The Tiger Catcher by Paullina Simons – LOS ANGELES
LA Confidential by James Ellroy – LOS ANGELES
The Sellout by Paul Beatty – LOS ANGELES
Novel set in the first half of the 20th Century HUNGARY
Ten Great Books set in SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
7th August 2026
Ten great books set in Southern California
Southern California is a vibrant, sun-drenched region defined by its iconic blend of breathtaking natural landscapes and dynamic urban culture. Stretching from the rugged Pacific coastline to majestic mountain ranges and the sprawling Mojave Desert, it offers an enviable outdoor lifestyle year-round.
At its heart lies Los Angeles, the global capital of entertainment, alongside diverse coastal hubs like San Diego. Renowned for its laid-back surf culture, world-class cuisine, thriving tech industries, and world-famous theme parks, Southern California pulses with creative energy, making it one of the most culturally influential and visited destinations in the world.
The Tiger Catcher by Paullina Simons – LOS ANGELES
Can true love ever die?
Julian lives a charmed life in Los Angeles. Surrounded by friends, he is young, handsome, and runs a successful business. Everything changes after he has a fateful encounter with a mysterious young woman named Josephine. Julian’s world is turned upside down by a love affair that takes him – and everyone else in his life – by storm. For the two new lovers, the City of Angels is transformed into a magical playground.
But Josephine is not what she seems and carries secrets that threaten to tear them apart ― seemingly forever.
A broken man, his faith in tatters, Julian meets a mysterious stranger who tells him how to find Josephine again if he is willing to give up everything and take a death-defying trip from which no one has ever returned. So begins Julian and Josephine’s extraordinary adventure of love, loss, and the mystical forces that bind people across time and space. It is a journey that propels Julian toward an impossible choice which will lead him to love fulfilled…or to oblivion.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Lê Thi Diem Thúy – SAN DIEGO
In 1978, six Vietnamese refugees were pulled from the sea just off California. In San Diego, a little girl’s matter-of-fact innocence masks the ghostly traumas that still haunt her: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland: the memory of a brother who drowned: the heartbreaking spectacle of her parents trying to make a new home, their struggle backlit by the memory of a forbidden love when they were young. thuy le has revealed a world of great beauty and enormous sorrows. The Gangster We Are All Looking For is an authentically original novel about remembering and forgetting, about home and family, and about trying to find a place – and voice – in a new world.
Fever City by Tim Baker – LOS ANGELES
Nick Alston, a Los Angeles private investigator, is hired to find the kidnapped son of America’s richest and most hated man.
Hastings, a mob hitman in search of redemption, is also on the trail. But both men soon become ensnared by a sinister cabal that spreads from the White House all the way to Dealey Plaza.
Decades later in Dallas, Alston’s son stumbles across evidence from JFK conspiracy buffs that just might link his father to the shot heard round the world.
Violent, vivid, visceral: Fever City is a high–octane, nightmare journey through a Mad Men-era America of dark powers, corruption and conspiracy..
The Book of Dead Birds by Gayle Brandeis – SAN DIEGO, THE SALTON SEA
Hye-yang is a dutiful daughter in a Korean village where the women are ocean divers. But prostitution awaits her until an American takes her over to live in the States. Here she becomes Helen, and has a daughter – with her dark skin, Ava Sing Lo looks black, is half-Korean, and never feels comfortable with either identity. Somehow Ava inadvertantly kills birds, documented by her Mother and decides to compensate somehow by joining an action group at The Salton Sea, rescuing pelicans, and here she can begin to discover who she really is.
LA Confidential by James Ellroy – LOS ANGELES
An involved story, with a beautiful, unique style. Graphic and dark. A police brutality case provides Ed Exley with an opportunity to make a name for himself but by testifying against other police officers he makes enemies as well as some powerful friends….
Adapted into a hugely successful Oscar-winning film in 1997, starring Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger.
Blood and Sand by Elizabeth Hunter – SAN DIEGO
Dead women are showing up in the desert east of San Diego, and no one understands why. When the story comes to the attention of reporter Natalie Ellis, she can’t help but make comparisons to the tragic deaths she’d investigated years ago. Are these women the victims of a serial killer, or something even more insidious?
Bodies may be piling up in his sire’s territory, but water vampire and feared enforcer, Baojia, is stuck entertaining the rich and clueless at a club in San Diego. He’s taken his exile with all the grace he could muster, but his patience is starting to thin.
Sparks fly when mortal and immortal are thrown together, and Natalie comes face to face with a reality that was lurking in the corners of her life. Pursuing the truth could cost Baojia everything, including the mortal woman who has earned his grudging respect.
The Sellout by Paul Beatty – LOS ANGELES
Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2016.
A biting satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
Born in Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father’s racially charged psychological studies. He is told that his father’s work will lead to a memoir that will solve their financial woes. But when his father is killed in a drive-by shooting, he discovers there never was a memoir. All that’s left is a bill for a drive-through funeral.
What’s more, Dickens has literally been wiped off the map to save California from further embarrassment. Fuelled by despair, the narrator sets out to right this wrong with the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
In his trademark absurdist style, which has the uncanny ability to make readers want to both laugh and cry, The Sellout is an outrageous and outrageously entertaining indictment of our time.
The California Club by Belinda Jones – HOLLYWOOD, SAN DIEGO, YOSEMITE
When Lara Richards jets off to glamorous California, the last thing she’s expecting is to find her old friend Helen transformed from a clipboard-clasping frump into a shimmering surf goddess. The secret of her blissful new life? The mysterious California Club.
So the offer of guest membership – one wish, guaranteed to come true by the end of their stay is one Lara and her friends can’t resist. Could this be Lara’s chance to win her best friend Elliot’s heart after ten years of longing? Or does the fact that he’s travelling with his brand new fiancée mean that Lara will have to come up with a new dream…?
An Inconvenient Woman by Stéphanie Buelens – LOS ANGELES
When Claire Fontaine learns that her ex-husband Simon is marrying again, to a woman with a teenage daughter, her blood runs cold. She is sure that years ago Simon molested her own daughter and was responsible for her mysterious death. She can’t let him get away with it a second time. Vandalism, harassment; whatever it takes, Claire will expose him.
Simon doesn’t know where Claire got this delusion from; her daughter’s death was ruled a suicide, but she has always blamed herself – is she just lashing out? Wanting to protect his new fiancee, he hires Sloane Wilson, an ex-cop turned ‘sin-eater’, whose job it is to handle delicate cases without getting the police involved, to get Claire off his back.
Sloane must navigate the wreckage of Claire and Simon’s marriage to discover the truth. Two people with conflicting stories and a whole lot of reasons to want to hurt each other. Is she crazy or is he manipulative? And can Sloane stay clear-headed enough to figure it out?
Beneath the Same Heaven by Anne Marie Ruff – LOS ANGELES
Kathryn, an American woman, and Rashid, a Pakistani-born Muslim man, seem to have bridged the divide between Western and Islamic world views with their marriage and two American-born children. But everything changes when Rashid’s father is suddenly killed by a US drone attack near the Afghan border, and their cross-cultural family descends into conflicting ideas of loyalty, justice, identity, revenge, and terrorism.
“A thought-provoking love story. This novel masterfully blends the dangers of geopolitics superimposed on romantic and unconditional familial love… Ruff bravely circumnavigates the violence at the heart of the story to lay bare the intricate drama of before and after. Revenge versus justice. Clanship versus kinship. Passionate love versus filial obligation. All are explored with intimate humanity in this compelling, tender, and timely novel.”—Kim Fay, author of The Map of Lost Memories, Edgar Award Finalist for Best First Novel.
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