Our editors handpick the products that we feature. We may earn commission from the links on this page. There are more books worth reading than any of us will get to in our lifetimes, but there are a few that will force you to put your entire life on pause until you get to the final page. Part medical mystery, part intergenerational epic, part Forest Gump-ian tromp through 20th-century history, the page novel will take you a weekend to read trust us , and a paragraph to understand why it deserves all its accolades and then some.
A brilliant bacchanalia of s campus nostalgia, biting class criticism, dazzling writing, and electric charactersβcomplete with a good old-fashioned murder-mystery plot. Cline's debut novel has a lot in common with the story of Charles Manson and the young women who quickly became his devotees. Set in the summer of the late '60s, not long before the violent killing of actress Sharon Tate, the fictional Evie becomes enchanted with Suzanne, an enigmatic personality she discovers in a Los Angeles park.
Evie's infatuation soon has her following Suzanne into a cult led by the Manson-esque Russell, who has his members doing his murderous bidding. It's up to Evie if she'll be able to go through with all that is asked of her, and readers will be ravenous to find out for themselves.
Everything about this bestseller is startlingly original, including, above all, its form: a letter to Osama Bin Laden from a young mother who lost both her husband and her son in a fictional terrorist attack he orchestrated. In her grief, she uncovers secrets about the circumstances of the attack that throw her already teetering world completely off its axis. Set in the alarmingly near future, the novel focuses on a gaggle of children spending the summer at a multi-family lakeside rental mansion that is soon besotted by a storm straight out of the Old Testament.
Damning without ever feeling scolding, this book will make you see our planet, and the generations who will inherit it, with fresh eyes and renewed energy. From the Nobel laureate and master of the hyperreal comes a gorgeously written novel that poses a question as old as Greek myths: What does it mean to be human? Human communication, no matter how wrapped up it gets in technology, remains a miracle, and nowhere more so than in this luminous story of a blind girl living in St.
