I want to hear about your unknown favorites!

My favourite "hidden gem" is a sci-fi novel, Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson.

Despite being the 2005 winner of the Hugo for best novel, I've never heard anyone else sing its praises or talk about it even in sci fi recommendation threads.

Premise: when the protagonist was 12, him, his sister and his best friend were playing together when they witnessed every star in the night sky disappear. They just blinked out of existence, all over the world, all in one night. Satellites fell out of orbit. The sun is gone, replaced by a fake one that allows life on earth to continue "as normal", but obviously normal was never the same again. Whodunit and how and why and how does humanity respond?

(Let me know in comments if this novel is actually very well liked and famous I would love to hear from you)

Because of You by B. G. Hennessey is a children's book that they would read at my daughter's preschool when the kindergartener's graduated every year. Brings me to tears every time.

When you help, care, share, and listen, you are being kind.
When two people help, share, care, and listen to each other, they are called friends.
When people from different countries help, care, share, and listen to one another, it is called peace.

The crônica is a uniquely Brazilian genre. It emerged in 19th-century newspapers as a narrative that mixes fiction and fact. They may be described as very short short stories that reflect either the current news or a cultural zeitgeist. Unlike most that you read in a newspaper, it is distinctly literary, emotional, poetic, and reflexive.

Crônicas can be humorous, amusing vignettes or slice-of-life. Some resemble an oversized joke, others are odd, whimsical, and experimental. They may tell us something about relationships, the homeless problem, or middle-class family dramas. They aren't always overtly factual but usually seek to reveal something about our lives, culture, and society. Crônicas are taught in Brazilian schools both as reading material and as writing practice.

Some well-known Brazilian cronistas are Rubem Braga, Carlos Heitor Cony, Stanislaw Ponte Preta (Sérgio Porto's pseudonym), Rachel de Queiroz, and Luís Fernando Veríssimo.

Because of their unique format and role in Brazilian life, crônicas are not often translated into English, which makes them inherently unknown for the purposes of this post.

My favorite cronista is Luís Fernando Veríssimo. Despite being a well-known leftist, most of Veríssimo's work in crônica is weakly factual and centered around the small dramas and incoherencies of the Brazilian white middle-class. Most of his crônicas are fairly short, barely one, two, maybe three book pages. Some could be considered short stories in length. They have a uniquely Brazilian "feel" that a foreign reader is unlikely to capture. Think of him as a Brazilian Woody Allen with a cultural background largely informed by his time in Rio, Porto Alegre, and the United States. Even in the most prosaic passages, Veríssimo's writing has the refinement, timing, and precision of a surgeon. More than anything, he is a master of dialogue.

Coming from the Brazilian south, LFV is notoriously introverted and hates interviews. This puts him in an interesting position to narrate the follies of our chronically festive society.

My favorite of his books is Comédias da Vida Privada ("Comedies of the Private Life"), his main collection of crônicas published in 1994.

EDIT: I managed to find one of his crônicas translated into English here. It's a good one! For reference, Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985.

Armor, by John Steakley. It's a sci-fi action book akin to Starship Troopers in a lot of ways, but follows one soldier. He is a scout - with little armor and weaponry - who is marked as deceased but is pulled off of the planet where it happened. His name is never purged from the roll and he gets dropped over and over into an endless war where he should have died, yet he continues.

There's a parallel story that runs alongside that narrative where how and why he goes and survives is gradually uncovered. I love the exploration of that aspect and the story of those characters alongside the well-worn, alien war trope. No more because spoilers, but if any of that description holds you go grab a copy and give it a read... it's the book I've re-read the most in my life.

Once extremely popular but now largely forgotten, Up the Down Staircase is a great book about a school teacher, students and beauracracy.

Hospital Station and the rest of the Sector General series by James White focus on medical care in a multi species federation in space.

Callahans Cross time Saloon was cozy before cozy became popular.

I will try my best here, although I'm not that much of a reader and even less reader of unknown books.

I specifically searched for one book - this is how much I wanted to reqd this one. It is Last day of creation by Wolfgang Jeschke. This book was inspiration for very unusual realtime strategy game Original War and that's the reason why I wanted to read the book. It is about time travel into distant past to acquire strategic resources for the future. I think it is well written and reads like a wind - it is kinda short book and you can get through it in a few hours.

