As much as I enjoy traveling to real places in fiction, I find that authors who ask me to inhabit a world of their own making make me think more deeply, and these are also the novels I dream about when I’m not actually reading them, the pages I cannot wait to return to when I can pick up the book again. By exiting the world we inhabit, and occupying a world very much like our own, I end up reflecting more thoughtfully about the contemporary moment, and in a way, feel more connected. I tried to create such a world in The Stranger Game, and this is something I hope to do again in a future novel.
I wrote...
The Stranger Game
By
Peter Gadol
What is my book about?
Rebecca’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Ezra, has gone missing, but when she notifies the police, they seem surprisingly unconcerned. They suspect he has been playing the “stranger game,” a viral hit in which players start following others in real life, as they might otherwise do on social media. As the game spreads, however, the rules begin to change, play grows more intense and disappearances are reported across the country. Curious about this popular new obsession, and hoping that she might be able to track down Ezra, Rebecca tries the game for herself. She also meets Carey, someone who is willing to take the game further than she imagined possible.
A thought-provoking, haunting novel, The Stranger Game unearths the connections, both imagined and real, that we build with the people around us in the physical and digital world, and where the boundaries blur between them.
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Childhood of Jesus
By
J. M. Coetzee
Why this book?
In conjuring a nation's refugees and writing in his typically austere style, the South African Nobelist JM Coetzee asks us to reflect on our current world with all of its harsh and maddening disparities. In three novels, Coetzee tells a fable-like story of one charismatic boy who can never be understood, never followed, never appreciated fully for his wisdom. Coetzee’s distillation of everyday suffering is haunting, yet ultimately cathartic.
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Blindness
By
José Saramago
Why this book?
One day an entire nation starts to go blind in Saramago’s unyielding narrative of human brutality amid anarchy. As in other novels by the Portuguese Nobelist, it would seem the author is writing about the Iberian peninsula—but the city descending into chaos could be Los Angeles, Lagos, or London. And like Coetzee, Saramago finds beauty in survival and unusual acts of kindness.
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Those Who Knew
By
Idra Novey
Why this book?
Doubling as both a political thriller and political satire, and set on an unnamed, maybe South American island, Idra Novey’s novel about a corrupt senator stars powerful women who are determined to uncover a past sexual assault and possible murder, ultimately speaking truth to power.
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How Beautiful We Were
By
Imbolo Mbue
Why this book?
The Cameroonian-American author Imbolo Mbue writes about an oil-rich African nation that avails itself to corruption and ecological disaster when it welcomes an American petrochemical company to conduct business freely. The novel focusses on one village and an often futile attempts to resist, with one young woman rising to international fame—but it also tells the too common story of how corporations succeed in bending an entire people to their will with wickedly false promises
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What Happens at Night
By
Peter Cameron
Why this book?
Anyone who reads one Peter Cameron book will read them all. In his latest novel, a married couple ends up at a grand hotel in a strange European country of fading glory, amid guests who are both eccentric and troubling. At times it’s hard to know whether what is happening is really happening; at times it’s all too acid and real. I hesitate to call this book a comedy, because it’s unsettling. But it’s also magical and memorable, and you won’t want to check out and depart its pages.
