Here are 74 books that A Hall of Mirrors fans have personally recommended if you like
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The key to a great contemporary thriller—as opposed to older novels about say, Sherlock Holmes or James Bond—is that solving the mystery reveals something essential about the protagonist. In other words these are character investigations as well as whodunits, where the same action provides revelations in both arenas. It’s what I discovered I wanted to do, when I veered from “serious fiction” to the books I began to write, starting with Presumed Innocent.
Set in Mexico in the 1930s when the revolutionary government engaged in an active campaign against the Catholic Church, Greene’s hero, the so-called Whiskey Priest, is a drunk who has also failed to adhere to his vow of chastity, but his kindness and commitment to worshippers make him an intensely sympathetic figure, as he is hunted by the local police chief determined to put him behind bars.
The book was a revelation to me when I first read it in college. I did not realize that the Mexican government had engaged in this war against the Church so recently. Nor did I realize that a novel so gripping could be told with such literary grace.
During an anti-clerical purge in Mexico, a priest is hunted like a hare. Too human for heroism, too humble for martyrdom, the little worldly priest is nevertheless impelled towards his squalid Calvary as much by his own compassion for humanity as by the efforts of his pursuers.
I’m a music historian who loves to read novels. Most of my childhood was spent either playing the piano or devouring whatever books I could get my hands on. Now, I try to share my love of music and good writing with my students at Boston University. When not at school, you can usually find me exploring the trails of New England with my dog.
Whether trying to finish an email or a book, I feel Dorothy Parker’s words deeply: “I hate writing,” she is purported to have said, but “I love having written.”
In this book, protagonist Jacob Finch Bonner does Parker one better. Stuck after his well-received first novel, he takes someone else’s story and passes it off as his own. Korelitz unravels the dire consequences, though with fizzy, suspenseful glee rather than scared-straight preachiness.
Bonner may not be, as he tells himself, “a great writer,” but Korelitz certainly is. It made me want to try to write again: hate, love, and all other feelings welcome.
** NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! ** The Tonight Show Summer Reads Winner ** A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 **
"Insanely readable." ―Stephen King
Hailed as "breathtakingly suspenseful," Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a propulsive read about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.
Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written―let alone published―anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student,…
We’ve all read them: the girl who is unknowingly of royal blood but was sequestered to an ordinary family to protect her identity. The detective with the broken home and a drink problem is driven to solve the crime. The action hero who can shoot their way out of any encounter. While these tropes are the bread and butter of genre fiction, they get overused. I found that my favorite and most engaging characters were those with complicated lives whose pasts might catch up with them at an inconvenient moment. Here are some of my favorite stories with unconventional characters that shine through the narrative.
George Smiley is a most unlikely hero for a spy thriller. He’s old, tired, and just wants to be left with his books and his research. He wears big, comical glasses, and his wife, the lovely Lady Anne, refers to him as her “Toad.” He doesn’t look like a spy at all.
George is old-school—careful, meticulous, and precise. In this book, we are gifted with an insider's view of a gimlet mind as he sifts through the traces of all that’s been buried, in pursuit, not only of the truth but of the foul trick that has turned the British Secret Service inside out. I came to deeply respect George’s integrity, his ability to self-evaluate, and see clearly not only the strategies and ploys of his enemy but also his own flaws and weaknesses.
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies.
The man he knew as "Control" is dead, and the young Turks who forced him out now run the Circus. But George Smiley isn't quite ready for retirement-especially when a pretty, would-be defector surfaces with a shocking accusation: a Soviet mole has penetrated the highest level of British Intelligence. Relying only on his wits and a small, loyal cadre, Smiley recognizes the hand of Karla-his Moscow Centre nemesis-and sets a trap to catch the traitor.
The Oscar-nominated feature film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is directed by…
The key to a great contemporary thriller—as opposed to older novels about say, Sherlock Holmes or James Bond—is that solving the mystery reveals something essential about the protagonist. In other words these are character investigations as well as whodunits, where the same action provides revelations in both arenas. It’s what I discovered I wanted to do, when I veered from “serious fiction” to the books I began to write, starting with Presumed Innocent.
