1. The Feverby Megan Abbott (2014, Little, Brown and Company)
Based on a real-life outbreak of unexplained physical ailments in teenage girls, Megan Abbott's The Fever unspools in a fantastical, creepy, frightening way. So many books try to explain the secret lives of teenage girls, and The Fever succeeds at capturing them, at least at a certain angle. Abbott is a master of the unsettling and upsetting, and The Fever grips you in its mania until its final pages.
2. Americanahby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013, Knopf)
There's a reason why everyone and their sister has been crazy about Americanah since it was published two years ago. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's story of love and life spanning the U.S., England, and Nigeria takes apart class, race, gender, and relationships with rich, elegant language, deep understanding, and black humor. Adichie expertly balances her characters' self-conscious self-criticism and in-the-moment experiences to capture reality.
3. The Handmaid's Taleby Margaret Atwood(1985, McClelland and Stewart)
After 30 years, Margaret Atwood's classic fable about life in the near, dystopian future, The Handmaid's Tale, seems more like a warning with every year. What if all women's healthcare rights were taken away by a sweeping act of Congress following a terrorist attack, and women of childbearing age were turned into brood mares for the ruling class? These days, that doesn't sound nearly as darkly fantastic as you might hope.
4. Kindredby Octavia E. Butler (1979, Doubleday)
Octavia E. Butler's genre-crossing novel Kindred uses time travel as a conceit to dig hard into race, gender, and class in the United States. AfricanAmerican Dana is suddenly transported from 1976 California to antebellum Maryland to save a small white boy's life. This begins a saga that spans decades and centuries, as Dana and her white husband are moved back and forth in time, witnessing and experiencing the horrors of slavery while negotiating their own realities as modern people. Butler is brutal and kind, and no matter how bad it gets, she won't let you turn away.
5. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrellby Susanna Clarke (2004, Bloomsbury)
It took Susanna Clarke 10 years to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a historical fiction story in which magic is real but only two people know how to wield it. Clarke maintains a light touch throughout the book's nearly 800 pages and 200 footnotes, in which she meticulously details the story of Strange, Norrell, and the mysterious forces they alternately control and are controlled by. It's weird and funny and creepy, and Clarke envelopes you so fully in her world thatyou'll have to drag yourself back to reality when it's over.
6. The Name of the Roseby Umberto Eco,translated by William Weaver (1983, Harcourt)
A postmodern novel about semiotics that involves a book of which no copy remains sounds like something you would never voluntarily pick up, let alone be unable to put down. But Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery set in a 14th-century Italian monastery, is masterfully plotted, and as you wind your way through the literal and literary twists and turns with novice monk Adso and his brilliant teacher, William of Baskerville, you might not even notice how much you're learning about literature, history, or religion.
7. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forgetby Sarah Hepola (2015, Grand Central Publishing)
Sarah Hepola spent more than two decades getting drunk, getting crazy, and forgetting it all in a haze the next morning, if not the night of. With alcohol as her emboldening, enabling copilot, she built a life and a writing career—and almost lost everything. In Blackout, Hepola bravely tracks her progression from experimental kid to wild twentysomething to barely functioning thirtysomething, linking her alcoholism to society and culture, and exploring the science behind her not-so-unique experience.
8. The Talented Mr. Ripleyby Patricia Highsmith (1955, Coward-McCann)
The 1999 Anthony Minghella film has nothing on Patricia Highsmith's crime classic The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which sociopath Tom Ripley meets his dream man and steals his life. Though Highsmith wrote openly about same-sex relationships in the very excellent 1952 The Price of Salt, here she only hints at the many ways in which Ripley is drawn to Dickie Greenleaf, as envy and desire curdle into jealousy and violence. Highsmith's atmospheric prose makes you feel the warm Italian sun, the coldness of Ripley's unwavering stare, and the glee of a criminal getting away with his crime—but for how long?
9. We Have Always Lived in the Castleby Shirley Jackson (1962, Viking Press)
Shirley Jackson's final novel is a flawless example of the domestic horror genre she perfected, in which the ordinary is made eerie and bizarre. Sisters Merricat and Constance and their invalid uncle Julian are the only Blackwoods left in their big old house outside a small New England town; four other family members have died of arsenic poisoning, and the entire village believes Constance guilty of murder, treating the remaining Blackwoods like freaks. The sisters seem contented within the confines of their estate, until estranged cousin Charles comes to visit, throwing everything into disarray.
10. Passingby Nella Larson (1929, Knopf)
Nella Larson is transcendent, so smart and cruel and lovely in Passing,her story of mixed-race Irene Redfield, her life with her black husband in Harlem high society, and her friend Clare, who is married to a racist white man and "passing" as white herself. This brief, sad story deals with race, of course, but it's also about female friendships, love and betrayal, and class. It's utterly American, and Larson hits that Edith Wharton/Henry James sweet spot, subtly capturing the most beautiful and the ugliest facets of human nature.
11. Ancillary Justiceby Ann Leckie (2013, Orbit)
The first of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy (the final is set to be published this October) is an odyssey sparked by a tragedy. Ostensibly a sci-fi mystery, Ancillary Justice plays with concepts of identity, colonialism, and imperialism, all through the eyes of Breq, an unreliable narrator who has no concept of gender. It's also a literary critique of the Iraq War. If that sounds insanely complicated, it is, but it's worth it. Allow Leckie's careful world-building to draw you in, as Breq searches for answers and hides truths even from herself.
