In addition to browsing by genre, time period, setting and a wide range of themes, BookBrowse offers specialized reading lists in our "beyond the book" section. These lists are curated by our professional reviewers to accompany featured works, and they can help you familiarize yourself with many fascinating niches of the book world.
Below are just a few examples of the hundreds of articles available in our Reading Lists category.
Fictional Pandemics
Emily St. John Mandel's
Sea of Tranquility features a character Mandel seems to have based loosely on herself: an author named Olive Llewellyn who is famous for writing a novel about a pandemic. Pandemics are a common trope in novels, particularly in the speculative or science fiction genre, with authors considering different imagined scenarios as to how a pandemic might occur and who might be affected. Here is a list of recent novels that feature fictional pandemics as a means of exploring social and political issues as well as human behavior.
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Novels by Cree Writers
Jessica Johns, the author of
Bad Cree, is a member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Northern Alberta. The Cree, or ininiw, who also refer to themselves as nêhiyawak (Plains Cree), nihithaw (Woodland Cree) and nèhinaw (Swampy Cree), are the largest group of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and live in areas stretching from Alberta to Quebec. Here are a few other recent novels written by Cree authors.
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Contemporary New England Fiction Writers
The stories in Lily King's
Five Tuesdays in Winter include settings in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts, three of the six northeastern states of the USA that are collectively known as New England (the others being New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island). Here we've highlighted some other contemporary authors who reside in and/or set their fiction in New England, along with examples of their works that reference the region.
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Books About Female Friendship
Shashi Bhat's
The Most Precious Substance on Earth takes readers into a childhood friendship between characters Nina and Amy that breaks our hearts, because it reminds us of people we've known. We either knew a Nina-and-Amy or were part of a Nina-and-Amy. It seems portrayals of female friendships in contemporary literature tend to showcase both the good and the ugly sides. By contrast, many film depictions seem carefully curated to focus on the idyllic qualities of these relationships, using a formulaic approach. Here are some novels, written between the '80s and recent years, with portrayals of nuanced female friendships.
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HarperVia
In 2019, HarperCollins, the world's second-largest book publishing group, announced a new imprint for international literature: HarperVia. With a planned 24 releases per year, HarperVia focuses on works from around the globe. Staff in the US and UK work to streamline the acquisitions process: Rather than waiting for a manuscript to be fully translated into English before assessing it, they liaise with authors, editors and agents abroad to acquire buzzy pre-publication titles. Tara Parsons, Associate Publisher at HarperVia, told BookBrowse, "Fiction from around the globe is really resonating with the U.S. audience… The rise in isolationism, whether as a political vehicle or as necessitated by COVID, has left many readers hungry for books that open up a personal and intimate window into other points of view." (This piece was written to accompany
Three O'Clock in the Morning by Gianrico Carofiglio.)
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Locked Room Mysteries
In
Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson, bookseller Malcolm Kershaw is contacted by the FBI regarding his list of favorite mystery novels with seemingly unsolvable murders. The oldest book on Malcolm's list is
The Red House Mystery, written in 1922 by A.A. Milne (of Winnie-the-Pooh fame). Milne's book is a locked room mystery, also known as an impossible crime mystery, featuring a man who is murdered in a literal locked room, though the genre extends to more expansive locations as well, such as the island in Agatha Christie's
And Then There Were None. What all books in the genre have in common is that the crime seems impossible, and thus equally impossible to solve, although, of course, it is solved in the end.
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