Here are 75 books that We Are the Water People fans have personally recommended if you like
We Are the Water People.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Crime is intrinsically interesting. From an early age, we’re taught behavioral norms. Hearing of transgressions, we ask, “How’d this happen?... Is it true?... What’s the deeper meaning?” Audiobooks also have a unique ability to engage us. With my reporting background plus a historical novel under my belt, I began researching the real-life case behind Takers Mad, aiming to bring it to life with the intimacy, suspense, and power of an audio drama. Then I was gobsmacked to find fresh evidence in this Gilded Age murder. Now, with Khristine Hvam’s ultra-talented narration, I hope our work entertains and also leads listeners to ponder vital questions—just like the best crime audiobooks.
Madhuri Shekar’s groundbreaking psychological thriller helped show new ways that audiobooks could plunge listeners into a story. I’m sure I wasn’t the only author who took note. Evil Eye follows a mother who immigrated to the U.S. from India as she prepares to accept her daughter’s partner into the family. But she is troubled by an old crime. The tale is told almost entirely through phone calls and voice messages. That meticulously constructed delivery heightens the suspense as we discover how trauma can span oceans and overlap generations.
Evil Eye garnered an Audie Award for Original Work in 2020.
Usha is convinced that the Evil Eye, a curse that brings continuous misfortune, was cast upon her daughter, Pallavi, in the womb. What else could have possibly left her driven, career-oriented daughter edging closer and closer to 30 without a prospective husband? Determined to set Pallavi on the right path, Usha arranges date after date with potential suitors - but after yet another setup fails, it seems her efforts are proving fruitless. But in an unexpected turn of events, Pallavi becomes her own matchmaker when she meets - and…
Crime is intrinsically interesting. From an early age, we’re taught behavioral norms. Hearing of transgressions, we ask, “How’d this happen?... Is it true?... What’s the deeper meaning?” Audiobooks also have a unique ability to engage us. With my reporting background plus a historical novel under my belt, I began researching the real-life case behind Takers Mad, aiming to bring it to life with the intimacy, suspense, and power of an audio drama. Then I was gobsmacked to find fresh evidence in this Gilded Age murder. Now, with Khristine Hvam’s ultra-talented narration, I hope our work entertains and also leads listeners to ponder vital questions—just like the best crime audiobooks.
Greg Donahue uses a trove of archival audio to dive into how David Hardy, a Pulitzer-Prize-nominated reporter who was instrumental in integrating newsrooms, struck up an unlikely friendship with his most mysterious source, David Friedland—a lawyer, fraudster, and government witness whose pastimes include chess and hand-feeding sharks. After faking his own death in the Bahamas to avoid arrest, Friedland also became one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives. The dynamism of these two real-life characters kept drawing me in. As did the revealing, decades-old recordings and the author’s impressive framing of history.
A lonely chalet at the summit of a snow-capped peak was the last place you would expect to find David Hardy. As an intrepid political reporter for the Daily News, the New Jersey native spent most of his time cornering officials in the halls and backrooms of the state’s government buildings or poring over the endless handwritten notes that covered his cluttered newsroom desk. In fact, the flight to Switzerland was one of the first times that Hardy had ever been on a plane.
But in March of 1986, a cassette tape landed on Hardy’s desk that changed everything. The…
Crime is intrinsically interesting. From an early age, we’re taught behavioral norms. Hearing of transgressions, we ask, “How’d this happen?... Is it true?... What’s the deeper meaning?” Audiobooks also have a unique ability to engage us. With my reporting background plus a historical novel under my belt, I began researching the real-life case behind Takers Mad, aiming to bring it to life with the intimacy, suspense, and power of an audio drama. Then I was gobsmacked to find fresh evidence in this Gilded Age murder. Now, with Khristine Hvam’s ultra-talented narration, I hope our work entertains and also leads listeners to ponder vital questions—just like the best crime audiobooks.
Adapted from a one-woman performance at the Minetta Lane Theater by the talented stage actor Carey Mulligan, Girls & Boys is a gripping and sometimes painful examination of domestic violence. The writer Dennis Kelly, who is acclaimed for his work in British television and film, creates a strikingly realistic narrator and an unforgettable storyline to examine how relationships can go horribly wrong. It’s a sad story, well-written and with brilliant acting. Kelly and Mulligan left a lasting mark on me.
When they met at an airport, it was love at first sight. But in time, everything collapsed. As an unnamed but unforgettable woman muses on her life—from meet cute to marriage and parenthood—her recollections inexorably build to a devastating truth. In this shattering performance, Carey Mulligan, star of the critically lauded drama An Education, captivates audiences with playwright Dennis Kelly’s harrowing ruminations on family, ambition, gender, and violence. An acclaimed Off-Broadway play, the gut-wrenching world of Girls & Boys now thrives as an Audible Theater production.
