The best fiction books

I’ve been fascinated by different cultures since I was 14 years old growing up in inner-city Chicago. My passion has given me a curious quest to travel the world and learn about different cultures. My friends have a tagline for me which is ‘From the Hood to Hanoi and All the Stops In Between’ because of my international teaching in Vietnam. As an adult who is now an international professor, sought-out global trainer, and cultural subject matter expert, my passion has increased for bringing an awareness to a broader audience about the beauty of diverse friendships. 

I hate surprises in real life, but in fiction, nothing beats a good plot twist. As both a reader and a writer, I love to get swept up in a story, especially when I’m not certain where it will take me or what will happen next. It’s like being on a thrilling ride! Each of the books on this list kept me guessing, caught me off guard, and made me shout “aha!”  

My recommendations are more like a diary of my nascent writing career. I don’t mean to get melodramatic here, but these five Korean-American authors literally (get it?) built me. None of them know this, but they were a quintet of Dr. Frankensteins who created Sung J. Woo, writer. I dared to write my first novel because these authors showed me how, in the best possible way, the only way, really: through their printed words. When I held their books in my hands, I believed a little more that I could do the same. I’ll always be proud to be in their debt.

I write the NYPD Detective Chiara Corelli Mystery series featuring Corelli and her partner Detective P.J. Parker. Most mysteries have a single main character so I’m passionate about finding other authors who write mysteries with two professional investigators as main characters. It’s fascinating to see how authors writing the same type of characters handle them and what they do about character growth over the course of the series. To me, watching two characters react to each other, seeing their relationship change over the course of a book or a series is much more interesting than reading about a single detective.

As a wife of 38 years, mother of two fine adults, teacher of 30 years in art, speech, theatre, art…well painter, and now author, I enjoy hearing about others' stories. Purely by accident, I wrote a small personal story and found that people wanted more… so I wrote more and shazam I had a book. My first book is about childhood experiences and growing up in my normal world. For me it was normal but the outsiders looking in today would see anything but normal. My parents’ careful actions sheltered my sister and me from the outside world's bad influences until things blew up. Then with care they showed us their world of Nazi hunting.

I am the author-illustrator of funny picture books for kids, including the interactive book, Animals Go Vroom!. As an illustrator, I revel in creating jokes and storylines in the pictures that kids can follow along with by themselves. And as a mother of two small children myself, I know first-hand the magical experience of reading books with toddlers that keep them guessing and giggling along the way.

Before becoming a psychological thriller writer I trained as a Clinical Psychologist, and I continue to practice as a therapist alongside my writing. Clinical Psychologists work in the field of mental health, bringing me into regular contact with the more difficult, distressed, or disturbed aspects of human psychology. Similarly, my novels typically explore the darker sides of what it means to be human, including themes of guilt, loss, fractured relationships, and trauma. The books on my list delve into this compelling and fascinating territory, and have inspired me as both a psychologist and a storyteller.

I grew up in a small, rural, mountain community in Colorado, which is where I learned to love the outdoors. I explored every inch of “my mountain” with my dog, Blueberry. I skied by age three, and my father taught me to fish, shoot a rifle and drive a Jeep before I turned twelve. And I loved to read. To my good fortune, a small stone house at the bottom of our hill housed the public library. The librarian was my best friend. My favorites were mysteries, suspense, and thrillers with strong female characters, which is how I came to be a mystery writer and a founding member of the Rogue Women Writers.

As a university professor, I often teach popular women’s writing, and I realized that I needed to teach Latinx popular fiction as well. Women’s popular writing in the United States reflects but also shapes the way women see themselves in a global neoliberal world. After I had written an article on class and Chicanx and Latinx fiction, I also realized that class and race are key to thinking about how Latinas/Chicanas both create and follow market trends in an effort to “better” themselves in addition to showing how various Latinas/Chicanas see each other in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender.  

I have a little secret. I was late to the romance table. Though I grew up with a romance reading mother, my initial interests lay in the fantastical worlds of Paulo Coelho, Anne Rice, and David Gemmel. Romance seemed forbidden, and I didn’t touch the genre until my late twenties, when a nasty breakup sent my disillusioned heart looking for more. And what a revelation! Romance taught me to expect more from myself and my relationships. At the close of one creative career, it lit an unstoppable passion to become a contemporary romance author. And here I am, a decade on, writing romance and sharing my book recommendations with you!

