100 Books Like The Guest

This book is perfect in every way.

As a writer, I find it scarily good. Not only does it have a compelling plot that kept me turning pages, but it’s sooo beautifully written, with unique, complex characters and a story that bends and twists through their lives, surprising me over and over.

Like all good gothic fiction, it includes a decaying mansion, mysterious disappearances, an eccentric old lady, stories within stories, and it also has twins!

Before her mega-hit Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn penned this diabolical noir set in the deep South. It’s an edgy story, presenting a gallery of disturbed characters—including the deeply troubled protagonist, a journalist who returns to her hometown to report on the murders of two young girls.

Some books I forget a week or two after reading, others just stick with me for a year or more, and some leave bootprints in my mind forever. This is one of the latter.

The first line had me hooked: “It would be inaccurate to say that my childhood was normal before they came.”

That one sentence fired up my imagination, and the story kept me turning the pages late into the night. Libby, an adoptee, unexpectedly inherits a once-grand mansion in London’s Chelsea, only to discover it comes with a grim family history that’s nothing like the fanciful one she’d imagined.

I’m particularly drawn to novels like this one, with multiple narrators and intertwining timelines.

No one writes suspense like Ruth Ware! Her books are all compelling page-turners, and yes, she follows my magic formula. All of her heroines are young women who go from a stable existence to some sort of fish-out-of-water situation that creates suspense. In this book, the young narrator, down on her luck, decides to respond to a letter claiming she is an heiress. While she knows that the letter has been sent to her because she bears the same name as the real heiress, she decides to claim the family fortune, or whatever she can get, and then run away.

But when she is introduced to the mysterious family members and finds that there are skeletons in the ancestral closet, she starts to feel trapped. At this point, I am nestling in with the popcorn and Diet Coke because this is the evening’s entertainment. I love the way Ware pushes… show more.

A character-driven novel with seemingly simple, captivating scenes that move at a thrilling clip. April and Frank, a married couple living in 1950s suburbia trying to survive their lives after WWII, are human and flawed.

At times, I despised and loved them simultaneously. It’s relationship at its ugliest and most passionate. The desperation they feel, their attempt at normalcy, and their desire to break away from it all, their angst and anguish, are timeless themes.

There’s a scene where they decide to give up their lives and move to Paris, and I thought, how many times I have done that? The novel, unlike its characters, is flawless.

I love a good look at class realities from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

So I was eager to dive into a book about Trust’s central character, Ida Partenza, the daughter of an early twentieth-century anarchist, but also the secretary and ghostwriter for wealthy financier Andrew Bevel.

Part of what is so captivating (and mind-boggling) about Trust is its metafictional structure: Is it a novel? Wait, is it a memoir? Wait, is it Bevel’s story, or Ida’s, or Bevel’s wife’s?

To say more, I’m afraid, would ruin too many wonderful surprises, but I will say that some of the loveliest, most memorable writing in this book appears in the voice of Bevel’s wife, Mildred.

Though it is set just after the war, the characters in this novel cannot escape from their memories of the Holocaust or guilt at having survived. Yet they are also stuck in a comic scenario—through a complex series of events, the Jewish protagonist Herman has wound up with three “wives,” his first wife from before the war who he mistakenly assumed dead, the Polish Catholic peasant who hid him from the Nazis and he married out of gratitude, and his mistress and fellow survivor he met upon relocating to New York. The novel is both hilarious and heart-breaking—a potent reminder of the impossibility of ever leaving behind the worst horrors of this war.   

Socialite Nora Charles helps guide her husband to discovering the truth about the eponymous “thin man” via artful suggestions, one-liner putdowns, and plenty of cocktails, and that’s why I love this book. Although Nick Charles is the main detective in this 1934 romp by Dashiell Hammett, Nora is instrumental in helping him make decisions of all sorts. The biting dialogue elevates this book above the genre norms of the time.

Nora’s comment on an impending Christmas gift from her husband:

“Whatever you’re giving me,” she said, “I hope I don’t like it.”

This one single novel sparked all those great movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy, in which Nora shines ever more brightly. The novel was a comedy of manners but, sadly, was also Hammett’s last.

When Bill (William John) Cunningham (1929-2016), son of an Irish Catholic family from Boston, moved to New York at the tender age of 19 in 1948, it became the life-defining step in his career as probably the most famous fashion photographer in the metropolis. He had been interested in fashion from an early age and sold his first hats. After returning from military service in Korea in 1953, he began photographing fashion and writing articles for Women's Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune.

It is no exaggeration to say that Cunningham's fashion sense and photography quickly shaped a new style of fashion journalism. His "street style" brought fashion, no matter how expensive or luxurious, into the world of everyday life. Cunningham made fashion interesting again only through his point of view and photographs. The quiet, always curious and meticulous Cunningham also became known for his commitment to the gay… show more.

I can still remember so much from this book. A great stat Hawes included was that in the year 1870, 90 percent of upper-class New Yorkers lived in townhouses or other types of single-family homes. By 1930, 90 percent lived in apartment buildings or “French flats,” as they were sometimes called. Basically, almost alone among American cities, New York chose to emulate Paris in its model of urbanism rather than London.

New York developers built and sold “French flats” that were large and ostentatious, like the Ansonia and the Dakota, which are still there today. These iconic apartment buildings were built along the streetcar and subway lines. Hawes was a writer for The New Yorker, so this is very readable.