Thrillers have often held a close and vital relationship with family drama. Take the recent Rian Johnson film Knives Out, for instance, where we have an Agatha Christie-esque whodunnit set in an old family home. It’s a film which relies entirely on the cracked and broken family dynamic to carry its … [Read more...]

This thriller begins with a rather lurid hook - a mass poisoning at a birthday banquet in which 300 people die. The only survivor is our narrator, Gwendolyn: left trapped in an unresponsive body, she has little to do but ponder what drove her sister Estella to commit mass murder and suicide. The … [Read more...]

It's pretty clear why Tiffany Tsao's The Majesties has been compared to the smash hit Crazy Rich Asians. After all, both are about obscenely wealthy Chinese families. But once I started reading, it became clear that this is a very different story — if Crazy Rich Asians was all about the luster and … [Read more...]

A sentient rock tricked into a familial murder, a toilet wall reimaged as a stage for revolution, and a lowly maid’s spicy Indonesian dish reworked for terror are just some of the mischievous and engrossing tales recounted in Eka Kurniawan’s Kitchen Curse. Translated from the original Indonesian by … [Read more...]

The Indonesian writer’s short story collection tells tales of hope and disappointment from Reformasi, the period following the ouster of the country's dictator Suharto. Indonesia holds a prominent place in the cultural imagination of the West. The nearly 20,000-island archipelago is a prime … [Read more...]