What We’re Reading

Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

College professor Jason Dessen leads an ordinary life with his loving wife, Daniela, and teenage son, Charlie. After a night out celebrating the success of an old friend, Jason is knocked unconscious and kidnapped by a masked man. When he wakes, a room full of strangers all know him to be a brilliant physicist who has miraculously returned after a mysterious absence. Jason flees to find his home not only empty but different on the inside. When he finally tracks down Daniela, she is now a famous artist who says they never got married … and there is no Charlie. Has he woken from a dream or suffered amnesia, or is something more sinister going on? Now a series on Apple TV+, this book is a thrilling escape that examines the path not taken.

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

by Shaun Bythell

In the more than two decades that Bythell has owned and operated The Book Shop, Scotland’s largest secondhand bookstore, he has met all manner of people wandering his shelves … and taken notes. Though each visitor (they’re not all customers) is unique, Bythell has noticed commonalities among certain types. In Seven Kinds, a light read at only 120 pages, he adopts a Linnaean system of taxonomy to outline and describe the seven genera of bookstore regulars — from the Young Family to the Occultist — which are further broken down into dozens of species. This funny but honest and cutting look at bookstore life will have you chuckling regularly, and perhaps uncomfortably if you find yourself described from a bookseller’s point of view in not-so-positive terms.

The God of the Woods

by Liz Moore

Fourteen years after her brother’s disappearance, 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar vanishes from her cabin at sleep-away camp deep in the woods of the Adirondacks in 1975. Readers meet Barbara’s wealthy family, who owns the camp and the land surrounding it, as well as camp employees from town who become entangled in the search for the missing girl. To top it off, convicted serial killer Jacob Sluiter has escaped from prison and been sighted nearby. In this atmospheric and eerie thriller, the author deftly juggles multiple points of view that jump across timelines to create a literary suspense novel full of nuanced female characters navigating the social constraints of the mid-’70s.

This article is featured in the November/December 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.