Books like Skinhead — picked by fans

I was moved and delighted by this highly original novel, which blends murder-mystery with heartfelt philosophical explorations into animal rights, mysticism, existential anxiety, and our own humanity.

Narrator-protagonist Janina, a woman who translates Blake, studies horoscopes and feels a deep connection to the animals around her; she tells the story of what happens one winter when a series of men in her Polish village are murdered by a culprit yet to be found.

I adored this book’s intelligence and blending of tragedy and humor. Its narrative combines a compelling plot with a distinctive first-person voice and deeply thoughtful reflections about the beauty, cruelty, and wonder of life.

About halfway into Red Dragon, you meet Francis Dolarhyde, and from then on, the book is all his. Forget the FBI who are looking for him, the only person you care about is Dolarhyde, the serial killer who’s been brutally murdering entire families.

As far as I’m concerned, he’s the hero. Hannibal Lecter isn’t Thomas Harris’ best villain. It’s Dolarhyde. He’s everything Lecter isn’t. He’s awkward, shy, hates his body, hates himself and spends all his time stewing on his inadequacies. If I’ve got to pick between the Virgin Dolarhyde and the Chad Lecter, it’s Dolarhyde every time.

Deep down, he just wants to be loved, but the way he goes about it is almost comically misguided. Dolardhyde is on an impossible, bloody mission to fix himself, and no matter how many bodies he drops trying to do it, I’m always rooting for him to make it out the… show more.

Everyone loves a bastard, and Pinkie, the hero of Brighton Rock, is such an awful bastard. He doesn’t like his friends, hates his girlfriend, and is driven by a pathetically brittle ego that can never be satisfied. But it’s the fact he’s so hopelessly trapped in the prison of his own angry, petty horizons that makes me love him. I love a doomed character.

When an author can make you know, it’s all going to end badly and still make you hope it won’t? That’s magic. I love it when I’m reading books that I can feel playing with my emotions but I’m enjoying it so much I don’t care. Pinkie is a bastard, and he sort of knows it, when it comes to the crunch, and he goes out like a coward, I can’t help but wish he’d managed to pull it off.

I fell in love with the film and so was deeply relieved when I finally read the book and found out it was even better.

While there’s a horrendous moral misstep that sets things in motion, what I love is how well it captures that timeless, uncertain, motes-of-dust-in-the-sunlight feeling of a teenage, British summertime.

As the protagonists’ small, crumbling world slowly disintegrates around them, McEwan, the genius that he is, finds a universal sense of adolescent instability that keeps you on his side as things go horribly awry. 

I love this book! A famous female pianist in Boston who kills bad people, and she has quirks. She also changes boy toys during the story; that whole dynamic is sexy and unusual. 

One of my new favorite books. I hate heavy procedural books, and this is not one. The FBI is involved, but not how you think. The railroad killer was also very creative. She does have the FBI chasing her and has friends in the FBI, which is unique, too. The beginning is good, with lots of action and intrigue, and the middle holds up with a bang for an ending.

There are a few surprises here and there, but it is just a solid story.

I love all of Rebecca Makkai’s work, but this novel, published earlier this year, absolutely blew me away.

Makkai is adept at keeping the pages turning, but it wasn’t just the story of podcaster Bodie Kane and the murder of her high school classmate that drew me in as much as the atmosphere. The novel is set in a New England winter, and Makkai does a fantastic job of using the darkness and isolation of the season to create thematic resonance.

I’ve only been to New England a few times and don’t know it well at all, but this novel makes me feel like I’ve been there.

A story that I did not know about, and it shocked me to find out it is based on reality. It is the story of Ozjorks, a Russian town where, in 1957, during a nuclear explosion, enormous amounts of radiation ended up in the air.

It was shocking to read how the inhabitants became like lab rats. And how a scientist arrives to work on research there and has not been told of the risks. I have great respect for how the writer must have researched the story and then mixed it with fantasy to make a book that kept me entranced from beginning to end.  

This is another story bringing history to life, in this case, the famous Rajah Quilt, made by convict women in 1841 while being transported to Tasmania.

I’m not a patcher myself, but my mum was, and I know how patching brings disparate women together, though not as disparate as these "dangerous women" and their leader, the Quaker philanthropist Kezia Hayter.

Hope Adams takes a worthy story and turns it into a gripping whodunnit, beginning with a murder on page one. It is hard at times to keep track of all the characters, but well worth the effort because their unlikely friendships are fascinating and crucial to the solving of the mystery.  

I loved the main character of this book from the very first: Sgt Cribb of Scotland Yard. I came across this book through a television adaptation. I watched, then went scouring the shelves of my local library, finding, to my delight, that the book was the first in a series.

This was the first Cribb novel, and I found it charming, with a great mystery at its core. I love the fact that the background is a little-known Victorian sport: pedestrianism or endurance walking.

I never realized before that a horror novel could also be a spellbinding thriller. Early on, I learned about the awful things this supposedly respectable couple was doing in their basement and the ghastly purpose they had done it for. But pit it against the naivete of the bumbling private detective who stumbles into the disaster, and for me, the story was thrilling and horrible at the same time.

Again, the author’s prose just took my breath away. I found myself holding my breath while turning the page and then letting it out when the chapter finished. This is one hell of a story!