Books you'll still be thinking about five years later

Amos and Emerson’s friendship has seemed unbreakable for over thirty years. Then, over a long lazy weekend, an unanticipated event shatters their veneer and they’re forced to choose whom, and what, they love most. An exploration of the sacrifices – of time, wellbeing, morals and ultimately the self – that lie beneath monetary wealth and status, and the desperation with which people grip hold of what they feel they’ve earned, this debut novel centres around a shocking act, and the frankly equally shocking responses to it. I am still angry at nearly all the characters and I expect I will be for some time!

I love and would recommend all of Emily St. John Mandel’s books, but The Glass Hotel is the one I can't stop thinking about, mainly because – and I mean this in the best possible way – it’s so strange. It begins in a remote hotel on the tip of Vancouver Island, where a woman called Vincent is wooed by a New York financier, and a hooded figure scrapes a provocative note into the window. We, and Vincent, are then transported to a life of extreme wealth on the east coast, which we eventually learn has been built on nothing, as a Ponzi scheme is exposed. The novel is an elegant exploration of guilt, grief and regret, and existing readers of Mandel will find much to enjoy, as passing allusions build into a suggestion that we’re living in a parallel universe of Station Eleven. Indeed, the joy of feeling dazzled by Emily St. John Mandel’s ingenuity is one of the reasons the book is still alive in my mind years after reading it. But mainly it’s that indescribable strangeness that has me hooked, and how I felt when reading it: like ice fracturing under a cobalt sky. 

Never would I have believed that the intricacies of the American pharmaceutical industry could be so gripping. This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It’s the meticulously researched and compellingly written history of the Sackler family, from the arrival of the family in Brooklyn, NYC to their exposure as the manufacturers and marketeers of OxyContin, one of the catalysts for America’s opioid crisis, an epidemic of drug addiction that has killed nearly half a million people. You’ll still be thinking about it five years on because you’ll be telling everyone you meet that they need to read it, and also because the crisis is ongoing. Until we stop hearing about people dying from an addiction to or overdose of painkillers, this book will, and should, still be on our minds.

Percival Everett’s The Trees is both comic and terrifying, fearlessly confronting America’s violent past with wit and horror. Set initially in the town of Money, Mississippi and then across the US, the novel follows a murder investigation turned journey into America’s soul. Someone is killing people across America. At each crime scene, detectives find both a new victim, and a second corpse which is always the same: a man who looks just like Emmett Till, the young Black boy lynched in Mississippi sixty-five years ago. The use of comic horror to address a deep and ongoing political issue is what has really stayed with me. I can’t and will not stop thinking about this book. 

Set during Trump’s first election campaign, this book is often on my mind now he’s been successful in his second, but I don’t think I would have stopped thinking about it even if we’d never heard from him again. A progressive Black woman and a conservative white man fall in love, and everything is most definitely not fine. It is, however, moving, hilarious, morally complex and compulsively readable. As Cecilia Rabess says herself, this is a love story that asks not ‘will they?’, but ‘should they?’ She uses the template of a romance novel to provoke questions, with no offer of neat resolutions. It’s funny, provocative and often uncomfortable: a recipe for continued contemplation and conversation amongst those who have read it.