Are you stumbling over the pronunciation of an unusual word in a new language? Are you wondering how to survive the end of the world, or the monsters from fairytales you heard as a kid? Maybe you need to kill someone: a stalker obsessed with your work, the family who cut you off, a client who harasses women. Or maybe you simply want to survive the turbulence of a love affair, or the perils of growing up in a woman’s body. In all of these cases, there’s a book for that. Here are thirteen how to books that will tell you everything you need to know.
How To Kill Your Biggest Fan by Helen Blair
In How To Kill Your Biggest Fan, Helen Blair lays out the story of Hazel Witt, a deeply cynical spinster and veteran romance novelist who receives a creepy letter from an obsessed fan. With the help of her assistant, Hazel digs out the previous letters from this fan and quickly realises that she has a stalker – one whose ex-boyfriends often wind up dead under mysterious circumstances. Under pressure from her flamboyant agent, Hazel uses these disturbing developments to “inspire” a new direction in her career, a thriller novel about a young woman who becomes a serial killer after being burned in love one too many times. Of course, Hazel won’t know how the story should end until her real life situation unfolds. Read my full review of How To Kill Your Biggest Fan here.
How To Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa
How To Pronounce Knife is the debut short story collection of Toronto-based poet Souvankham Thammavongsa. Fourteen slices-of-life depict the vastly different lived experiences of Lao refugees of all ages, genders, and creeds. These are stories of humour, hurt, hope, and honour. What they have in common, the through line, is the pursuit of a place to belong and the discombobulation of see-sawing between cultures. Every piece in this collection is deeply affecting, that strange combination of sweet and soul-crushing. Read my full review of How To Pronounce Knife here.
How To Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann
How To Be Eaten interrogates the dark side of the fairy-tales we were raised on. Five women form a support group to process their traumas, ones lifelong readers will recognise: falling in love with a blue-bearded billionaire, being eaten by a wolf, winning a man’s love in a competition, being held captive in a house made of candy… These women are, rightfully, wary of each other, but they have more in common than they realise at first. There’s no knight in shining armour coming to save them, either, so they might have to save each other.
How To Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Doing the rounds of writers festivals and book talks, Alexander Chee kept getting the same question over and over: “how much of your fiction is autobiographical?”. Setting aside the ridiculousness of asking that question of a gay Korean American in the 21st century when his last book was about a 19th century soprano singer living in Paris, the idea stuck in his head and ended up becoming this collection of essays. How To Write An Autobiographical Novel grapples with changing identities, the transformative power of drag, the loss of a parent, and the changing political landscape of Donald Trump’s America.
How To Fail by Elizabeth Day
In How To Fail, Elizabeth Day – author, journalist, and broadcaster – offers a holistic view of “everything she’s learned from things going wrong”. She explains the fruit that failure has borne for her in all areas of life, including dating, work, sport, babies, families, anger and friendship. Her thesis is that understanding why we fail ultimately helps us evolve, and makes us stronger. The book is based on her podcast of the same name, by the way, if you want a taste test.
How To End A Story by Helen Garner
The publication of the inimitable Helen Garner’s diaries was cause for jubilation among all readers of Australian literature. In How To End A Story, all three volumes are compiled into a single collection, spanning her life and work over the course of two turbulent decades. From the publication of her first novel in the 1970s, to a consuming love affair in the 1980s, to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s, these diaries reveal the inner thoughts and workings of one of Australia’s most brilliant literary exports.
How To Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is the master of horror-comedy, and How To Sell A Haunted House is one of his finest. A grown daughter is faced with returning to her hometown to clean out her late parents’ house and ready it for sale – with the help of her underachieving brother. Unfortunately, it’s going to take more than a lick of paint and a spritz of air freshener to get this house to market. Louise and Mark are haunted by more than memories, and the house has feelings of its own about being sold to a new family.
How To Find Love In A Bookshop by Veronica Henry
How To Find Love In A Bookshop follows Emilia Nightingale’s fight to keep her late father’s bookstore out of the hand of developers, while her village customers look for love and the life they want to live. It’s a delightful story with the coziest possible vibes, a David and Goliath battle against gentrification and corporate greed, sharp and sweet dialogue, and heart-warming love connections. You’ll find yourself browsing for love as well as books next time you’re at your local independent bookstore.
How To Kill A Client by Joanna Jenkins
How To Kill A Client is set in the sparkling high-rises of Brisbane’s CBD, where recent murder victim Gavin Jones did his best (worst) work. As an in-house lawyer who controlled millions of dollars per year, he was legal firm Howard Greene’s biggest client – and he was also a huge arsehole, especially to the women in his life. No one liked Gavin, and everyone was victimised by his cruelty – but who took the drastic step of ending his life?
How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
How To Kill Your Family is narrated from Limehouse Prison by Grace Bernard, the “Morton Murderer”. She’s been convicted of a murder she didn’t commit, but – as her hand-written prison memoir reveals – she got away with several more that she most certainly did. Her absentee father’s family disavowed her and her mother when she was born, leaving them to live in relative poverty while they enjoyed mansions and yachts and holidays in Spain. So, Grace dispatches them, one by one, leaving her father for last to really maximise his suffering. Read my full review of How To Kill Your Family here.
How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran
Caitlin Moran is a genius. She somehow intuited that, in order to make her provocative insights about feminism and the current state of gender roles palatable, she needed to share outrageous and hilarious observations to illustrate and illuminate what she’s talking about. The laughs in How To Be A Woman are the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. This is one of the funny memoirs that jump-started the contemporary conversation about feminism: what it means, what it should address, and whether any issue faced by women is truly “too small” for consideration.
How To Survive Everything by Ewan Morrison
Who knows better how to persevere than the children of a doomsday prepper? In How To Survive Everything, Haley and Ben are kidnapped from their mother’s happy (normal) home by their father. He believes that the apocalypse has begun, and he’s determined to keep them safe – but can he? Is the threat to their lives, and humanity, real or the product of a delusional mind? This is a story about surviving the end of the world, told by a teenage girl whose world suddenly becomes very small.
How To Lose Friends And Alienate People by Toby Young
We like to think that our career should have a neat, upward trajectory – one job, then a promotion, then another, then another, until we reach the top (or retire, or die). It’s a nice dream, but for many of us it looks something more like Toby Young’s experiences detailed in his workplace memoir How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. He leaves London as a high-flying journalist to take a new job as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. It feels like his ‘big break’, but two years later he finds himself fired, friendless, and stumbling from shitty job to shitty job to try and make his way back.
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