Here are 100 books that Joe Cinque's Consolation fans have personally recommended if you like
Joe Cinque's Consolation.
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Anyone who’s attended high school knows it’s often survival of the fittest outside class and a sort of shadow-boxing inside of it. At my late-1970s prep school in the suburbs of Los Angeles, some days unfolded like a “Mad Max” meets “Dead Society” cage match. While everything changed when the school went coed in 1980, the scars would last into the next millennia for many. Mine did, and it’d thrust me on a journey not only into classic literature of the young-male archetype, but also historical figures who dared to challenge the Establishment for something bigger than themselves. I couldn’t have written my second novel, Later Days, without living what I wrote or eagerly reading the books below.
For years, I refused to re-embrace Holden Caulfield, because Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, declared it inspired him to bloodshed. I’m glad I did, getting the juices circulating for my novel.
Holden, manic-depressed over his brother’s death, cut loose from his prep school, may speak in a stream-of-consciousness babble, but he enunciated an old-soul contempt of Ivy-League elitism that reverberates today.
When Holden declares, “The more expensive a school, the more crooks it has,” it’s a literary MRI on American classism still tearing us asunder.
Set in Melbourne and Launceston, Tasmania, The Aphorism Club explores themes of resilience and female tenacity.
The story follows the life of Ruby Pearl Hart, a girl with a raspberry birthmark on her face. The story starts with Ruby’s childhood, which is marred by careless adults and tragedy. She finds…
Everybody lies. Good people, evil-doers, and the well-intentioned. My fascination began when I discovered through genealogy the mistruths, obfuscations, and lies by omission that peppered my own family tree. In my case the forebears believed there were good reasons to lie and no reason to think that the truth would ever be uncovered. But DNA profiling has shone a big light on the dark corners. Also being a teacher for a few decades means I’ve heard just about every permutation of alleged truth there is! These books focus on the character’s journey through deception and fabrications to arrive at a version of truth that is less unbearable than the lies.
Vertigo is not so much about the lies people tell, more the reasons why they can’t face the truth. The story unfolds as the reader is immersed in the physical world of the characters. The environment frames the sense of loss and isolation they experience and is described in detail. You can almost hear and smell the land around them. Lohrey also evokes the power of the Australian bushfire season and its power to destroy everything we build. Having lived through the New Year’s Eve fire in NSW in 2019/20 I feel every raw nerve ignite through her description.
Luke and Anna, thirty-something and restless, decide on a sea change. Worn down by city life and wounded by a loss neither can talk about, they flee to a sleepy village by the coast. There, surrounded by nature, they begin to feel rejuvenated. But when bushfire threatens their new home, they must confront what they have tried to put behind them.
Vertigo is a fable of love and awakening by one of Australia's finest writers, about the unexpected way emotions can return and life can change.
‘Vertigo will keep you up much too late but it’s worth a one-sitting read.’…
Everybody lies. Good people, evil-doers, and the well-intentioned. My fascination began when I discovered through genealogy the mistruths, obfuscations, and lies by omission that peppered my own family tree. In my case the forebears believed there were good reasons to lie and no reason to think that the truth would ever be uncovered. But DNA profiling has shone a big light on the dark corners. Also being a teacher for a few decades means I’ve heard just about every permutation of alleged truth there is! These books focus on the character’s journey through deception and fabrications to arrive at a version of truth that is less unbearable than the lies.
I love Nordic crime and Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indridason writes a good game. His Detective Erlendur is a complex man who has little luck in his relationships with the living; but when it comes to solving murder and mystery, he is like a dog with a bone. Like all his Reykjavik Murder Mysteries there are several strands interwoven to create a multi-layered puzzle. At the heart of the series, and this fifth book, is the one mystery that he can’t, yet most desperately wants to solve, his brother’s disappearance in a snowstorm when they were boys. Everyone lies, particularly the guilty.
One cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam at her holiday cottage. At first sight, it appears like a straightforward case of suicide; Maria had never recovered from the death of her mother two years previously and she had a history of depression. But then the friend who found her body approaches Detective Erlendur with a tape of a seance that Maria attended before her death and his curiosity is aroused.
Driven by a need to find answers, Erlendur begins an unofficial investigation into Maria's death. But he is also haunted by another unsolved mystery -…
Set in Melbourne and Launceston, Tasmania, The Aphorism Club explores themes of resilience and female tenacity.