I lived in small towns with “ordinary” people most of my life, so books where people from small towns contend with situations beyond the ordinary fascinate me. I also served in the US Army as a nuclear, biological, and chemical operations specialist and am a military history buff, so anything with a military spin is all that more engaging for me and I developed a morbid fascination for just how easy it would be for us to end civilization as we know it. Therefore, military science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction are among my favorite genres. 

I’m a playwright and novelist born in the US and raised in a grab-bag of other countries. I grew up moving between cities and languages, and now, as an adult, I move between different modes of artistic practice. My first book, The Island Dwellers, is an interlinked story collection set partially in the US and partially in Japan and my second book begins with someone fleeing NY for LA; perhaps one of the impulses I understand most is to abandon ship and start over. I’m compelled by stories in which people seek to transform themselves or to refashion their lives. I think it takes a great daring (and a great desperation) to do either. 

For many years I have enjoyed a grass roots lifestyle. I have lived my research as a beekeeper, milking cows, making cheese and growing food. I am a simple living advocate, and the cottage industry—its slower pace—resonates with me. I create bespoke yarns at the spinning wheel, but for as long as I can recall, I have been wrapped in the arms of stories. Childhood is a dandelion clock, here then gone on a breath of wind. A time of life that’s fleeting. Young hearts can conjure exploration and magic. They are alive to bright possibilities, and this is what makes YA literature so exciting. 

For fifty years I have studied and taught the history of Africa, which  makes me about the luckiest guy around.  My focus has been on Southern Africa, and especially Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.  Aside from the fantastic physical beauty, the region attracts because of the comparability of its history and experience with that of the United States at many points:  for instance, a colonial past, systems of slavery, and fraught [to say the least] racial dynamics.  I have enjoyed 23 journeys or lengthier sojourns in Southern Africa, and have taught at five universities, including North Carolina State, Duke, and the University of Zimbabwe as a Fulbright Lecturer.

I grew up in the heart of Scotland addicted to visiting museums and exploring local stories and legends. Now as an adult I’m either to be found with my nose in a history book or out on an archaeological dig. I love to weave the lives of Scottish heroes such as Roberts Burns into books filled with fantasy and adventure for children, and to write spine-chilling tales for adults where supernatural creatures from Scottish myths lurk between the pages. I recently co-created a series of educational writing videos for school children to help them explore the history of their local area, and hopefully inspire the historical authors of the future!

I was 12 when I first played Dungeons and Dragons. I’d always been interested in swords, armour, the fight between good and evil (thank Star Wars for that) but I’d never read fantasy. D&D introduced me to it, and I fell in love with the genre. Conan was my first reading foray into fantasy, and then The Hobbit and I was hooked. I still go to the Royal Ontario Museum and stare at armour and weapons, and love visiting medieval castles. I can’t walk in the woods without picking up a stick and it becoming a sword to fight the orcs waiting for me around the next bend.

I started reading romance because I wanted to drown myself in stories of women stepping into their power and getting everything they wanted. Romance is a genre often looked down upon because of the happy-ever-afters, but I think that’s part of why it can be so deliciously subversive. Most (but not all) romance novels are centered on women, their voices, their sexuality, their desires, and their victories. In a world that’s often cruel, escaping into a world where dreams and fantasies are possible can be liberating. I started writing romance because I wanted to be a part of these stories and craft a world for others to escape into.

I’m a former independent publisher and current writer of memoir and fiction. My degree was in zoology (animal biology), which got me my first job in educational publishing. After a solid career in textbooks, I switched over to trade publishing and finally writing. I may have left the "hard science" behind, but I continue to be fascinated by human and animal behavior, which shows up in my reading and writing. 

Novels are great. I’ve written one myself. I have also written many short stories for major science fiction and fantasy publishing venues—Asimov’s, F&SF, Analog, Lightspeed, etc. But there is something special about single-author short story collections. They are like tasting platters. They reveal running themes and can be a unique way to explore places—through the imaginations of its authors. For example, many of my stories are set in or feature characters from Nigeria. I hope you enjoy the books on this list and that they show you something new about Africa and what (some) African authors dream about. 

Social history has always been my passion: unless you know how people thought, felt and lived, even down to how they dressed and ate, it is often impossible to understand why they acted as they did. And no period is as fascinating to me as the inter-war years; after WW1, the greatest conflict the world had ever seen, the upcoming generations determined to break barriers, discard the last vestiges of what they saw as hidebound custom, to invent new, freer ways of writing, painting, dancing - and to have fun. And for most of this post-war generation, there was nowhere like Paris.