it wields, a tale of love and guilt, and of enormous greed of all kinds. It had me completely enthralled and I loved it.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. This is full of terrific descriptions of the state of society at the time – the grim conditions that the poor suffered, the shocking revelations of what went on in the workhouse, and the depiction of the criminal underworld – the contrast of good and evil. I found it shocking, fascinating and moving.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I’ve read this many times and each time I fall under its spell. Identity is a recurrent theme, just who was Rebecca, what was she really like and what lead to her death? It’s a novel where secrets are only just  suppressed, like a ticking bomb waiting to explode revealing the devastating truth.

Silas Marner by George Eliot. The story revolves around Silas Marner, a weaver living in Raveloe, a village on the brink of industrialisation. He was wrongly accused of theft and left his home town to live a lonely and embittered life in Raveloe where he became a miser, hoarding his gold and counting it each night. It has the touch of a fairytale about it, or of a folk myth, and it tells of the consequences of our actions. 

Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh – a tense, dramatic story of the last days of Christopher Marlowe, playwright, poet and spy. Accused of heresy and atheism, his death is a mystery, although conjecture and rumours abound.