Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
A man lives alone in an endless house of statues and tides, keeping careful journals, until signs of another person appear. Strange and absorbing.
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Books for Book Lovers
A reader who has already finished the bestsellers wants something less obvious. These eight are strange, ambitious or translated, so they are likelier to be new to them.
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The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil and his gang arrive in 1930s Moscow and upend the city, in a satire that also follows a writer and the woman who loves him. Dark, absurd and unlike most novels.
The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa
On an island where objects vanish along with memories of them, a novelist hides her editor from the authorities. Quiet, eerie and tightly built.
Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata
Keiko has worked at a Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years, and the people around her keep asking why. Short, funny and sharp about what society expects.
Life After Life
Kate Atkinson
Ursula Todd is born, dies and is born again, living the same life in different ways as the world heads toward war. Ambitious and moving, for readers who like a structural puzzle.
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
A Korean family faces poverty and prejudice across four generations, from a fishing village to Japan. A sweeping, absorbing saga with a wide emotional range.
The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A boy in postwar Barcelona picks a book from a hidden library and starts hunting for its vanished author. A love letter to books with a gothic mystery inside.
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
A flu pandemic ends the modern world, and twenty years on a traveling company performs Shakespeare for the survivors. Quiet, literary and about what is worth keeping.
How to choose
Do not guess what they have read. Ask a friend or family member what they already own, so you avoid a duplicate. Then hand them one odd book instead of another bestseller. Piranesi is the most unusual, The Master and Margarita is a wilder classic, and Convenience Store Woman and The Shadow of the Wind both come in translation. For a big family saga, pick Pachinko, and for a clever structure, Life After Life. Station Eleven is the quiet, literary choice.
A few themes are heavy. The Memory Police shows authoritarian violence, Pachinko includes suicide and discrimination, The Master and Margarita is a dark satire of Stalinist Moscow, and Station Eleven involves pandemic deaths.
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- Books for TeensThese eight books suit readers of about 13 to 17, with fast plots and characters close to their age.
- Books for GrandparentsGrandparents often have time for a story that rewards unhurried reading, so these eight are gentle, warm or true.
- Books for CoworkersA book for a coworker should be easy to like, so these eight keep politics and graphic content to a minimum.