Undiscovered Wonders

[staceass]

we all know the popular books -- the da vinci codes and the oprah picks and the stuff that inevitably turns into movies. but does that mean they're good?

so here's my question: what's your favorite hidden gem? out of the hundreds of thousands of books that are published every year, which is the one that not too many people have heard of that you would honestly say was a 'great read'? and, of course, why?

to kick things off, i'm gonna present The Mercy of Thin Air. I picked it up a little while ago thinking "good old fashioned none-brain-taxing chick lit", and was suprised to find that it was actually a great deal more.

 

[wilderness]

ohhhhh.
Stillriver by Andrew Rosenheim.
One of my favourite novels. Brilliant.


Michael Wolf felt he had escaped his past - Stillriver, the small town in Michigan where he grew up, his troubles with his father, the petty jealousies and competitiveness of his younger brother, and most of all the disaster that ended his relationship with Cassie, the love of his life. As the book opens, Michael is forced to return to Stillriver when he is told of his father's brutal murder. He finds the town's new prosperity only partly masks old hurts and humiliations. But when he discovers that Cassie has also returned to Stillriver, he is thrown into total turmoil while trying to solve the mystery of his father's death.

A powerful love story, Stillriver, is also a novel about family relationships and the tensions of life in a small close-knit community.


The blurb doesnt do it justice at all.
I recommend this book to all! It has so much depth and is just so touching!

Lani

 

[MonkeyCatcher]

Darkfall and Darksong by Isobelle Carmody (the next in the series is due out next year I think). I read them at the start of last year and absolutely adored them. I think that they are targeted for a teenage audience, but I loved them anyway. They were interesting, compelling reads, and didn't follow the usual fantasy setout, which was very refreshing.

 

[KristoCat]

I loved The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey. The story is very engaging, well-told, and creative. It can be read by both young adults and adults.

 

[Scottishduffy]

The ones I have enjoyed the most have been some of the non-fiction books I have read. Such as STIFF: The curious lives of human cadavers.

The Kitchen Boy was a also a very good book. A fiction work about the last days of the Romanovs.

 

[G4G]

I'd recommend Sarah Dunant's Transgressions. I haven't seen this book discussed much except in the heavy sunday papers. It's a very well written thriller, IMO: an intelligent "page turner".

 

[Stewart]

The book I'm reading just now, Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates, is a great read. Yates' books went out of print when he died in the early 90s but they have been reissued and people, it seems, are coming to learn of Yates' writing which is, from my limited understanding, realist miserabilism. Excellent! Although Revolutionary Road, sitting waiting to be read, is seen as his classic.

 

[Tom]

The Man without Qualities - Robert Musil.
Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch
Petersburg - Andrey Bely

And probably a few others. These three are 20th century masterpieces. Petersburg, for example, is similar to and predates Ulysses and is much better.

 

[VampGrrl]

The Wages of Sin by Jenna Maclaine. It's self-published (but don't let that scare you off) so it'll never get widely known, but it's really a great book if you like paranormal romance/vampire fiction. It was way better than 2 out of the last 3 books I've read by authors of traditional publishing houses.