7 novels featuring a book within a book

Magpie Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

Editor Susan Ryeland has worked with Alan Conway for years, putting up with his eccentricities for the sake of his bestselling detective series. Every Atticus Pünd mystery novel feels pretty much the same to Susan by now, each one set in a small English village, following an Agatha Christie-like formula. When Susan reads Conway’s latest, however, she finds there might be more to the fictional mystery at Pye Hall. The more she reads, the more she becomes convinced of a real life mystery between the pages. A tale of greed and gruesome murder prompts Susan to investigate in this clever novel-within-a-novel.

The Bromance Book Club

by Lyssa Kay Adams

This second chance love story is so much fun—and gave me a new appreciation for the romance genre. Baseball star Gavin Scott is successful on the field, but at home? He's struggling to make his marriage work. Desperate for help, he turns to his best friends, who—unbeknownst to him—have a secret romance book club in which they read and discuss romance novels. The guys give him a historical romance to read, Courting the Countess, portions of which appear between chapters, and tell him to use it as a guide to win his wife back. Through big gestures and fumbling attempts at vulnerability, Gavin learns how to love his partner better. (Open door.)

The Woman in the Library

by Sulari Gentill

This utterly compelling read features not just a book within a book but a mystery within a mystery! Australian writer Freddie Kincaid is working in Boston after winning a literary fellowship. She's sharing a table with three strangers at the Boston Public Library when the quiet is pierced by a woman's scream—and the four, who quickly bond after sharing this frightening moment, later discover that what they really may have heard was a murder taking place. But wait! Freddie and her pals are actually characters in a novel that established Australian writer Hannah Tigone is working on, and she's mailing chapters we're reading to a doting fan who has some advice for Hannah ... along with pointed tips that grow ever more disturbing. This is a fun little puzzle box of a book, although I've got to warn you: some of you are going to hate the ending.

The Secret Book of Flora Lea

by Patti Callahan Henry

Talk about a strong premise! In 1960s London, a young woman named Hazel unwraps a parcel from America while working at Hogan’s Rare Book Shop. She is gobsmacked to find an illustrated children’s book called Whisperwood and the River of Stars. This book shouldn’t exist, because only two people in the world know about Whisperwood: Hazel and her sister Flora, who created the fairy tale together while billeted in Oxfordshire during WWII. Hazel believes the book is proof that her sister didn’t die, as presumed, back in 1940, and embarks on a quest to find her. A heartfelt historical novel about the power of stories, forgiveness, and love. For fans of Kimberly Brubaker Bradley's The War That Saved My Life and Susan Meissner's Secrets of a Charmed Life.

The Connellys of County Down

by Tracey Lange

Lange's debut We Are the Brennans is one of my favorite juicy, big-hearted family novels. This family drama is about the three adult children in the Connelly family. In the opening pages, Tara is released from prison after serving 18 months on a drug charge and goes home to see her siblings: her brother, a single dad who is still struggling with lingering symptoms from a brain injury sustained many moons ago, and sister, the Type A firstborn who always has things under control but who is struggling at the moment, not that she’ll admit that to her siblings. I love stories of complicated families, and was also pleasantly surprised to discover this novel features a book within a book: the title references the ongoing story the mother of the now-grown Connolly children once told them at bedtime.

S./Ship of Theseus

by Doug Dorst, J.J. Abrams

A mystery and burgeoning romance unfold between two graduate students in this novel-within-a-novel. Jen and Eric leave notes in the same copy of Ship of Theseus, a literary novel that was the last book written by the anonymous author V.M. Straka. Translator F.X. Caldeira included an introduction and footnotes and wrote the ending, as Straka withheld it before he died. Jen and Eric’s marginalia draws them together as they trade theories about the book and open up about their lives. But danger is afoot and they must race to figure out Straka’s identity before it’s too late. How you read the story—novel or marginalia and ephemera first—matters as much as the story itself. Team members Ginger and Leigh buddy read this a few years ago and say it’s one of the most unique reading experiences they’ve ever had.

Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Literary historical fiction that is a book within a book within a book, weaving a tangled web of power, wealth, and deceit. While many Americans struggled after the Wall Street crash of 1929, Benjamin and Helen Rask flourished. The popular novel Bonds, published in 1937, details their privileged upbringing, excessive lifestyle, and the cost of acquiring their fortune. But Bonds might not be the whole story or the right one. Fans of epistolary literature will appreciate the four-part structure of a novel, autobiography draft, memoir by the biographer, and diary excerpts. Every time you think you know the story, it transforms into something else.

7 novels featuring a book within a book

Magpie Murders

The Bromance Book Club

The Woman in the Library

The Secret Book of Flora Lea

The Connellys of County Down

S./Ship of Theseus

Trust

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summer reading starts May 16th