The story follows the life of Ruby Pearl Hart, a girl with a raspberry birthmark on her face. The story starts with Ruby’s childhood, which is marred by careless adults and tragedy. She finds…
Everybody lies. Good people, evil-doers, and the well-intentioned. My fascination began when I discovered through genealogy the mistruths, obfuscations, and lies by omission that peppered my own family tree. In my case the forebears believed there were good reasons to lie and no reason to think that the truth would ever be uncovered. But DNA profiling has shone a big light on the dark corners. Also being a teacher for a few decades means I’ve heard just about every permutation of alleged truth there is! These books focus on the character’s journey through deception and fabrications to arrive at a version of truth that is less unbearable than the lies.
Brian McGilloway’s novel is told in the first person from the perspective of a grieving mother who tries to pick through the lies and secrets to uncover what happened to her only child. On her journey she uncovers the brutal truth; everybody lies. The book takes a realistic look at Dora Condron’s emotional descent into a bleak world where she comes to believe that no one will tell the truth. I like most of all that it is crime novel, a mystery, and a family drama that is told from the single perspective. The mother’s introspection about her failings as a parent really hits home when we consider what our own last words might have been to a loved one who walks out the door and never walks back in.
'A hugely compelling story of loss, grief and vengeance, The Empty Room is probably the best novel yet by one of our finest mystery writers. Unmissable.' John Connolly
'The tension and heartbreak kept me turning the pages' Patricia Gibney
'A searing, thrilling and heartbreaking look at life, loss and revenge, expertly handled by a hugely talented storyteller' Chris Whitaker
Pandora - Dora - Condron wakes one morning to discover her 17-year old daughter Ellie, has not come home after a party.
The day Ellie disappears, Dora is alone as her husband Eamon…
When I started writing mysteries, beginning with St. Martin’s Malice Award-winning Southern Fried,I wanted to get the medical, investigative, and courtroom details right. What better resource than good first-hand accounts from professionals who do those things every day? I love traditional, play-fair mysteries and the puzzles they present. But I also love writers who get the technical details right while also writing engaging novels I can get lost in. Nothing better than curling up with a good mystery.
Nancy Pickard is one of my favorite authors, starting with her Jenny Cain series. The Whole Truth, featuring true-crime writer Marie Lightfoot, was a shift for her. The novel simultaneously follows Marie as she researches the case of a dangerous serial killer and as she writes about it, which gives an interesting insight into the difficulties of living in a world where crime is real.
"Nancy Pickard pushes at the presumed limits of [crime fiction]" said the Los Angeles Times Book Review, praising the award-winning creator of the Jenny Cain mysteries. Now, Pickard blurs the line between fiction and reality in a novel of gripping intensity, and premieres a superb new heroine: true-crime author Marie Lightfoot. For her next surefire bestseller, Marie is covering the trial of a Florida killer -- a case that penetrates her own life, layer by disturbing layer.
Whether real like Ted Bundy, or imagined like Hannibal Lecter, few killers of our time are in the same league as Raymond Raintree.…
I’ve always hated horror movies and anything scary—but I love true crime. I’m particular in how I consume it; I prefer to listen to it rather than read it and never at night. But give me a Dateline marathon and I’m a happy woman. While much of my own writing is far from true crime (Twin Willows Trilogy is YA urban fantasy, and What They Don’t Know is contemporary YA), my thriller The Forgetting explores dark subject matters—so dark, in fact, that my agent said to me, “But you seem so nice.” I am, for the most part…but I’m also not afraid to shine a flashlight into the darkness that lives in all of us.
Every month when my copy of Vanity Fairarrived, I’d flip directly to Dominick Dunne’s column and savor every word. Each story in this collection reads like those columns: full of juicy details alongside human pathos. While most of the pieces cover the O.J. Simpson trial (for which Dunne was front and center in the courtroom every day), he also writes about other high-profile cases of the rich and infamous such as the Menendez Brothers and Sunny von Bulow. But the first story in the book is about the murder of Dunne’s own daughter, Dominique, reminding us that at the other end of these sensationalized stories is a real person whose life has tragically been cut short. One of the things that affected me most about Dunne’s writing is that he was always on the side of the victim, and that’s displayed here in spades.
Dominick Dunne's mesmerizing tales of justice denied and justice affirmed.
For more than two decades, Vanity Fair published Dominick Dunne’s brilliant, revelatory chronicles of the most famous crimes, trials, and punishments of our time. Whether writing of Claus von Bülow’s romp through two trials; the Los Angeles media frenzy surrounding O.J. Simpson; the death by fire of multibillionaire banker Edmond Safra; or the Greenwich, Connecticut, murder of Martha Moxley and the indictment—decades later—of Michael Skakel, Dominick Dunne tells it honestly and tells it from his unique perspective. His search for the truth is relentless.
