Here are 100 books that High-Rise fans have personally recommended if you like
High-Rise.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve loved weird horror from a young age, and that passion only grew as the years went on. It all started when I was ten, and I got an anthology of classic horror for my birthday. Inside I read The White People by Machen, Cast the Runes by MR James, and The Colour Out of Space by Lovecraft, and I was hooked. Ever since then I chased that same thrill of the horror that is so out there and strange it just breaks your brain and changes you inside out. I have a feeling I’ll be chasing that obsession until the end of my days.
A very dark turn in my list, indeed. A hole opens up in their apartment, who knows who or why? It doesn’t matter. They dub it the funhole, and would do what any of us would do, and start sticking things inside of it. Things get dark, fast.
If you want to be up all night, unable to sleep, give this book a whirl.
Kathe Koja's classic, award-winning horror novel is finally available as an ebook.
Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Although I’m an academic by training, I secretly struggle with heavy nonfiction tomes (think: massive histories of long-ago countries). I start reading these with the best intentions but quickly get sleepy, bored, or both, setting them aside and instead picking up a novel, which I’ll immediately devour. That’s why I love memoiristic, hybrid work so much: writing that pairs the intimacy of fiction with the information buffet of nonfiction, where you learn without realizing you’re learning. These books feel like a conversation with a close friend who is intelligent, thought-provoking, and passionate about various subjects—what could be better than that?
I read Olivia Laing’s bookat the height of my own loneliness: isolated, in lockdown, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part memoir, part art history, part cultural criticism, the book managed to be both intimate and expansive—just what I needed as I sat by myself in front of a computer, anxiously refreshing virus graphs.
I became absorbed by the lives of Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, artists I’d heard of but knew nothing about, and by the various aspects of loneliness I’d never previously considered. It’s the perfect example of the type of hybrid writing that I find truly magical.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
#1 Book of the Year from Brain Pickings
Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub
A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring.
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began…
I’ve always been preternaturally attentive to the way words work—as components of meaning, but also as visual, aural, and functional objects with their own erratic behaviors. Since joining the Oulipo in 2009, I’ve had even more occasion to think and talk about how those behaviors can be pointed in a literary direction, and to recognize successful experiments when I read them.
A bracing slap to the face, this book. Or maybe a punch to the gut. The conceit is the series of portraits of hoarders based on the reality show of the same name, and the recipe is to combine their testimonials—“I save old soda cans and turn the tin snips into flowers,” say, or “I want desperately to change”—with lists of objects, described as though in a slow camera pan across a filthy room. But the alchemy is the way Durbin mashes the two together, not quite at random but not correctlyeither. It’s a harrowing litany of fragments, so specific that the unspoken point is all too clear: what’s broken is much bigger than any of these individual people or things.
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 An NPR Best Book of 2021 An Electric Literature Best Poetry Book of 2021 A Dennis Cooper Best Book of 2021
In Hoarders, Durbin deftly traces the associations between hoarding and collective US traumas rooted in consumerism and the environment. Each poem is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snow globes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit to plants. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects a cultural moment back to the reader…
In this collection of nine stories, J.C. Gemmell takes readers on a quest into the future.
Tion is a dystopian civilisation built on the wreckage of a drowned Earth. Here, technology saves and oppresses, and mankind clings to survival in a place where the privileged live above the clouds, and…
I respond to the darkness and the darkness responds to me. Before writing anything creative, I was studying to be a sociologist. I didn’t get there but all those peculiarities that criminology, deviant behavior, and symbolic interactionism (don’t get me started on Foucault or else we’ll be here all day) stuck with me. I won’t say I don’t care about characters but I’m more interested in stories that examine a character in relation to their status and situation within society. So yeah, lots of poverty, loneliness, and identity issues.
