I can’t count the number of conversations where I’ve been asked to slow down, or take a breath, or talk in a straight line. My neurodivergent heroes are versions of me: me if I were an alien, or a dying old lady, or a zombie. Gus is the closest I’ve come yet to writing my true self. He’s just me. I want readers who identify with Gus to feel seen and accepted and those who don’t—to understand what it’s like to live like this. And, just maybe, to have a little fun along the way.
Tom is the hero we need today. I love characters who know who they are and don’t care what others think of them. And I value ‘fun’ as a goal.
Tom just wants to fool around and yawns at his aunt’s disapproval. The contests between Tom and his aunt’s champion, Captain Najork, are the best descriptions of games I’ve ever read, especially when you consider that the games themselves are invented out of whole cloth and the words applied seemingly at random.
Tom is so good at fooling around that he does little else. His Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, who thinks this is too much like having fun, calls upon the fearsome Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen to teach him a lesson. So the Captain challenges Tom to three rounds of womble, muck, and sneedball, certain that he will win. However, when it comes to fooling around, Tom doesn't fool around, and his skills prove so polished that the results of the contest are completely unexpected...
Plot and style matter, but character is what I engage with. This book is a hilarious and touching portrait. Lionel Essrog doesn’t ‘suffer’ from Tourette’s Syndrome, but he happens to have it. He’s so natural that he completely normalizes his condition.
The plot involves an investigation that is told in Chandleresque prose, a very private-eye noir. Essrog is an unexpected narrator who nevertheless manages to own the story. I don’t use the phrase ‘pitch-perfect’ very often, but it fits here.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A complusively readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most inventive novelist.
"A half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette's syndrome.... The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.... Unexpectedly moving." —The Boston Globe
Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo…
Zeni lives in the Flint Hills of Southeast Kansas. This tale begins with her dream of befriending a miniature zebu calf coming true and follows Zeni as she works to befriend Zara. Enjoy full-color illustrations and a story filled with whimsy and plenty of opportunity for discussions around the perspectives…
I love story remixes: new takes on an existing genre. This book takes a conventional mystery plotline and gives it bright new coloring thanks to the narrator’s autism.
As is often the case with neurodivergent folks, Christopher doesn’t know much about the world, but he understands himself. A quiet masterpiece. No sentimentality, thank heavens.
'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwan
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the…
This book is a wonderful, fast-paced creep fest! I don’t read a lot of horror, but Frank’s quirkiness caught my attention and held it.
The way he reacts to bad news reveals something about himself. As the trouble comes nearer, the increasingly shocking reveals explain Frank’s quirkiness and make it clear that there’s a true psychopath on the loose. And he’s getting closer! I didn’t want to look away but I couldn’t help gulping now and then.
The polarizing literary debut by Scottish author Ian Banks, The Wasp Factory is the bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath.
Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least:
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.
That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.…
If you’re intrigued by the psychology of relationships this is the novel for you.
Described as a modern-day Rebecca, this is a story of a bereaved man’s obsession with his deceased married lover, Michelle. Determined to find out all he can about Michelle’s life when she wasn’t with him,…
It’s easy to root for a superhero or an underdog. Highsmith sets a high bar for herself by introducing one of the least appealing anti-heroes I’ve ever encountered and daring us to care about him. Tom has nothing to recommend him. He’s not talented at all. He’s certainly not cool. Mostly, he’s lazy, scared, and selfish, and he does some terrible things.
The book is a master class in manipulating audience sympathy. I found myself rooting for this narcissistic dork while the pages flew by.
It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring"…
Gus is a chaotic, fast-thinking class clown. When the principal suspends him for disrespecting her, he decides to visit his big sister on Vancouver Island, the only person in his life who really ‘gets’ him.
Gus is trying a new med for his attention disorder. Side effects of this med can involve hallucinations. Talking bugs, an avalanche of bird poop, and a runaway hospital gurney turn Gus’ trip into an odyssey. The elevator pitch for the book would be “Catcher in the Rye meets Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
Carol Golden isn't her real name. She doesn't remember her real name or anything that happened before she was found in a Dumpster, naked and unconscious, on the beautiful Palos Verdes Peninsula in Southern California.
After helping her get some initial medical treatment, government at all levels officially declares her…
What happens when you’re face-to-face with a truth that shakes you? Do you accept it, or pretend it was never there?
Award-winning author Mark A. Rayner smudges the lines between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative in this collection of stories that examines this question—what Homer called passing through The…
