The best part about sharing a novel with others is the conversations that come from the texts. Talking about your favorite moments, how the writing resonated with you, favorite characters, and all the wonderful aspects that go into the novel and its content can be part of what makes reading fun and engaging. If you are looking for a book you will want to share with others, take a look at some handpicked novels that create engaging conversations for readers.
Graveyard Shift by M. L. Rio
This novel’s themes on insomnia, research ethics, and academia will enthrall readers. It is an ensemble horror mystery novel about people who work the night shift.
Every night, five people cross paths in the college cemetery. No person is the same and everyone wants something different from the lives they are living. When they find an open grave in the cemetery that is placed where it shouldn’t be, these characters begin unraveling the mystery of the strange happenings around their town. Readers will become engaged in the academic and moral dilemmas presented in the book along with the characters themselves and their development throughout their journey. Rio’s scholarly background and creative storytelling make her novels hard to put down and this one is no different.
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
This novel’s themes on grief, legacy, and identity will touch readers’ hearts in this emotional literary fiction examining what it means to lose things and people and what it means to change from these experiences.
When 10-year-old Ebby finds her brother dead surrounded by the pieces of a jar that was a family heirloom, her life is changed forever. When the case is left unsolved, eighteen years go by and her family ends up in the spotlight again. Reminiscing about her brother and the jar that had been in her family for generations after being brought to the North by an enslaved ancestor, Ebby’s past follows her for more reasons than one. Wilkerson’s prose will keep readers in this multigenerational epic as Ebby’s mysterious life unfolds on the page.
Time’s Agent by Brenda Peynado
The themes of final-stage capitalism, loss, love, and time will keep your mind busy as this science fiction takes us into the discovery of pocket worlds and the effects of human intervention.
When humanity discovers pocket worlds, academics study this new technology and the potential of harnessing it. Forty years after its discovery, Raquel finds herself in the aftermath as pocket worlds become controlled by corporations squeezing profits out of every colonizable part of space and time. Her wife, Marlena, lives in a pocket world that Raquel carries around her neck but refuses to speak to her. In the ruins of her dreams, Raquel gets one more shot to confront time itself to save someone. Peynado’s worldbuilding is one-of-a-kind, as she takes our world and its issues and puts them into her creative spaces, giving readers an outlet to face our problems in the fictional sphere.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
This novel’s themes on storytelling, identity, and history give readers stories within stories to highlight what it means to bury stories and yourself in the process.
Alma Cruz is worried about losing her sanity to her writing. When she inherits a plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she comes up with a plan to bury her unfinished stories. In the attempt to let her failed characters rest in peace, she finds them to do the opposite. Reviving themselves to speak to her and revise their stories, her characters will not simply be buried and forgotten. Between her and Filomena, her groundskeeper, these characters come to life and make sure their stories are heard. Alvarez paints a beautiful story that asks the question of which stories get to be told, and which ones get buried and forgotten?
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
This novel’s themes on grief, family, and societal expectations tell a moving story of what it means to be human and the complexities tied to grief.
Brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek’s lives are altered forever after the death of their father, as they figure out how to grieve. Peter is a lawyer in his thirties who picks up medication to help him sleep and juggles his relationships with two different women. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player who sees himself as the socially awkward half of Peter, yet finds himself rapidly engaging in a relationship with an older woman. The grieving brothers and their loved ones take their narrative and challenge what it means to feel desire, despair, and possibility when the world does not stop moving. Rooney takes her characters and their lives to question how much one life can hold inside without breaking.
The conversations from the books we read are part of the reader’s experience, especially when they become part of their memory when they look back at the books. Creating conversations is essential because it keeps our minds moving and constantly gives us a reason to engage in critical thinking. If you read one of these recommendations, share your thoughts with others because it becomes part of your reader’s experience and makes reading fun.
Need some help getting the conversation started? Click here.
Looking for more books to stimulate conversation? Check out our Exploring the Depths of Literary Fiction bookshelf on Bookshop.org.
