Any introvert who has tried to read around others knows the dreaded question: “what’s your book about?”. The trick is, it turns out, to carry a book that people would rather not know about (and maybe question your motivation for reading). This has coincidentally been a bit of a theme in my reading this year, so I thought it was a good time to put together a list of books to read when you want to be left alone. Even if the content is relatively benign, these titles will be enough to scare anyone off.
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes
Blurb: “Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence—at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel.” Read my full review of Dear Dickhead here.
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
Blurb: “Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate. I’m Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I’d killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let’s get started.” Read my full review of Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone here.
A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder by Holly Jackson
Blurb: “Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. It was all anyone could talk about. And five years later, Pip sees how the tragedy still haunts her town. But she can’t shake the feeling that there was more to what happened that day. She knew Sal when she was a child, and he was always so kind to her. How could he possibly have been a killer? In A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder, now a senior herself, Pip decides to reexamine the closed case for her final project, at first just to cast doubt on the original investigation. But soon she discovers a trail of dark secrets that might actually prove Sal innocent . . . and the line between past and present begins to blur.” Read my full review of A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder here.
How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
Blurb: “When Grace Bernard discovers her absentee millionaire father has rejected her dying mother’s pleas for help, she vows revenge and coldly sets out to get her retribution―by killing them all, one by one. But then, Grace is imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit… Outrageously funny, compulsively readable, and subversive, How To Kill Your Family is a wickedly dark romp about class, family, love… and murder.” Read my full review of How To Kill Your Family here.
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Blurb: “When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing 40, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit. Dick proposes a kind of game between them, but when he fails to answer their letters Chris continues alone, transforming an adolescent infatuation into a new form of philosophy. I Love Dick is a fierce and funny book beloved by feminists and fashionistas alike, blurring the lines of fiction, essay, and memoir.” Read my full review of I Love Dick here.
Love In The Time Of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson
Blurb: “PhD candidate Phoebe Walsh has always been obsessed with true crime. She’s even analyzing the genre in her dissertation—if she can manage to finish writing it. It doesn’t help that she’s low-key convinced that her new neighbor, Sam Dennings, is a serial killer (he may dress business casual by day, but at night he’s clearly up to something). It’s not long before Phoebe realizes that Sam might be something much scarier—a genuinely nice guy who can pierce her armor to reach her vulnerable heart. Turns out that reading nothing but true crime isn’t exactly conducive to modern dating—and in Love In The Time Of Serial Killers, one woman is going to have to learn how to give love a chance when she’s used to suspecting the worst.” Read my full review of Love In The Time Of Serial Killers here.
My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Blurb: “In My Sister, The Serial Killer, Korede’s sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola’s knife. Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she’s exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.” Read my full review of My Sister, The Serial Killer here.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Blurb: “In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters―beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys―commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy in The Virgin Suicides, a hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.” Read my full review of The Virgin Suicides here.
Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin
Blurb: “Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace. Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a crackling and delightfully weird reminder that we will one day turn to dust and that yes, this is depressing, but it’s also what makes life beautiful”. Read my full review of Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead.
How To Kill Your Biggest Fan by Helen Blair
Blurb: “In How To Kill Your Biggest Fan, bestselling romance author Hazel Witt hates romance, hates her readers, and is completely disillusioned with the publishing industry. The only people she tolerates are her agent, Derek, who terrifies her, and her assistant, Ayo, who ferries her from one tiresome book signing to the next. Despite past success, Hazel’s sales are dwindling. Derek tells her she needs to write something different, and when Ayo finds a disturbing and obsessive letter from Hazel’s biggest fan. Margo has spent years being obsessed with Hazel – using her books as literal bibles, taking the events in her novels as dating advice, and believing that the characters within are real. Can Hazel escape the woman who has turned out to be a deranged stalker, desperate for love? Or does she need Margo more than Margo needs her?” Read my full review of How To Kill Your Biggest Fan here.
