For the In Case You Missed It: Backlist Reading Challenge (ICYMI), each month you choose a book published in a different year, starting with 2013 in January and working your way up to 2024. This is a great way to go through backlist books and here are our recommendations for amazing reads for each year.
2013 – The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that.
The solving of the mysterious death took me on quite a circuitous journey, and I enjoyed seeing how it all unraveled. Cormoran Strike as a detective is a well developed character, and I loved reading as much about him as the mystery. The entire Cormoran Strike series are some of my favorite detective novels.
2014 – Mr. Mercedes, Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes is the first in the Bill Hodges trilogy, and right from the first chapter, King hooks us. This is not in the typical horror novel that he’s been known for in the past, but more in the thriller genre with supernatural elements that he’s been blessing us with over the past few years.
In the predawn hours, in a distressed American city, hundreds of unemployed men and women line up for the opening of a job fair. Emerging from the fog, invisible until it is too late, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes. Months later, an ex-cop named Bill Hodges, still haunted by the unsolved crime gets a crazed letter from “the perk,” claiming credit for the murders. Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, fearing another even more diabolical attack and hell-bent on preventing it.
2015 – Slade House, David Mitchell
Note to self – don’t go in any house that’s on a creepy dead end street that has a history of disappearances! That’s what I thought to myself after reading about this unusual brother, sister duo and that creepy ass house.
Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents—an odd brother and sister—extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late.
2016 – Behold the Dreamers, Imbolo Mbue
Behold the Dreamers is a beautifully written book about family, dreams, what home means, what the American dream really means and the immigrant experience. The author was able to capture and detail in an engrossing life what are some of the thoughts, rituals, and life experience is like for an immigrant. Not only that, but it really focused on what “home” is. Is it a place, is it the people in your life, your family, where you feel a sense of belonging, or where you are comfortable.
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. He lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty, and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future. However, when the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, all their lives are dramatically upended, and Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.
2017 – The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden
I got a book hangover after reading The Bear & the Nightingale! The author manages to tell a rich, detailed story with an intricate and fast moving plot, and characters that you will love and despise. The characters feel so real, and I went through all the emotions with them – the heartbreak when Vasilia’s father lost his wife – the gruff way that women were treated – ugh! – the love the family felt for each other – and the mistrust of the villagers and most people for anything “too magical”.
At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn’t mind. She spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse’s fairy tales. After Vasilisa’s mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa’s new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.
2018 – Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owen
This is a complex story that takes it’s time – but there is so much to unpack that it never felt slow to me. The “marsh girl” as Kya is called, is treated by the townspeople with everything from revulsion to mean and gently curiosity. Kya grows up but it’s hard, and the author and narrator let us feel just how hard it is for her. Yet there’s kindness there too … and sadness … and love. I fell hard for this book.
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life’s lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.
2019 – Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams
Queenie, the book, is everything! Love, love, love! Queenie, the main character, is a HOT MESS! She is going through a breakup – which has triggered a lot of pain because of past rejections. And she is not handling it well. Self-sabotage is real, and Queenie is doing it in so many ways. Yet, she has her circle of friends and a full life, even if she doesn’t feel so. The British-Caribbean vibes in this book is a flex – and here I recommend the audiobook especially if you’re not familiar with Jamaican slang, to really get an intimate experience of the culture.
2020 – The Sundown Motel, Simone St. James
This book right here got me with it’s easy suspense, dramatic turn of events, creepy hotel and haunting. Loved it! You need to go into it blind. You really don’t need to know anything more than what’s explained in the first few pages … Carly is looking for her aunt who disappeared 35 years ago in Fell, NY. St. James successfully blends a mystery together with the supernatural. It was unique to have the case being investigated by two amateurs thirty five years apart and the reader is privy to both narratives. The search for answers is so well written and I was happy to be drawn into their obsessive search for answers.
Upstate NY, 1982. Every small town like Fell, New York, has a place like the Sun Down Motel. Some customers are from out of town, passing through on their way to someplace better. Some are locals, trying to hide their secrets. Viv Delaney works as the night clerk to pay for her move to New York City. But something isn’t right at the Sun Down, and before long she’s determined to uncover all of the secrets hidden
2021 – Razorblade Tears, S.A. Crosby
The last thing Ike Randolph expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss. Derek’s father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy. Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge.
Wow did Cosby get it right with such a complex story – fathers regrets, race, homophobia, complex family dynamics, and action – lots and lots of action.
2022 – The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, Sangu Mandanna
The Very Secret Society of Magical Witches, Sangu Mandanna is a very cute cozy fantasy novel with adorable characters, witty banter, interesting plot, a little twist or 2 and just written very well with spot on pacing. Mika as a character was a delight to read about, even as she is always doubting herself. Her found family is also quirky and the romance elements just flowed with the story.
As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don’t mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she’s used to being alone and she follows the rules…with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos pretending to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously. But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic.
2023 – The Reformatory, Tananarive Due
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory in Jim Crow Florida that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead. Robbie also has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things.
I’ve mentioned my love The Reformatory, Tananarive Due a million times already, but I won’t sop! Set during slavery times, the author’s skill with words makes for vivid imagery and graphic details. But the story is also compelling, blending together injustice, death, hauntings, grief and so much more. This is a tough read, but so, so worth it. Empathy starts with seeing … and this book lays it bare.
2024 – A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher
Talk about a book that you wont want to put down. I thoroughly enjoyed this fairytale retelling of The Goose Girl. Cordelia’s mother is a poor sorceress with a mean streak, even towards her own daughter. She’s out to snag a rich husband for herself and Cordelia, but Cordelia’s finally had enough, and has some allies to help her stop her mother. A Sorceress Comes to Call was just so deliciously layered with a touch of fantasy, drama, mystery, horror, friendship, family dynamics and suspense.
All these books were amazing to read, whether you’re doing this challenge or not. Have your read any of them?
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is delightful. I can’t wait for her next book in the same “world,” which comes out this year.