This list reflects my focus as a writer about and researcher of cultures very different from my own. I grew up in the country of New Zealand and have been based in Australia for a long time–but I have worked and lived in places like India, Barbados, Malaysia, Canada, Jordan, Syria, Cambodia, and Laos. All of those experiences contribute to my evolution as a writer through academic works, biography, creative nonfiction, memoir, and, more lately, crime fiction and screenwriting. I would not be the writer I am without this curiosity for the “Other,” and it continues to drive me.
When I first visited Venice, I had the strange sense that I already “knew” the city because I had read this first and all the subsequent Leon novels set in the city and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. From those books, I recognized landmarks and hidden alleys, cafes and restaurants, how to take the Vaparetto, and where the main police stations and markets were.
I wanted to write like that, make the city a main character–and I love other series that do the same, like Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series set in Sicily. These books “take you there.”
'A splendid series . . . with a backdrop of the city so vivid you can almost smell it.' The Sunday Telegraph
Winner of the Suntory Mystery Fiction Grand Prize __________________________________
The twisted maze of Venice's canals has always been shrouded in mystery. Even the celebrated opera house, La Fenice, has seen its share of death ... but none so horrific and violent as that of world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, who was poisoned during a performance of La Traviata. Even Commissario of Police, Guido Brunetti, used to the labyrinthine corruptions of the city, is shocked at the number of…
In writing my own crime novels set in 1920s British India, I am always looking for other series that take me into “Other” places, and the Makan series that starts with this book is a wonderful model. This is the pen name for Jamal Mahjoub, a Sudanese-British writer who gives real insights into cultural differences and practices. His protagonist is a Sudanese working as a cop in Cairo, and the adventures roam far and wide across the city and its people.
For me, the word pictures created here help inspire my own writing aspirations, there is always much to learn.
Former police inspector Makana, in exile from his native Sudan, lives on a rickety Nile houseboat in Cairo, scratching out a living as a private investigator. When he receives a call from the notorious and powerful Saad Hanafi, he is thrust into a dangerous and glittering world. Hanafi is the owner of a star-studded football team and their most valuable player has vanished. His disappearance threatens to bring down not only the businessman's private empire but also the entire country.
Makana encounters Muslim extremists, Russian gangsters and a desperate mother hunting for her missing daughter, as his search stirs up…
A fake date, romance, and a conniving co-worker you'd love to shut down. Fun summer reading!
Liza loves helping people and creating designer shoes that feel as good as they look. Financially overextended and recovering from a divorce, her last-ditch opportunity to pitch her firm for investment falls flat. Then…
This brilliant piece of nonfiction novel writing made me think hard about my own work. Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-born British writer, and the story of Mahmood Hussein Mattan, who was wrongly hanged in 1950s Cardiff.
Mohamed’s own father knew Mahmood, and as a writer, she explores wonderfully, if graphically, what Cardiff was like for migrants back then. She reminded me to focus on the “small” people in life, those dispossessed as well as those who look out for such people. Her work is also a reminder that the world is a cross-cultural place and that our own characters do well to remember that.
BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Based on a true event, this novel is “a blues song cut straight from the heart ... about the unjust death of an innocent Black man caught up in a corrupt system” (Walter Mosley, best-selling author of Devil in a Blue Dress).
In Cardiff, Wales in 1952, Mahmood Mattan, a young Somali sailor, is accused of a crime he did not commit: the brutal killing of Violet Volacki, a shopkeeper from Tiger Bay. At first, Mahmood believes he can ignore the fingers pointing his way; he may be a gambler and a petty thief, but he…
I am inspired by books that unlayer other and more complex societies, and this one is high on my favorites list. Higashino is strong on what drives people and their actions, in this case, a mother and daughter, their estranged and bullying husband/father, a secret next-door admirer, and the cops assigned to solve the father’s death.
And in so doing it is a wonderful revelation about the nuances in and of Japanese life and culture. Again, Tokyo or a specific section of that marvellous city becomes as much a character as all the others, so the book becomes for me a guide to the nature of Japanese and big urban life.
Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor. Overhearing the commotion, Yasuko's next door neighbor, middle-aged high school mathematics teacher Ishigami, offers his help, disposing not only of the body but plotting the cover-up step-by-step. When the body turns up and is identified, Detective Kusanagi draws the case…
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
I lived and worked in Damascus for several months before the outbreak of what has become a dreadful and ongoing war. It was one of the greatest experiences in my life, and I still have great affection for the city, the country, and its people.
Writers there have long balanced off politics and life, and one of the best was Khalid Khalifa whose books for me capture so much of what has been the Syrian experience for the last half century or so. His characters might have been taken directly off the street and stood in a long line of the great Arabic story tradition, which has so much to tell us about life, meaning, challenge, and triumph.
1980s Syria, our young narrator is living a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents in Aleppo. Her three aunts, Maryam the pious one; Safaa, the liberal; and the free-spirited Marwa, bring her up with the aid of their ever-devoted blind servant.
Soon the high walls of the family home are unable to protect her from the social and political changes outside. Witnessing the crackdowns of the ruling dictatorship against Muslims, she is filled with hatred for her oppressors, and becomes increasingly fundamentalist. In the footsteps of her beloved uncle Bakr, she takes…
The British are losing grip in 1920s India as demand grows for political independence, and tension is growing in the southern city of Madras where Superintendent Chris Le Fanu, head of a modern criminology investigative unit, struggles to solve the murder of a visiting British woman. He and his Muslim assistant, Habibullah, uncover an international drug trafficking ring involving local officials and business tycoons that stretches into the new movie industry.
Personally sympathetic to Indian aspirations, Le Fanu clashes with his conservative boss and most of his police colleagues. His personal life is in chaos because of a cross-race relationship despised by the local elite. Solving this mystery sees Le Fanu navigate corruption, racism, and politics near the end of the empire.
Secrets, lies, and second chances are served up beneath the stars in this moving novel by the bestselling author of This Is Not How It Ends. Think White Lotus meets Virgin River set at a picturesque mountain inn.
Seven days in summer. Eight lives forever changed. The stage is…
It began with a dying husband, and it ended in a dynasty.
It took away her husband’s pain on his deathbed, kept her from losing the family farm, gave her the power to build a thriving business, but it’s illegal to grow in every state in the country in 1978.…
