If you’ve ever tried to arrange books by genre – as a librarian, as a bookseller, or just as a bookworm who likes to keep their personal collection organised that way – you know all too well that there are some books that just don’t fit neatly into a category. It can be frustrating for shelving purposes, but oh so fascinating to read. Here are twelve books that blur genre boundaries.
True Story by Kate Reed Petty
Kate Reed Petty didn’t accidentally write a book that blurs genre boundaries; every choice in True Story is very deliberate. Epistolary sections, film script sections, hallucinatory chapters, phone conversation transcripts – all of them used (to great effect, mind you) to reflect different aspects of rape culture. A high school rumour about a sexual assault has a ripple effect, reverberating throughout the lives of the key players. The fragmentary nature of the narrative is reflected on the cover, which shows four different ‘versions’ of cover design, each drawing upon the tropes of different genres. Read my full review of True Story here.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
With In Cold Blood, Truman Capote popularised the concept of the ‘non-fiction novel’ – a more-or-less true story told using the narrative techniques of novels. Capote forever changed the way that true crime is written by blurring genre boundaries between fact and fiction. Of course, bending the rules this way also led to some major ethical issues, and also potentially changed the real-world outcome of the case (given that he effectively inserted himself into the lives of those impacted), but them’s the breaks. Read my full review of In Cold Blood here.
Sadvertising by Ennis Ćehić
Sadvertising is a collection of short, sharp stories about modern life, technology, and marketing. They’re drenched in black humour, existential dread, and late-capitalist yearning. Ćehić draws on real-life pop culture and the pervasive technology that runs our lives to craft modern-day parables and satires in miniature that are deeply resonant. The stories stop just short of science fiction, but there’s an incredible meta twist in the final story that flips everything on its head. Read my full review of Sadvertising here.
Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Imagine a historical fiction novel, blending the wit and wisdom of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, with magic – depicted in a Tolkien-esque level of detail – and footnotes that evoke David Foster Wallace. All the way down that rabbit hole, you’ll find something like Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell, the 1,000-page epic by Susanna Clarke. With its length and breadth, it’s a book about many things (Englishness, bureaucracy, madness and reason) and encapsulates elements of many genres. Read my full review of Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell here.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
When you first pick up Never Let Me Go, you’ll probably assume that you’re getting your standard boarding school novel. Some dark academia elements creep in, and then you’ll realise you’re getting something else entirely. Ishiguro drip feeds the dystopian/sci-fi/alternate history story to the reader, mentioning something offhand and then paying it off satisfyingly quickly (usually in the next chapter), which makes it very just-one-more-before-bed-ish. It’s an intense, smart, compelling read with a lot to say about the reality we live in. Read my full review of Never Let Me Go here.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
No One Is Talking About This is a really weird book. It’s full of nods to inside jokes and flash-in-the-pan memes that will be instantly recognisable to those who are Very Online, and completely meaningless to those who are not. There’s a dramatic shift in tone between the two parts, which I suppose makes this not so much one of the books that blur genre boundaries as one that hopscotches rapidly between two ineffable styles. Patricia Lockwood’s poetic prowess is on full display in this story, told in fragments, of a life lived online. Read my full review of No One Is Talking About This here.
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
There are a lot of books that blur genre boundaries, but few do it as explicitly and radically as In The Dream House. It is an intimate, horrifying, beautiful, defiant, heartfelt, multi-dimensional account of Machado’s formative – and abusive – love affair. This is a Rubik’s cube of a book, examining the subject from every possible angle, twisting and turning upon itself until all the edges line up. It’s one thing to weave tropes and motifs of different genres into your novel, where you completely control the narrative, but it takes a special skillset to do so with a true story, one not beholden to the rules of fiction. Read my full review of In The Dream House here.
Lanny by Max Porter
Lanny is a remarkably short novel, quick to power through and with lots of white space, but it seems to contain multitudes: magic, suspense, horror, joy, and wonder. Myth and modern life come together through the eyes of children (and the spirit of a village, kind of). Porter really pushes the boundaries between prose and poetry, but it’s hardly one of those highly-literary Experimental books that blur genre boundaries and make you feel like you’ve just dropped far too much acid to understand. It’s compulsively readable, and even the dullest among us will be able to pick up what Porter is putting down. Read my full review of Lanny here.
All The Beautiful Things You Love by Jonathan Siedler
No one’s giving out medals for mixing romance into other genres, so the blurred genre boundaries of a romance have to be something special to get us to pay attention. All The Beautiful Things You Love does it – a romance in reverse, a love story told from the break-up looking back. It’s a very contemporary take on the tragic end of a marriage, with a woman selling off all the possessions that remind her of her ex on Facebook Marketplace. Seidler does an excellent job of using the genre twist to evoke the all-consuming grief of heartbreak. Read my full review of All The Beautiful Things You Love here.
I Saw A Man by Owen Sheers
I Saw A Man starts out as a love story between Michael and Caroline, two adventurous journalists starting to think about settling down – then it veers wildly off course when Caroline dies unexpectedly. Michael is bereft, and all that pulls him out of his grief is his friendship with the family next door – until that family is struck by tragedy, too. A tragedy that Michael has more to do with than he can admit to anyone, even himself. It’s a mystery wrapped in a family drama shaded by romance and psychological profile. Read my full review of I Saw A Man here.
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
Plenty of great literary writers have penned fictionalised accounts of great historical figures – but very few have had the gall to do so when the subject is still living, and imagine a life for them very different to the one that actually played out in the real world. Curtis Sittenfeld takes the big leap in Rodham, writing a version of Hillary Clinton’s life that could’ve been had she never married Bill. No Lewinsky scandals, no email security questions, an entirely different series of trials and tribulations as she accrues power and political capital. It’s hard to even narrow down one genre to describe this one, it’s that blurry. Read my full review of Rodham here.
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Thirteen separate but interrelated stories come together in A Visit From The Goon Squad, each with its own particular blend of genres. An aging punk rocker hires a troubled young woman, and their pasts are revealed and intertwined with that of a cast of characters that surround them. It’s a book about music, first and foremost, but also about survival and transformation. Reviews heap praise on its “breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint” – and you think they must be kidding about that last one, but they’re not! Read my full review of A Visit From The Goon Squad here.
Leave a Reply