Sheldon Horowitz, an aging widower suffering from dementia, has been removed from New York to Oslo, so he can live with his granddaughter, his only relative, and her new husband.
Confused but wily, Horowitz is soon on the run in a country he does not know, hiding the neighbor boy being pursued by the thug who murdered the boy’s mother. This book was a total surprise to me, and seemed an unlikely amalgam of elements that could never work together—but did.
He will not admit it to Rhea and Lars - never, of course not - but Sheldon can't help but wonder what it is he's doing here...Eighty-two years old, and recently widowed, Sheldon Horowitz has grudgingly moved to Oslo, with his grand-daughter and her Norwegian husband. An ex-Marine, he talks often to the ghosts of his past - the friends he lost in the Pacific and the son who followed him into the US Army, and to his death in Vietnam. When Sheldon witnesses the murder of a woman in his apartment complex, he rescues her six-year-old son and decides…
I'm Associate Professor of Economics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, USA. My expertise is in conflict, war, and peace economics. I'm deeply motivated to understand the broader impacts of violent conflicts in low-income countries with the hope that doing so will pave the way for us to live in a more harmonious world. Recently, I've been interested in economics of cultural heritage destruction during violent conflicts. My aim is to understand patterns of heritage destruction in the past such that we can incorporate heritage destruction in atrocity forecasting models of today. I'm just as passionate to teach what I have learned over the years and what I'm curious to explore in the future.
I bought Kalyvas’s book back in 2009 as a doctoral student looking to understand the social science literature on civil war violence and finished reading it only in 2023 as an associate professor interested in studying target choice for a class I was teaching.
Though singularly focused on civil wars, the book goes deep in constructing theoretical arguments to support the premise of the book and travels broad in applying the models across various civil wars. It teaches readers to look beneath the surface to understand what we observe on the outside.
It is a great resource for those looking for good examples of how to develop a theoretical model. Finally, I also highly recommend this book to graduate students looking for research ideas.
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of…
I’m a history professor at Western Washington University. I first got interested in understanding social movements, power, and political violence in the late 1990s and early ‘00s as a young anarchist. Later, while studying history in graduate school, I realized that much of what I thought I knew about the FBI, violence, and radical movements of the 1960s and ‘70s was inaccurate. I don’t have any magic solutions to the problems facing humanity, but I believe that studying history—including the history of political violence—can help us better understand our present moment and how we might build a more just and peaceful world.
Prior to this book, most works on the long history of terrorism applied contemporary definitions of the term to various incidents throughout world history. Wilson turned the page on this framework.Killing Strangersanalyzes the gamut of political violence in Western Europe and North America since the late eighteenth century to explain how we’ve arrived at a contemporary reality characterized, in part, by recurring fear of impersonal atrocities carried out in public gathering spaces. Wilson shows how, on one hand, the rise of the modern bureaucratic state’s “monopoly” on legitimate force pushed most violent challengers to the fringes of society. On the other hand, various technological innovations—from dynamite and automobiles to commercial airlines and satellite television—offered new possibilities for those intent on violent havoc.
A bewildering feature of so much contemporary political violence is its stunning impersonality. Every major city centre becomes a potential shooting gallery; and every metro system a potential bomb alley. Victims just happen, as the saying goes, to 'be in the wrong place at the wrong time'.
We accept this contemporary reality - at least to some degree. But we rarely ask: where has it come from historically? Killing Strangers tackles this question head on. It examines how such violence became 'unchained' from inter-personal relationships. It traces the rise of such impersonal violence by examining violence in conjunction with changing…
I have always been interested in political and social events around me, and being from Turkey, it was inevitable not to be surrounded by the news of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK that has been going on for decades. However, perhaps due to being a member of the non-Muslim minority community of Turkey myself, I have always been interested in the ‘non-mainstream’ explanations of a state-ethnic group conflict. This interest in alternative explanations led me to study an MSc in Nationalism Studies and to a PhD in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, with the focus of my thesis being Kurdishness in Turkey.
This book is a brilliant example of how to properly conduct an anthropological ethnography amongst Kurds and to use the ethnographic data whilst presenting your argument.
I read and reviewed this book when it was first published in 2014, one year after I had finished my own ethnographic fieldwork across different cities in Turkey and Northern Kurdistan for my PhD research that I eventually turned it into the book I advertise here.
