10 Best Philosophical Mystery Books Featuring Battle of Thoughts
Welcome, loyal readers and curious newcomers, to a list that's going to get your grey cells doing overtime and rethink about everything you know! We're here to dive into the enigmatic realm of philosophical mystery novels where minds clash in battles of wit and intellect. Don't worry; this is no stale textbook fare. The paradox of philosophy wrapped in the enticing envelope of mystery lit makes these books a must-read, no debate about that!
In this list, we've compiled ten of the absolute best where philosophy and mystery intertwine like lovers, creating a challenging yet satisfying puzzle. Expect to encounter astute detectives, brilliant scholars, veiled secrets and of course, the constant question of existence. We're talking about novels which can be deemed a battleground for the mind, leaving you drenched in thoughts, contemplation, questioning the deepest recesses of human morality and wisdom.
So, welcome aboard this cerebral journey, filled with enigmas and hypotheticals. It's a wild ride that will keep you at the edge of your seat while remaining curled up in your favourite reading nook. Whether you're an avid fan of philosophical mysteries or a first-timer, this list is bound to offer a thrilling page-turner that'll leave you profoundly moved, and perhaps a tad smarter. Buckle up, armchair philosophers, we're about to embark on a literary adventure!
『Notes from Underground』
Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.
Author | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
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Price | $4.99 |
Publisher | Vintage |
Release Date | Jan 12, 2011 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Trial』
The story of the mysterious indictment, trial, and reckoning forced upon Joseph K—one of the twentieth century’s master parables from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir The Trial reflects the central spiritual crises of modern life. Kafka’s method—one that has influenced, in some way, almost every writer of substance who followed him—was to render the absurd and the terrifying convincing by a scrupulous, hyperreal matter-of-factness of tone and treatment. He thereby imparted to his work a level of seriousness normally associated with civilization’s most cherished poems and religious texts. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Author | Franz Kafka |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Everyman's Library |
Release Date | Jun 30, 1992 |
Source | Google Books |
『Sophie's World』
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Author | Jostein Gaarder |
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Price | $11.99 |
Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Release Date | Mar 20, 2007 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Wind That Lays Waste』
A taut, lyrical portrait of four people thrown together on a single day in rural Argentina The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is evangelizing across the Argentinian countryside with Leni, his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God or fate leads them to the workshop and home of an aging mechanic called Gringo Brauer and a young boy named Tapioca. As a long day passes, curiosity and intrigue transform into an unexpected intimacy between four people: one man who believes deeply in God, morality, and his own righteousness, and another whose life experiences have only entrenched his moral relativism and mild apathy; a quietly earnest and idealistic mechanic’s assistant, and a restless, skeptical preacher’s daughter. As tensions between these characters ebb and flow, beliefs are questioned and allegiances are tested, until finally the growing storm breaks over the plains. Selva Almada’s exquisitely crafted debut, with its limpid and confident prose, is profound and poetic, a tactile experience of the mountain, the sun, the squat trees, the broken cars, the sweat-stained shirts, and the destroyed lives. The Wind That Lays Waste is a philosophical, beautiful, and powerfully distinctive novel that marks the arrival in English of an author whose talent and poise are undeniable.
Author | Selva Almada |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Graywolf Press |
Release Date | Jul 09, 2019 |
Source | Google Books |
『Fahrenheit 451』
Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
Author | Ray Bradbury |
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Price | $12.99 |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Release Date | Nov 29, 2011 |
Source | Google Books |
『Transcendent Kingdom』
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! • Finalist for the WOMEN'S PRIZE Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.
Author | Yaa Gyasi |
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Price | $11.99 |
Publisher | Vintage |
Release Date | Sep 01, 2020 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Last Samurai』
Called “remarkable” (The Wall Street Journal) and “an ambitious, colossal debut novel” (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is back in print at last Helen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classic” (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, ‘destined to become a classic?’” (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.
Author | Helen DeWitt |
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Price | $9.48 |
Publisher | New Directions Publishing |
Release Date | May 31, 2016 |
Source | Google Books |
『What Are You Going Through』
THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY NPR, PEOPLE, AND O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS’ TOP BOOK OF 2020 THE INSPIRATION FOR THE FEATURE FILM BY PEDRO ALMODOVAR THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, STARRING JULIANNE MOORE AND TILDA SWINTON “As good as The Friend, if not better.” —The New York Times “Impossible to put down . . . leavened with wit and tenderness.” —People “I was dazed by the novel’s grace.” —The New Yorker The New York Times–bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own. In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.
Author | Sigrid Nunez |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Penguin |
Release Date | Sep 07, 2021 |
Source | Google Books |
『My Heart Hemmed in』
Nadia, the Narrator, is a school teacher in Bordeaux in the same school as her husband, Ange. They live their profession as apostolates and gain an authentic happiness. But for some time, the couple is the subject of a general, harassing and inexplicable vengeance by the students. Nobody wants to sit in the front row anymore; no one wants to hear the sounds of their voices; the children seem to be afraid of them... Nadia tries to understand the nature of this strange conspiracy through the movement of the story.
Author | Marie NDiaye |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | |
Release Date | Jan 01, 2017 |
Source | Google Books |
『trans(re)lating house one』
In the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election, a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces. A chance meeting alters her trajectory, and the space between fiction and reality narrows. As she circles the city’s points of connection—teahouses, buses, galleries, hookah bars—her many questions are distilled into one: How do we translate loss into language? Melding several worlds, perspectives, and narrative styles, trans(re)lating house one translates the various realities of Tehran and its inhabitants into the realm of art, helping us remember them anew.
Author | Poupeh Missaghi |
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Price | $9.99 |
Publisher | Coffee House Press |
Release Date | Feb 04, 2020 |
Source | Google Books |
And there you have it folks! Ten of my top picks for philosophical mystery novels that truly exemplify the riveting battle of wits. Each of these extraordinary novels are crafted by exceptionally talented authors, who have beautifully woven engrossing narratives filled with thought-provoking conflicts and wonderfully convoluted philosophical musings. They wouldn’t just whisk you away into a world of mysterious circumstances, potential victims, and unconventional heroes; they’d chip in a hefty serving of introspective thoughts and crunchy moral dilemmas.
While these books range from slightly ominous to downright eerie, they promise to keep your mind thoroughly engaged, inviting and forcing you, all at once, to follow the charade of clues and wisdom. So grab a cup of your favourite brew, a comfy blanket, and let these enigmatic tales transport you into a labyrinth of contemplation and intrigue. Remember, it's not always about obtaining the answers, but relishing the questions along the way. After all, what's a mystery without the allure of the unknown! Don't be surprised if you find your coffee growing cold, forgotten in the drama of deciphering what your favourite character might think or do next! Happy Reading!
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