BOOK CRITIC HEIDI JOHNSON-WRIGHT SUGGESTS
A COMBINATION OF CLASSIC AND
CONTEMPORARY FICTION FOR FALL READING
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Drood by Dan Simmons (a perfect companion to Wilkie Collins’ two best books, The Woman in White and The Moonstone.)
- The Resurrectionist by Jack O’Connell
- The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
- My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
- The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (a perfect companion to the fantastic non-fiction book, Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King)
- The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- America Classics: Moby Dick by Herman Melville (a perfect companion to the gripping non-fiction book, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick); The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; anything by Raymond Chandler, but esp. Farewell My Lovely and The Big Sleep
- The Alienist by Caleb Carr (a perfect companion to the non-fiction book, Low Life by Luc Sante)
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (a perfect companion to the fantastic non-fiction adventure travel book, Blood River: Terrifying Journey Through the World’s Most Dangerous Country by Tim Butcher)
- Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
- Anything by Graham Greene, but esp. The Heart of the Matter
- Anything by W. G. Sebald
- My three favorites by Mario Vargas Llosa: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; Death in the Andes; Feast of the Goat
- The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
- Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
- The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul West
- Two books by Donna Tartt: The Secret History and The Little Friend
- Anything by Arturo Perez-Reverte, esp. Queen of the South and The Painter of Battles
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
