Books like Vernon Subutex 1 — picked by fans

A spy story with a heart. A secret agent is sent to a small city to assassinate a woman who was once a terrorist, but there's one snag - he must choose the right one among three different suspects. (The other two are innocent). His mission gets increasingly complicated when he develops relationships with each of his potential targets while performing his due diligence. The last novel by the great Spanish novelist Javier Marías.

Angleton, the long-serving director of counterespionage for the CIA, may not be a household name, but he is one of the pivotal characters of the Cold War. A Yale-educated poet who rubbed shoulders with Pound and Elliot, be joined the agency in its early days, rising through the ranks to become its most powerful figure. His incessant search for moles eventually drove him into a state of paranoia verging on insanity, but not before he had done untold damage to countless suspects. A brilliant and disturbing study of the corrupting ability of power.

A startling kaleidoscope of a novel – indicated by the arresting cover.

Mas’ book whirled me into the heart of its narrative with fast-moving stories of women whose lives are radically changed by supernatural encounters – which, in 19th century Paris, invite diagnoses of mental illness. What follows is a disorienting but compulsive account of 'madness', ‘other-world-ness’ - and the dangers of being different.

Beautifully imagined and expertly crafted, this novel engrossed me – and I learned a lot about mental asylums, and attitudes to women, in rather unenlightened times. A fabulous book.

Placing the reader squarely into the mind and sensibility (if you can call it that) of a sociopathic killer, Ms. Highsmith created an entirely new type of thriller; in this case, the reader is not so much concerned with whodunit as to why hedunit. Following Mr. Ripley across Europe and witnessing his extended string of crimes and the extensive web of lies he weaves--and his appreciation for the finer things in life, I was both enthralled and repulsed by his exploits. In a weird way, I admired him and found myself rooting for him. To create the interior life of such a repugnant human being, and to do it so well, is a great achievement in fiction. Not since Humbert Humbert have I read about such a likable criminal.

I love the opening quote in this book. I’ve never, ever forgotten it since I turned the first page. It’s a quote from Dante’s Inferno: “Midway through life’s journey, I found myself lost in a dark wood, having lost the way.”

That’s exactly where I found myself when I started reading this book. Like millions of other people, I was lost when I found it. I was looking for someone or something–wiser than me–to help me recognize that what I was going through in early midlife is actually a very normal, perhaps essential part of life’s journey.

In a near-future world where one can purchase emotionally intelligent androids or “artificial friends” (AFs) to keep children company, we take the AF’s perspective. Klara, who begins as a display item in a department store, is adopted by Josie, a girl with what seems to be a fatal illness, and dedicates herself to trying to save Josie’s life.

Like all AF's, Klara has been programmed to observe and learn, and she seems to have exceptional abilities in this regard. She also possesses an especially kind disposition, keen emotional intelligence, and a number of other qualities that make her feel more human than most of the actual humans in the story.

For me, Klara is one of the great characters in recent literature, and her unique perspective is one of the things that make this immersive speculative novel such a pleasure to read. 

This is, of course, considered to be one of the great books, but I have noticed that not a lot of people I know have actually read it.

I was apprehensive that it might be a bit slow, but I was surprised, in fact, thrilled to find it a great read, an amazing journey through the internal life of both the narrator (recalling events from his childhood) and of Swann and Odette.

The descriptions of both place and of emotion are exceptional, and Proust’s rendering of the characters’ psychological and emotional states, how we perceive their meaning, and how it affects their lives is phenomenal.

The book feels fresh, inventive, and modern, and although it is the first volume of seven, it easily stands alone. 

This is the best history of the Dreyfus Affair and I wish it were available in English. Whereas most histories of the Affair cast Dreyfus as a hapless victim or as a patriotic automaton, who might not have even been a Dreyfusard had he not been Dreyfus, Duclert shows him to have been a true hero, whose super-human resolve and fortitude eventually allowed justice to prevail. Dreyfus emerges not as a martyr to antisemitism but as the first example of the resistance hero, the model for the struggle against authoritarianism and state terror in the twentieth century.

There’s so much texture on this cover, and the Renoir painting stands out because it’s probably the most recognizable part. The story involves Irene Cahen d’Anvers, the woman who sat for Renoir as a young girl, and how she came from a prominent Jewish family in France. Irene made some pivotal decisions that would forever change the lives of her ex-husband and daughter.

This is the first novel by Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. It has been translated into English but with a French title, which contains a pun that can’t be translated (referring both to a location in Paris and to the infamous badge imposed by the Nazis). A darkly comic and shocking send-up of French antisemitic literature, the novel features a clownish protagonist named Raphaël Schlemilovitch who embraces every antisemitic stereotype imaginable, becoming in turn, a cosmopolitan, a traitor, a collaborator, and a pimp before winding up on the couch of Sigmund Freud begging to be put out of his misery. Modiano wrote this novel to exorcise the demons of French literature and it helped him carve out a place as a distinctly Jewish voice in the French literary pantheon.