Welcome back to Book Break! In this video we are talking about one of my favorite genres to read:
dark books written by women. This is basically the most common type of book that I read,
so I really could not stop when putting this list together, so you might end up with rather a long
shopping list by the end! I have got 21 books I'm going to recommend to you now. First up is Little
Bandaged Days by Kyra Wilder. This is the brand new paperback cover and you can tell just how dark
this book is going to be from how disturbing this image is. Little Bandaged Days is about
a woman who moves with her husband and two young children to Geneva for her husband's job, and she
is basically left alone all day every day in this new rented apartment with two very young children
and she slowly starts to lose her mind. And we are really sucked into this with her, it's a very
claustrophobic nightmare-like reading experience, we don't know who to trust in this book or whose
version of events to trust, because even the main character who we are following is losing her own
grip on reality. And we also get flash forwards throughout the book to the mother in a hospital,
which is very foreboding, we know that something very bad is going to happen. A brand new release
I've got here is Nightshift by Kiare Ladner. So this is about a young 20-something woman who
has just moved to London when she meets a woman called Sabine and becomes infatuated with her.
Sabine works a night shift and so our main character Meggie decides to give up her regular
job, her regular life, her relationship with her boyfriend, all to join Sabine
on this night shift. So again this is a very dreamlike reading experience, all taking place
in the rather otherworldly existence of London's night shift workers. And it's about obsession,
it's about female friendship and sexuality, it is very dark and it really sucks you in. And while
we're on the theme of books about obsession, If I Can't Have You by Charlotte Levin is a really
fun dark story of one woman's obsession with a man that she meets at work. It's a very fun,
page turning book, we follow our main character Constance Little becoming completely obsessed with
this man and reading far too much into their interactions, really convincing herself the
relationship can be something that it's not. But it very quickly slides from fun and relatable into
dark and disturbing as you start to really worry about what Constance is up to. But I also
really liked the angle that the book took on this situation, it doesn't just paint Constance to be
a stereotypical crazy ex-girlfriend, you really really sympathize with her, even as she goes
further than she should. The Harpy by Megan Hunter is a really unusual dark fairy tale of a novel.
This is about a woman who discovers that her husband has cheated on her, and so they agree that
to save the marriage, as revenge, she is allowed to hurt him three times. And he won't know when
this hurt is coming, or what form it will take, so it's very tense, it's very unsettling. And
also strewn throughout the novel we hear about the main character Lucy's fixation with harpies, the
mythical creature, and that lends this book this very fairy tale otherworldly sense. Next I've got
here Can You See Me Now? by Trisha Sacklecha, and I'm very excited to have this one. I have not read
this book yet but I absolutely loved this author's last book which was called Your Truth or Mine,
so I am so excited to see what she's written next, and it sounds very dark. So this book is about a
woman called Alia who is a cabinet minister in the Indian government, but secrets from her past from
15 years ago are starting to resurface. And then we also get to hear about 15 years ago
when Alia met two other girls. They go to this Indian boarding school and Alia gets sucked into
their world of wealth and privilege, but it says here that with intimacy comes jealousy, and with
privilege, resentment, and Alia finds that it only takes one night for her bright new world
to shatter around her. That sounds fantastic, and I know from reading this author before
it's going to be as good as it sounds. The Hidden Girls by Rebecca Whitney is great if you love
unreliable narrators. So our main character here Ruth is a new mother, recovering from postpartum
psychosis. So she and the people around her do not trust what she is seeing and perceiving. So that's
an absolutely terrifying situation to be in when you can't even trust your own senses. And then
Ruth starts hearing noises in the night, and she becomes convinced that there is someone who needs
her help, but she doesn't know if she's imagining it or not, and no one else is going to believe her
if she can't even believe herself. As Long As We Both Shall Live by JoAnn Chaney is a really
fun book for fans of Gone Girl. This is Gone Girl cranked up a notch, there are so many twists and
turns that you will not know what's going to happen next. So we follow a man in this book
whose wife has just vanished in seemingly a tragic hiking accident, until police dig a little further
and find out that his last wife mysteriously died as well - so what is going on here? Every
time you think you know what's happening there is still another twist to come, this book gets
so dark and it's so much fun. And then there's Dead Girls by Abigail Tarttellin. I actually
interviewed Abigail Tarttellin about this book so I'll link to that video below, we talked about
feminism in the thriller genre, and this book is just so much fun if you like to see powerful
women in your thrillers, it's acknowledging the very real threats faced by women and girls,
but it doesn't let the girls be reduced to just victims in the story. Our main character in
Dead Girls is actually an 11 year old girl called Thera. Her best friend has just been murdered, the
year is 1999, and Thera is looking for revenge. The Favorite Sister by Jessica Knoll is another
really fun dark book. So this is about a reality show, a reality TV show about successful business
women. It is supposedly a feminist show but the producers are just trying to pit the women against
each other, like in so many other reality tv shows that we've seen. So that setting
is already dark enough, but in this book we know that season four of this show will end in murder.
And so we are retracing the steps to find out what happened. And again there are just so many twists,
so many surprises, the book gets dark, the book gets controversial, be prepared for anything to
happen in this one. Luster by Raven Leilani is dark in a very different way. This book is darkly
funny, darkly relatable. Our main character is a woman in her 20s called Edie who gets caught up in
this semi-open marriage situation with two white characters who have an adopted Black daughter,
and so we have all sorts of complicated dynamics in this book. The darkness doesn't come from the
plot in this one, the darkness comes from within the characters’ minds, and the way they relate
to the world, and how brutally relatable a lot of readers will find this book. But there is
definitely darkness in the plot of Shelter by Jung Yun. This book opens with a very violent crime,
so be warned for that, it is brutal. Our main character is a man called Kyung whose parents
are the victims of this crime, and so they come to live with him and his family for the first time in
a long time. The family has had a lot of issues and we follow the tragic aftermath of this crime.
