100 books like Speaking of Summer

I didn’t think I could appreciate this memoir of a son searching for his imprisoned father in Gaddafi’s Libya until, suddenly, I did. This book showed me that the bonds between all fathers and their sons transcend things like nationality and religion. It is part of the core of what it means to be human.

I knew from the very first pages that the author would never again see his father, even as he tirelessly spends most of his adult life trying to. By extension, I understood that as much as we want to, we can never really know our fathers.

I raced through the pages.

Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat’s linked short-story collections brilliantly balance a focus on detail, gesture, and situation with a cumulative vision of place and fateful circumstance.

In Claire of the Sea Light, the disappearance of a young girl frames a sequence of tales about several members of the small seaside community where the girl lives with her father.

After Claire’s sudden disappearance in the opening narrative, we follow the adults’ betrayals, sacrifices, and missteps to the final story, when the missing girl’s own perceptions provide a moral and imaginative frame for the family and community she must now choose to rejoin or escape permanently.

Aimee Baker’s Doe is a diptych: poems in the first section focus on missing women, while those in the second section reimagine the lives of unidentified women.

Baker creates recurrent, multiple patterns of imagery that celebrate the beauty and dignity of each woman – in argument, essentially, with the ways true crime sometimes exploits and objectifies victims’ lives. At the same time, Doe is about North America as a captivating space of the imagination: the poet creates a geography by turns intimate and vast, familiar and strange, beautiful and terrible.

The finely-crafted textures of the poems in Doe, as well as the apparent dedication to investigation and research in the work overall, make for a rare combination.

Each of Andrew Porter’s two story collections and one novel develop missing persons as a theme. His latest collection, The Disappeared, also continues the author’s tendency to use place in ways that both locate and isolate his characters.

We find ourselves mainly in San Antonio, and sometimes Austin, Texas in The Disappeared, but the protagonists are also linked by a recurrent sense of hesitancy, missed opportunity, and fecklessness. Each story is about being middle-aged, but by the end, Porter has masterfully balanced his depictions of urban-male domesticity with a deeper, more existential sense of being human.

It is Porter’s evocation of missingness – sometimes foregrounded, sometimes slight – that creates the beautifully elegiac sensibility the reader is left with in finishing The Disappeared.

I love thrillers set in foreign locations that give me a glimpse into other cultures, along with a big dose of mystery and intrigue. This book delivers on all fronts.

I could not put this book down. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, I loved the dual points of view of Nicole, the missing British wife of a wealthy Nigerian businessman, and her estranged aunt Claudine, who arrives from London to look for her. The sense of dread, helplessness, and desperation both women experience throughout the book is palpable and devastating, making both characters relatable and well-developed. 

This book deftly explores the complications that arise when women, especially black women, go missing in foreign countries.

As I‘ve said, I love foreign-set thrillers, especially the ones set in England. And this was another book I devoured. 

Although the suspense and intrigue of the plot kept me glued to the pages, I had to put it down multiple times as I went through a range of emotions reading about black women and girls being let down, hurt, and preyed upon by the people meant to protect them.

I eagerly followed Eva’s journey, not just to find her birth mother and reclaim her identity, which was literally cut from her, but to expose the chilling truth of why four black women went missing, and the police didn’t look for them. 

This book was a sad reminder of how easily black women and girls fall through the cracks unnoticed.

I rarely read YA these days. But the description of a teenage girl searching for her best friend who has gone missing instantly grabbed me. And once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. I had to know what happened to Monday. 

I honestly don’t know if I could have gone through everything Claudia, the main character, did in her search for Monday, which made her such an appealing and sympathetic character. And I felt her anger, frustration, and confusion when no one seemed to care or even notice that Monday was gone. 

This book was an emotional sucker punch that stayed with me long after I was done with it and accurately portrays the reality of how unsafe the world can be for young black girls.

As much as I love foreign-set thrillers, I love cross-genre thrillers even more. And horror thrillers top the list. This book grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go until the last page. 

I love how the woods in the book are a sinister place with teeth and a creeping sense of dread every time Liz enters it. Although there were times I wanted to slap Liz for her poor decisions, I breathlessly followed her investigation to uncover her own connection to what lurks in the woods and the mystery of decades of missing and murdered black girls in her hometown.

This book is a thought-provoking exploration of evil and just how easy it is for fear and hatred to grow into something truly terrifying.

This is the only book that has ever made me physically sweat while reading it. I admit to being a true crime junkie, and this book scratched that itch in a huge way – despite being fiction.

Jumping back and forth between the day of a family’s horrific murder and present-day, where the surviving daughter is obsessively sought after by true crime enthusiasts (heyo!) and internet sleuths, this book turned a glaring spotlight on the hardships of both the economically poor, and single parenthood.

To say this book left me devastated would be an understatement. Add in a touch of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and this page-turner is nothing short of an absolute masterpiece of character work and cultural empathy. Not only did this book give me 759 heart attacks (the good kind), but it had me guessing up until the very last page.

The narration is completely devoted to the worldview of main character Harry White. A man who climbs the ladder of corporate and social America thanks to unnatural drives inside him both dedicated to achieving his success and predicated ultimately to securing his eventual self-destruction. The demon is inside Harry White and it is the American dream. An extraordinary novel from an extraordinary writer who had already written himself into the annals of American literature with such classics as Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Room. The Demon in my view is Selby Jr.’s most personal and impersonal work.