Explore Books suggests complex, entertaining fiction titles

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Books in Aspen recommends a harrowing memoir, hot and sticky London literary fiction and a Christie mystery.

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From the publisher: Now available in paperback, Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House” is a searing account of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman. Each chapter in this wildly inventive memoir is driven by its own narrative trope — the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman — through which Machado holds her story up to the light, examining it from different angles. She considers her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

From Annika White, bookseller: This book is a total page-turner! A deeply moving memoir that acts as a tribute to the high and lows of partnership (with plenty of suspense to make it such a fun read). It brilliantly uses form to mirror the way romantic love destroys our perceptions of reality and of ourselves, which I absolutely love.

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From the publisher: Summer in London stops for no one. Not the half-naked drunks and stoners, the bachelorette parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried cigarettes. It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens, and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive.

Everyone but Maggie. She’s 30, pregnant, and broke. Faced with moving back to the town she fought to escape, she’s wondering if having a baby with boyfriend Ed will be the last spontaneous act of her life. Ed, meanwhile, is trying to run from his past with Maggie’s best friend Phil and harboring secret dreams of his own.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s debut is a mesmerizing work of literary fiction, a dive into the soul of a city and a searing look at what it takes to build a life there.

From Elizabeth Sills, bookseller: A book about a hot, sticky London summer from a cast of misfit characters, all of whom are going through big, heavy life changes. All the while, there’s a whale stuck in the Thames! It’s a wonderful fiction book tackling questions of friendship, family, and quarter-life crises.

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From the publisher: A far-from-warm welcome greets Hercule Poirot as he arrives for lunch at Lucy Angkatell’s country house. A man lies dying by the swimming pool, his blood dripping into the water. His wife stands over him, holding a revolver.

As Poirot investigates, he begins to realize that beneath the respectable surface lies a tangle of family secrets and everyone becomes a suspect.

From Kenzie Llewellyn, bookseller: I love the characters in this book, they have wonderful dynamics and are all interesting and complex. This book is written wonderfully, it’s simple yet atmospheric. As with most of Christie’s books, it’s a fantastic cozy mystery with plenty of twists and turns.

Type of Story: Review

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