Booklists: suggested reading

 

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Alex Awards: As Simple As Snow
If You Like Gregory Galloway Booklist

 

If you like psychologically suspenseful books that are "full of contradiction and ambiguities and mysteries" (Galloway- As Simple As Snow). Titles may also have subjects related to codes and Houdini . . .

 

 

• As Simple As Snow
  Author: Galloway, Gregory
  Publisher: Putnam $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399152318 Date: 2006
  A mesmerizing labyrinth of art, magic, and cryptic love sparks the imagination in this arresting first novel about a young man's quest to unravel the puzzle his missing girlfriend may (or may not) have left behind.
  Updated 6.1.06
  
  

 

These are adult titles suggested for teens - not all books are suitable for all readers. Please use your judgement when considering these titles.

 

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

 

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• The Tutor
  Author: Abrahams, Peter
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 25.95 ISBN: 0345439384 Date: 2002
  LJ
  Master of psychological suspense Peter Abrahams returns with an ingenious tale of an ordinary family that unknowingly invites the agent of their destruction into their own home.
  Suggested Reading: Psychological Suspense Stars
  Updated 5/5/02
• The Man from Beyond
  Author: Brownstein, Gabriel
  Publisher: Norton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393051528 Date: 2005
  Booklist
  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in New York on a spiritualist crusade, defending the powers of the mysterious medium Margery. His good friend Harry Houdini is a skeptic, and when Doyle claims Margery's powers are superior to Houdini's, the magician goes on the attack.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Elementary Stars | Magic & Magicians | Spiritualist Stars
  Updated 8.15.05
• Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
  Author: Doctorow, Cory
  Publisher: Tor $ 24.95 ISBN: 0765312786 Date: 2005
  PW
  One of the leading voices of next-generation SF and author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom returns with a miraculous novel of secrets, lies, magic, and Internet connectivity, set on the streets of modern-day Toronto.
  Suggested Reading: Internet Stars
  Updated 3.10.05
• The Virgin Suicides
  Author: Eugenides, Jeffrey
  Publisher: FSG $ 20 ISBN: 0374284385 Date: 1993
  This beautiful and sad first novel, recently adapted for a major motion picture, tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter's spectacular demise by self-defenstration, which inaugurates "the year of the suicides."
  Updated 5.22.06
• 26A
  Author: Evans, Diana
  Publisher: Morrow $ 23.95 ISBN: 0060820918 Date: 2005
  PW Booklist
  A hauntingly beautiful, wickedly funny and devastatingly moving novel of innocence and dreams that announces the arrival of a major new talent to the literary scene. The attic room at 26a Waifer Avenue in the lower-middle-class London neighborhood of Neasden is a sanctuary for identical twins Georgia and Bessi Hunter. - Publisher Marketing.
  Suggested Reading: Twins | Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 8.15.05
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
  Author: Foer, Jonathan Safran
  Publisher: Houghton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0618329706 Date: 2005
  Kirkus PW LJ
  Oskar Schell is an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
  Suggested Reading: 9/11 Stars | All Stars | Adult Book for Teens
  Updated 3.10.05
• The Two Sams: Ghost Stories
  Author: Hirshberg, Glen
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 23 ISBN: 0786712254 Date: 2003
  PW
  With this unique collection, acclaimed author Glen Hirshberg breathes new life into an age-old literary tradition.
  Suggested Reading: Ghostly Stars
  Updated 9.22.03
• The Girls
  Author: Lansens, Lori
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316069035 Date: 2006
  Booklist LJ Kirkus
  In Lori Lansens' astonishing second novel, readers come to know and love two of the most remarkable characters in Canadian fiction: Rose and Ruby, 29-year-old conjoined twins.
  Suggested Reading: Twins
  Updated 2.28.06
• Other Worlds
  Author: Michaels, Barbara
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 23 ISBN: 0060192356 Date: 1999
  On a foggy evening, in a smoky club, a lofty assemblage of crime specialists settles in to talk about poltergeists and murder. The two grisly cases they discuss are sure to raise the hair on every reader's neck--and raise the standard for what is considered to be a great mystery fiction.
  Updated 5.16.06
• The Time Traveler's Wife
  Author: Niffenegger, Audrey
  Publisher: MacAdam/Cage $ 25 ISBN: 193156146x Date: 2003
  PW LJ
  Alex Award
