Nonfiction November Week 4: Stranger than Fiction

This week we’re focusing on all the great nonfiction books that *almost* don’t seem real. A sports biography involving overcoming massive obstacles, a profile on a bizarre scam, a look into the natural wonders in our world—basically, if it makes your jaw drop, you can highlight it for this week’s topic and link up at Plucked from the Stacks.

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Larrimah by Caroline Graham & Kylie Stevenson 

True crime is often stranger than fiction, and the circumstances surrounding the 2017 disappearance of seventy year old Paddy Moriarty from Larrimah, a tiny Northern Territory outback town, is decidedly odd. In a community barely 1kmsq in size, whose main attractions are a no-eyed crocodile and a Pink Panther in a gyrocopter whose head falls off intermittently, with a population of just 12 people where, at any one time, half of the residents are at war with the other, whether it’s over the provision of pies to the passing trade, the leadership of local ‘progress’ committees, the revenge-driven massacre of a buffalo, or the theft of Mars Bars, how could Paddy and his dog have vanished unseen, without a trace?

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One Last Dance by Emma Jane Holmes 

A character in fiction employed as both an exotic dancer and a funeral director would likely be dismissed as unrealistic, but for a time that’s just what Emma Jane Holmes did. Her memoir One Last Dance explains how she came to be a stripper under the the alias Madison, working nights at a Sydney club, while collecting the deceased and directing funerals during the day.

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Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Journalist Jon Ronson intentionally seeks out people who have stories that are stranger than fiction. In Lost At Sea, a collection of his newspaper and magazine columns, Ronson investigates a man preparing to welcome the aliens to earth, a woman trying to build a fully-conscious robotic replica of the love of her life, and a group of teenagers planning a school massacre in a town where it is Christmas every day of the year, among others.

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