What is Linda Kass reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Linda Kass, author of the forthcoming World News from Waverley High: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I recently picked up The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits after receiving an email invite from Al Filreis, a Faculty Director at UPenn’s Kelly Writers House, to join a small book group to discuss this novel in in the fall—I must have been on their mailing list. While I couldn’t participate, my interest to read the book, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, was piqued. This is a tender story about a middle-aged man fighting illness and marital woe who heads on a road trip, east to west. Tom Layward, a 55-year-old academic, is at a crossroads in his life. When his wife had an affair twelve years earlier, he vowed to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. The story takes place at the time when daughter Miri is headed for Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and Tom and wife Amy are not on good terms. His decision to keep driving after dropping Miri off at school is an impulsive act for Tom, a man of reason. As Tom keeps driving west, he visits people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son. As he moves toward some unknown future during this extended road trip, he...[read on]

About World News from Waverley High, from the publisher:

A tale of identity, activism, and finding your voice in a world on fire, this coming-of-age novel set at an urban high school captures a singular moment in American history—through the eyes of one unforgettable girl.

1969. Lena Rosen is an intelligent, observant teenager torn between spontaneity and self-consciousness. During her junior year, she becomes attuned to the pulse of her times in her first-period Current History class, where rebellion, social change, and musical innovation of the 1960s dominate discussion. When Lena becomes the associate editor of the school newspaper The Beacon, she is drawn into the swirling discourse surrounding the Vietnam War, civil rights, environmental disasters, and campus protests—while also grappling with her growing attraction to Jack Stone, the paper’s editor.

As the year progresses and the antiwar movement gains momentum, the unrest builds at Waverley High. Lena wrestles with her own cultural and religious identity as a Jewish teen while she and her fellow students struggle to cope with racial discord, a bomb threat, and the emotional toll of a world that seems to be unraveling. When tragedy collapses the distance between headlines and Lena’s own life, she must decide what it means to stand for peace—and to hope for a better world.

Set during one school year against the backdrop of an America on the brink of change, World News from Waverley High reveals the crossroads of personal growth and national unrest.

Visit Linda Kass's website.

Writers Read: Linda Kass.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that embody resilience

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. Any Human Heart was longlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a TV series. His books have won many literary awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, and the Costa Book Award. He was named a Granta Best Young Novelist in 1983, and in 2005, he was awarded the CBE. Boyd's newest novel is The Predicament.

In 2020 at GQ (UK) he tagged "five books that, for him, embody and inspire resilience like no others," including:

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

This book is Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishing, exemplary autobiography. Nabokov (born in 1899) was the scion of a rich, enlightened, noble Russian family. He grew up in a world of unreflecting wealth and astonishing privilege. All of which was snatched away forever with the arrival of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Nabokov then became an impoverished exile – first in Berlin, then Paris and then, with the advent of the Second World War, the US. Fame and fortune eventually arrived, thanks to the global success of his novel Lolita, but what is remarkable about Nabokov’s telling of his life story is his composure. He lost everything, he never returned to his native land, his father was assassinated, family members perished in the Holocaust, but his view of life and his savouring of its particular pleasures never wavered. There was no bitterness, no regrets, no wailing at misfortune. The book is also beautifully written – in English. Miraculously, he became, after James Joyce, the language’s unrivalled stylist.

Read about another entry on the list.

Speak, Memory is on Eve Claxton's top ten list of memoirs and autobiographies, Anne Applebaum's top five list of memoirs of Communism and Eva Hoffman's list of five notable memoirs of identity, dislocation & belonging, and is one of Susan Cheever's favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven Booker Prize-nominated novels with a sporting edge

Emily Facoory curated a list of Booker Prize-nominated novels "that incorporate sports, whether as a central theme or simply a brief scene." One title on the list:

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Featuring another sport set to be included in the 2028 Olympic Games, Netherland – longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 – follows Hans, a wealthy Dutch banker living in New York just after the tragedy of 9/11. Feeling lost and alone after his wife leaves him and returns to London with their son, he stumbles across a New York subculture of cricket players.