12. Laviniaby Ursula K. Le Guin (2008, Harcourt)
When you read The Aeneid, you may have noticed that Lavinia, daughter of the king of the Latins, functions only as a prize of war, never speaking a word herself. In Ursula K. Le Guin's retelling, it's Lavinia reciting the history of her life before Aeneas arrived, what it felt like to hear a prophecy about herself, and how she worked to turn that dire prediction into the best possible future. Le Guin makes a minor character a poet in her own right, conversing with Virgil and reflecting on how deeply she loved, how hard she fought, and how much she lost. Turns out when a woman is given a voice, she has a lot to say.
13. The Yoga Store Murder: The Shocking True Story of the Lululemon Killingby Dan Morse (2013, Berkeley)
Yes, the title is awful and the cover is terrible, but The Yoga Store Murder is an incredible piece of true crime. In 2011, Jayna Murray was violently murdered inside the Bethesda, Maryland, Lululemon store where she worked. Her coworker Brittany Norwood was found in another room, tied up and injured, but alive. Journalist Dan Morse, who was one of the first reporters on the scene, gives a detailed, smart, measured account of the case, showing us the killer could only have been one person, and how it came to be. It's one of the least sensational, well-balanced, best-written true crime books around, a seriously compelling read.
14. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadaversby Mary Roach (2003, W.W. Norton and Company)
Mary Roach's respect for science is so greatand her sense of the absurd is so finely tuned thatit seems inevitable that when she explores a particularly weird field, she can't help but write the funniest, most interesting books about it. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was her first effort in this genre, and it was an instant classic. Roach takes you down every postmortem road a body can go—example: Experiments with cadavers are responsible for seatbelts' incredible safety record—and though she's very smart, she never loses her outsider's perspective on how strange the science of death is.
15. The Sparrowby Mary Doria Russell (1996, Villard)
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow attempts to answer some pretty massive questions—What is faith? Is there a God, and does this God have a plan?—and in doing so,puts the reader through the wringer. In the not-too-distant future, science confirms that mysterious sounds from space are actually alien songs, and a tiny group of researchers, including a Jesuit priest, set off in search of their singers. What happens is beautiful and horrible. Russell immediately hooks you with allusions to some terrible mystery,and moves you along through a densely plotted but perfectly detailed story. Be careful not to read too quickly in your haste to find out what happens.
16. A Thousand Livesby Julia Scheeres (2011, Free Press)
What do you know about Jonestown besides the expression "drink the Kool-Aid"? Probably not much about the actual people of Peoples Temple, Jim Jones's church whose members moved to Guyana and committed mass suicide. In A Thousand Lives, Julia Scheeres gives a voice to the ones who died and the ones who survived Jonestown, and they have a lot to say. Why did people join Jones, a charismatic preacher in Indianapolis? How did he convince them to move first to Northern California and finally to an unsettled outpost in South America? Scheeres's reporting is excellent; this is a vital, compelling read.
17. The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Madeby Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell (2013, Simon & Schuster)
It is a truth universally established that The Room is one of the most bizarre movies ever made. Tommy Wiseau, its writer, producer, director, funder, and star, made a fortune (maybe) selling irregular jeans on Fisherman's Wharf (possibly) that he used to fund his dream film (definitely). It co-starred Greg Sestero as girlfriend-stealing Mark, who went on to write The Disaster Artist about his friendship with the weirdest person anyone could ever meet. "'Prepare yourself physically and mentally for this crazy stuff,' Tommy said." Sestero's stories about Wiseau are hilarious and poignant and so inexplicably strange, you won't be able to stop reading them.
18. Three Bags Fullby Leonie Swann,translated by Anthea Bell (2007, Doubleday)
Everyone knows the English detective classics—your Sherlock Holmeses, your Agatha Christies—and everyone knows the tropes in which they traffic. But they're satisfying in their predictability. What Leonie Swann does in Three Bags Full is apply those ideas to a flock of sheep. The smartest one, Miss Maple, heads a team of ovine investigators to solve the mystery of who murdered their shepherd. Swann's sheep ruminate on the nature of murder, perform daring acts of surveillance, and methodically accumulate clues until they discover the murderer. Swann's novel is as addictive as any human-led crime novel, and its protagonists are utterly original.
19. The Secret Historyby Donna Tartt (1992, Knopf)
Who doesn't want to read about louche 1-percent college students and their literal bacchanals and their intense friendships and substance abuse and insanity at a creepy old private college in the New England woods? Donna Tartt's first novel, based very loosely on her time at New Hampshire's Bennington College, is first-rate literary fiction. The Secret History is narrated by outsider Richard, who falls in love with a trio of weird, wealthy friends who believe in a greater, more mystical world than the humdrum life of privilege that so bores them. When their troublemaking turns into something more serious, things quickly devolve. As soon as you finish, you'll want to read it again.
20. Doomsday Bookby Connie Willis (1992, Bantam Spectra)
Connie Willis has a way of making sense of time travel sonitpicky sci-fi fans and readers of a more literary bent can understand and appreciate it. This is not what makes her story of "what if modern people got stuck in 13th-century England and had to deal with the plague," Doomsday Book, so excellent, though it certainly helps. Willis has a wonderful sense of levity; without the few funny bits, all the fear and sadness would be unbearable—and this being a plague novel, there is a fair bit of gruesome dying. She writes expansively, andallows her characters room to breathe and inhabit their worlds without getting bogged down in details.
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