By Simon McDonald, Editorial Manager | simon@thereadingroom.com
Later this month Lauren Beukes returns with Broken Monsters, a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.
In the meantime, why not try one of these 10 books recommended by Lauren Beukes herself?
Words are weapons, and one man is immune, in this dazzlingly original high-concept thriller from Australian author Max Barry.
Four simultaneous plane crashes. Three child survivors. A religious fanatic who insists the three are harbingers of the apocalypse. What if he’s right?
Detective Tallow has uncovered two decades’ worth of homicides that no one knew to connect and a killer unlike anything that came before.
A chilling story about guilt, family secrets, and the lethal power of desire.
Aimee Bender’s stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life in all its grotesque, beautiful glory.
A blind old man, a young apprentice working in a tattoo shop, and a mad woman haunting an Ohio institute narrate this story of a family that encounters an endlessly shifting series of hallways in their new home, eventually coming face to face with the awful darkness lying at its heart.
The monster showed up just after midnight, as they do, but it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming.
As the witch pyres of the Spanish Inquisition blanket Renaissance Europe in a moral haze, a young African slave finds herself the unwilling apprentice of an ancient necromancer.
A fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes 80 titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.
Mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers.