Author Sara Desai shares top tips for plotting a great heist novel, including the research needed to learn how to be a thief herself.
The Hatton Garden raid was meticulous in its planning, dazzling in its complexity – yet still the perpetrators were caught. In this interconnected age, has the Hollywood-style heist become a thing of the past?
The double Pulitzer winner turns to crime with a tale of 1960s New York gangsters, rendered with superbly observed, affectionate, page-turning brio
Author Sara Desai shares top tips for plotting a great heist novel, including the research needed to learn how to be a thief herself.
The heist is a well-trodden path in the world of film, but less so in novels. There’s no reason why this should be, as it offers the perfect framework for engaging characters, tension, action…
If you’re ready to see fantastical characters tackle incredible missions, check out these books.
If you loved the fantasy heist plot in SIX OF CROWS or want THE ITALIAN JOB in space, check out these action-packed SFF heist novels.
Get swept away with 8 YA heist novels you won't be able to put down!
In 1990, two thieves made off with a $500 million cache of art by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and more. Three decades later, the works remain missing
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is a fantasy heist novel about a crew of thieves. Here are more exciting books like Six of Crows to read!
If you loved the fantasy heist plot in SIX OF CROWS or want THE ITALIAN JOB in space, check out these action-packed SFF heist novels.
You think you've got career problems? Russian artist Zinaida Serebriakova launched her career just as the world was starting to unravel. Self-portrait as a young art student Zinaida turned 21 during the Russian Revolution of 1905 when widespread violence, poverty and political upheaval did little to help the art market. Even bigger revolutions were just around the corner. In 1905, a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein published the theories that would overturn centuries of scientific beliefs and transform our understanding of space and time. That same year, Sigmund Freud published his revolutionary book describing how our "logical" behavior was really governed by subliminal compulsions and irrational urges. As if to confirm that the Age of Reason was truly dead, hostile nations were already spiraling toward World War I. It was in this unpromising environment that Zinaida set out in search of beauty. Zinaida brushing her hair in the mirror During her lifetime search, Zinaida painted a remarkable series of self-portraits. Newly married at age 22 Age 27, by candle light Modeling a scarf Age 30: a mother In art as in politics, the old rules were coming apart like wet tissue paper. Zinaida had been trained traditionally by the great Russian illustrator Repin but now artists such as Picasso and Matisse were pursuing what Hilton Kramer called "a netherworld of strange gods and violent emotions." Soon the futurist painters would add their own fiery polemic: What is the use of looking behind?... Time and Space died yesterday.... We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman....We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism.... Despite all this, Zinaida steadfastly continued to pursue her own notion of beauty, lovingly painting the human body in a representational style. During times of disintegration, revolutionaries, priests and utopian ideologues compete to fill the vacuum (usually causing widespread misery for the innocents caught in the crossfire). Zinaida fell in love with a young engineering student but the church barred their marriage due to questions about the young man's faith. The couple got around the church's objections, married and had children shortly before politics intervened in the form of the February Revolution of 1917. Violence returned again that same year with the October Revolution, when Zinaida's lifelong home on the grounds of the Neskuchnoye estate was burned and its food supply plundered. The new Bolshevik government rejected democracy in favor of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and threw many people in jail, including Zinaida's husband. There he contracted typhus. He was released shortly before he died in 1919. In the words of Leon Trotsky, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Zinaida was left with no money, four hungry children and a sick mother. She managed to feed her family by drawing pencil illustrations for the Kharkov Anthropological Museum. Then in 1924 she learned of an art job in Paris. Zinaida left Russia temporarily only to find when her project was completed that hostile relations between the countries prevented her from returning to her family. With the help of the red cross, the distraught mother was able to smuggle her two smallest children out of the country. However, she remained separated from her two older children for over 30 years. Zinaida felt relatively safe working in France until the Nazis invaded. Then her Russian citizenship was sure to get her arrested, so she became a French citizen. All the while, she continued to draw and paint. Age 54 Age 62 Age 71 Looking over this lifetime of self-portraits, I am struck by the persistence of Zinaida's smile, and the tenderness that seems to have outlasted the forces that buffeted her. She resisted assignments painting Soviet generals and commissars and refused to become caught up in ideological painting of her day. Instead, she turned again and again to the purity and tenderness of the naked human form. Her daughter recalled: The female nude was mother's favourite subject. While she was in Russia young peasant women would pose for her. In Paris her friends would come over to her studio, drink a cup of tea, then they would stay and pose for her. They were not the professional models that you might find in Montparnasse and maybe this is the reason why they are so natural and graceful. Today on the cusp of 2012, we can already see the next crop of despots eager to impose their solutions. They've had a century to refine Lenin's special math that justifies sacrificing individual human beings to achieve some glorious future for humankind. By now, they have become positively glib at it. But Zinaida's joyous pictures suggest that she viewed the math differently, from the side of the equation where the individual is everything. Pink cheeks here and now outweighed any blueprint for a distant utopia. Her math seems to have helped her remain indomitable during the years when artists with a more intellectual approach reacted with cynicism and despair. If you ever meet a person with such an attitude, marry them quick. It will be the best thing you can do for the quality of your day-to-day life. I wish all of you a happy, healthy 2012.
These thrilling fantasy heist novels will keep you turning the pages faster, faster, faster.
Check out my Portrait of a Thief review here! If you're looking for a book that's Oceans 11 meets The Farewell, this is for you!
Check out my Portrait of a Thief review here! If you're looking for a book that's Oceans 11 meets The Farewell, this is for you!
I’m so excited to be part of the TBR & Beyond tour for this heist novel with a twist. Find the full tour schedule here. About the book The Drowned Woods Genre: YA Fantasy Publishing Date: August 16, 2022 Synopsis:…
Olympia: Three art thieves risk the biggest heist of their careers in the charming, exciting graphic novel "Olympia". Alex and Sam, absent their companion Carole, are planning to steal a valuable helmet from an army museum. They think Carole is dead, but...
The first novel set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077 follows a group of strangers as they discover that the dangers of Night City are all too real. In neon-drenched Night City, a ragtag group of strangers have just pulled off a daring heist on a Militech convoy transporting a mysterious container. What do each of them have in common? Good, old-fashioned blackmail. Forced to do the job, they have no idea how far their employer's reach goes, nor what mysterious object the container holds. The newly-formed gang - consisting of a veteran turned renegade, a Militech sleeper agent, an amateur netrunner, a corporate negotiator, a ripperdoc and a techie - must overcome their differences and work together lest their secrets come to light before they can pull off the next deadly heist. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780759555952 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Orbit Publication Date: 08-08-2023 Pages: 416 Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 7.50(h) x 1.20(d)About the Author Rafał Kosik is one of the most influential Polish science fiction writers of the 21st century. He's a laureate of the highest sci-fi literary honors in Poland. His meticulously thought-out visions of the future draw the attention of mature readers, while his YA sci-fi adventure series "Felix, Net i Nika" is a beloved bestseller with the younger audience. In his science fiction novels he combines high-concept ideas reminiscent of Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, or more recently Liu Cixin, with a more sociological and philosophical approach to the human being, characteristic of works by the great sci-fi Masters, Stanisław Lem and Philip K. Dick. Recently he worked with CD PROJEKT RED on the show Cyberpunk: Edgerunners as a screenwriter.
These thrilling fantasy heist novels will keep you turning the pages faster, faster, faster.
Fire and Heist is Oceans 11 meets Dungeons and Dragons in a tale about believing in yourself. I adored this story and I never wanted it to end!
