Science fiction is rightly famous for experimenting with new and strange social worlds, but fantasy tends to fall back on the usual feudal tropes: the whims of kings, the valor of knights, the always-temporary powerlessness of farm boys, the technicalities of succession. Which is a shame, because fantasy provides just as much opportunity to reimagine what society could look like. That’s what I try to do in my books, and at my job, where I’m working to bring 21st-century data literacy and quantitative reasoning to a state government stuck resolutely in the ’90s. When I think of books that have done what I’m trying to do, these five are at the front of my mind.
The action in this book begins when Severian, an apprentice in the Torturers’ Guild, gives a convict a weapon to kill herself rather than be tortured.
The reason there’s a Torturers’ Guild is, allegedly, that it beats prison: Better to deliver a punishment and then let the punished person return to their life, the thinking goes, than confine them to a useless existence as a ward of the state. Severian is expelled from the Guild, but not from the profession, and wanders the world plying his trade, at least until the plot can’t spare him.
It’s a constant dissonance, looking through the eyes of a character whose training and purpose is the infliction of pain, who seems so decent and forthright in the story he narrates. (But don’t be fooled.)
In a thoroughly decadent world of the future, Severian the torturer is cast out from the torturer's guild when he falls in love with one of his victims and allows her to die
The tortured hero was my first love, and I’ve never been able to shake him. He never fails to crush me, and there’s nothing more rewarding to a masochistic reader than being completely annihilated, then put back together again. These heartbroken heartbreakers are easy to love (usually), easy to forgive (hopefully), and always keep you coming back for more (definitely). My character, Darian, was born of my search for the perfect tortured hero, and although I’ve moved on to a different kind of hero for my follow-up novel, Magnolia May, he’ll forever own my heart.
As far as tortured heroes go, Erik Fiskare is more of the brooding, quiet, suffer in silence type. The torturing happens on page, in a scene that will send your heart to your stomach. I suggest carving out time for a trilogy; it’s imperative you read book two to get the full impact of book one, and by then you’ll need book three just to heal. Lastly, be sure you’re stocked with Kleenex…and perhaps some antacid. I’m here if you need me.
A watershed moment exists in every man's life—the moment he stops being his mother's son and starts being his lover's man. When he transitions from protected to protector.
Erik "Fish" Fiskare is only a college junior when a gunman walks into the campus theater, intent on stopping the show. From the lighting booth, Fish sees his girlfriend, Marguerite "Daisy" Bianco, get caught in the line of fire. Everyone runs away from the stage but Fish, in a watershed moment, runs toward it.
Spanning fifteen years, The Man I Love explores how a single act of violence reverberates through a circle…
When I finally accepted that I’m analytical, it was surprisingly liberating. I think that’s why I enjoy trying to figure out a story and its characters and what will happen next. Because of this, it’s delightful when a story genuinely surprises me. I especially appreciate magical elements that defy reality. I’m also a motivational speaker and filmmaker, two powerful story-telling mediums, so I love books that inspire me in some way, challenge my perspectives, and leave me thinking about them for days. When a book is so well written that I can turn off my brain and lose myself in the story, it’s a fabulous escape for me.
I was first attracted to this book because it begins with a suicide. I have written about suicide, so I’m interested in how others view it and how it can be used as a catalyst to drive a story.
In this case, a dear friend’s suicide becomes pivotal to the evolution and development of the other three main characters. Whenever someone ends their life, those left behind begin to question everything and often suffer from feelings of guilt. This book shows how the other characters coped, moving forward, along with fabulous, colorful memories from when the four friends were together.
I love that it made me laugh and cry. I found myself wishing that I had three dear friends like the ladies in this story.
People like Feeney Simms don't commit suicide. Beautiful, charismatic, mother of two, wife to a handsome, successful husband, beloved by her friends-this is not the typical picture of a tortured soul. But one summer night, Feeney drives to the beach and swallows a handful of pills. No note, no explanation, nothing. Like that, she's gone.
