Here are 76 books that A Slant of Light fans have personally recommended if you like
A Slant of Light.
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I grew up reading murder mysteries and watching old black-and-white films on television. As a teenager, I couldn’t get enough of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I loved challenging myself to solve the mystery before the end of the book, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
One thing I noticed in reading the classics is that LGBTQ+ people were either completely absent or used for comic relief or tragic effect. I wanted to change that with my stories, showing that they can be compelling protagonists, solving murders and sometimes finding love.
What’s not to love about this? I first experienced The Big Sleep by viewing the classic Humphrey Bogart movie, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the film, I admit I was a bit perplexed over some of the plot points.
Reading the book cleared up some, but not all, of my confusion, and yet it’s a book I would read again and again. The classic 1930s setting of Los Angeles and Hollywood, the noir elements, and the hard-boiled detective, Phillip Marlowe, are an unbeatable combination in my mind.
Raymond Chandler's first three novels, published here in one volume, established his reputation as an unsurpassed master of hard-boiled detective fiction.
The Big Sleep, Chandler's first novel, introduces Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralysed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail and murder.
In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe deals with the gambling circuit, a murder he stumbles upon, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women.
In The High Window, Marlowe searches the California underworld for a priceless gold coin and finds himself…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
The 1930s have always fascinated me. It was such a historically difficult time for the entire world. The Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, WWII, and the rise of two of the world’s most notable leaders, FDR and Winston Churchill. I have spent years of study on this period and written three novels that take place during the thirties. Does it make me an expert? Only one deeply familiar with an exciting decade.
She checks all the boxes that I hunt for in thirties fiction. The Great Depression, family, and the persistent drive of a protagonist (Elsa) to survive in the midst of harsh adversity. I love when an author paints vivid word pictures of this era, and Hannah does a superb job (as usual).
I want to feel the thirties, to actually mentally become a participant in experiencing what the characters experience. Hannah does just that.
"The Bestselling Hardcover Novel of the Year."--Publishers Weekly
From the number-one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes a powerful American epic about love and heroism and hope, set during the Great Depression, a time when the country was in crisis and at war with itself, when millions were out of work and even the land seemed to have turned against them.
“My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family.”
Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on…
The 1930s have always fascinated me. It was such a historically difficult time for the entire world. The Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, WWII, and the rise of two of the world’s most notable leaders, FDR and Winston Churchill. I have spent years of study on this period and written three novels that take place during the thirties. Does it make me an expert? Only one deeply familiar with an exciting decade.
I loved this book because it contains everything that attracts me to this time period, the thirties.
There’s Prohibition, a popular mobster who paints himself as a religious member of the community, politically corrupt NYC, and the story of a young man’s journey from rags to riches.
Doctorow’s brilliant pacing kept me awake, provoking me to jealousy of his genius.
'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom'
It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.
Detective Kate Bowen is out of time—and out of options.
A surveillance operation on the Irish border goes cock-eyed. Detective Kate Bowen is left red-faced when her target vanishes into the mists of the Irish Sea. She must work smart to figure out where he’s headed and what he’s plotting.
The 1930s have always fascinated me. It was such a historically difficult time for the entire world. The Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, WWII, and the rise of two of the world’s most notable leaders, FDR and Winston Churchill. I have spent years of study on this period and written three novels that take place during the thirties. Does it make me an expert? Only one deeply familiar with an exciting decade.
Towles does an excellent job in weaving a narrative that captures a different side to the Great Depression.
It’s not the poverty, the homeless, the downtrodden, but the elite and how they navigated the thirties. Although the protagonist (Katey) is a working-class woman, Towles creates moral complexities for her that paint a vivid picture of the world of the thirties from the heights of the elite.
It gave me a perspective of the thirties I sometimes ignored because it doesn’t fit the image of the unemployment line, the soup kitchens, and people jumping out of windows after the crash. I was able to view the thirties from a different angle.
