Trashy novels for smart people

Discover the best trashy novels for smart people! Explore our curated list of witty, indulgent reads that blend clever storytelling with guilty pleasure. Perfect for book lovers who enjoy smart yet delightfully trashy fiction.

The Flanders Panel Cover
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The Flanders Panel

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

A fifteenth-century painting by a Flemish master is about to be auctioned off. Hired to clean the painting, a young art expert in Madrid discovers in an X-ray an inscription hidden in the corner, setting off a sophisticated whodunit around the European art world.
Last Call Cover
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Last Call

by Tim Powers

Enchantingly dark and compellingly real, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Last Call is a masterpiece of magic realism from critically acclaimed author Tim Powers. Set in the gritty, dazzling underworld known as Las Vegas, Last Call tells the story of a one-eyed professional gambler who discovers that he was not the big winner in a long-ago poker game . . . and now must play for the highest stakes ever as he searches for a way to win back his soul.
Towing Jehovah Cover
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Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

A satirical novel on the death of God. For inexplicable reasons he dies and falls into the sea, and the Vatican hires a supertanker to secretly tow his two-mile-long body to the Arctic for preservation. But the secret leaks out and everyone gets in on the act, exploiting God's death to their own end.
Flashman Cover
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Flashman

by George MacDonald Fraser

"If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."–P.G. Wodehouse The first novel in the Flashman series Fraser revives Flashman, a caddish bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, and relates Flashman’s adventures after he is expelled in drunken disgrace from Rugby school in the late 1830s. Flashy enlists in the Eleventh Light Dragoons and is promptly sent to India and Afghanistan, where despite his consistently cowardly behavior he always manages to come out on top. Flashman is an incorrigible anti-hero for the ages. This humorous adventure book will appeal to fans of historical fiction, military fiction, and British history as well as to fans of Clive Cussler, James Bond, and The Three Musketeers.
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Back Bay

by William Martin

Meet the Pratt clas. Driven men. Determined women. Through six turbulent generations, they would pursue a lost Paul Revere treasure. And turn a family secret into an obsession that could destroy them. Here is the novel that launched William Martin's astonishing literary career and became an instant bestseller. From the grit and romance of old Boston to exclusive -- and dangerous -- Back Bay today, this sweeping saga paints an unforgettable portrait of a powerful dynasty beset by the forces of history...and a heritage of greed, lust, murder and betrayal.
Doomsday Book Cover
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Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. “A tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.
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ID: 0385332815
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Good Omens Cover
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Good Omens

by Neil Gaiman

Fantasy.
A Night in the Lonesome October Cover
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A Night in the Lonesome October

by Roger Zelazny

Snuff, a guard dog who performs thaumaturgical calculations, accompanies his master, Jack, on collecting expeditions into the Whitechapel slums of nineteenth-century London
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ID: 0735104387
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Zaddik Cover
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Zaddik

by David Rosenbaum

Ex-NYPD cop Dov Taylor is called upon to recover the Seer's Stone, a magnificent 72-carat diamond stolen from one of New York's most closed communities, the Hasidim. The gem has fallen into the hands of a former Nazi and notorious war criminal known as the Magician, whom Dov must pursue through New York's many strange worlds.
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Homunculus

 

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ID: 0385180179
(Type: books)
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ID: 044122332X
(Type: books)