Faced with this loss, Ali, Max, and Liddy, Feeney's closest friends, are left reeling, grappling with the devastating cocktail of grief, guilt, and anger that's left in the wake of a suicide. In a desperate attempt to avoid further loss, the three women make the…
I love reading about monsters as much as I love writing about them. Unfortunately, it also means I’m super picky about the dark fantasy I read. These authors don’t disappoint. Dark fantasy is a genre that I continue to return to, whether it’s aimed at teens or adults. I’ve had to deal with many monsters in my life and I understand that they can take many shapes and forms. These books are some of the very best I’ve read and I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.
Let me emphasize how gorgeous this book is. Imagine a Tim Burton world filled with bones and two skeletons having a heart-wrenchingly beautiful love story. That is the landscape of The Bone Valley by Candace Robinson. This book gets quite gory and dark but is absolutely my favorite of her books for its sheer originality and incredibly unique world. Not to mention the horrible villain who literally takes over the underworld just so she can torture people. Yeah, it’s dark. Robinson is known for her incredible balance of romance and horror nestled within a beautiful world, and this book is the epitome of that.
He’s a lover. She’s a thief. A magic like no other will bind them together.
After the death of his parents, Anton Bereza works hard to provide for his younger siblings. Love has never been in the cards for him, especially after desperation forces Anton to sell himself for coin. And he has no idea that, beneath the city of Kedaf, lies a place called the Bone Valley.
When Anton’s jealous client plots against him, he is cursed to spend eternity in a world where all that remains are broken bones. There, Anton meets Nahli Yan—a spirited woman who once…
Though religious violence is an odd obsession for a nice guy like me, the topic was forced on me. Having lived for years in the Indian Punjab, I was struck by the uprising of Sikhs in the 1980s. I wanted to know why, and what religion had to do with it. These could have been my own students. It is easy to understand why bad people do bad things, but why do good people—often with religious visions of peace—employ such savage acts of violence? This is the question that has propelled me through a half-dozen books, including the recent When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends.
This modern classic by a Harvard anthropologist is about torture and inflicted body pain in general, though it has abundant examples from the bible and religion-related conflicts. Her main thesis is that acts of torture are attempts to destroy the worlds of the victim and remake them in the mold of the torturer. It helps us understand that acts of religious violence are always so some extent a clash of worldviews and the attempt to forcibly destroy one view of reality with another.
Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, this profoundly original work explores the nature of physical suffering. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Henry Kissinger. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain difficult to describe in words, it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme cases to an inarticulate state of cries and moans.…
I must be something of a specialist on the impact of conventional and guerrilla warfare on the civilian population. Truth is, leaving school, I never intended to have anything to do with war beyond the books I enjoyed reading. On leaving the military in my 30s I employed the only skills I had and managed organisations and mostly news teams operating in conflict zones all over the world. I matured into a crisis manager, responding and consulting to crisis situations such as kidnap & ransoms, and evacuations from conflict zones. Most of the characters in my books are real, good and bad, taken from the vast theatre of my own experiences.
My line of work has only enhanced my fascination with spies and spying. Espionage was on the periphery of my world and I was privy, on occasion, to snippets of information that shed light on certain events. Reading this book was like being privy to a host of secrets, many during my own era. How fascinating to be taken through the history of espionage from biblical times until today. The author reveals missing pieces to many significant moments in history, where monumental decisions were made based on information bought and sold, died for, killed for, stolen, or extracted by torture or coercion. Equally fascinating is how so much of that information was misinterpreted, denied, ignored, inflated, or simply misplaced. Great battles were won and lost, kingdoms toppled, fortunes spent and made, often based on a single snippet of information.
'Almost every page includes a sizzling historical titbit ... captivating, insightful and masterly' (Edward Lucas, The Times)
The history of espionage is far older than any of today's intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The first mention of espionage in world literature is in the Book of Exodus.'God sent out spies into the land of Canaan'. From there, Christopher Andrew traces the shift in the ancient world from divination to what we would recognize as attempts to gather real intelligence in the conduct of military operations, and considers how far ahead of the…
We have always loved to read about the bad boy with a secret soft side and when we started writing together, we decided to jump on this genre as well. Writing in dual POVs gives us an opportunity to explore how the bad boy is perceived by others as well as show exactly what the bad boy is thinking…and we love it! There's nothing better than a misunderstood alpha who hides his true feelings because he doesn’t feel worthy. And when he finds that amazing woman who just gets him…magic! We hope you enjoy our very own bad boy with a secret soft side in our book Complicate Me.