I’ve always been fascinated by outsiders, people who don’t quite fit into societal expectations and exist on the fringes, just trying to get by or be left alone. I relate deeply to characters who are trapped between their own inner turmoil and the need to navigate a world full of contradictions and absurdities. I suppose one could argue that I’m comparing notes. Despite these books being dark and unsettling, they are also comforting. As a writer of psychological literary fiction, I can say it’s clear that these novels inspire me creatively and resonate deeply with me; they offer a window into the quiet chaos that resides in many of us.
I first read Josef K.'s haunting tale when I was a teenager. I hadn’t read anything by Kafka before and was initially quite frustrated because it wasn’t clear what the hell was going on, which, in retrospect, is rather the point.
I read this book again about five years ago and still found it a disturbing reflection on how society dehumanises the individual, often with no rhyme or reason, one might say Kafkaesque. Interestingly, I found it even more relatable as an adult.
"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term ""Kafkaesque." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment — based on an undisclosed charge — in a maze of nonsensical rules and bureaucratic roadblocks. Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925, Kafka's engrossing parable about the human condition plunges an isolated individual into an impersonal, illogical system. Josef K.'s ordeals raise provocative, ever-relevant issues related to the role of government and the nature of…
I’m a historian of early modern Europe. I have a particular interest in the history of violence and social relations and how and why ordinary people came into conflict with each other and how they made peace, that’s the subject of my most recent book Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe, which compares the entanglement of everyday animosities and how these were resolved in Italy, Germany, France and England. I’m also passionate about understanding Europe’s contribution to world history. As editor of The Cambridge World History of Violence, I explored the dark side of this. But my next book, The Invention of Civil Society, will demonstrate Europe’s more positive achievements.
I love this book because it’s a story about ordinary people. But it’s a true story.
It reads like a fairytale: a peasant, Arnaud du Tilh, is accused of impersonating another man who had abandoned his wife several years before. Arnaud seems to have outwitted the judges until the errant husband returns condemning the impostor to death.
I like this story because it helps to identify with men and women in the past, who in many respects, are just like us. It’s also a piece of great history reconstructed from original trial records. Davis is a great writer.
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer's day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago.
Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French…
I am a queer writer who lovers to read and write mystery and crime fiction. The history of these genres is often full of homophobic stereotypes and scapegoating of queer characters. While I think it’s important to show queer characters as flawed, I also want to make sure to celebrate the contributions of queer writers to these messy, wonderful genres.
I adore historical mysteries, particularly those that confront the unsavory realities of racism, sexism, and homophobia in our not-so-distant pasts. This book delves into all of these in such a striking, fully inhabited way.
What I loved most about this book was the immediacy and urgency of its voice, which drew me in from the first page and never let me go. It’s a harrowing story, and the narrative frame gives it a pace that always manages to drive forward while still allowing enough space for the setting to come to life.
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“A blistering historical thriller.” — Entertainment Weekly
A servant and former slave is accused of murdering her employer and his wife in this breathtaking debut that moves from a Jamaican sugar plantation to the fetid streets of Georgian London—a gripping historical thriller with echoes of Alias Grace, The Underground Railroad, and The Paying Guests.
All of London is abuzz with the scandalous case of Frannie Langton, accused of the brutal double murder of her employers, renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite. Crowds pack the courtroom, eagerly…
I grew up without a TV (well, we had a monitor for movies), so we spent a lot of time as a family reading. And the novels that I gravitated more and more towards were ones with psychological themes. It didn’t matter if they were modern or ancient; if they got at something unexplainable (or even explainable) about the human psyche, about what motivates us to behave in the ways that we do—especially if those behaviors are self-destructive—I wanted to read them. And I still do.
It’s rare that I find a book that plunges me so deeply into the psychology of a character.
Grace is the protagonist of Alias Grace. She’s cunning. She’s bold. She’s possibly a murderess. The most fascinating aspect of Grace to me is that she is based on a real-life character from Canada in the mid-1800s.
Throughout the whole book, I kept wondering about her—not just the fictional character, but the real one too—was this what she was really thinking? Was this how she really behaved?
I found her voice in the novel to be absolutely undeniable. You want to believe everything she says, but at the same time, you mistrust her...
Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor.' Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim? Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an extraordinarily potent tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery.
'Brilliant... Atwood's prose is searching. So intimate it seems to be written on the skin' Hilary Mantel
'The outstanding novelist of our age' Sunday Times
