Photo: Martha Pavlidou

4 of 5
Brilliance
452 pages; Thomas & Mercer
Sakey is one of the best—his writing is perfectly paced. Talk about suspenseful! He wrote a novel a couple of years ago, The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, that I keep putting in people's hands. This one is set in the near future, when a certain percentage of humans are "brilliants" who can do strange things like read body language with total accuracy or sense patterns in the stock market. You pick up one of Sakey's books and it's like, I will now disengage from my world and go into his.
— Gillian Flynn