Matthew Revert and I go way back. He’s a true polymath in that he’s a designer, musician, and also the author of multiple novels and collections. My favorite of his is Basal Ganglia, a novel about two lovers that live in this insane pillow fort. There’s a movie, I think it’s called Dave Builds a Maze, that kind of taps into the full-flung dive into implausibility to explore personal space and intimacies but of course, Revert’s just hits different.
Basal Ganglia casts an unsettling spell, but one that in its aphoristic intensity and lightning-flash insights into human loneliness and connection, achieves a genuine empathic wisdom." - SERGIO DE LA PAVA, author of A Naked Singularity
"Matthew Revert is one of the visionaries. What else can you say?" - SCOTT MCCLANAHAN, author of Hill William and Crapalachia
As teenagers, two lovers, Rollo and Ingrid, escape the world as it is known to live underground in a sprawling pillow fort that mirrors the structure of the human brain. Construction of the fort takes 25 years and once complete, their life exists…
After half a lifetime working all over the world as an environmental scientist, I am now a full-time writer of fiction and non-fiction. I’ve studied the effects of oil industry waste in Yemen, monitored groundwater contaminated with radioactive tritium from bomb-making sites in Europe, and remediated oil pits in the South American jungle. I ran Australia’s national climate adaptation program and was CEO of Australia’s national marine science agency, which does much of the research on the Great Barrier Reef. And everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve seen how environmental destruction hurts people, societies, and, inevitably, our future. Each of my six novels and my non-fiction examines this issue in different ways.
The only non-fiction book on my list, this prescient, chilling work examines the geopolitics of climate change.
Written in 2008 by an ex-naval officer turned journalist, this book works on two levels. First, cogent explanations of the science and interviews with senior military personnel from America and Great Britain. Then, eight scenarios that describe how the world might react as emissions rise.
Scenario One: 2045. The average global temperature is 2.8°C higher than in 1990. Prognosis: Awful.
And the scary thing is that’s pretty close to the trajectory we are currently on.
Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Spreading epidemics. Drought. Rising sea levels. Plummeting agricultural yields. Crashing economies. Political extremism. These are just some of the expected consequences of runaway climate change in the decades ahead - and any of them could tip the world towards conflict. Bold, unflinching, and based on exhaustive research, "Climate Wars" grippingly reveals how world leaders are likely to react, and promises to be one of the most important books of the coming years.
I am an author and avid reader of romance, especially those full of conflict in a world heavy with magic, shifters, vampires, and others. My dad was a great storyteller and sparked my interest in the paranormal. When I was a kid, he’d tell me stories about growing up in the mountains of Puerto Rico. The evil that lived there. My imagination took it from there. I wish I would’ve written down those stories. I can’t get him to talk about them anymore. It might be the reason why The Nine: Zane had started out as a contemporary romance story until Zane took over with all his paranormal drama.
I have always loved fictional works that explore deep truths of humanity and existence. As a teen struggling to understand my purpose and beliefs, I grew fond of dystopian books with subtle, hope-filled messages pointing to God as our salvation amid chaos. I loved the genre so much that I began writing a Christian dystopian novel of my own and self-published it at 19, weaving pieces of my testimony throughout the main character's inner journey. For me, a book is only as good as its characters, no matter how gripping the plot is. So, the books on this list contain some of the genre's most authentic, intricately written souls.
As a fast-paced sci-fi dystopian book about the end times, Unbound took me by surprise. The main character is amusingly real in his unbelief in God and skepticism about the prophecies from the book of Revelation, telling things as they are and unable to comprehend the intense visions he experiences.
The storyline is compelling, and I could not help but continually compare it to the biblical prophesies because they were so eerily parallel and realistically portrayed. This book had my heart racing and made me want to read the next in the series as soon as I finished it.
"The Da Vinci Code meets Hunger Games meets Left Behind...An imagining epic." Hugh Hewitt, New York Times Bestseller
Elijah Goldsmith has nightmares he needs to ignore. Why would a rich kid from Manhattan dream three straight nights about a dragon and the destruction of St. Peter's Basilica? He's never even been to Rome.
