Stranger than Fiction: Essential Non-Fiction Novels, True Crime & Crónicas
By Adelle Stripe
Stranger than Fiction: Essential Non-Fiction Novels, True Crime & Crónicas
By Adelle Stripe
Truth? There is no truth. "There is no longer any such thing as fiction or non-fiction; there's only narrative."
News of a Kidnapping
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
£9.99 £9.49Ferociously brilliant account of the kidnapping, imprisonment, and eventual release of a handful of prominent figures in Colombia in the early 1990s by the Medellín Cartel, a drug cartel founded and operated by Pablo Escobar.
The Order of the Day
Eric Vuillard
£8.99 £8.54A short, powerful account (a récit, or historical essay with literary flourishes) of the annexation of Austria in WW II told by novelist and filmmaker, Eric Vuillard. The book received the esteemed Prix Goncourt, which is always the sign of quality.
Limonov
Emmanuel Carrere
£9.99 £9.49Limonov is not a fictional character, but he could have been. He's lived a hundred lives. He was a hoodlum in Ukraine, an idol of the Soviet underground, punk-poet and valet to a billionaire in Manhattan, fashion writer in Paris, lost soldier in the Balkans, and now, in the chaos after the fall of communism a charismatic party leader of a gang of political desperados. Limonov sees himself as a hero, but he is also a bastard. This is Emmanuel Carrere's sensational account of Limonov's life, and perhaps one of his greatest books.
Kick the Latch
Kathryn Scanlan
£9.99 £9.49An exhilarating account of a woman's life at the racetrack, based on transcribed interviews presented in vignette form that the author describes as 'a composite portrait of a self'. This compulsively readable non-fiction novel transforms oral history into high art.
The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba
Carlos Manuel Alvarez
£12.99 £12.34One of the most exciting young writers in Latin America employs the crónica form—a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative nonfiction, and novelistic techniques—to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history.
The Long Drop
Denise Mina
£9.99 £9.49A well deserved winner of the Gordon Burn Prize that tells the unsettling tale of Peter Manuel in 1950s Glasgow.
Dead Girls
Selva Almada
£11.99 £11.39Internationally acclaimed Argentinian author Selva Almada dives into the heart of femicide with this investigative novel, comparable to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or John Hersey’s Hiroshima. With her unique style of prose that captures the invisible, and with lyrical brutality, Almada manages to blaze new trails in this innovative approach to journalistic fiction.
Happy Like Murderers
Gordon Burn
£12.99 £12.34In this controversial and influential work, Gordon Burn reveals the strange inner dynamic of Fred and Rosemary West's relationship. Based on meticulous research, this dark history is told in a powerful, compelling narrative.
Libra
Don DeLillo
£8.99 £8.54A troubled adolescent endlessly riding New York's subway cars, Lee Harvey Oswald enters adulthood believing himself to be an agent of history. This makes him fair game to a pair of discontented CIA operatives convinced that a failed attempt on the life of the US president will force the nation to tackle the threat of communism head on. Libra is an audacious, masterful blend of fact and fiction, laying bare the wounded American psyche and the dark events that still torment it.
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
Truman Capote
£9.99 £9.49The chilling true crime 'non-fiction novel' that made Truman Capote's name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative. Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation (assisted by Harper Lee) explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved.
The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer
£16.99 £16.14Mailer's classic follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. The Executioner’s Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence.
You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat]
Andrew Hankinson
£9.99 £9.49Newcastle doorman Raoul Moat became notorious when, after killing his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, shooting her in the stomach, and blinding a policeman, he disappeared into the woods of Northumberland, evading discovery for seven days. Eventually, cornered by the police, Moat shot himself. Andrew Hankinson re-tells Moat's story using his own words, and those of the state services which engaged with him, bringing the reader disarmingly close, at all times, to the unravelling mind of its narrator.
Hiroshima
John Hersey
£12.99 £12.34Published in 1946, Hiroshima tells the devastating stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city. It is one of the earliest examples of New Journalism, where narrative techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reporting. Never out of print, it has sold more than three million copies and is an essential book for readers with an interest in 20th century history.
HHhH
Laurent Binet
£9.99 £9.49Another Prix Goncourt award-winner, Binet's masterful retelling of Operation Anthropoid, and the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, is an exhilarating debut novel. Blending the author's personal journey with the subject, his attempt to untangle the events of one day in 1942, and the stories of Czech assassins Gabčík and Kubiš, HHhH is a thrilling literary version of European history. Highly recommended.
A Journal of the Plague Year
Daniel Defoe
£9.99 £9.49Written 100 years after the Black Death, Defoe's classic tale of the Bubonic Plague was based on the diaries of his uncle who lived through the period. Told as an eyewitness account, it uses fictional devices to describe the horror of the epidemic and its impact on the people of London. Is this the first nonfiction novel? I think it probably is...
People of the Abyss
Jack London
£22.98Jack London's moving firsthand account of working-class life in Whitechapel. For a short period in 1902, the author lived amongst the poor in workhouses, or on the streets. His book influenced George Orwell who went on to write Down and Out in Paris and London, and the Road to Wigan Pier after reading it. Personally, I believe that London's work of narrative journalism is superior.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe
£12.99 £12.34This electrifying non-fiction novel tells the tales of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters in the 1960’s as they lead a group of psychedelic evangelisers around America in a painted bus driven by the legendary Neal Cassady whom Dean Moriarty’s character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was based. It still a best-seller about the history of the hippies, LSD, and the counterculture movement. A wild trip in literary form. Far out!
I'm Jack
Mark Blacklock
£8.99 £8.54Told through a series of letters, witness statements and assorted documents, I'm Jack unlocks the chaotic story of one of Britain’s most notorious hoaxers, Sunderland's John Humble, aka “Wearside Jack”, the man who assumed the voice of Peter Sutcliffe. Using Humble's voice, Blacklock reveals the wild goose chase that ensued across the North of England in the late 1970s, and the internal collapse of its narrator.