Thursday, September 08, 2011

Top 10 novels of teenage friendship

Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of six books, including Die a Little, The Song Is You, Queenpin, and Bury Me Deep. She has been nominated for many awards, including three Edgar® Award nominations, Hammett Prize, the Macavity, Anthony and Barry Awards and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Abbott won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2008 for Queenpin. She was also nominated in 2010 for Bury Me Deep for Best Paperback Original and in 2006 for Best First Novel for Die A Little. In 2008, she won the Barry Award (Deadly Pleasures and Mystery News award) and has been nominated three times for the Anthony Award (Bouchercon World Mystery Convention award).

Her new novel is The End of Everything.

One of Abbott's top ten novels of teenage friendship, as told to the Guardian:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

This is a cheat, because Jane is years from adolescence, but the beatific Helen Burns is a few years older and their feverish bond at the punishing Lowood School seems to reflect many a passionate teen friendship founded on feelings of shared loneliness, and the respite to be found in burrowing, as Jane does with the dreamy Helen, against an older friend's neck, holding on for dear life.
Read about another book on Abbott's list.

Jane Eyre also made a list of Bettany Hughes's six best books, the Guardian's top 10 lists of "outsider books" and "romantic fiction;" it appears on Lorraine Kelly's six best books list, Esther Freud's top ten list of love stories, and Jessica Duchen's top ten list of literary Gypsies, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best weddings in literature, ten of the best locked rooms in literature, ten of the best pianos in literature, ten of the best breakfasts in literature, ten of the best smokes in fiction, and ten of the best cases of blindness in literature. It is one of Kate Kellaway's ten best love stories in fiction.

The Page 99 Test: Jane Eyre.

Visit Megan Abbott's website.

The Page 69 Test: The End of Everything.

--Marshal Zeringue