It's bad timing, too. He's graduating soon and applying to be a spy in the International Security Agency. That's where he meets Naomi. She's the kind of girl who makes boys like Elijah want to share their secrets. Were they brought together to learn what his secrets…
I am actually NOT a good person to make any reading list, because I am not an avid reader. As the most performed playwright in the Chinese speaking world, the fuel for my over 40 plays comes from life itself, not by books about art/creativity. To be creative, you need to be inspired by life, to see how great works of art are composed, including nature. To understand life you need to focus intensely on it and observe how it works in as objective a way as possible. It’s great to find a book about creativity that will help your creativity, but I find life itself is the greatest inspiration.
“What is this?” I asked myself on first reading. “Fiction?”
Each short piece contained a moving story that was like a jewel to view and think about, but something was strange, in a wondrous way. It seemed like fiction posing as journalism, like the great classical Chinese tale “A Record of the Peach Blossom Land” by Tao Yuanming (6th century) that inspired my most popular play.
It upended my concept of short story, and of art, opening doors to ways of writing. “Fiction in disguise.” Astonishingly creative, yet peaceful and profound. Wildly creative themes and twists narrated by a quiet objective voice. Maestro Borges taught me that you can shock an audience through very calm narrative, and how profound creativity starts with format.
A master class in creativity that ends with compassion.
The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century.
Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing…
I grew up in a small community surrounded by mountains and vast public land. I learned to ride a horse before riding a bike, and my dad taught me about recreating in remote areas. I didn’t think of those lessons as survival training, but in my novels, the skills I learned as a kid often save the characters’ lives. All the books on this list feature ordinary people doing extraordinary things to survive and, in some cases, protecting those they love. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have!
I love to be surprised. Poster Girl started a bit slow, but as the story unfolded, the web of connections made this dystopian book much more interesting than I thought it would be.
The story began after a revolution. Many considered patriots by the former government were either killed or imprisoned. As the new government tries to paint itself as the liberator from oppression, similarities between the new and old regimes are exposed.
As with any good dystopian story, it shows what people will do to survive in a dangerous and unfamiliar world and how they navigate relationships within a new set of social rules.
A fallen regime. A missing child. A chance at freedom.
Ten years ago, Sonya was the face of an oppressive regime. Then it was toppled by rebels and she was thrown into prison - where she has been locked up ever since.
When an old enemy comes to her with a deal, it seems too good to be true: find a missing girl who was stolen from her parents, and earn her freedom.
But as Sonya hunts for the child, she is forced to dig deeper into the past - and her family's dark secrets - than she ever bargained…
I have always loved fictional works that explore deep truths of humanity and existence. As a teen struggling to understand my purpose and beliefs, I grew fond of dystopian books with subtle, hope-filled messages pointing to God as our salvation amid chaos. I loved the genre so much that I began writing a Christian dystopian novel of my own and self-published it at 19, weaving pieces of my testimony throughout the main character's inner journey. For me, a book is only as good as its characters, no matter how gripping the plot is. So, the books on this list contain some of the genre's most authentic, intricately written souls.
A Time to Die is a gritty dystopian book with many unexpected twists and a unique, intricate world that transported me right into it from the first chapter. I loved how genuine and transparent the main character is in her approach to every new circumstance and her newfound relationship with God.
Each chapter is fast-paced, intense, and almost always ends on a cliffhanger. It is one of the most thrilling, raw survival stories I have read, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a book that will keep them engaged and begging for more when it is over.
Parvin Blackwater believes she has wasted her life. At only seventeen, she has one year left according to the Clock by her bedside. In a last-ditch effort to make a difference, she tries to rescue Radicals from the government's crooked justice system.
But when the authorities find out about her illegal activity, they cast her through the Wall -- her people's death sentence. What she finds on the other side about the world, about eternity, and about herself changes Parvin forever and might just save her people. But her…
