As a lover of both fiction and nonfiction, I find that the ultimate pleasure in reading is when the author combines the two without short-changing either. These are books that provide accurate and deep historical background, but also tell stories shaped by that context. These are also books that have intricate, unusual, and effective narrative structures.
I wrote
The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors
This is the most extreme book on this list, as it is essentially straight history that is fictionalized.
The author does an unparalleled job of bringing the Battle of Gettysburg and its actual participants to life. He used careful readings of letters and other accounts to piece together a vision into the principal characters’ thinking and motivations.
The narrative technique of using many people’s perspectives on overlapping events is not new, but here is used with uncommon dexterity and illustrates how many events and people factored into how the battle unfolded. You experience the battle not only dynamically, but from the viewpoints of some people whose quick reactions proved decisive and other people who had no options.
The book comes to life with its excellent prose and was well deserving of its Pulitzer Prize. It is a rare book that belongs on a reading list in a writing course as well as a course at a military academy.
“My favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.”—James M. McPherson
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty…
Wow! It is no wonder that this was another Pulitzer Prize winner.
It’s a slow-burning thriller with secrets as well as historical currents that carry its multifaceted characters in sometimes surprising directions. A blind girl fleeing Paris to St Malo becomes part of the French resistance. An orphan becomes a Nazi soldier tasked with geo-tracing enemy radio signals.
The story is deep and satisfying, with a narrative that brings characters’ lives together with just the right amount of foreshadowing and flashback, and it keeps you riveted. You will turn back to page one after you read the last.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION
A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.'
For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic…
This book is set in motion in the cultural revolution in China—a background that profoundly shapes the main characters’ choices and destinies.
A young scientist who has witnessed her father’s persecution ends up at a science center looking for radio-wave evidence of extra-terrestrial life. Not only does she find it, but she figures out how to communicate with it.
Couple the scientist’s views of humanity with those of a disillusioned heir to an oil fortune, and the stage is set for an epic novel with a unique take on first contact. This book—the first of a trilogy—provides frightening insights into how history can shape humanity’s future.
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones.
1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.
Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable…
This book concerns a group of young firefighters known as smokejumpers and the catastrophic Mann Gulch Forest Fire in Montana in 1949.
Maclean was from the community and worked in the US Forest Service before he became a professor and eventually an author who spent years researching the event. You learn about the physics of forest fires, the invention of the first "escape fire," how multiple and cascading errors can lead to a disastrous outcome, and about the lives and heroics of a group of firefighters.
Interestingly, it is all seen through the journey of a man trying to understand a captivating event from his past. This book falls pretty squarely in the non-fiction category, but has multiple stories interwoven with the facts. It helps that Maclean was not only an author of many nonfiction articles, but also the author of the highly successful novel (and movie) A River Runs Through It.
It also has an additional rarity in that it was published posthumously, put together by Maclean’s son, which adds another interesting layer to the narrative.
When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs through It to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, "It has trees in it." Forty years later, the title novella is widely recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. Maclean's later triumph, Young Men and Fire, has over the decades also established itself as a classic of the American West. And with this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, a fresh audience will be introduced to Maclean's…
I almost forgot to include this on the list as I first read it almost fifty years ago but find that it stands up well over time.
This novel covers an enormous timeline yet is still well-anchored by weaving together rich episodes that all take place around northeastern Colorado. You gain insight into the geology of the Rocky Mountains and the region’s dinosaurs of the Jurassic period.
You learn about the lives of the Arapaho, a beaver trapper, an immigrant family, and the Great Plains’ buffalo herds. You even learn about the sugar beet industry. Michener puts it together as an ancestral tale of twentieth-century Paul Garrett, but it can essentially be read as a collection of separate stories.
This book is Michener at his best. You will undoubtedly have your own favorite parts, but there are many to enjoy and much to learn as Michener did his research.
Written to commemorate the Bicentennial in 1976, James A. Michener’s magnificent saga of the Westis an enthralling celebration of the frontier. Brimming with the glory of America’s past, the story of Colorado—the Centennial State—is manifested through its people: Lame Beaver, the Arapaho chieftain and warrior, and his Comanche and Pawnee enemies; Levi Zendt, fleeing with his child bride from the Amish country; the cowboy, Jim Lloyd, who falls in love with a wealthy and cultured Englishwoman, Charlotte Seccombe. In Centennial, trappers, traders, homesteaders, gold seekers, ranchers, and hunters are brought together in the dramatic conflicts that shape the…
While writing a technical book on social and economic networks for research scientists, my wife helped me with the proofreading. She kept telling me how much she enjoyed the introductions to each of the chapters and that I should expand them into a book for the general public. It took me another decade to complete it, but it resulted in The Human Network. In it, I discuss the different ways in which people can be influential, the systematic errors people make when forming opinions, as well as how splits in friendship networks lead to persistent inequality, immobility, and polarization. I also discuss how financial contagions are different from the spread of a disease, and how network patterns of trade and globalization are changing international conflict and wars.
To hide a corporation’s failure to properly service a space ship, Captain Jonas Stryker is prosecuted but saved from imprisonment by a dying man, who hires Stryker to collect asteroids for their mineral content. Stryker soon finds he must stop a shadowy corporate group called The Board, who employ space piracy, terrorism, and even weaponised asteroids to overthrow the Federation government.
Set in Lagrange points, space stations, the Moon and outback Australia, it is a fast-moving story with some speculative future technology. If you were interested in the NASA attempt to alter the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos, you might…
When a trial to cover-up a corporate failure ends Captain Jonas Stryker's career, he wants revenge against The Board, a ruthless, shadowy organization with limitless funds that employs space piracy, terrorism, and even weaponised asteroids. Posing as a space miner, Stryker learns that The Board wants him killed, while a young female SCIB police agent wants retribution against him for having her career spoiled at his trial. As Stryker avoids attempts to kill him, he becomes the only chance to prevent The Board from overturning the Federation Government and imposing a Fascist-style rule. A story of greed, corruption and honour,…