Kill Your Boomers by Fiona Wright
Blurb: “The great Australian dream is slipping out of reach for Keira and her friends. No partner, no house, no kids. At 30-ahem, she is still languishing in a mould-filled share house, with an unexplained and ever-growing hole in the floorboards that threatens to consume her and her housemates. When her best friend Dylan is able to buy an apartment with the help of his partner’s inheritance, Keira sees a way out. The bank of Mum and Dad. But what to do with parents who are in the rudest of health, and whose plans threaten to spend the only lifeline she has? Kill Your Boomers is an audacious book that asks just how far you will go to get your dream house (or at least a one bedroom flat without mushrooms growing in the bathroom).” Read my full review of Kill Your Boomers here.
Kill Your Husbands by Jack Heath
Blurb: “In Kill Your Husbands, three couples rent a luxurious house in the mountains for an unplugged weekend of drinking and bushwalking. No internet, no phones, no stress. On the first night, the topic of partner-swapping comes up. It’s a joke – at first. Not everyone is keen, but an agreement is made. When the lights come back on, one of the men is dead. No one will admit to being his partner. The phones still don’t work, and now the car key is missing. They’re stranded. And the killer is just getting started…” Read my full review of Kill Your Husbands here.
How To Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann
Blurb: “How To Be Eaten reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma. In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy tale ending. And Raina’s love story will shock them all. Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed…”
The Usual Desire To Kill by Camilla Barnes
Blurb: “The Usual Desire To Kill is a wry, propulsive story about an eccentric yet endearing family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them. Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda’s mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports the usual desire to kill.”
Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton
Blurb: “How do we talk about porn? Why it is that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with nineteen acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire.”
Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell
Blurb: “Recently ghosted and sick of watching her friends fade into the suburbs, thirty-something Hannah finds community in a true-crime forum that’s on a mission to solve the murders of four women in Atlanta. After William, a handsome lawyer, is arrested for the killings, Hannah begins writing him letters. It’s the perfect outlet for her pent-up frustration and rage. The exercise empowers her, and even feels healthy at first. Until William writes back. Love Letters To A Serial Killer is a dark and irresistibly compelling debut thriller.”
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch
Blurb: “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families is an unforgettable firsthand account of a people’s response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech–largely by machete–it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title.”
You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead by Marieke Hardy
Blurb: “Welcome to a chronicle of broken hearts, fervid pursuits, passionate friendships, deranged letter-writing, the allure of the bottle, the singular charms of musicians, the lost song of youth, and three very awkward evenings with varying prostitutes-exactly zero percent of which the author’s parents will want to read. Add to that a slightly misguided attempt to give real-life friends and ex-lovers a “right of reply” to the stories they appear in and it’s fair to say an extended stint in the Witness Protection Program beckons. Confessional, voyeuristic, painful, hilarious, and heartfelt, You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead reveals the acerbic wit, unflinching gaze, and razor-sharp insight of a writer at the height of her powers – or the unhinged fantasies of a dangerous mind with not enough to do.”
How To Kill A Client by Joanna Jenkins
Blurb: “Gavin Jones is dead at thirty-nine. As a lawyer who controlled millions of dollars in fees per year, he was legal firm Howard Greene’s biggest client and wielded that power with manipulative contempt. But he saved his worst behaviour for women, at work and at home. The partners of Howard Greene relied on his favour to fund their lavish lifestyles. But no one liked Gavin. The list of those who suffered from his cruelty was long enough to include pretty much everyone who had contact with him. So who actually killed him? How To Kill A Client is a fast-paced and wickedly funny thriller about power and revenge set in the pristine towers of capitalism.”
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit by Pagan Kennedy
Blurb: “In 1972, Martha “Marty” Goddard volunteered at a crisis hotline, counseling girls who had been molested by their fathers, their teachers, their uncles. Soon, Marty was on a mission to answer a question: Why were so many sexual predators getting away with these crimes? By the end of the decade, she had launched a campaign pushing hospitals and police departments to collect evidence of sexual assault and treat survivors with dignity. She designed a new kind of forensics tool—the rape kit—and new practices around evidence collection that spread across the country. Yet even as Marty fought for women’s rights, she allowed a man to take credit for her work. The Secret History Of The Rape Kit chronicles one journalist’s mission to understand a crucial innovation in forensics and the woman who championed it.”
