98 books like Little Deaths

I’ve read In Cold Blood at least twice, but I think three times is the actual count. The first time, I was in my early twenties, not yet a writer, and I remember being gobsmacked—love that word—by a single sentence.

I remember reading the sentence again. And again. It was a marvel to me how alive it was, and how it told me all I needed to know about a place to understand that place. Nothing happens here; move on, it said—“Like waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings had never stopped there.”

Mailer’s opus dramatizes the cursed life of Gary Gilmore. In 1976, he robbed and killed two strangers. After being tried and sentenced to death, Gilmore insisted on being executed, to the disagreement of the justice system, who wanted him to remain alive. Written simply and with great compassion, the novel is disturbing, yet ultimately thought-provoking and redemptive.

I find this book to be an unsettling but impactful read, both thought-provoking and complex. We Need to Talk about Kevin follows the mother of a troubled teenager responsible for a school shooting.

It’s about nature versus nurture, the relationship between mother and child, and deeply seated guilt. It draws inspiration from real events, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine, which wasn’t the U.S.’s first mass shooting at a school, but it would become one of the most infamous.

Shriver’s novel raises unsettling questions about a mother’s guilt and self-justification and a community’s heartache and blame. I consider it to be a captivating and moving book.

To say I love this book is to say I love torture, which may not be accurate. It’s better to say it burrowed into my brain and stayed there for far too long. I don’t get scared easily. But this novel caught me differently.

This one freaked me out on a level I’d never experienced before. Why? Because it’s the kind of story that could happen to anyone, especially to dingbats like me. And make no mistake: Nick, the “hero” of this story, is a complete dingbat. I mean, he’s smart. But he makes so many believably bad decisions in the face of a ruinous situation to preserve his own interests that we’re reminded how no one is immune to situations that conspire at every level to defeat us.

This book just gets under your skin and stays there. It did mine.

For me, this is another masterful interweaving of historical fact and wildly creative imagination. It’s a prime example of in-depth research wielded to tangibly ground the reader in the book’s world; you learn about everything from 19th-century psychological theory and forensics to quilt-making and housecleaning techniques.

Part of what I really love about the novel, though, is that unlike in The Handmaid’s Tale, here Atwood deliberately blurs the lines between “good” and “evil” and “victim” and “villain.” Grace isn’t entirely likable, and she’s pretty much entirely unreliable. So, embodying her perspective as a reader is a continual guessing game of whether or not she’s telling the truth about her role in the murders at the book’s center. At the same time, it’s also a kind of ethical guessing game, for even if Grace is guilty, Atwood makes the role society and class play in her downfall so painfully clear… show more.

I had to read this when it came out because it felt ripped from the headlines. Sarah Lai has left behind her Hollywood dreams of filmmaking for a quieter, simpler life. But a journalist reaches out and drags her past to the forefront by asking questions about Sarah’s experiences working with a celebrated producer. There have been… complaints. From women. A lot of women.

Sound familiar? This is a wholly fictional take on past events, but it also forces the reader to examine the ways in which we might be complicit in holding up systems, and what we can do to break bad patterns.

Engaging, timely, and I couldn’t put it down. Again, women find their voices and stand up for other women around them. That’s a narrative I can’t miss. 

I love how clever this book is! It seems like a simple premise, but the Sliding Doors-style structure, allowing us to follow Joanna into two different versions of the future, prompted me to think of all the similar moments of fear I’ve experienced and how they, too, could have ended in an ‘impossible decision.’

I was thrilled, angered, and gripped by both storylines individually, but it’s the way they knotted unexpectedly together that made me ask: What would I have done in this situation?

I read this gripping psychological noir about a woman escaping her past and falling into a steamy, lethal affair a few years ago, but it’s still vividly seared into my mind.

I found the writing utterly captivating, and I think Lippman is an absolute genius when it comes to plot. This twisty story of love, lies, betrayal, and revenge kept me guessing right until the very end–not to mention reading through the middle of the night!

If character-driven fiction is a hallmark of the modern, Western, realist novel, here’s a community-driven novel recounted in the first-person plural narration for all of its 200 pages. As the title suggests, Brown Girls is a coming-of-age story of brown girls, children of immigrants, who grow up in Queens, New York, although the novel’s biggest innovation lies in the way it makes it impossible to nail down the protagonist. The book’s narrator-protagonist, the “we” who continues to talk in the book, refers to a consistently fluid, changing, and inclusive community of straight and queer brown girls from NYC who share a South or Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, Latinx, biracial or other kinds of mixed-race identity, a narrative feat I haven’t yet encountered in another novel. 

Thomas’s 2015 novel revolves around Eileen Leary, a tough Irish American nurse yearning to break the middle-class mold in which her life is set when her husband, Ed, a neuroscientist, develops early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Thomas describes his slow deterioration and the ravages inflicted on Eileen and their son, Connell, in drawn-out moments and exquisite detail. In an especially harrowing scene, Eileen stays up all night watching her once brilliant husband struggle with the simple task of tabulating the final grades in his community college class.

Though the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae, it is as unsparing an account of Alzheimer’s as I have ever read.