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow, a “sharply stylish” (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society—now with over one million readers worldwide
On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have…
I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother’s family traces their ancestry to the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, and my family taught me to draw strength from our sense of being deeply rooted in the region. I attended the United World College of the American West, which has an extensive outdoors education program, and I learned there to value the natural world that I had previously taken for granted. I left New Mexico at nineteen and haven’t lived there a full year since. Reading and writing are my salve for my homesickness and my portal to the ever-changing world that is the American Southwest.
At first glance, this book of short stories is about Denver gentrification, but the volume is much more – a series of studies of how Native and Mexican women remember and revisit the “lost territory” of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado when they head to the Rocky Mountain metropolis.
I love that rather than look back East or out West when seeking home, the women of Fajardo-Anstine’s work look northward and southward, to the past and to the future. I was not at all surprised to learn that Fajardo-Anstine consulted with Prof. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez for her work. Fonseca-Chávez’s Following the Manito Trail oral history project let me keep listening for similar voices.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.
“Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart.”—Sandra Cisneros
WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE STORY PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION
Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in…
I am a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces and the CIA with more than 20 years experience in “interesting” places around the world. That experience (and a graduate degree) gave me the background and tools to write about special operations and espionage history. I am also a conflict archaeologist and have conducted battlefield and campaign studies on three continents. I know and love these stories because they have been part of my life, and know readers will also love them.
The American Southwest is not the usual place one thinks about in connection to espionage, but some of the most notorious spy incidents in U.S. history happened here during World War II and are still happening!
Former CIA officer E. B. Held brings these events to life (and in some cases death) with just the right amount of historical background to interest any traveler or spy aficionado in exploring these amazing stories.
I love how the author shows the importance of New Mexico to espionage history from Leon Trotsky to the Manhattan Project to today’s events at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This book will give you a new perspective on “The Land of Enchantment."
When thinking of New Mexico, few Americans think spy-vs.-spy intrigue, but in fact, to many international intelligence operatives, the state's name is nearly synonymous with espionage, and Santa Fe is a sacred site. The KGB's single greatest intelligence and counterintelligence coups, and the planning of the organization's most infamous assassination, all took place within one mile of Bishop Lamy's statue in front of Saint Francis Cathedral in central Santa Fe. In this fascinating guide, former CIA agent E. B. Held uses declassified documents from both the CIA and KGB, as well as secondary sources, to trace some of the most…
A charming cozy mystery with a delightful twist: The detectives are three kittens with magical powers, determined to solve a most purr-plexing case.
Precocious kittens Bippity, Boppity, and Boop are exceedingly loyal to their human, the twenty-eight-year-old up-and-coming magician Mila. She saved them from starving to death in a dingy…
I was born in Santa Fe to families with long histories in the southern region of the state. It was my grandfather, Louis Whitlock, a state senator, who headed the legislation that landed Carlsbad this monument of folly.
My childhood was shaped by the reality and beauty of the state. The books I’ve chosen are dear to me because they reflect familial lore. It is a state I love, a state I hope every American visits at least once. Yet much of its reality is obscured by pottery and rugs, Lucchese boots and impressive architecture. These books, I hope, offer a counterbalance, so that anybody touring the state can appreciate its complex culture and history.
By now, McCarthy is well known for his books on the Southwest. Cities of the Plain is painfully overlooked.
I read it in college as a precocious creative writing major and fell in love because the towns mentioned (Belén, where my grandmother was born, as example) were familiar to me and yet I had no idea these nowhere places of my youth were known to anybody else in the world, to say nothing about their value to any artistic form.
Unlike All the Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain has zero romanticism to it: it’s a contemporary, hard-driven tale of ranching in the badlands of New Mexico. McCarthy focuses on the pumpjacks and the stench of creosote that encapsulate the southern part of the state.
There’s also a gruesomely funny passage about an Oldsmobile and dozens of jackrabbits.
