100 books like Mistaken

Here’s another book with two lovers occupying two parallel realities, though I would say that the romance is almost beside the point in this book, where a multitude of stranger, more engrossing things are always threatening to steal the spotlight: Cults! A town of cats! The return of Ushikawa! Two moons! A novel named Air Chrysalis! You couldn’t ask for more, really.

Such a peculiar book. The Horned Man is not for those who want answers or resolutions. By the time the final page is turned you'll find yourself with more questions than you had at any other point in the book. It takes the Unreliable Narrator device to the extreme, to the point where you don’t really believe anything from the get-go, a unique way to tell a story, but it works here. This book is dark, smart, uncomfortable, and it is unlike anything you'll ever read. Lasdun’s prose is also exceptional, and I’ve often found myself getting lost in his paragraphs, enjoying how I can stop and really take the time to re-read how the author has crafted his story, and lead you exactly where he wanted to.

A man is driving to some oceanside cliffs to end his life. On the way, he stops for a night at a B&B in a small fishing village. He meets a girl, who has disappeared in the morning, and the man thinks, “What the heck. I’ll just stick around here and pretend I’m the girl’s boyfriend (who no one in the village has met before) and wait until she returns.” The villagers grow increasingly suspicious (about everything, it seems) and the man is soon caught in an uncontrollable deception of his own making.

This is a really odd, really well-written Gothic tale by an author I’d never heard of (who doesn’t seem to have written anything before or since), but I picked it up because its vagueness intrigued me. It’s the interplay of the main character trying his best to pretend he’s someone he’s not, for reasons even he’s… show more.

This is post-modern crime fiction thematically linked and all with increasingly unreliable characters—because they’re each going insane.

In City of Glass private investigator, Daniel Quinn, goes mad sinking deeper into an investigation about identity. Who is telling his story and can they be relied on? Is it any of these characters who appear: ‘the author,’ ‘Paul Auster the writer,’ ‘Paul Auster the detective’?  Whoosh.

I love this stuff but understand it’s an acquired taste!

A post-Donna Tart’s Secret History-esque tale of literary mystics who make up a secret society at Trinity College Dublin which tends, unfairly, to get left behind in analyses of Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction.

This is fiction from or dealing with the abrupt and accelerated modernity that hit Ireland like a cultural torpedo in the early 2000s, and quite a lot of it fails to capture the discombobulation of living through that time.

The First Verse is a campus novel about sexy secretive students and shady deeds which also plots a queer geography of Dublin’s gay scene as well as illustrating the emotional tension that exists in Dublin between city centre and its polarised northern and southern suburbs.

Dublin is such a mannered city, caught in Georgian poses while falling apart as postmodernity obliterates its value system, that it surprises me there aren’t more Dublin novels about baroque subcultures. McCrea is… show more.

This is one of several excellent books that explores how nonhuman animals shaped cities (see also Andrew Robichaud’s Animal City, Frederick L. Brown’s The City is More Than Human, Dawn Day Biehler’s Pests in the City, and Hannah Velten’s Beastly London, for example). Cities are multispecies spaces and they have always been so, even as the history of a given city shifts and changes. When we walk through a city like Dublin today we may not immediately think about the many, many nonhuman animals who used to roam the same streets and pathways we walk on today. And yet, as Juliana Adelman explores in this book, there are hints and traces of this animal history if we know where to look.

I first read this book in my teens and it profoundly affected me. The storyline is set in Dublin from 1907 to 1914, when a third of the city’s residents were destitute. Large families lived in single rooms in the dilapidated former homes of wealthy landlords. The author weaves the lives of his fictional characters into the workers’ revolt and great lockout of 1913, a tragic time for the ordinary people of Dublin. In spite of this, there are wonderful scenes of kindness and self-sacrifice that a close-knit community will often provide. I feel this book greatly influenced my own writing decades after first reading it. 

I chose this short book because it casts light on a hidden history—that of faction fighting. Contrary to widespread belief, factions were not confined to rural areas in Ireland, nor were they a wholly nineteenth-century phenomenon. Kelly’s book provides a detailed account of the development of factions in eighteenth-century Dublin, from the Kevan Bail to the Ormond and Liberty Boys (and other little-known factions), and vividly describes the periodic disorder associated with them as they tried to establish control in the city. Kelly also outlines how the city’s economic and demographic growth led to the social conditions which nurtured factionalism, and he traces changes in the nature of factionalism as the eighteenth century progressed. An enthralling read about a topic that has often gone under the historiographical radar!

I picked this because it showed me – and still does – that the most foreign journey is within, and that when the body stops travelling, the spirit takes over the trek.

Brennan is a fabulous writer – at her best, among the best – and in her head (she wore a beehive that according to a colleague at The New Yorker was taller than she was) she is travelling all the time.

She ought to be better known. 

This Stella prize-winning novel is so mysterious, the ominous atmosphere shudders off the page.

It’s a modern-day parable about ten women who are abducted and held prisoner in the Australian desert. Gradually they realised the common thread between them is they’ve all been involved in a sex scandal with a powerful man.

Wood ingeniously takes to the patriarchy with a blow torch. It’s breathtakingly powerful. Reading the final line, I shut my eyes and my heart hurt. In a good way. 

"Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves."