2025 & 2026 Reading Challenge discussion

I've just realized that something I love, as a reader, is to feel UNEASE.

I'm not talking about suspense, or mystery, or fear, or horror. Nothing that intense. Just a vague and generalized sense of dread, that something definitely doesn't feel quite right, without yet knowing the full extent of how bad things truly are. In some cases, the revelations that follow are horrifying. In others, you may imagine something far worse than the underlying reality.

I'm reading Vita Nostra right now and suffice it to say, the opening part makes me feel extremely uneasy. I can't wait to see where the rest of this story goes.

Other books that have elicited this feeling for me:
- Both of the Aminatta Forna books I've read: The Memory of Love and The Hired Man
- West by Carys Davies
- The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
- Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
- The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

Several of Alice Munro's short stories do it too.

Can you recommend any other novels that have made you feel this way?

Thank you!

Jamie

There was this amazing scifi short story I read that made me super uneasy, almost disturbed actually, even though the content wasn't really all that horrendous or gruesome. The writing was just that good! Unfortunately, I cannot remember the title or the author.

I don't know if this fits, but there was also this book I read by Mary Higgins Clark that made me uneasy as a child when I read it because I was nervous about what was going to happen and wasn't sure where she was taking the story. It was a good uneasy, a mystery kind if uneasy. I have to see if I can find the title. Lol.

this was the book. My fourteen year old self thought this was a might good/uneasy story.

Easy!
For sc-fi : the first short story in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu. I still catch myself thinking about this story, several years later…

For contemporary, I have two good books : the one I'm reading right now, Blindness by José Saramago. And I've just realised the second one has not been translated into English, but if you read French : Le Club des miracles relatifs by Nancy Huston.

If you like historical fiction, anything about World War One, describing the life of the soldiers.

I would suggest The Lovely Bones or Room. Also, there's a very small part in The Institute which made me feel uneasy - in fact, I can still picture the scene now.

I love this feeling too!

Off the top of my head:

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

I'll think on this more

Try


Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood

The story "The Willows" will definitely make you feel uneasy, and so will most of the other stories.

Hi,
I would recommend In the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami.

Thanks

Hi, I would recommend the by Jacqueline Davies