After the play, this program includes an interview with Tony-winning playwright Dennis Kelly, who…
Crime is intrinsically interesting. From an early age, we’re taught behavioral norms. Hearing of transgressions, we ask, “How’d this happen?... Is it true?... What’s the deeper meaning?” Audiobooks also have a unique ability to engage us. With my reporting background plus a historical novel under my belt, I began researching the real-life case behind Takers Mad, aiming to bring it to life with the intimacy, suspense, and power of an audio drama. Then I was gobsmacked to find fresh evidence in this Gilded Age murder. Now, with Khristine Hvam’s ultra-talented narration, I hope our work entertains and also leads listeners to ponder vital questions—just like the best crime audiobooks.
Unspooled as an episodic series, Danielle Elliot traces the true story of one woman’s long-running nightmare in Vancouver. Police received hundreds of complaints about a stalker and then repeatedly arrived at shocking scenes. But authorities began to doubt the victim’s claims—until she was found dead. I’ve long admired the hard-boiled writing of Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar, and I don’t think it is only the Canadian setting that makes Death by Unknown Event remind me of their work, but rather the psychological intrigue. Except the twisting plot of these 12 episodes is no work of fiction—sometimes life just can be that strange.
For seven years, Vancouver nurse Cindy James reported more than 100 separate incidents of harassment, ranging from threatening phone calls to home invasions to ritualistic assaults, including strangulations and stabbings. Canada’s Royal Mounted Police spent over a million dollars investigating her claims and found zero evidence of foul play, leading them to suspect she was making it all up. Then, in 1989, Cindy was found dead, bound and naked, half a mile from where her car was parked in a shopping mall. What happened to Cindy James remains one of the most bizarre and perplexing true crime stories in recent…
I’ve always loved good literary fiction for the opportunity it provides to step into someone else’s life for a brief period. I’ve lived and worked intensely in the medical and health development field for over two decades in many beautiful parts of the great African continent. I’ve come to understand that we all go about our lives with similar goals, concerned with the same universal themes. What a joy it is to find great books by authors who know their African settings. Not only do the characters’ stories move me, but I learn and become more curious about the political history in the background.
Yusuf is a young boy, an indentured servant to an Arab trader, living in a cloistered environment amidst much he doesn’t understand. On a trading trip from the Swahili coast, through the foothills of Kilimanjaro, and on to Lake Victoria, he has the opportunity to see foreign wonders, learn how the trader negotiates, and see the attitudes of the Swahili traders toward the people from the interior, the relatively new Indian immigrants, and the German colonizers. The trip is brutal; descriptions are straightforward and realistic but the author never sensationalizes events. This is an important piece of the incredible variety in the mosaic of African culture and history. The honesty and authenticity the author provides make it clear what he has to offer the literary world and why he was awarded a Nobel prize.
Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, 12-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into the complexities of precolonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf's eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence.
Since I first visited Africa in 2004 I’ve found it difficult to tear myself away. I’ve lived in South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, and Sudan and travelled in all corners of the continent. I’ve participated in a revolution, hung out with the illegal fishermen of Lake Victoria, been cursed—and protected—by witch doctors, and learned Swahili. I’ve also read extensively about the place, written three books about it, and broadcast from it for the BBC World Service. In my other life I research and write about international development for universities and global organisations. This too has a focus on Africa.
Tanzania is a country I have fallen in love with over the past few years and my most recent book is about the Tanzanian half of Lake Victoria.
Vassanji’s book tells the story of his upbringing in Dar es Salaam as well as his travels around the country, from Lake Victoria to Zanzibar. It’s particularly interesting on the subject of East Africa’s South Asian communities, which the author grew up in, and their interactions with both European colonisers and black Africans.
I lived in Dar es Salaam for a while and loved observing this ancient community’s traditions (and eating at the city’s excellent Indian restaurants). Vassanji’s novel, The Gunny Sack, is also worth a read.
From M.G. Vassanji, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and a Governor General's Literary Award winner for Non-fiction, comes a poignant love letter to his birthplace and homeland, East Africa—a powerful and surprising portrait that only an insider could write.
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part history-rarely-told, here is a powerful and timely portrait of a constantly evolving land. From a description of Zanzibar and its evolution to a visit to a slave-market town at Lake Tanganyika; from an encounter with a witchdoctor in an old coastal village to memories of his own childhood in the streets of Dar es Salaam…
We've been writing together for over ten years now. A theme that we’ve come back to lots of times is the horrible workplace with its bosses from hell. Feedback from readers tells us that the ways in which we’re made miserable at work are universal and it can be fun to examine them in fiction. We doubled down on the theme in the Oddjobs series of books. We both love to read and write horror, and we spend time with lots of horror authors, so this list came together very easily.