First published in 1994. Environmental issues present a daunting challenge to the international system. The destruction of the tropical rainforest, the Chernobyl explosion and the ozone layer 'hole' all underline the transnational nature of environmental threats and the need for states to act together in order to tackle them. How have such environmental issues entered political agendas in different parts of the world and how has that affected national positions? Can governments ever reconcile their own national interests with the international cooperation needed to deal with transboundary issues such as climate change?
This book traces the history of international environmental…
I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother’s family traces their ancestry to the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, and my family taught me to draw strength from our sense of being deeply rooted in the region. I attended the United World College of the American West, which has an extensive outdoors education program, and I learned there to value the natural world that I had previously taken for granted. I left New Mexico at nineteen and haven’t lived there a full year since. Reading and writing are my salve for my homesickness and my portal to the ever-changing world that is the American Southwest.
Most memoirs of Native life describe Native-White relationships. Taffa dives into relationships among Native communities and between Native and Chicanx neighbors and family members in both the Fort Yuma Quechan Reservation and Farmington, New Mexico.
Threaded throughout are the TV shows and diner dinners and dusty hikes and radio soundtracks that almost any New Mexican who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s will remember.
A Best Book of the Year: Washington Post, Esquire, Time, The Atlantic, NPR, and Publishers Weekly
An Oprah Daily "Best New Book" and "Riveting Nonfiction and Memoir You Need to Read" * A New York Times "New Book to Read" * A Zibby Mag "Most Anticipated Book" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book to Cozy Up With" * The Millions "Most Anticipated" *An Amazon Editors "Best Book of the Month" * A Parade "Best New Work By Indigenous Writers" *…
Although I grew up in New York City, from a young age I was drawn to the natural world, particularly through gardening and camping trips. Eventually I studied biology in college and earned a Master’s researching stream ecology. I also always imagined myself a writer. For years my writing was solely in letters and journals, but during my Master’s I started a novel featuring an immature mayfly in the stream (it was somewhat autobiographical). Ecology is all about the connection of organisms to their environment and to one another, and I think this perspective of connectedness has embedded itself deeply in my writing and my life.
First of all, this sprawling novel is funny and entertaining, and those qualities would be reason enough that I would recommend it. Yet beyond those qualities, it created a strong sense of place and a real social and political conflict without ever becoming preachy or heavy handed—not an easy feat as I have learned.
The storyline, a conflict over land use and water rights, is repeated again and again throughout the West and Southwest in particular—in this case pitting real estate developers against impoverished locals. But the story is also about a conflict of cultures and how those cultures perceive and connect to the land. Exposing such conflicts is a boon of literature.
The Milagro Beanfield War is the first book in John Nichols's New Mexico Trilogy (“Gentle, funny, transcendent.” ―The New York Times Book Review)
Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began-though few knew it at the time-the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than by battlefield victories.…
PI David Randall is not a fan of singer Sherry White, but when he learns she has received threatening letters, he agrees to help with security for her concerts in Parkland.
When Sherry’s personal psychic quits, Randall enlists Camden to help Sherry deal with her stage fright. Randall’s investigation is…
I’m a novelist, essayist, and journalist who’s written extensively about the problems and consolations of faith, about belonging in and out of faith, and about the tribes of what I think of as the In Between. When you’re in between, you’re neither in it nor out of it, whatever “it” might be for you. You bear an “infinity of traces,” as the writer Antonio Gramsci called these formative influences. My first novel looks at these influences directly, while my second one looks at them indirectly. I’m late in the game with a third novel now—a detective story that investigates a murder along with these same themes.
One of my permanent, permanent favorites. Cather’s novel about a pair of French Catholic missionaries in 19th-century New Mexico is a lot of things: a portrait of a complex and life-giving friendship, a “loveship,” if I can borrow from Alice Munro.
It’s also an immersive historical treatment of Catholic proselytizing in the Southwest and a lyric poem about the beauty of that land. It’s smart about the rigors and consolations and the inevitable condescension of missionary work. It’s smart about everything. A perfect book.
From one of the most highly acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century—"a truly remarkable book" (The New York Times),an epic—almost mythic—story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape,…