I'm sure a lot of you have already heard of Lullaby by Leila Slimani. This book had a
lot of hype. It is based on a true story and it's about a nanny who we know right from the beginning
is going to kill the two children in her care. And the book is not a fast-paced, page-turning
thriller, it is a slow sad and dark meditation on everything that led up to this happening.
The opening of the book, which is also written on the cover here, is “the baby is dead, it took only
a few seconds” so that gives you some hint of the level of darkness we find in this book. Necessary
People by Anna Pitoniak is a dark book about friendship. It's one that takes quite a turn,
it will definitely surprise you. It's about two girls who met in college, have been best friends
ever since, but there is a lot of resentment between them. There is definitely a power dynamic
at play here, and we are following one of the girls, Violet, who has always felt rather in her
friend Stella's shadow. I was absolutely hooked on this one right from the get-go, even as nothing
major seems to be happening for the first half of the book. There are really dark undertones, we see
the characters manipulating each other, it's very foreboding and it's a lot of dark fun. A
very sad dark book with a lot of heart is Miracle Creek by Angie Kim. So this is a court case story
that takes place after a fatality at a medical treatment center run by a Korean immigrant family.
And the medical treatment center itself was already very controversial. Lots of people
have been protesting against it because of its claims to be able to cure conditions like autism.
And also the mother of a child who is killed in this fatality is also placed under suspicion. So
we follow a lot of different characters in this book, there's a lot of issues being explored,
it's a really really interesting, sad, dark book that I just could not recommend more. Another
one that I'm sure you've seen the hype for is My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite.
This is about a woman whose sister keeps murdering her boyfriends, and our main character keeps
having to help her clean up the crime scene and get rid of the body and she doesn't know what
to do. She loves and wants to protect her sister, but she also knows that what she's doing is very
very wrong - and particularly when her sister starts dating the man that our main character
has a crush on, her loyalties are torn. Then I've got All is Not Forgotten by Wendy Walker, which
is a book I really enjoyed but it is very very dark, and definitely needs a trigger warning for
sexual assault. This is about a teenage girl who was attacked, and her parents and doctor decide
there is this treatment, this fictional treatment available in the book where she can erase that
memory, and they decide to erase the memory for her so that she doesn't have to live with
that trauma. We hear this whole story through the perspective of a character who's not part of the
family, I won't reveal who they are because it's a twist that gets revealed a few chapters in but
it's worth having the surprise when it happens. And the book is very creepy, very unsettling,
not for everyone, but if you love dark twisted stories it's for you. The Farm by Joanne Ramos
is a feminist dystopia but set in a world that is barely removed from our real world. So this is set
at Golden Oaks, a centre for surrogates. So very very rich clients can pay for their babies to be
born to surrogates at this center. And we follow a few different perspectives: the woman who runs the
center, and two different women who are surrogates there. And the darkness in this book really comes
from the sad truths that it reveals about race and class and inequality, and the stories that
we will tell ourselves to survive in a world where power is not distributed equally. For some dark
short stories I recommend Revenge by Yoko Ogawa. And this collection has a fun twist because these
stories are all connected to each other in a way that you only really find out when you get to the
end of each story and see how it builds in to a story that you read earlier in the collection.
All of these stories are slightly eerie, slightly unsettling, some of them take place in the real
world, some of them go into a slightly fantastical realm. They also play with reality between the
different stories and how they're connected, because a character who died in one story,
we might find having a different ending in another story. Yoko Ogawa is such a brilliant writer and
this is a collection that the second you finish it you will want to go back and start from the
beginning and look for more connections. And then I'm going to finish off with three recommendations
for books that are coming out very very soon, so you'll want to get your pre-orders in for
those. So the first one is The Hiding Place by Jenny Quintana which is coming out in March.
This one is about a woman called Marina who has always known that she was adopted,
but the circumstances of her birth have always been a mystery. She was nicknamed Baby Blue by
the newspapers after she was found as a baby, wrapped in a blue shawl, abandoned in a house,
and that house still stands. Its split into flats and one of them is now to let. So marina wants to
know if this house might hold the secrets to her past, or if there is someone out there who doesn't
want them to come to the surface. Also coming in March is Saint X by Alexis Shaitkin. This is
a dark literary fiction novel about a woman whose older sister was murdered on a family holiday to
this luxurious caribbean island of Saint X many years ago. So we flash back and forth between the
past, this holiday, and present day, when our main character is trying to piece together what could
have happened. So it's partly a mystery thriller and it's partly a dark coming of age novel of the
older sister, because we get to hear her narration of the story through diaries left behind. So it's
a completely unique mix. And finally, coming in April, is When I Was Ten by Fiona Cummins.
Fiona Cummins is the author of thrillers like The Neighbour and The Bone Collector series, these
very chilling books, and When I Was Ten is about a woman who, 21 years ago when she was 10 years old,
her parents were murdered, and this young girl was nicknamed the angel of death, and now lives
a quiet anonymous life under an assumed name. But it's been 21 years since this terrible murder,
and now a documentary crew have tracked down this woman and her estranged older sister,
and they want to shine a light on what really happened all those years ago.
So I would love to know your recommendations like this of dark books written by women,
and I'll put a link here to a playlist of all the videos we've made before about thrillers,
horror, and mysteries, so do click through and have a browse, and we'll see you next time!