Read This: Books under the Radar is a weekly post written by a guest author – often a friend of mine, someone I’ve met on my writerly travels, or an author I admire – who recommends three books they think deserve more recognition. If you’re interested in buying any of the books, please click on the covers and give these hidden gems some love. You can see the full list of books which have been selected, as well as the author’s latest book on Bookshop.org, where you can have a browse and buy any that take your fancy. Happy reading!

Read This: Cara Hunter

Cara Hunter and I met in 2018 when we did an event together in Winchester for her debut novel, Close to Home, and my third, Bitter Orange. We were interviewed by the brilliant Rebecca Fletcher – I think it was her first interview, and now is much in demand. Cara, meanwhile has gone on to write many more novels, selling all over the world, and many in development for TV. Here’s what she has to say about herself:

Cara Hunter is the Sunday Times bestselling author of the DCI Adam Fawley series and the TikTok viral hit Murder in the Family. Her books have sold over a million copies in the UK alone and have been translated into 30 languages. Close to Home and The Whole Truth were selected for the Richard and Judy book club and the series is now in script development for TV. Murder in the Family was a Sunday Times, New York Times, and USA Today bestseller. The screen rights have been acquired by Neal Street Productions. On her podcast Watching the Detectives, Cara discusses crime scene investigations with DI Andy Thompson and former Crime Scene Investigator Joey Giddings.

Twitter @CaraHunterBooks
Instagram @CaraHunterAuthor
Watching the Detectives is available on Spotify, Apple and wherever you get your podcasts

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders 

Saunders is rightly celebrated for winning the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, but this book is non-fiction. Saunders has been lecturing on the Russian short story at Syracuse University for two decades, and this book is fruit of all those years of thinking and talking about the value and craft of fiction.

Saunders presents the reader with masterpieces by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol, takes them apart, and shows you how they work. We begin with Chekhov’s ‘In The Cart’ of 1897, with a schoolteacher being driven out of town on a sunny April morning. And then we stop, after a mere three paragraphs, and Saunders turns to us, conversationally, asking about what we’ve learned and where we think the story is heading now. It’s a deceptively simple but incredibly effective technique, made possible by the fact that all the stories he uses are out of copyright so are available – if he wishes – to be quoted in full. It’s extraordinary, immersive and interactive and I recommend it to any reader who asks me for advice about how to start as a writer.

The End of Us by Olivia Kiernan

Something very different now, and The End of Us, by my dear writer friend Olivia Kiernan. I’m a great fan of Liv’s Dublin-set police procedural series featuring Frankie Sheehan, but this is her first standalone thriller. In a modern twist on Strangers on a Train, two couples come up with an apparently fool-proof and victim-less way to make easy money through life insurance fraud. It was one of those nights, they’d been drinking, no-one really thought they were being serious, and there was definitely no mention at all of anyone getting killed. Until one night, not long later, one of the four doesn’t come home.

The End of Us is perfect ‘affluence noir’ – a delicious schadenfreude concoction of money, entitlement, selfishness and cruelty. I pretty much read it through in one sitting, and I definitely

think it deserved more air-time then it got when it first came out. I also think it would make fabulous TV, so I have my fingers crossed for Liv for that!

The Unforgotten by Patrice Chaplin

And finally another thriller, this one from a long time ago, The Unforgotten, by Patrice Chaplin, first published in 1988 and still available as an e-book.

There are shades of Rebecca in this tale of a young woman who falls in love at first sight with an older man glimpsed at a theatre whom she later meets again. He, though, as she gradually realises, is still hopelessly entangled with Ruth, his long-dead wife. Her presence is as visceral as Rebecca’s ever was and the house every bit as saturated with her memory as Max de Winter’s Manderley, drenched in the overwhelming scent of the roses her husband planted for Ruth when she was dying.

The New York Times said the book had a ‘surging intensity’ when it was first published and the final twists have stayed with me all this time. Darkly romantic, just a little uncanny, and with an Oxford connection, this is one book that has definitely remained ‘unforgotten’ for me.

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I am the biggest George Saunders fan – from the book Cara recommends, to his short story collections, his novel, and all of his writing advice. The other two, I have to admit I haven’t heard of, but I LOVE a brilliantly written thriller, so these are going on the list. Any of these three that catch your eye? And if you’d like to be told about future Read This recommendations, you can follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my newsletter.

More Read This: Books Under the Radar

Lou Morrish author of Women of War
Francesca Ramsay author of Pinch Me
Sarah Leipciger author of Moon Road
Tim Chapman university librarian
Juliet West author of The Faithful
Lindsay Hunter author of Hot Springs Drive
Gina Chung author of Sea Change
Susmita Bhattacharya author of Table Manners
Vanessa Harbour author of Safe
Freya North author of The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne
Judith Heneghan author of Birdeye
Clare Mackintosh author of I Promise it won’t always Hurt like This
Barney Norris author of Undercurrent
Jo Leevers author of The Last Time I saw You
Alice Winn author of In Memmoriam
Anna Mazzola author of The House of Secrets
Alice Peterson author of The Saturday Place
Jenna Smith bookblogger
Lucy Atkins author of Windmill Hill
LV Matthews author of To Love a Liar
Jo Furniss author of Dead Mile
Ruth Thomas author of The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line
Clare Pollard author of The Modern Fairies
Nina Stibbe author of Went to London, Took the Dog
Nassaibah Younis author of Fundamentally