Stories told through a series of written documents, such as letters, diary entries, emails, text messages, and newspaper clippings. You don’t even have to snoop!
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—debris from the 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Dracula by Bram Stoker*
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the ‘Master’ and his imminent arrival.
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop.
Several People are Typing… by Calvin Kasulke
When his consciousness is uploaded into his company’s internal Slack channels, boosting his productivity, Gerald, who works for a PR firm, enlists the help of a co-worker to help him escape—and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes.
One Woman Show by Christine Coulson
Author Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her final project was to write wall labels for the museum’s new British Galleries. During that time, she dreamt of using The Met’s strict label format to describe people as intricate works of art. The result is the story of Kitty Whitaker as she is defined by her potential for display and moved from collection to collection through multiple marriages.
*Discuss this title at Thursday Evening Book Club
