The most recommended books about Manhattan

If mystery and suspense are your thing, this is a who-dun-it that will suck you in quickly. This book totally captivated me from start to finish. I think what hooked me was the way the author took the prologue to actually show the past, and then when the novel started, all the threads of the story were sewn together so beautifully. Full of twists and turns which make a great suspense experience. There is some romantic drama tossed in which is always the icing on the cake for me as well.

While not technically a horror novel, this book paints a scary possibility – an unflinching look at what a nationwide blackout in the middle of winter would be like, focusing on a group of people in an apartment building in Manhattan. They are trapped, trying to find food, trying to stay warm, trying to survive. Loved this book. I always recommend this one. 

This book, and a couple of seminars with Byron Katie, really did change my life! I was stuck in negative thinking and couldn’t seem to get out of it. She offers a straightforward method to challenge your thoughts and turn them around to other possibilities. It‘s almost magical how your hurtful beliefs can be changed into accepting “the way it is” without the hurt.

Get this book and get some relief from whatever is bothering you. Truly.

This is embarrassing. Joseph Mitchell, the journalist and legendary longtime contributor to the New Yorker, is, in my opinion, the finest chronicler of 1950-80s Manhattan life who ever lived.

Here’s what’s embarrassing. I have previously devoured all of his story collections and any reprints in the New Yorker, but never read his greatest work, about the Village bohemian eccentric Joe Gould. Not anymore. As deft a piece of journalism as ever was.

In Zone One, the frantic oh-*expletive* bloodbath phase of a zombie apocalypse has clicked over into something like a new normal. In lower Manhattan, our hero “Mark Spitz” mops up straggler zombies seemingly stuck in mindless loops from their past lives and reflects on the transformed yet familiar landscape. Zone One made me realize how specific streets are encoded in my own memories, and made me want to be more present in my own life, to move through the world less like a zombie.

No one captures the self-loathing and paradoxical liberty of the moneyed junkie as well as St Aubyn (except perhaps Anna Cavan). The second novel in his almost-autobiographical Patrick Melrose series, Bad News finds our fucked-up anti-hero on a gargantuan smack binge in New York at the age of 22. How the author – now clean – can reconstruct his frame of mind is remarkable; how he can do it with such precision and wit is mind-blowing.

This book is rich in detail and tells the story of Maddie who is a travel writer who meets her future husband, Ian, while abroad. From the beginning during a 911 call, it’s obvious that something has gone badly wrong. This is a wonderfully written book, set in the Balkans, Iraq, and Kansas, to name a few places, and is full of tension. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. 

Discount Armageddon is the first of the InCryptid novels.

The Price family comes from a long line of monster hunters, but a few generations back, they decided they didn’t agree with the prevailing definition of “monster.” Now they’re dedicated to protecting the cryptid community—as long as it’s not chowing down on the neighbors.

I love this universe because there’s such a wide variety of characters that are each convinced that their way is the right way. Sometimes you never quite know whose side someone will come down on. Discount Armageddon introduces us to Verity Price.

Verity is tough, resourceful, and yeah—kinda selfish at times. She’s no goody-two-shoes, but she does a lot of good, just the same.

Two words. Grandma Dowdel. She is one of the many reasons I love this book. Fifteen-year-old Mary Alice is forced to leave her parents and her home during a difficult time in 1937. A city girl, it’s no easy feat moving from the big city of Chicago to a small town and in with her larger-than-life grandmother who will have you laughing out loud at her very un-granny-like antics. Peck’s punchy, smart, and often hilarious prose, parallels nicely with undertones of a more serious and difficult period of time for many families.  Mary Alice is easy to root for as she finds her footing in a year filled with many new adjustments in a place very different from home.  

This book was published at the beginning of the cocktail revolution and was instrumental to creating the idea that cocktails could be based on peak season produce in the same way that food is.

Everything from herbs, fruits, and vegetables get featured in a drink. While the book is historically important, it still feels modern, packed with techniques to make the best of the season’s bounty. 

In 2021’s most widely-discussed literary novel, Lin, the former enfant terrible of the early 2000s alt-lit scene, rejects that movement’s terse and affectless style in favor of a more startlingly inventive prose alive to everyday experience’s strangeness. This autobiographical novel recounts its narrator’s attempt to wean himself from the toxic habits and substances of our “dominator” society and, through natural foods and psychedelic drugs, to return to a matriarchal cooperative tradition he describes at length. Whatever we think of Lin’s potentially sentimental historiography, he embeds it in a gentle family comedy that effloresces into a tender romance. I appreciate Lin’s countercultural commitment to rejecting fashionable pessimism and unthinking science-worship, and I respect his evolving ethic of personal kindness. It would be preachy if issued as a proclamation, but becomes a practice we can all learn to share when shown in a novel.

