Lou Berney’s 6 favorite books with powerful storytelling

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Oklahoma native Lou Berney is the award-winning author of several crime novels, including Dark Ride, November Road, and The Long and Faraway Gone. His new novel, Crooks, follows four siblings who each find separate paths toward carrying on their parents’ crooked legacy.

‘In a Lonely Place’ by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947)

This is such a dark, beautiful crime novel, and it’s also a master class in the powers of narrative perspective and interiority. The faint throb of unease that runs through the story is brilliantly handled. In a Lonely Place is both way ahead of its time and exactly of its time, and it still chills me every time I read it. Buy it here.

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‘Slaughterhouse Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1969)

I was assigned this book during my first year of college, in freshman comp, and it blew my mind. I hadn’t realized until this book that a “serious” novel could be so fun and weird and tight. I don’t think I would have become a novelist without it. Buy it here.

‘Deacon King Kong’ by James McBride (2020)

I love sprawling novels and authors who try to do too much. The author of The Good Lord Bird and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store tries to do too much and thoroughly succeeds. This is a crime novel and a family novel and a novel about nothing less than everything American. The richness of the world McBride creates is magical. Buy it here.

‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes (1605 and 1615)

Cervantes’ classic can be an intimidating novel. I know it was for me when I finally cracked it open. But Don Quixote is a pure joy to read, packed full of larger-than-life characters who are in fact exactly true to life. That’s what I’ve been aiming to do in my own fiction ever since. Buy it here.

‘Love Medicine’ by Louise Erdrich (1984)

There aren’t many writers who are better at weaving elegant prose, wry humor, and biting social commentary into such a profoundly moving and satisfying narrative fabric, as she did in her very first novel. Erdrich is a great poet who never forgets she’s a storyteller and a great storyteller who never stops being a poet. Buy it here.

‘Case Histories’ by Kate Atkinson (2004)

For a lot of writers, I think, there’s one book that kicks open a door they didn’t even realize was there. For me, it’s Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. I had never read a crime novel like it, both dark and light, both hilarious and harrowing, and I knew immediately this is what I wanted to do. Buy it here.