The Panopticon
10 best books like The Panopticon (Jenni Fagan): Woke Up Lonely, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, Bobcat and Other Stories, The Redemption of Galen Pike, The Only Ones, Hawthorn & Child, Mr Lynch's Holiday, The Listeners, The Celestials, The Folly of the World
| Author | Fiona Maazel |
| ISBN | 1555976387 |
Woke Up Lonely is an original and deeply funny novel that explores our very human impulse to seek and repel intimacy with the people who matter to us most.
Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the twenty-first century. With its communes and speed-dating,...
| Author | Matt Bell |
| ISBN | 1616952539 |
In this epic, mythical debut novel, a newly-wed couple escapes the busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost-uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to live there simply, to fish the lake, to trap the nearby woods, and build a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their...
| Author | Rebecca Lee |
| ISBN | 1616201738 |
Rebecca Lee, one of our most gifted and original short story writers, guides readers into a range of landscapes, both foreign and domestic, crafting stories as rich as novels. A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's...
| Author | Carys Davies |
| ISBN | 1907773711 |
In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change...
| Author | Carola Dibbell |
| ISBN | 1937512274 |
Inez wanders a post-pandemic world, strangely immune to disease, making her living by volunteering as a test subject. She is hired to provide genetic material to a grief-stricken, affluent mother, who lost all four of her daughters within four short weeks. This experimental genetic work is policed...
| Author | Keith Ridgway |
| ISBN | 1847085261 |
The two protagonists of the title are mid-ranking policemen operating amongst London's criminal classes, but each is plagued by dreams of elsewhere and, in the case of Hawthorn, a nightlife of visceral intensity that sits at odds with his carefully-composed placid family mask but has the habit of...
| Author | Catherine O'Flynn |
| ISBN | 0670918563 |
Welcome to Lomaverde - a new Spanish utopia for those seeking their place in the sun. Now a ghost town where feral cats outnumber the handful of anxious residents. A place of empty pools, long afternoons and unrelenting sunshine.
Here, widowed Midlands bus driver Dermot Lynch turns up one bright...
| Author | Leni Zumas |
| ISBN | 1935639293 |
Hypnotic and profoundly disquieting, The Listeners explores a far-out world where a patchwork of memory, sensation, and imagination maps the flickering presence of ghosts.
This is the story of a woman whose life is shaped by tragedy. Quinn is thirtysomething, a survivor of a fractured and...
| Author | Karen Shepard |
| ISBN | 1935639552 |
In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, to work for Calvin Sampson, one of the biggest industrialists in that busy factory town. Except for the foreman, the Chinese didn't speak English. They didn't know they were strikebreakers. The eldest of them was...
| Author | Jesse Bullington |
| ISBN | 0316190357 |
On a stormy night in 1421, the North Sea delivers a devastating blow to Holland: the Saint Elizabeth Flood, a deluge of biblical proportions that drowns hundreds of towns, thousands of people, and forever alters the geography of the Low Countries. Where the factions of the noble Hooks and the merchant...
| Author | Monika Schröder |
| ISBN | 0374351228 |
As World War I draws to a close in 1918, German citizens are starving and suffering under a repressive regime. Sixteen-year-old Moritz is torn. His father died in the war and his older brother still risks his life in the trenches, but his mother does not support the patriotic cause and attends subversive...
| Author | Nathan Larson |
| ISBN | 1617750794 |
Decimal, attempting to clean up loose ends after the violent events in the first book, stumbles upon information concerning the gruesome murder of a prostitute and a prominent US senator's involvement. Immediately he finds himself chasing ghosts and fighting for his life, pursued by Blackwater-style...
| Author | Eric Lundgren |
| ISBN | 1468306871 |
Along the streets of the once-great Midwestern city of Trude, the ornate old buildings lie in ruin. Shrouded in disappointment and nostalgia, Trude has become a place to “lose yourself,” as one tourist brochure puts it: a treacherous maze of convoluted shopping malls, barricaded libraries,...
| Author | Lauren Grodstein |
| ISBN | 1616201126 |
The Explanation for Everything explores humankind's insatiable search for meaning, the risks and rewards of faith, and the salvation that love can offer us all.
Lauren Grodstein's New York Times bestselling novel A Friend of the Family was hailed as "such an incisive diagnosis of aspirational...
Ian McEwan’s Atonement meets Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth in this extraordinary debut.
A novel set between the past and present with magical realist elements. Goblin is an outcast girl growing up in London during World War 2. After witnessing a shocking event she increasingly...
| Author | Alina Simone |
| ISBN | 0865478996 |
A witty, keenly observant look at our Internet-obsessed culture
Anna Krestler is adrift. The Internet has draped itself, kudzu-like, over her brain, which makes it even more difficult to confront the question of what to do when she is dismissed from her job as a cubicle serf at a midtown law...
| Author | Benjamin Percy |
| ISBN | 1555975690 |
A powerful debut novel set in a threatened western landscape, from the award-winning author of Refresh, Refresh.
Echo Canyon is a disappearing pocket of wilderness outside of Bend, Oregon, and the site of conflicting memories for Justin Caves and his father, Paul. It’s now slated for redevelopment...
| Author | Mark Slouka |
| ISBN | 0393348830 |
Warning: this is a guy’s review for guys. Men aren’t supposed to read novels, but it’s been documented that doing so won’t actually kill us. So sensitive souls take note, this review contains some violence and adult language.
First a question: did you ever read Catcher in the Rye? If...
| Author | Jess Richards |
| ISBN | 1443410144 |
Set on an isolated island off the Scottish coast, in a community run by women who are in awe of a mysterious structure called the Thrashing House, the novel is narrated by two teenage girls in very different circumstances. Mary is doing her best to protect her younger brother, Barney, as the island’s...
| Author | Kevin Maher |
| ISBN | 0316223565 |
A warm and funny debut about a young man in trouble and a family in love and in pieces. It's the first summer of lust for 14-year-old Jim Finnegan, a boy trying to become a man in 1980s Dublin. Jim's vivid and winning voice leaps off the page and into the reader's heart as he watches his parents argue, his five...
| Author | Anna Raverat |
| ISBN | 1447202376 |
It started quietly and without her looking for it, but the aftershock was profound. Ten years ago, Rachel had an affair. It spiralled out of control and left her and her life in pieces. Now, writing at her window, she tries to put those pieces back together. She has her memories, recollections of dreams,...
Water rations are down to one gallon per person per day... the mayor is proposing digging a trench to the Pacific Ocean... dried out West Coast cities are crumbling and being abandoned by the east... and in Portland, Oregon, water is declared a communal right but hoarding and riots persist.
Amidst...
| Author | W. Scott Poole |
| ISBN | 1593765436 |
The new book from award-winning historian W. Scott Poole is a whip-smart piece of pop culture detailing the story of cult horror figure Vampira that actually tells the much wider story of 1950s America and its treatment of women and sex, as well as capturing a fascinating swath of Los Angeles history.
In...
| Author | Will Wiles |
| ISBN | 0007424434 |
A bold and brilliant debut from a darkly funny new voice. Oskar is a minimalist composer best known for a piece called Variations on Tram Timetables. He is married to a Californian art dealer named Laura and he lives with two cats, named after Russian composers, in an Eastern European city. But this book...