Even the simplest jobs can turn out to be horrible. George and Lou are the nicest, most amiable underworld thugs you could meet. They just want to get their delivery job done and then go out for some beers and bowling. Except, the thing they don’t know is that their delivery consignment is a very angry werewolf. When it escapes, they are forced into a cat-and-mouse chase across Florida. No paycheck can be worth the horror and torment that Jeff Strand’s bloody comedy puts them through.
Two thugs. One innocent woman. And one VICIOUS frickin' werewolf.
Meet George and Lou, thugs for hire. The kind of intimidating-yet-friendly guys who will break your thumbs, but be polite about it. Their latest assignment is to drive across Florida to deliver some precious cargo to a crime lord. The cargo: a man in a cage. Though Ivan seems perfectly human, they’re warned that he is, in fact, a bloodthirsty werewolf.
George and Lou don’t believe in the supernatural, but even if they did, it’s daytime and tonight isn’t the full moon. Their instructions are straightforward: Do not open the…
I am the Agatha-winning author of the Rare Books Cozy Mystery series. My first in the series, below, won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery Novel. I’ve worked for more than twenty years in museums and symphonies and have the great fortune of being married to a librarian. When not writing, I’m drawing and painting. I live in Maryland with her family. Although I’m not much of a baker, I won’t ever turn down a sweet lokshen kugel.
As someone who worked in museums for decades, finding Sheila Connolly’s series was a fantastic look behind the curtain of my career.
I got such a kick out of going behind the scenes with fundraiser Nell Pratt as she navigates historic artifacts in the collections, seeking donations, and solving crimes in her historical society.
At The Society for the Preservation of Pennsylvania Antiques, fundraiser Eleanor "Nell" Pratt solicits donations-and sometimes solves crimes. When a collection of George Washington's letters is lost on the same day that an archivist is found dead, it seems strange that the Society president isn't pushing for an investigation. Nell goes digging herself, and soon uncovers a long, rich history of crime.
I so love thrillers because they delve into that area of ourselves that can be ‘safely’ afraid and give you that adrenaline rush that nature taught us is fight or flight. Thrillers teach us lessons, too, about people and the psychology of the most dangerous ones in our society. Through reading into this genre, I learned a lot about life before I even lived it, and I learned to recognize the less wholesome traits that humanity can have. What’s fascinating to me most is exploring those dark sides of the human psyche in order to make comparisons on what is right or wrong with some people’s behavior.
This is a psychological thriller with a difference. This story appears to be one thing and is, in fact, something else. Following the path of a struggling working mother with post-natal depression, we see the world through her paranoid eyes.
What I really enjoyed about this book is the unexpected twists and turns. Is she really imagining this, or did she see that little girl on the platform? It makes you question everything, including the motives of those surrounding the main character (always a good thing!). It is a masterpiece of misdirection and an unreliable narrator.
I am the girl on the platform. When new mother Bridget catches her train home from London, she witnesses something terrible: a young girl is taken from the platform, right before her eyes.
No one knows where I am. But no one is reported missing and with Bridget the only witness, she is written off as an attention seeker. Nobody believes her - not even her own husband.
Can you find me? But Bridget knows what she saw, and becomes consumed with finding the little girl. Only she can save the child's life... but…
I’m a Romanian American author who arrived in the US with a job in software development. In more than twenty years as an immigrant, I’ve struggled with the same problems these novels explore: how to build a home in a new land, away from my family; how to fit in or make my peace with not belonging; how to be the parent of American-born children whose culture is different from my native one. I’m familiar with the US immigration system from my yearslong citizenship application, and I also interviewed an immigration lawyer extensively for my thriller.
In this gripping courtroom drama, an explosion in Miracle Creek, Virginia, destroys the business of South Korean immigrants Pak and Young Yoo and puts their daughter Mary into a monthslong coma. As arguments mount against the woman accused of starting the fire, Young struggles with a question many immigrants must face. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought her child to the US, where Mary struggles as a teenager and where she was almost killed. The tension between the two generations resonated with me as a parent and immigrant. As Young hopes to discover who caused the explosion that killed two other people, she must also help Mary imagine a future in their adoptive country.
'That wonderful, brilliant sort of book you want to shove at people as soon as you've finished so they can experience it for themselves' Erin Morgenstern
A thrilling debut novel for fans of Liane Moriarty and Celeste Ng about how far we'll go to protect our families - and our deepest secrets.
In rural Virginia, Young and Pak Yoo run an experimental medical treatment device known as the Miracle Submarine - a pressurised oxygen chamber that patients enter for "dives", used as an alternative therapy for conditions including autism and infertility. But when the Miracle Submarine mysteriously explodes, killing two…