  The love story of Henry and Claire whose lives are punctuated by Henry's disappearance to different points in time--sometimes even back to visit Claire as a young woman. When Henry meets Claire, he is twenty-eight, and she is twenty. He's a hip, handsome librarian; she is an art student with Botticelli hair. Henry has never met Claire before; Claire has known Henry since she was six...
  Suggested Reading: Librarian Stars | Time Travel Stars | Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 8.14.03
• Lost
  Author: Robotham, Michael
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385508662 Date: 2006
  LJ
  London detective Vincent Ruiz (Suspect) returns and is accused of faking amnesia when he's found shot in the leg, but with no memory of how. Ruiz turns to psychologist Joe O'Loughlin, and soon a twisted trail of grief, vengeance, and the search for redemption is revealed.
  Updated 12.27.05
• Escapade
  Author: Satterthwait, Walter
  Publisher: St Martins $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312130686 Date: 1995
  Kirkus
  Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle team up to solve the ultimate locked-room whodunit, in this brilliant comic novel that's also a traditional mystery, by the author of The Hanged Man. "Mr. Satterthwait writes in a bright, satirical style".--New York Times Book Review.
  Updated 5.24.06
• Lovely Bones
  Author: Sebold, Alice
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 21.95 ISBN: 031666343 Date: 2002
  Booklist Library Journal PW
  In the hands of a brilliant new novelist, and through the eyes of her winning new heroine, this tale of family, memory, love, and living is told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. In the sweet, untroubled voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief the most hopeful and joyful of stories.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts | All Stars Lists | Reading Group Stars
  Updated 6.29.02
• Broken Verses
  Author: Shamsie, Kamila
  Publisher: Harvest $ 14 (paper) ISBN: 0156030535 Date: 2005
  Kirkus
  Fourteen years ago, famous Pakistani activist Samina Akram disappeared. Two years earlier, her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. In present-day Karachi, her daughter Aasmaani has just discovered a letter in the couple's private code-a letter that could only have been written recently.
  Aasmaani is thirty, single, drifting from job to job. Always left behind whenever Samina followed the Poet into exile, she had assumed that her mother's disappearance was simply another abandonment. Then, while working at Pakistan's first independent TV station, Aasmaani runs into an old friend of Samina's who gives her the first letter, then many more. Where could the letters have come from? And will they lead her to her mother?
  Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves - Publisher Marketing
  Updated 2.23.05
• Cryptonomicon
  Author: Stephenson, Neal
  Publisher: Avon $ 29.50 ISBN: 0380973464 Date:1999
  PW LJ
  The adult grandchildren of two men once involved in code-breaking espionage in World War II find a sunken Nazi submarine that leads to a massive conspiracy, which can either enhance freedom - or subjugate the world.
• Lost Boy, Lost Girl
  Author: Straub, Peter
  Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400060923 Date: 2003
  Booklist PW
  From the bestselling author of Black House and Mr. X springs a groundbreaking story of the persistence of evil, told with tantalizing ambiguity and structural audacity.
  Updated 9.22.03
• The Quick and the Dead
  Author: Williams, Joy
  Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 067944646x Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  Over summer vacation, three girls explore a world seemingly empty of meaning yet filled with eccentricity and random events. A panorama of contemporary life, seen through the looking-glass of adolescence, The Quick and the Dead is at once mundane and magical, ominous and comic.
  Updated 10/6/00
• Broken As Things Are
  Author: Witt, Martha
  Publisher: Holt $ 23 ISBN: 080507595x Date: 2004
  Kirkus
  "A sensitive Southern tale of weirdly imaginative children and hapless adults. Ms. Witt has staked out a territory somewhere between Harper Lee and Flannery O'Connor." - E. L. Doctorow. - Publisher Marketing.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts | Adult Books for Young Adults
  Updated 6.10.04

Nonfiction

• Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini
  Author: Brandon, RRuth
  Publisher: Random $ 25 ISBN: 0679424377 Date: 1994
  Booklist
  A mesmerizing, intimate look at a man whose obsessions and secret fears made him one of the most memorable, fascinating, and charismatic performers. The author reveals much that is new, including the first full description of Houdini's fabled death.
  Updated 5.16.06