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Books · Clues from Past Puzzles
Skim the opening clue - the hard, oblique one worth the most - from every Books puzzle that has already run. Spot one you like and jump in to play the whole thing. The answers are not shown here; that is what the puzzle is for. Come back to play the latest.
- Book #1 Its author was in her late thirties, had never published anything, and wrote it after reading an article about how loneliness in young people goes largely unnoticed because nobody expects it. It won a first-novel award before it was finished. A comic novel that turns out not to be one.
- Book #2 Its author was mentored while writing it by Margaret Atwood, who has said she mostly asked awkward questions. It is framed as a historical novel written thousands of years later by a male author, submitted for comment to a female colleague who suggests he publish under a woman's name. A speculative novel about what happens when the physical balance flips overnight.
- Book #3 Its author noticed that the two names were interchangeable spellings of each other in the parish records, and that almost nothing has ever been written about the boy who died. The most famous man in the book is never once given his name - he is the father, the son, the Latin tutor. A historical novel, and one chapter follows a flea from Alexandria to Warwickshire.
- Book #1 Its author has said she resisted the subject for years and only committed after reading about a Belgian woman who guided downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees on foot while still a teenager, and who was never widely known. A historical novel about the women left behind, and its title is a code name.
- Book #2 Its author first attempted this book in 1972 and abandoned it because the research was beyond him and the wound was too recent. He came back to it nearly forty years later. The past in it is actively hostile to being changed - it arranges accidents, illnesses and coincidences to protect itself. A time-travel novel with an unusually detailed 1958.
- Book #3 Its author waited ten years after his previous book to publish this one, and it caused a public disagreement with Ursula K. Le Guin about whether he was borrowing from a genre while declining to be associated with it. A post-Arthurian fable about a mist that erases memory, which is either a curse or a peace treaty depending on who you ask.
- Book #1 Its last section reframes everything before it as a manuscript written by one of the characters, who admits she has given two people an ending they did not get. Its author was later accused of borrowing detail from a wartime nurse's memoir, which he had credited in an afterword. A literary novel in three parts and a coda.
- Book #2 It was written first as a screenplay, which its author abandoned and rebuilt as prose, which is partly why it moves in flat scenes with almost no interiority. There are no quotation marks and barely any commas. Its title comes from the opening line of a Yeats poem about sailing away from a place that has no use for the elderly. A crime novel set on the Texas border in 1980.
- Book #3 Its author has said she began it while birdwatching in Australia, thinking about extinction, and that she followed one rule throughout: nothing in it could be technology that did not already exist somewhere in a laboratory. She insists it is speculative fiction rather than the other thing. A dystopian novel narrated by what may be the last human being.