Fans pick 100 books like Resin

I’m a fan of speculative fiction and those rare novels set on Svalbard. This novel satisfies both cravings. 

Spurred by a desire to change his life, Jack Miller joins an expedition to northern Svalbard in January 1937 and is abandoned by his companions as the dark season approaches. Paver mines the psychological page-turning quality of a great ghost story with beautiful language and palpable descriptions of the Arctic landscape and its natural wonders. 

Left alone, Jack must deal with loneliness and isolation and their effects on his psyche. It’s hard to avoid such themes when you’re dealing with an extreme setting like the High Arctic, especially during the months of total darkness, but they are themes that make me think about the great philosophical questions such as how one finds meaning in life.

This novel has so many reasons to recommend it. It incorporates radical experimentation and horrifying surgeries being done in a bizarre hospital. To make it even more mysterious, there is a hurricane threatening the island which complicates the investigation of US Marshall Teddy Daniels searching for a patient who has disappeared.

I loved the creepy island hospital and the use of weather as a character.

I loved visiting the Shetland isles with world-weary police inspector Jimmy Perez. The islands, the unique culture, weather, and the remoteness were such compelling components of the story. I loved how Ms. Cleeves used Scotland as one of her characters. She created this lush and detailed world that’s eerie and uncomfortable, the perfect setting for a murder mystery.

I’m also a sucker for a grumpy detective, and Jimmy Perez is such an understandably jaded character, but he still has a kind, warm heart under his crusty exterior that comes out when he’s interacting with his more novice colleagues and members of the community. 

Pied Pier, soul stealer, serial killer. Who is Mr. Clarinet? On the island of Haiti – not yet recovered from the sickeningly corrupt rule of Papa Doc Duvalier – children are vanishing amidst rumours of black magic and voodoo. Private investigator, Max Mingus, is hired to track down the son of a wealthy islander. Nick Stone lived for many years in Haiti, and his in-depth knowledge of the place seeps through the book like the blood of its numerous victims. The Haiti of this novel is dark, lawless, dangerous, and utterly fascinating. 

I’m often asked by Americans who aren’t familiar with Wollstonecraft (or confuse mother and daughter), which of her books to read first. Vindication of the Rights of Woman is her most famous, but I always answer that if you only read one, this book is it. It’s her most modern and personal work, and the last thing she wrote before dying of puerperal fever at age 38, after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley. It’s part travelogue, love letter, philosophical treatise, cultural history, and (I would argue) suicide note, bookended by her two attempts after a shattering affair with American speculator Gilbert Imlay. It’s short and accessible, beautifully written, and a glimpse into a magnificent mind.

When I met my husband’s family a couple of decades back, his cousin told me: “You’ll never survive a relationship with a Swede if you do not know what “Lagom” is ”Lagom is our way of life.”

“Lagom” could be translated as “the right balance.” It means not too much and not too little. It can apply to work or to alcohol consumption. The Swedes often say “Lagom är bäst,” “Lagom is best”.

With a great sense of humour, Everdahl sheds an interesting light on Swedish culture. You’ll never see the Vikings the same way after this read!

This is one of the few novels that genuinely scared me. I was so tense during the first half of the book when the friends were hiking in a remote Swedish wilderness and being hunted by… something. Nevill does an amazing job of keeping the tension through this part of the book pulled so taut that I was mesmerized.

Then I was completely caught out by the turn the novel takes around the middle and it started to appeal to everything I love about folk horror and the supernatural, and it appealed to my love of heavy music. One of my all-time favourite books, I didn’t want it to end.

Now here’s a fun flip on so-called “cosy” crime. Remember the twist of Columbo, the way the show started with us viewers seeing the murderer commit the crime and then allowing us to watch Columbo slowly assembled his case against them? This book by Helene Tursten and translated to English by Marlaine Delargy offers a similar vibe. Our protagonist Maud has more than one notch on her proverbial belt, and we get to hear about each killing, along with the justification for them all. All the grit you’d expect from Scandinavian crime, but with the delightful slant of this outwardly fragile old lady being the center of it all. From Sweden to South Africa, Maud makes her mark! Plus there are cookie recipes, with a distinctly Scandi-noir flavor.

Taking place in northern Sweden, where the cold and snowy environment plays its own part, this story focuses on a cult-like church where the founder has been brutally murdered. A lawyer and friend of the victim’s sister, Rebecka Martinsson, travels up from Stockholm to help solve the case. It’s dark and gritty and suspenseful – it’s also the first of 6 books. 

Recent genetic research on the human remains of a 10th-century Viking grave excavated in 1878 in Birka, Sweden, rocked the world of Viking studies when it determined that the warrior buried with numerous weapons and two horses was not male, but female. I loved how this author imagines what that woman’s life might have been like. She also suggests that the woman buried in the Birka grave was merely one of many female Viking warriors, offering data drawn from archaeological finds, from historical accounts, from language studies, and from the sagas to support the theory that ‘shield maids’ really did exist. I had been dubious about the possibility of female Vikings, but the arguments presented in this book are too compelling. Reading it changed my mind. Now I’m a believer.