Author Peng Shepherd Shares 7 Great Novels That Bend Reality

This clever, eerie debut follows Anisa, a struggling young Pakistani translator in London searching for her big break, but the market for great literary works in Urdu is small. Her boyfriend, Adam, is a savant who can speak a dozen languages, which causes plenty of friction, but when he suddenly begins conversing in perfect Urdu on a trip to Pakistan to meet her family, Anisa demands to know what’s going on. Adam reveals his secret: the Centre, a mysterious language school in the English countryside which charges an exorbitant fee and has strict no-contact rules with the outside, but guarantees complete fluency in less than two weeks.
Anisa is skeptical, but curious, and also desperate. She enrolls—and emerges ten days later speaking perfect Russian. Addicted, she returns to the Centre again to learn German, and is drawn deeper into its subtle web of secrets, until she discovers the true, terrible price of this fluency. The Centre probes questions about language, identity, and appropriation, and will force you to ask yourself, what price would you pay for success?

Don’t let the phrase “meta-science-fictional novel” scare you off. Yu manages to be both hilarious and heartrending in the same story, and this book is as much a clever time travel puzzle as it is a beautiful meditation on fathers and sons.
A time machine mechanic spends his life traveling the universe to save people from themselves by stopping them from interfering in their own pasts. Often, his customers are just trying to spend time with a deceased relative, or hoping to right a wrong that haunts them, but Charles, who himself is haunted by the disappearance of his own father when he was young, knows how dangerous tampering with the past can be. But while his ship is docked for repairs, he returns to the garage to see his own future self emerge from his own time machine. He panics, and shoots himself. Just before his future self dies, he hands Charles a book and tells him that it is “the key.” Frantic to figure out what could make him seek out his past self before time catches up to him and he’s facing his own gun again, Charles begins rewriting the book as he sets off across the universe, hoping that by the time he reaches the end, he’ll understand what’s going on and how to avert it—as well as, perhaps, how to find his lost father before it’s truly too late.

Silvey’s incredible debut is another looping mystery of a sort, in which two characters, Thora and Santi, keep meeting each other in different versions of their lives. Sometimes they’re lovers, sometimes they’re friends, classmates, coworkers, almost strangers, or even enemies—but the one thing that’s constant is that in every life, they manage to find each other again. I was already hooked trying to figure out who Thora and Santi are to each other and why they keep meeting, but I promise you, you’ll never see the twist coming—or the second one.

It’s so hard to describe this near-perfect novel without giving too much away. I’m still in awe of how Clarke managed to fit so much into such a slim book. A man named Piranesi lives in the House, but this is no ordinary house. The House is a vast, maze-like structure of halls and rooms and statues—so vast that it contains oceans on some levels, and distant wings might have their own weather. Piranesi never leaves the House, and has no memories or knowledge of anything beyond it. He believes that he and one other person he calls the Other, who occasionally visits him and brings him things like shoes or vitamins, are the only two humans in the world, and that only 13 others have existed before them, based on the remains of 13 solitary skeletons he’s found in the House’s near-infinite rooms over the years. But when the Other warns him of a mysterious intruder named “16,” Piranesi begins to question everything he thinks he knows about the House, how he came to it, and who the Other really is. It’s a breathtaking, dazzling puzzle of a read.

But even as she rises to become a famous lawyer, gets back together with her high school sweetheart, and travels the world, she begins to worry that All This and More’s promises might be too good to be true. Because while the technology is amazing, something seems a bit off….Can Marsh really make her life everything she wants it to be And is it worth it.