An Ethical Guide To Murder by Jenny Morris
Blurb: “Thea has a secret. She can tell how long someone has left to live just by touching them. Not only that, but she can transfer life from one person to another – something she finds out the hard way when her best friend Ruth suffers a fatal head injury on a night out. Desperate to save her, Thea touches the arm of the man responsible when he comes to check if Ruth is all right. As Ruth comes to, the man quietly slumps to the ground, dead. Thea realises that she has a godlike power: but despite deciding to use her ability for good, she can’t help but sometimes use it for her own benefit. Boss annoying her at work? She can take some life from them and give it as a tip to her masseuse for a great job. Creating An Ethical Guide To Murder helps Thea to focus her new-found skills.”
Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want To Come by Jessica Pan
Blurb: “What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she’d normally avoid at all costs? Writer Jessica Pan intends to find out. With the help of various extrovert mentors, Jessica sets up a series of personal challenges (talk to strangers, perform stand-up comedy, host a dinner party, travel alone, make friends on the road, and much, much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert can teach her lessons that might improve the quality of her life. Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want To Come is a reminder that meaningful change often begins with a single uncomfortable step—and that being brave doesn’t require being fearless.”
Home Is Where The Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose
Blurb: “Home Is Where The Bodies Are is a chilling family thriller about the (sometimes literal) skeletons in the closet. After their mother passes, three estranged siblings reunite to sort out her estate. While going through their parents’ belongings, the siblings stumble upon a collection of home videos and decide to revisit those happier memories. However, the nostalgia is cut short when one of the VHS tapes reveals a night back in 1999 that none of them have any recollection of. On screen, their father appears covered in blood. What follows is a dead body and a pact between their parents to get rid of it, before the video abruptly ends. Beth, Nicole, and Michael must now decide whether to leave the past in the past or uncover the dark secret their mother took to her grave.”
I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee
Blurb: “Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her-what to call it?-depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work, but the effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can’t be normal. But if she’s so hopeless, why can she always summon a desire for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like? In I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki, Baek begins to disentangle the harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse.”
How To Lose Friends And Alienate People by Toby Young
Blurb: “How To Lose Friends And Alienate People is Toby Young’s hilarious account of the five years he spent steadily working his way down the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy for interactive sex toys. Within the space of two years he was fired from Vanity Fair, banned from the most fashionable bar in the city and couldn’t get a date for love or money. Even the local AA group wanted nothing to do with him. But it’s not just a collection of self-deprecating anecdotes. It’s also a seditious attack on the culture of celebrity from inside the belly of the beast.”
Diary Of A Murderer by Kim Young-ha
Blurb: “Diary Of A Murderer captivates and provokes in equal measure, exploring what it means to be on the edge—between life and death, good and evil. In the titular novella, a former serial killer suffering from memory loss sets his sights on one final target: his daughter’s boyfriend, who he suspects is also a serial killer. In other stories we witness an affair between two childhood friends that questions the limits of loyalty and love; a family’s disintegration after a baby son is kidnapped and recovered years later; and a wild, erotic ride about pursuing creativity at the expense of everything else.”
A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage by M.K. Oliver
Blurb: “Brimming with brio, humor, and just a dash of murder, A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage introduces a brilliant new anti-heroine: Lalla Rook. Lalla has a lot on her to-do list: help her husband make partner by flattering his masculinity, secure her dream home in Hampstead, get her daughter into private school, host her four-year-old’s birthday party, and remove the dead body from her living room. Lalla can’t pretend she hasn’t missed the adrenaline rush that comes with transgressing. And, as a wife and mother, she’s already an expert multitasker. So disposing of a body, framing a friend, and being the world’s best homemaker should be easy to achieve.”
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