The best true stories that are as fun to read as fiction

From To Kill a Mockingbird to A Time to Kill to A Few Good Men, the courtroom drama is modern America’s version of Greek theater. Who doesn’t relish rooting for the underdog, witnessing a masterful cross-examination, or watching a team of legal gunslingers take down a maleficent corporation? Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action offers all of that high-octane drama in a unique package: every word of the story is true. I read the book in college, and it inspired me to go to law school. A Civil Action has the brisk pacing and rich characterization of a novel, yet its real-world grounding makes it as enlightening as it is entertaining. When I set out to write my own book, I borrowed Harr’s template and wrote it like a legal thriller that just so happens to be true. 

If every American loves a good courtroom drama, every American also loves to hate the Sackler family, the billionaire founders of Purdue Pharma. It is hard to understate the devastation that this single family has caused in countless communities across the United States. In Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe, a journalist with The New Yorker, brings the Sacklers to life in three-dimensional technicolor and with prose that is at once elegant and delightful to read. The story he tells is shocking, disturbing, and admirably humane, a complex portrait of a family who built a dynasty, yet who knew early on that its crown jewel, OxyContin, was dangerously addictive and who peddled it like candy anyway. A lyrically written page-turner, Empire of Pain is hard to put down.

Michael Lewis is a literary magician. He can take the most obscure and unpalatable topic, find a story buried somewhere inside it, and turn that story into a book so good that you want to tell your friends about it. The Big Short is Lewis at his best. It tells the story of a motley crew of unconventional stock traders who saw the diabolical lie at the center of the subprime mortgage boom and bet against the market when the market was sizzling. They were Cassandras, destined never to be believed—until the market crashed in 2008, their detractors lost their shirts, and they made off like bandits. Also, with The Big Short, you get two for the price of one: Adam McKay, one of my favorite Hollywood directors, turned the book into a film that is as entertaining as its literary inspiration.

I’ve always had a fascination with America’s political capital, Washington, D.C.—the way it brings together some of the most brilliant and bombastic people in the universe, the way it serves as a petri dish of high-minded principles and low-brow appetites, the juxtaposition of glittering surface and seamy underside that made the early seasons of House of Cards so binge-able. In This Town, Mark Leibovich brings D.C. to life in a story that is at once stomach-churning, rage-inducing, and laugh-out-loud funny. If you’ve ever wondered what Washington is really like behind all the flag-waving and politicking, the talking points, and stage lights, this is the book for you.

When I was a kid, I loved history but hated history books. My favorite way to learn about the past was to read well-written historical novels. That was before Erik Larson landed on the literary scene. His books are as compelling as fiction, but they are entirely true. In The Devil in the White City, Larson tells the rollicking, tumultuous, and sordid story of the Chicago World Fair in 1893 through the eyes of the architects and savants whose genius brought the fair to life in the face of impossible odds and through the eyes of the Jekyll-and-Hyde businessman-cum-serial killer who stalked the fair for beautiful and unattached young women and left a trail of bodies as long as Jeffrey Dahmer before an intrepid investigator finally discovered his scheme—and basement crematorium.