The most recommended books that are a story within a story

I loved this book so much that I lost sleep while reading it. Like the main character, Abe, I feel most at peace while I’m near water. Abe uses fishing to fill a void after his wife dies. I use it to cleanse my thoughts; it can get a bit busy in my head sometimes.

The book is about loss, healthy and unhealthy choices, friendship, betrayal, and scary monsters. It includes four of my favourite things: engaging characters, beautiful writing, water, and horror.

Horror is my comfort blanket, and this book is full to the brim with it; lots and lots of cosmic horror coupled with sorcery and monsters: some huge and others human, many dead and some alive.

I love this book for its Matroyska doll-style structure: The first five sections tell stories in different periods— from the mid-19th century to the 22nd—loosely connected by repeating characters and media, each ending abruptly and without resolution. The sixth section, set in the 24th century, is the spine of the novel, told in its entirety. Then Mitchell revisits the time periods in reverse chronological order, resolving each story, ending where we began in the mid-19th century.

It was a highly satisfying experience that changed my view of how a story could be told. It is widely considered one of the finest novels of the 21st century. It covers ideas I would normally balk at, like reincarnation and the existence of eternal consciousness. Still, the storytelling is so powerful that it all came across as believable to me. I loved the way Mitchell demonstrated how an idea in one time period… show more.

I love a good mystery and a good story within a story. This book has both. Estranged sisters, Meredith and Nina, have never been close with their mother, Anya, until they finally have a chance to understand what made her so icy. As a deathbed promise to her husband, Anya agrees to tell their daughters her story, but it is so difficult for her that she must tell it little by little and as a fairy tale. From frozen, war-torn Leningrad to modern-day Alaska, the story changes this family forever. 

For anyone who has secrets, or has someone in their life they just can’t understand, this powerful book helps you see that there is a way through. It also reminds us that everyone has a story that can thaw the hardest of hearts.

Susan Ryeland, former publisher (and hero with Atticus Pund in The Magpie Murders), runs a small hotel with her boyfriend in Greece. When a couple visit and describe a murder in their daughter’s wedding hotel, and on the same day—Ryeland’s intrigued. 

Susans’s former client and the writer/creator of the Atticus Pund series knew the victim and writes a book about the murder (Atticus Pund Takes the Cake). It convinced the couple’s daughter that the man convicted is innocent. Now she’s missing. Ryeland leaves Greece to investigate. 

Horowitz is a mastermind of mystery, famously so. And this book is as full of the twists, turns, and clues as The Magpie Murders which I loved. The complexity and the characters are re-delivered. Fantastically!!

What I loved most about this was the story within the story. A famous author is travelling back from a convention in Brazil when his plane goes down. The only other survivor is a young boy, not quite in his teens. In order to reach safety, they must battle not only Colombian drug runners and other nefarious characters, but the jungle itself.

Zadie Smith’s first ‘historical’ novel does not disappoint. This is a wonderfully written, witty, richly imagined, characteristically idiosyncratic book.

This intriguing book is set in the nineteenth century and peopled with historical figures—the now little-known novelist William Ainsworth, his housekeeper, the fascinating Mrs. Touchet, Charles Dickens, Andrew Bogle, a man born into slavery in Jamaica, who becomes a key witness in a real-life Victorian cause celebre.

Intricately structured, at its heart one finds a powerful, compelling story within a story which gives a force to the book. The issues raised within the book—racism, colonialism, woman’s rights, populism, fake news—resonate in our times. A book to set you thinking.

My selections are based on good writing and authenticity, even Fleming peppered his Bond books with elements of the real thing that no one but insiders would know, like ‘M’ writing his memos in green ink on blue notepaper. Alan Judd who served as a British army officer before joining MI6 has written a series of books about Charles Thoroughgood, a former army officer who like Judd himself ‒ his real name is Alan Petty ‒ then joined MI6. Every one of them is a gem, reeking of authenticity. A former colleague of Judd even told me that one of his books was based on a real case. He knew because he shared an office with the author at the time! Judd is by far the best of the current bunch!

I adored this love letter to classic crime fiction, which is a marvelously clever novel within a novel.

As a writer and former editor, I couldn’t help but cheer for Susan Ryeland, the beleaguered editor trying to manage her bestselling author (and all-around dislikable human being), Alan Conway.

If you love a twist like I do, this book has a doozy, which turns the first half of the book into a code that Susan (and readers) must break to solve the murder in the second half of the book. Ingenious.  

The only male author on this list, Coleman Dowell’s Southern Gothic tale is included because it contains some of the most nuanced writing of female characters I’ve ever encountered. Too Much Flesh tells the narrative of a well-endowed farmer named Jim, his petite wife Effie, and a young man, Jabez, whose mutual obsession with Jim leads to, well, something of a frenetic climax. A story within a story, the tale is told to us by a “spinster schoolteacher” (the book was published in 1977), Miss Ethel, who channels her sexual repression into this story of the farmer.

Neither Miss Ethel nor Jim’s wife, Effie, come across as one-dimensional—they feel and act like real people on the page. Dowell himself was gay and deftly handles this queer narrative in a way that is somehow both quiet and stunning, and makes an interesting case study for the time period and genre. And… show more.

Lawrence Block has written, I don’t know, 33,000 books? That’s inspiration alone. But in Keller, the mononymous title character of Hit Man and star of numerous short stories, he compels readers to root for someone who’s not exactly committing good deeds. I find that intriguing, and Chapel Fox, the antihero of my story within a story, travels down a similar road. You’ll find yourself cheering him on. You shouldn’t.