25 Books Like The Miracles of the Namiya General Store

Min's knotty tale is almost thriller-like in its plot, but she unpicks the threads of the overlapping relationships between her characters with such patience, insight and poetry. It's a heartbreaking book that explores the uncomfortable tension between extreme pain and extreme beauty, as well as bringing sharp insights into the way in which Asian women are profiled and fetishised in the classical music world.

This is a gentle satire of the hypocrisy and at times ludicrous nature of bourgeois life in modern New Zealand, and of how a woman who married "up" into money struggles with it all, especially as the financial security unravels. Many of the characters are hilarious in their unwitting shallowness. The novel was deservedly acclaimed as New Zealand's best novel of the year at the awards ceremony earlier this year.

All of Higashino’s books are great, but this is one of the best, and it happens to be the first novel in the Detective Galileo series, where a physics professor helps a detective solve crimes. Imagine Sherlock Holmes, except set on the streets of Tokyo. We follow Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police as he tries to piece together the mysterious events surrounding a murder where we, the reader, already know who committed the crime.

The format is so very different from your normal crime novel, and that is one of the truly interesting things about this book. It’s still a marvel to me that Higashino keeps you wondering the whole time, even as you already know key parts of the outcome. If you want to understand the Japanese mind in advance of a trip (or move) to Japan, this is a great place to start!

When I first visited Venice, I had the strange sense that I already “knew” the city because I had read this first and all the subsequent Leon novels set in the city and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. From those books, I recognized landmarks and hidden alleys, cafes and restaurants, how to take the Vaparetto, and where the main police stations and markets were. 

I wanted to write like that, make the city a main character–and I love other series that do the same, like Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series set in Sicily. These books “take you there.”

It's always great to discover a new-to-me author of crime thrillers like Peter Swanson. His two ultra-deceptive main characters deliver shocking surprises.

Two strangers meet in a London lounge, awaiting their flight to Boston. Ted is handsome and married. Lily is beautiful and also married. Attracted to one another, they sit together on the plane and swap stores of their not-so-blissful lives. When Ted reveals that his wife is cheating on him, Lily says, “Sounds like the kind worth killing.” Ted says, “How would I do it?” “So you don't get caught.”

A cross between Gone Girl and Strangers on a Train, Swanson's chapters alternate between Ted's point of view and Lily's and reveal what they're really thinking. A diabolical tale that's ultimately terrifying.

A fine book. Set in alternate reality modern(ish) times with TVs, aircraft etc but with the power in the hands of clans that have personal combat magics that make them the dominant force in the setting.

Constantly engaging with a great portrait of "crime family" dynamics in a non-western setting. Shades of The Godfather and other Mafia tales, but also very much its own thing.

The jade-based magic system is both simple and interesting.

I wasn't particularly moved on an emotional level but the story with exciting, entertaining, and had lots of fascinating detail both on the small scale (street fights, family arguments, training school scenes) and the large (nations vying for power, government vs clan interactions etc). And the story has great potential to expand.

This will have to be a brief review - finished the book while sitting up all night with my daughter in A&E. But definitely… show more.

Literally, this is the Godfather of Mafia novels and the book that made, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” part of the American vernacular.

It’s a great read, and it later became a great movie. I quote Michael Corleone from Godfather III in my novel. Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone was the reigning king of fictional Mafia dons until Tony Soprano walked onto the small screen.

Author Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather to get out of debt. He succeeded and magnificently so.

Haruki Murakami is probably the most famous Japanese author in the world and the father of Japanese magical realism. I have read a large portion of his work, and I have enjoyed many of his books (even with his weird ear fetish).

This one, however, is one of my favorites. It’s two stories in one, and although others sometimes criticize it for not being a good blend between the two stories, it is that separation that actually makes this book a gem for me. It captures your imagination as you follow a human computer down into a psychological miasma of perception and thought.

If that seems confusing, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to spoil for you one of my all-time favorite Murakami books. Also, if you want to know what I mean by human-computer, I guess you’ll just have to pick up the book.

No one does dialogue and atmospheric tension like Tana French. Faithful Place is my favorite of hers.

I felt like the characters were so alive that I could hear their voices in my head long after I had closed the book. This story is rife with a gritty, urban Irish atmosphere and thick with familial tension. French does a cross between literary fiction and procedural that is devastating, at times quite dark, and yet ringing with hope—one of my favorite qualities in a mystery.

Best read on a dark, rainy afternoon with a mug of rich coffee—or a Guinness. 

This novel has so many reasons to recommend it. It incorporates radical experimentation and horrifying surgeries being done in a bizarre hospital. To make it even more mysterious, there is a hurricane threatening the island which complicates the investigation of US Marshall Teddy Daniels searching for a patient who has disappeared.

I loved the creepy island hospital and the use of weather as a character.