As a reader and writer, I work with a pretty broad definition of “mystery.” You’ll find my own novels in the fantasy section of the bookstore, but my books are mysteries too — and romances, and tales of adventure, and intimate character studies, and reflections on our reality, no matter how fantastical the worlds in which they take place. I love melding genres! So when I think of my favorite mysteries, I try not to limit myself to the mystery section of the bookstore. Few things make me happier than discovering partway through a book that a mystery has been building that I didn’t even notice.
For the past five years, Bitterblue has reigned as Queen of Monsea, heroically rebuilding her nation after her father's horrific rule. After learning about the land of Torla in the east, she sends envoys to the closest nation there: Winterkeep—a place where telepathic foxes bond with humans, and people fly across the sky in wondrous airships. But when the envoys never return, having drowned under suspicious circumstances, Bitterblue sets off for Winterkeep herself, along with her spy Hava and her trusted colleague Giddon. On the way, tragedy strikes again.
Meanwhile, in Winterkeep, Lovisa Cavenda waits and watches. The teenage daughter of two powerful politicians, she is the key to unlocking everything—but only if she's willing to transcend the person she's been all her life.
The majority of books I read involve characters with a relatable, and sometimes even predictable, arc of growth and change. As much as I love variations on this theme, imagine my delight to stumble across something completely different. Korede is a nurse in Lagos whose sister Ayoola may just be a serial killer. The book opens with a phone call from Ayoola: Could Korede please come help her clear away the body of Ayoola’s suddenly dead boyfriend? Korede’s responses to phone calls like this are a continuously surprising delight. And though the premise of this book is hilarious and absurd, Braithewaite is playing with real, deep truths about humans here. I loved it.
Sunday Times bestseller and The Times #1 bestseller
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019 Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019 Winner of the 2019 LA Times Award for Best Crime Thriller Capital Crime Debut Author of the Year 2019 __________
'A literary sensation' Guardian
'A bombshell of a book... Sharp, explosive, hilarious' New York Times
'Glittering and funny... A stiletto slipped between the ribs and through the left ventricle of the heart' Financial Times __________
When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber…
The less I say about the plot of this book, the better your reading experience will be. I avoided reading the flap copy, and I recommend you do too. What I can promise you is this: a book set in Arizona and firmly grounded in the reality of racism and deportation in the USA, mixed together with spirituality, mythology, sci-fi pop culture, a surprising solution to a mystery, and, just possibly, aliens from outer space. Plus, beautiful writing! This is one of those books with super short chapters, each of which is a little gem. I loved it.
“In a world where we are so often dividing ourselves into us and them, this book feels like a kind of magic, celebrating all beliefs, ethnicities, and unknowns.” —The New York Times Book Review
Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe meets Roswell by way of Laurie Halse Anderson in this astonishing, genre-bending novel about a Mexican American teen who discovers profound connections between immigration, folklore, and alien life.
It’s been three years since ICE raids and phone calls from Mexico and an ill-fated walk across the Sonoran. Three years since Sia Martinez’s mom disappeared. Sia wants to…
This is my favorite novel by the mystery master Josephine Tey, because it quietly breaks the mold. Miss Pym, bestselling writer of a book about psychology, makes an author visit to an English “college of physical culture,” where young women are training in various athletic arts. As the students of this school charm Miss Pym and occupy her ruminations, she continues to delay her departure. But where is the mystery? It isn’t until the final third of the book that the mystery appears, and it was only on rereading that I realized it had been coming all along. I love this kind of unexpected unfolding. I also adored the resolution.
A classic murder mystery from the Golden Age of detective fiction, written by genre legend Josephine Tey.
Leys Physical Training College is famous for its excellent discipline and its spectacularly athletic students. Miss Lucy Pym, expert psychologist, is pleased and flattered to be invited to lecture there - even if the Olympian splendour of the students leaves her feeling just a little inadequate.
But a nasty accident spoils the occasion, and suddenly Miss Pym must turn her intellect to the unpleasant suspicion that, among all these healthy young students, there lurks an incurably sick mind...
Most of the “mystery” books I’m recommending here aren’t categorized as such — especially this one, which you’ll find in the sci-fi section of your bookstore. But sci-fi abounds with mysteries; in much of my favorite sci-fi, the characters are undergoing some sort of deeply human yet otherworldly experience that’s essentially a mystery that they (or the reader) must solve. Ted Chiang is a writer highly skilled at touching the mysteries and paradoxes of our existence, then distilling them into beautiful stories that cause my sense of the wondrous to expand. I love the way his stories make me feel. And then I love rereading them and picking apart the techniques — like, for example, the use of tense in Story of Your Life — that make his writing so powerful.
'A science fiction genius . . . Ted Chiang is a superstar.' - Guardian
With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful first collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably diverse stories, all told in his trademark precise and evocative prose.
From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of…
I’m going to guess that most adults don’t encounter many picture books, except in the context of introducing them to children. I would like to humbly suggest that if your reading habits don’t extend to picture books, you may be missing out. It’s an art form I adore, and one of my favorites is this book about a mysterious painter in Paris whose paintings contain scenes that come alive. I love Agee’s palette and the perspectives he chose for this story — and no matter how many times I read this book, I’m still thrilled by the twist at the end. It’s the sort of mysterious story that delights, while opening your imagination to bigger things.
Art imitates life in this hilarious, absurdist picture book--one of Jon Agee's most beloved titles, now back in print.
"Outrageous!" the judges cried. "Ridiculous!" Who would dare enter a portrait of a duck in the Grand Contest of Art? But when Felix Clouseau's painting quacks, he is hailed as a genius. Suddenly everyone wants a Clousseau masterpiece, and the unknown painter becomes an overnight sensation. That's when the trouble begins.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.
So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you want to understand some of the events that have shaped present-day America, from political polarization and the election of Donald Trump, to January 6, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian expansionism, and the current Israel-Hamas war, I argue, you need to understand some of the twists and turns of America's most infamous "non-scandal, scandal.”
I was in Benghazi well before, during, and after the attack as a US diplomat and co-director of a medical NGO. I have written three books, and have been a contributor to The NYT, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Salon, The Financial Times, Newsweek, and others.
On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans. The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent.
Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…
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Nigeria,
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