Riot Recommendation

Riot Recommendation: What Are Your Favorite Books About Pirates?

Vanessa Diaz

Managing Editor

Book Riot Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz is a writer and former bookseller from San Diego, CA whose Spanish is even faster than her English. When not reading or writing, she enjoys dreaming up travel itineraries and drinking entirely too much tea. She is a regular co-host on the All the Books podcast who especially loves mysteries, gothic lit, mythology/folklore, and all things witchy. Vanessa can be found on Instagram at @BuenosDiazSD or taking pictures of pretty trees in Portland, OR, where she now resides.

The Anatomist’s Tale by Tauno Biltsted

Born into abject poverty in the British Empire, our narrator aspires to a better life as a ship’s surgeon—until a tyrannical captain provokes a mutiny, forcing him into a life of piracy and eventually to a tropical commune of maroons called New Madagascar. Told through a series of confessions to those who visit the narrator during his imprisonment at Marshalsea, The Anatomist's Tale relates one man’s brush with the heady freedom of outlaws—and the price of returning to “civilization.”

Ahoy, me hearties! These stay-at-home orders have us feeling like landlubbers and we’re jonesing for stories about life back on the high seas. So tell us, mateys: what are yer favorite books about pirates? Whether they be fictional tales or nonfiction accounts, shout those at us on that there Facebook and Twitter, savvy? We’ll be rounding up yer answers and sharin’ the bookish bounty with yer fellow Riot scallywags next week. You best be blowin’ us down with yer picks, so heave ho! We’ll just be here looking up more terrible pirate lingo.