My second tip is Porn Star-Everything You Want To Know And Are Embarrassed To Ask by Steven St.Croix (male pornstar). The book is written in a question-answer manner and IMHO is agreat look into porn bussiness of days long gone (say pre-internet era). I have read more books written by pornstars, Ron Jeremy wrote quite hilarious biography! Lisa Ann's first book is also good, Linda Lovelace's Ordeal is very interesting read.

My favorite book that is not well known is Another Day, Another Dungeon by Greg Costikyan. It's a humorous fantasy novel that plays on the tropes of typical fantasy fare. Thinking about this book reminded me also of the Myth Adventures series of books by Robert Aspirin. I'm uncertain how well known those are, given that they're ~40 years old and there's like 20 of them. They're overshadowed by Discworld, but they're fun reads nonetheless.

Love threads like these!

Hope: A Tragedy is about a Jewish guy in modern America who finds Anne Frank living in his attic. Written by Shalom Auslander, which might be the best (pen?) name I've ever heard.

No One Is Here Except All Of Us is a gorgeously written book about a small European town, the inhabitants of which collectively decide to remake reality while WW2 rages just across the river.

Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein 4 books, incomplete as the author has a day job

Notoriously hard to say anything about this without spoiling major things, but in essence the main character is a librarian who travels the world looking for new information and sharing what she knows - if asked a question a Steerswoman must answer truthfully.

Then stuff starts to happen and you’ll learn new things about the world with the main character, which is the main reason this book is so good.

Neither of these are fun reads and they may be better known than I'm giving them credit but Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada is an incredible novel about Nazi Germany. Hans was a German writer who cooperated subversively with the Nazis and ended up in prison for it. After the war he wrote this story in 24 days, biographically, about a couple he heard about in prison and drawing on his experiences during the war. Very well written and powerful story.

The other is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. She is such an incredible writer, the way she draws you along with the characters and reveals the story through their eyes is gripping. Another depressing story about racism.

My favorite ones are oddly Soviet books. The first one is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which @mrzool in this thread does a better job of explaining the premise of the book.

The second is the Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chinghiz Aitmatov. The story is about a railroad worker that is trying to get a dead friend to the traditional burial grounds for his people. And there is secondary plot that is also sci-fi in nature. The plot line deals with a joint American-Soviet mission, whose the rocket launch was witnessed by the main character, but wasn't planned.

Soul by Andrei Platonov. This one is more an obscure book considering you have to put in soul book Soviet to get it. This is a collection of novellas that Platonov had wrote in the 30s, but the novella that has the name Soul was heavily censored, and only in the 1990s did they find an uncensored version of it (which my copy of it has pointed out where the censored version ended) and allegedly Stalin had wrote in the margins of the novella that it was shit.

It's been well over a decade since I read it but I really enjoyed "Death and the Penguin" by Andrey Kurkov. It's a really great dark humoured book about an aspiring writer called Viktor living in Kyiv who has a pet penguin called Misha he adopted from a local zoo that closed. Viktor gets a job writing advance obituaries for a local paper and starts to investigate after the people he writes these obituaries for start to die.

Another one that's not unheard of in a certain way is "Moonraker" by Ian Fleming, I reckon most may have heard of or seen the film but not the book. I love the James Bond novels, I've spoken of them a few times on Tildes. They're really fun espionage thrillers and they contain all the classic Bond tropes, beautiful women, gorgeous locales, disfigured megalomaniacal villains with plans to destroy the world/ruin Britain's reputation/fund terrorism and Moonraker no different. It has nothing in common with the pretty terrible Roger Moore film because it was written in the early 50's so no space stations, Jaws, or laser fights in space. Instead Bond is assigned to investigate Drax Industries, headed by eccentric multimillionaire industrialist Hugo Drax, who are currently developing the Moonraker, a missile system that delivers nuclear payloads for Britain. Moonraker is my favourite Bond novel, it's short, punchy, full of action, it's got a fantastic villain in Drax, a cool plot, and it's just a damn good Cold War novel.

Fleming's Bond is a bit of anti-hero with Fleming even saying himself he was never written to be a heroic character. Just be aware that if you do want to read this or any other Fleming Bond novels, while Moonraker isn't as bad since it's entirely set in London or on the Devon coastline, when Bond travels abroad he can be pretty bigoted towards anyone who isn't white and British. These books were written in the early 50's by a rich white man from a rich white family who was born in 1908. However, I do believe the most recent versions of Fleming's novels did go through a sensitivity committee to remove and replace outdated or offensive language but I can't speak for those as I haven't read them.