A sports romance and opposites attract? Sign us up! But then toss in the mouthy rebel of a professional football star who is rarely told no and we are all in. Kingston Scott is the bad boy who chases the good girl and it plays out in epic fashion. Despite Kingston’s playboy reputation, we couldn’t help but root for him to win the girl. Because underneath it all, he’s a total softie, especially when it comes to his girl Silver.
"A charming and steamy small-town romance between a mysterious woman struggling to protect the safe haven she's created, and the reckless man determined to break down her walls." HEA Book Babes
“My secrets have always kept me safe…until he saw my truth.”
Kingston Scott is the most eligible bachelor in professional football, a charming rebel on and off the field. He’s also in desperate need of an attitude adjustment.
After a reckless night puts him behind bars, he’s sentenced to coach football at a sleepaway camp in the middle of nowhere. He’s not sure he’ll survive an entire month of…
I have been fascinated by this topic ever since the first newspaper stories exposing American involvement in torture began to appear in the early years of the so-called War on Terror. This fascination has persisted up to the present, as it remains clear – given recent accounts of Ron DeSantis’ time at Guantanamo – that this story refuses to die. Equally fascinating to me have been accounts revealing the extent to which this story can be traced back to the origins of the Cold War, to the birth of the National Security State, and to the alliance between that state and the professions (psychology and behavioral science) that spawned “enhanced interrogation.”
In many ways the best account of the history of modern torture.
As Rejali shows, this has all too often been mis-remembered as the history of Soviet and Nazi torture. Torture, in his account, has been widely practiced by modern democracies.
He identifies the French (in the context of the Algerian War of Independence) as the real innovators in the field of modern “stealth” or invisible torture, ie. torture designed not to leave marks: waterboarding and electro-torture.
I particularly like this for the way it explodes many of the myths surrounding the history of modern torture.
This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he…
It is a beautiful and aching; filled with lingering characters, flashes of brutal violence and almost-connections.
It is a window to the beauty and pain that is Haiti – past and present. It is both grounded and magical – clearly well-researched but soulful. Probing and yet sensitive. Artfully done.
It is not a collection of short stories but vignettes that are part of a single narrative terror, trauma, and survival, starting over, and ghosts of the past that linger. The characters are vivid, the language is lovely, the stories are grounded, and...life is unforgiving to some and too forgiving to others.
We meet him late in life: a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him, and learn that he has also kept a vital, dangerous secret. Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant exploration of the “dew breaker”--or torturer--s an unforgettable story of love, remorse, and hope; of personal and political rebellions; and of the compromises we make to move beyond the most intimate…
Sam Dagher is a Lebanese-American journalist and author with more than 15 years of experience reporting on the Middle East and its people. He has lived in Baghdad, Beirut, and Damascus and worked throughout the region. Sam has been committed to telling the region’s stories from the ground up and in the process shedding new light on the root causes of war, extremism, and migration.
The Shell is a peek into both the horrors and absurdities of totalitarian regimes told in the form of a prison diary kept by the author. Khalifa, a Christian by birth and an atheist, was mistaken (or perhaps not, given what I learned about the Assad regime in the course of my work) for a radical Islamist, arrested and locked up in the notorious Tadmor desert prison, more accurately a death camp. The book reveals the horrific consequences of the logic and methods of the Assad family and other dictators in the Middle East and beyond: Anyone suspected of harboring a hint of opposition to the ruler will be labeled a terrorist and traitor, crushed and turned into an example to instill fear in the wider population.
The work of a moder-day Sozhenitsyn that exposes acts of violence and brutality committed by the Syrian regime. This compelling first novel is the astonishing story of a Syrian political prisoner of conscience—an atheist mistaken for a radical Islamist—who was locked up for 13 years without trial in one of the most notorious prisons in the Middle East. The novel takes the form of a diary which Musa keeps in his head and then writes down upon his release. In Tadmur prison, the mood is naturally bleak and yet often very beautifully captured. The narrator, a young graduate, is defiant…
