100 Books Like Mistaken

I love books that explore how ordinary people might react in extraordinary circumstances, and this one takes that to another level.

The main characters, Tengo and Aomame, see that the world has changed—the most obvious clue being that there are now two moons in the sky—and it is fascinating to watch how these two very different people cope with living in a new and mysterious context. Murakami has a knack for making the surreal seem believable, and in this book, he is at the top of his game.

Such a peculiar book. The Horned Man is not for those who want answers or resolutions. By the time the final page is turned you'll find yourself with more questions than you had at any other point in the book. It takes the Unreliable Narrator device to the extreme, to the point where you don’t really believe anything from the get-go, a unique way to tell a story, but it works here. This book is dark, smart, uncomfortable, and it is unlike anything you'll ever read. Lasdun’s prose is also exceptional, and I’ve often found myself getting lost in his paragraphs, enjoying how I can stop and really take the time to re-read how the author has crafted his story, and lead you exactly where he wanted to.

A man is driving to some oceanside cliffs to end his life. On the way, he stops for a night at a B&B in a small fishing village. He meets a girl, who has disappeared in the morning, and the man thinks, “What the heck. I’ll just stick around here and pretend I’m the girl’s boyfriend (who no one in the village has met before) and wait until she returns.” The villagers grow increasingly suspicious (about everything, it seems) and the man is soon caught in an uncontrollable deception of his own making.

This is a really odd, really well-written Gothic tale by an author I’d never heard of (who doesn’t seem to have written anything before or since), but I picked it up because its vagueness intrigued me. It’s the interplay of the main character trying his best to pretend he’s someone he’s not, for reasons even he’s… show more.

This is post-modern crime fiction thematically linked and all with increasingly unreliable characters—because they’re each going insane.

In City of Glass private investigator, Daniel Quinn, goes mad sinking deeper into an investigation about identity. Who is telling his story and can they be relied on? Is it any of these characters who appear: ‘the author,’ ‘Paul Auster the writer,’ ‘Paul Auster the detective’?  Whoosh.

I love this stuff but understand it’s an acquired taste!

This beautiful book is possibly the most important book of my writing career. I found it in a second-hand bookstore in Dublin on a rainy afternoon and, like the plot, I felt that my finding it was a stroke of providence. I was so moved by the story that I immediately signed up for a writing workshop with the author. That workshop was a defining moment in my life – after it, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Although this story is not directly about art, it shows how a man’s calling, his compulsion to paint, plays a key role in the lives and the destinies of others. The novel has a fairytale-like quality to it, a poetic timelessness that captures the essence of spirituality and love.

I love the delightful yet diverse ensemble of characters that form the story of Evening Class and how their individual stories weave together so beautifully. It taught me that it’s never too late to take a risk or try something new and that everybody has a story, no matter how they present themselves to the world. There is something so comforting in Maeve Binchy’s delightful prose and many moments of laugh-aloud humour.

Christmas brings memories of other Christmases and can, therefore, be as much a melancholy time as a wonderful one.

The last story in James Joyce’s Dubliners ends with this burden of memory, and within a marriage, strikes a note of separation at the time of festivity. Before then, he brings to life for us Christmas parties, Edwardian Dublin in late December, conviviality, and the pain and delight of music.

It’s as good a story as anyone ever wrote and as Christmassy in its sadness as Dickens is in its joy.

Stranded on a dark road in the middle of the night, a young woman accepts a lift from a passing stranger.

It’s the nightmare scenario that every girl is warned about, and she knows the dangers all too well – but what other choice does she have? As they drive, she alternates between fear and relief – one moment thinking he is just a good man doing a good thing, the next convinced he’s a monster.

But a monster is exactly what she's looking for. When the driver drops her safely home Lucy’s heart sinks. She will have to try again tomorrow night. She’s made herself the bait, in her bid to find the man who took her sister.

Set in and around Dublin and the Dublin mountains, this gripping read from the author of The Nothing Man and 56 Days will keep you guessing until the very end. But… show more.

In Dublin Hanged, Henry paints an evocative picture of the turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Irish capital collapsing under rising property crime, food shortages due to series of particularly inclement winters, and political unrest. He also vividly captures the events that led to the organisation of the first metropolitan uniformed police in the British Isles, which came to be widely unpopular. Henry shows, the organisation of the force was costly and in order to fund the new police, the household tax ‘skyrocketed’ virtually overnight. Henry’s analysis reveals there was a marked decline in the frequency of rape and violent assaults in the years following the introduction of the police in October 1786, indicating a degree of effectiveness of the new police despite the lack of its popularity.

This is one of several excellent books that explores how nonhuman animals shaped cities (see also Andrew Robichaud’s Animal City, Frederick L. Brown’s The City is More Than Human, Dawn Day Biehler’s Pests in the City, and Hannah Velten’s Beastly London, for example). Cities are multispecies spaces and they have always been so, even as the history of a given city shifts and changes. When we walk through a city like Dublin today we may not immediately think about the many, many nonhuman animals who used to roam the same streets and pathways we walk on today. And yet, as Juliana Adelman explores in this book, there are hints and traces of this animal history if we know where to look.