Fans pick 100 books like The Silence

Privilege, entitlement, politics, and sleaze, it’s all here, along with the disturbing sense that many perpetrators get away with far too many misdeeds for most of their lives, while their victims’ lives are instantly thrown into crisis. It’s a solid, twisty psychological thriller with hints of the Bullingdon Club and Westminster bad behaviour.

Author Louise Doughty's books demonstrate that psychological suspense and crime novels can be literary fiction. Platform Seven is well-written but opens in a location that’s anything but inspiring – Peterborough railway station. What could possibly happen here? But we’re soon drawn into the isolation and menacing sense that it’s something very bad indeed. This novel could be called a ‘genre splice’ – part domestic noir and part ghost story. Doughty’s genius is laying the breadcrumb trail of clues to keep the reader turning the pages and staying ahead of Lisa, the main character. She seems to be unaware of what’s really going on, or perhaps chooses to ignore the signs. An emotional story with a theme of coercive behaviour for book clubs to discuss. 

A school siege is a theme that will strike terror into the hearts of teachers and parents everywhere. It’s that planned-for scenario that will ‘never happen here’ (rural Somerset). And then it does. Lupton slows down the narrative so it feels as if events are unfolding at a pace close to real time. Alongside the stress and anxiety, Lupton draws on her characters’ stories to examine the world we live in and aspects of humanity. There are stories of first love and parental despair, we glimpse the mind of a psychopath and the stoic heroism of two Syrian refugee brothers, who’ve already been through hell at the hands of people smugglers. Dormant racism rears its ugly head. It’s a poignant read with plenty for book clubs to discuss. 

I was late discovering Lisa Jewell’s psychological thrillers but I’m in awe of how her novels are a masterclass in psychological fiction. I’ve chosen Invisible Girl because it’s rooted firmly in the domestic noir genre with ordinary family life contrasting with what lies beneath. Characters are not what they seem to be. For book club discussion there’s a fascinating theme around how lonely misfit men can be radicalised online into the dark and sinister world of women-hating ‘incels.’ Incel stands for ‘involuntary celibates’: angry men who can’t find a woman to love them and blame all women. At the extreme, these men become unhinged and violent towards women they don’t even know. Others are sad losers, who become victims in other ways. Book clubs will find plenty to discuss in this novel.

Oh, this one? It is everything. The villain is a virgin! Which deep down we all want. Seraphena is promised to him since childhood, groomed into marrying him and killing him in order to save her country. When the wedding night comes – he rejects her, leaving her behind. People blame her. If she hated him before, she loathes him even more. Until he reappears into her life to save her and they both fight this attraction. She still has a mission, and this is her excuse to try to seduce him. He is a tough nut to crack. He is actually more in control of himself than she is. As she grows to know him in his supernatural surroundings, hatred is hard to keep and so is distance…

An American journalist, expelled from Italy in 1925, traces roots, rise, and rule of Il Duce in this 1935 book, which is as vivid as its title.

Mussolini appears as a cheap showman, who, “acting the Hero,” revived ancient Roman pomp and spectacles. He was also aware of the power of mass media, especially the cinema, “posing before men and moviemen.”

One of the virtues of Seldes’ book are the extensive quotations, which unmask Mussolini and others in their own words. Fascist documents, quoted at length, include “The Fascist Decalogue” (note its VIII. Commandment!) and the “Fascist Catechism,” which must be read to be (dis)believed.

Seldes’ book has become valuable again in the current age of assorted domestic and foreign media- and image-obsessed demagogues, autocrats, and dictators.

Migration is the great theme of the twenty-first century. Our experience has set historians on a quest to see how new the mass movement of peoples really is. Isayev’s book is one of the first full-length studies of migration in Roman times.

It is enormously wide-ranging, bringing together the evidence of archaeology and of Roman comedy and history with the insights of geographers and sociologists. We see populations transplanted against their will, enslaved prisoners, hostages, and refugees, but also settlers and traders trying to make their fortune, and explorers and travelling scholars. Best of all we explore the ways that Romans thought about this, sometimes encountering chillingly familiar hostility but more often positive views of new arrivals. Romans often thought of themselves as a city of immigrants, and saw their willingness to accept newcomers as one reason for their success. Isayev does a wonderful job of opening up this new… show more.

More often than not, people forget that the Vesuvian sites are, as gruesome as it sounds, large mass burials – not just of the cities themselves, but of people. The human remains of Pompeii (and by extension, Herculaneum) have been ignored or treated like some kind of circus attraction for centuries. What Lazar does is open your eyes to just how much information there is to be found from the casts and skeletons, and the potential to learn so much more about people and life in the first century. Her work is groundbreaking.

This is a dazzling mix of theory, sociology, and history. Falasca-Zamponi is attentive to the myths, rituals, festivals and ceremonies, symbols, and recurring images of Italian fascism—and she is attentive, too, to the political power that Mussolini relentlessly drew from such cultural forms.

With tremendous analytical imagination, Falasca-Zamponi unpacks the significance of the fascist salute, Mussolini’s balcony poses, all the axe-and-bundle imagery, those omnipresent black shirts, and the fascists’ distinctive “passo romano” marching style. For me, the heart of the book is its intense analysis of fascist violence as spectacle. Not just spectacle, though. Falasca-Zamponi also makes the case that for the early fascists violence—“great, beautiful, inexorable violence,” in Mussolini’s words—was sublime, regenerative, glorious, salvific.

The early fascists made violence, Falasca-Zamponi suggests, as if it were art. 

This book encompasses why I am passionate about spiritual giftings and how important they are in spiritual warfare. I love high-stakes and adventurous plots, and Lisa kept me turning pages late into the night. I learned so much history regarding the Church before the Reformation and was reminded how easy it is for the enemy to make evil appear attractive.

This book gave me a new awareness of the spiritual realm and the power of prayer and discernment. Besides, it takes place in Italy, and I am obsessed with Italy!