Ryan is undoubtedly the biggest name in cocktails right now. He has pioneered numerous venues in London and around the world focused on changing the way we think about bars and cocktails.

His book is not only a great entry into the world of cocktails with great classic recipes, but it also showcases interesting flavour combinations and techniques that can be used both in a bar and at home.

This was the first “real” book I read where the characters were gay and no one was being ridiculed for it. I was fourteen years old when I checked it out from the library and I was astounded by it. It helped me understand that I could just be gay and there was nothing wrong with that. Or me. 

I love this novel. It’s about a young man mourning the death of his wife and trying to deal with crippling grief while also repairing his relationship with his sixteen-year-old stepson. With such a premise you wouldn’t think the book would be funny, but it’s both hysterical and emotionally touching. 

Trooper has a gift for making extremely dysfunctional characters lovable, putting them in ludicrous situations and turning them loose on each other. This book really resonated with me because of the damaged-yet-enduring family dynamic after the death of a loved one, which is similar to my own experience following the death of my father. 

The evolving relationship between the main character and his stepson is also great, and Tropper nails the adolescent angst I remember so well from my own childhood.

I chose this book because it is, I am almost sure, the least known of the bunch, in a list that I admit champions some lesser-known giants of American literature from the last century and a style that influenced me as a writer. But what Dos Passos does with this novel stands apart. An experimental novel when it was published in 1925 Dos Passos jumps back and forth between the narratives of his disparate characters – from bankers to soldiers - creating a pastiche of life in the 1920s and in New York in particular that is raw and harsh at times in its critique of the greedy capitalistic country we were becoming.

What strikes me most about this hundred-year-old book, is how starkly modern it seems today.

There are so many things I loved about Motherland, it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters, Elissa Altman is a brilliant writer and a great storyteller. Her portrayal of her dramatic, narcissistic mother created a flawed, human, larger-than-life character I will never forget. Elissa moves us through time effortlessly, at one moment vividly portraying herself as a child and in the next, seamlessly bringing in the voice of wisdom—her adult voice now—as we watch her struggle to make peace with the past. I deeply resonated with the love and hate, attachment and resentment that ricocheted between this unforgettable mother-daughter pair. I love books that grab me and don’t let me go. Motherland definitely had me hooked all the way from beginning to end. I hated leaving Altman’s world behind. I didn’t want the book to end.

I first read The Naked and the Dead in a college course covering modern American fiction after World War II.

It was Mailer’s first novel and is recognized as one of the best novels to come out of a writer’s own war experiences (amazingly, Red Badge of Courage, was written by Stephen Crane, without benefit of ever experiencing war first-hand).

You’d think it would have little influence for a crime writer but it does. If you haven’t read the book and intend to, it’s time for a spoiler alert.

One of the main characters is Lt. Hearn, but halfway through the novel, Mailer does the unthinkable. He kills off one of his main characters.

Why in the world would Mailer do something like this? The answer, of course, is that he was mimicking the war experience.

War is unpredictable, especially in terms of who lives and who dies. The lesson… show more.

For my bookworm girlies who long for a historical adventure. This was one of the first historical fantasy/romance books I ever read and I loved it. I remember really loving the main character because not only was she bookish and unintentionally funny, she was smart, awkward, and relatable. The story gives the reader a chance to dive into a culture you may not be completely familiar with and that accounts for half the intrigue right there! I love the lore, the supernatural elements, the history, the action. It’s a story that ticks all the boxes for fun reads and I’d encourage anyone who enjoys those things to give it a shot.  

Of all the fascinating things about this book’s unnamed character whose goal is to mix prescription drugs in order to sleep through the year, what interested me most was her relationship with her college friend, Reva. What do we call a “friendship” that persists just because it’s our only one?

I’ve seen toxic attachments explored in sexual relationships and families before, but not friendships, which we tend to think of as less complicated, easier to break off. The main character almost never leaves her apartment, but she is relentlessly visited by the needy Reva, who she barely tolerates. Reva is going through hard things and needs support, but the main character has almost nothing to say about her destructive love affair, eating disorder, or even her grief when her mother dies.

These two are clearly holding each other back, and yet, they can’t quite cut each other off. Although it’s… show more.

Who doesn’t love a crossover? When two intellectual titans clash with an apocalyptic adversary, sparks fly. Mastermind merges Andrew Mayne's standout characters—FBI's Jessica Blackwood and the genius Dr. Theo Cray—in a high-stakes game against a cultist serial killer named the Warlock. With cities vanishing amidst chaos, and a mystery as deep as the voids themselves, this is not just a read; it's an experience.

Dive into a narrative where every twist is meticulously plotted, and where the line between genius and madness blurs. For those craving a crossover with intelligence and suspense at its core, this thriller is not to be missed.