100 books like Vertigo

So what if his worldview never makes sense to anyone but himself? I see Holden Caulfield as the quintessential benchmark for a bad boy, shucking off the last few days at the boarding school that expelled him to wander around Manhattan in a daze. Some readers don’t like him so much that they are personally invested in attacking him and what he represents. 

But what is it that he represents, exactly? When I look beyond the surface of his false bravado, he’s a character deeply affected by the death of his brother and is setting out on a quest to understand how to be a real person in a world of phonies. Many of us, as teenagers, also have moments of feeling misunderstood and alone. I know I did, and so did Holden. 

This book remains one of the most evocative texts for me about where truth lies in a story. But this beautifully crafted version of the events that ended Joe Cinque’s life is no fiction. My heart breaks every time I read it, my rage at the callousness of his murderer and deep-seated sadness at the carelessness of his friends bubbles anew with each foray into the pages. Garner’s writing takes me to the scene, to the court, and into the very core of his family’s grief. Powerful. 

I love Nordic crime and Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indridason writes a good game. His Detective Erlendur is a complex man who has little luck in his relationships with the living; but when it comes to solving murder and mystery, he is like a dog with a bone. Like all his Reykjavik Murder Mysteries there are several strands interwoven to create a multi-layered puzzle. At the heart of the series, and this fifth book, is the one mystery that he can’t, yet most desperately wants to solve, his brother’s disappearance in a snowstorm when they were boys. Everyone lies, particularly the guilty.

Brian McGilloway’s novel is told in the first person from the perspective of a grieving mother who tries to pick through the lies and secrets to uncover what happened to her only child. On her journey she uncovers the brutal truth; everybody lies. The book takes a realistic look at Dora Condron’s emotional descent into a bleak world where she comes to believe that no one will tell the truth. I like most of all that it is crime novel, a mystery, and a family drama that is told from the single perspective. The mother’s introspection about her failings as a parent really hits home when we consider what our own last words might have been to a loved one who walks out the door and never walks back in. 

Like all of Neil Gaiman’s works, this comic book is haunting and meaningful. Laced with DC references, philosophy, and nightmares, we lose ourselves in its strange world, or should I say, worlds? We follow Tim, a 13-year-old on the brink of becoming one of the greatest magic wielders of all time. But magic comes at a cost, and perhaps he should know that, or at least that’s what the four unlikely guides of our hero believe. And here starts the trip into magic and its many worlds, including a great meeting with Death herself in the afterlife.

This must be my favourite personification of Death ever, managing to be both fun and kind. This is a great meaty adventure comic that really makes you travel and gives you an experience like no other. Don’t expect childishness here, and don’t put it in the hands of too young an audience as… show more.

Juan Villoro’s memoir takes readers on a tour of contemporary Mexico City that is also a meditation on chilangos’ (Mexico City residents) relationship with the past. The book bounces between the author’s childhood in the neighborhoods of Mixcoac and Del Valle and the present day, traversing the sprawling metropolis and giving readers a sense of its scale and complexity. Through Villoro, we meet the sewer cleaners and tire repairmen who keep the city humming. We visit monuments like the Angel of Independence and Chapultepec Castle and the bustling spaces of Santo Domingo Plaza and Tepito—places that seem to hover between past and present and myth and reality. At once spry and erudite, the book is an immensely satisfying rumination on the city and its people. 

Philipp Blom has an exceptional mind. This book looks at the fourteen years prior to the outbreak of the First World War with a depth and breadth you won’t find anywhere else. It somehow captures the broad, transdisciplinary rush to knowledge, to comprehend the new, that at a deep level characterized this period. You learn something or get a fresh perspective on almost every page and you begin to understand the pre-war years for what they were - a powderkeg of change ready to burst across almost every established boundary.

Fires in Australia in 2019 and 2020 killed billions of animals in a climate disaster. The numbers are impossible to comprehend.

In this beautiful, elegiac book, Dr. Celermajer grieves the losses by telling of one of her beloved pigs. She moves outward to reflect on how individual stories allow us to remember enormous losses. She refuses to tell this story of a climate catastrophe by telling of a few wrongdoers.

In one powerful reflection, she concludes that it is essential if almost impossible to say ‘it is I, it is I’ when speaking of who brought these losses. 

Published in February, 2022, this is the most modern of my five choices. An impressive debut by an author who lives in a one-hundred-and-fourteen-year-old haunted house, The Hitman’s Daughter embodies modern Gothic, with its atmospheric setting in a haunted, historic, past-its-prime hotel/chateau, a gruesome murder, a whiff of the supernatural, and a kick-ass heroine (Mave) plagued by her past (and daddy issues.) Thanks to a massive New Year’s Eve blizzard that traps Mave and the chateau’s high-society guests at the scene of a crime, this felt like a twisted, claustrophobic game of Clue.

On New Year's Eve, four Londoners climb to the top of a high rise with the same intention. They've all come for different reasons, but their plan is the same. Instead of ending their lives, however, they save each other. 

I love this novel, which is perhaps the truest and most hopeful story about suicide I’ve read. The final scene, which takes place on the one-year anniversary of the opening scene, is something I think of at least once a year, and I am always shaken by its insight. At times, side-splittingly funny and heart-rendingly sad, this is a must-read for anyone recovering from a mental illness.