I could not help but feel impressed and influenced by the meticulous attention to detail in the ethnographic work.
This detailed work, combined with the tragic personal narratives of the interviewees, makes this an intriguing book to get a glimpse into what being a Kurd means in current Turkey.
The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey examines political violence, the politics of fear and the Kurdish experience of pain through an analysis of life stories, personal narratives and testimonies of Kurdish subjects in contemporary Turkey. It traces the physical and psychological impacts of the war between the state security forces and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) guerrillas in the last three decades, in Kurdish populated areas in the south-eastern part of Turkey.
Focusing on the instrumentalization of violence, the ensuing and manufactured culture of fear, gendered experiences of state violence, pain, incarceration, and corporeal punishment, Ramazan Aras argues that these…
As someone who studies and writes about Latin American anarchism for a living, I’ve encountered no shortage of influential historical accounts written by scholars and activists writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English during the past sixty years. My “best of” list includes English-language histories that reflect important shifts in how people began to study and write about anarchism beginning in the 1990s. Before then—and continuing up to today to some extent—historians often focused on the role of anarchists in a country’s labor movement. Today, historians increasingly explore both the cultural and transnational dimensions of Latin American anarchism. In these studies, authors frequently explore the roles of and attitudes toward women in anarchist politics.
Craib’s Renegade uses a biographical approach to explore larger cultural and transnational politics—this time in early twentieth-century Chile. Again, migration—so crucial to the history of Latin American anarchism—plays a central role in understanding the multinational dimensions of anarchism in countries across the region. Craib uses the life and death of the anarchist poet Domingo Gómez Rojas, along with his friends and comrades, to explore the Chilean anarchists and their relations with student rebels. The book illustrates how anarchists in Chile created urban “transnational communities” of anarchists born in Santiago, anarchists who moved to the capital, and anarchists who immigrated to Chile. They then used their culture and multinational experiences to forge transnational connections beyond Chile.
On October 1, 1920, the city of Santiago, Chile, came to a halt as tens of thousands stopped work and their daily activities to join the funeral procession of Jose Domingo Gomez Rojas, a 24 year old university student and acclaimed poet. Nicknamed "the firecracker poet" for his incendiary poems, such as "The Cry of the Renegade", Gomez Rojas was a member of the University of Chile's student federation (the FECh) which had come under repeated attack for its critiques of Chile's political system and ruling parties. Government officials accused the FECh's leaders of being advocates for the destruction of…
I am Professor of Early Modern Literature at Bangor University, Wales UK and Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Âge Classique et les Lumières, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France. I am someone who has been interested throughout his career in all aspects of what used to be called the European Renaissance and especially in establishing a dialogue between cultural debates raging four hundred years ago and those which dominate our own everyday lives in the twenty-first century. In the past, my work has addressed ideas, for example, concerned with social theory, the construction of cultural space, and the significance of memory.
This book is a meditation on the ways in which violence has come to shape everyday life in the modern age, from the international political stage to scenes of our own daily routines.
Particularly poignant and thought-provoking are Žižek’s considerations of how inactivity, passivity, and reluctance to engage may ultimately be the most violent courses of action to adopt.
I'm a professor of modern U.S. history and have spent my career researching this list's fascinating era. This moment began our modern political history. The first Red Scare in the United States, erupting in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, was a conflict over the definition and limits of radicalism in a modern democracy and the limits of its repression. It was also tied to other seismic questions of the era that remain relevant, including how far the fights of women and Blacks for opportunities and rights that other Americans took for granted could succeed, whether to end mass immigration, the meaning of ‘Americanism,’ the extent of civil liberties, the limits of capitalism, and the role of social movements in the republic.
One of the great historians of our time just published the best overview of this period we have yet and it places the Red Scare and Red Summer (widespread attacks on Black communities on an unprecedented scale) of 1919 at the center of its 1917-1921 sweep. We get a great picture of how the World War I home front escalated repression and the U.S. connections to an explosive international situation during and after the war, including the Russian Revolution.
National Bestseller • One of the year's most acclaimed works of nonfiction • A Best Book of 2022: New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus
From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor
The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions…