There, he befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure helps Hans to find a community within the sport and rediscover his childhood passion for the game, providing a much-needed sense of stability. As Hans becomes part of the team, he begins to rebuild his life and find his footing in the post-9/11 world.

The New York Times praised author Joseph O’Neill for his depiction. He ‘writes about cricket not with Beckettian economy, but with an insider’s knowledge and a metaphorical sweep,’ they said, hailing Neverland as ‘the first great American novel underpinned by a deep understanding of the complexity of spin bowling’.

Read about another novel on the list.

Netherland is among Jimmy So's five top 9/11 novels, Richard Tomlinson's top ten cricket scenes in fiction, and Brooke Hauser's six favorite books about immigrants.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels about (literally) divided countries

Tamar Shapiro grew up in both the U.S. and Germany and now lives in Washington, DC with her husband, two children, and the world’s best dog. Her debut novel is Restitution. Shapiro’s writing also appears in Electric Literature, Poets and Writers, and Literary Hub (forthcoming). A former housing attorney and non-profit leader, she is a 2026 MFA candidate at Randolph College in Virginia.

At Electric Lit Shapiro tagged eight novels "set in countries that have fractured, shifting our maps and our conceptions of the world. The reconfigurations covered on these pages take many different shapes, but all are born of violence, and the scars are still visible." One title on the list:

Milkman by Anna Burns

Milkman, which won the 2018 Booker Award, does not explicitly mention Northern Ireland. In fact, the book steers clear of proper nouns and names, instead using descriptors, such as “country over the water” and “country over the border.” Still, it is clear Milkman is about a young woman in 1970s Northern Ireland, who is being stalked by a paramilitary leader in her neighborhood. At the same time (and perhaps because of his interest), she faces constant surveillance. Intimate and political oppression quickly become one and the same. In a place of violence and divided loyalties, everyday items and mundane choices are deadly political symbols. At once horrifying and deeply revealing, Milkman lays bare the ways in which communities and individuals fall apart.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirteen notable feminist books

Emma Specter is the Culture Writer at Vogue, where she covers film, TV, books, politics, news and (almost) anything queer. She has previously worked at GARAGE and LAist and has freelanced for outlets including The Hairpin, Bon Appetit, them, the Hollywood Reporter and more. Her first book is More Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing and the Lust for ‘Enough’.

Specter lives in Los Angeles. In her spare time, she shops for vintage purses and bakes a lot of bagels.

For Vogue she and her colleagues tagged thirteen feminist books that deserve a place on your nightstand. One title on the list:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

It may be surprising to see fiction on this list, but Evaristo’s skill at portraying 12 very different protagonists in this Booker Prize–winning novel, which spans decades’ worth of race, class, gender, and sexuality-based identity, more than deserves some good old-fashioned feminist acclaim.

Read about another entry on the list.

Girl, Woman, Other is among Sarah Davis-Goff's six top books about women working together, Ore Agbaje-Williams's seven books featuring very, very complicated friendships, Cecile Pin's seven novels featuring displacement in multicultural London, and Kasim Ali's nine top books about interracial relationships.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top books about the wives of Henry VIII

Martha Jean Johnson is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and the author of a series of books and articles on public opinion and public policy. The Queen’s Musician is her debut novel. She also reviews trends in historical fiction and discusses her own love of reading and writing in her biweekly blog, Historical Magic. She currently divides her time between writing and her work with the National Issues Forums Institute, an organization that encourages civil discourse and nonpartisan deliberation on national and local issues.

During a long public policy career, Johnson analyzed and reported on American public thinking, working with noted social analyst and public opinion pioneer, Daniel Yankelovich. She has published articles in USA Today and The Huffington Post and appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and PBS. She is the author of a series of nonfiction paperbacks on major political issues, co-authored with Scott Bittle.

At The Nerd Daily Johnson tagged seven books for fans of Six the Musical. One title on the list:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

This first novel in Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy won the prestigious Booker Prize. In it, Henry’s exceedingly clever counselor helps oust Katherine of Aragon so the king can marry Anne Boleyn. But three years later, Anne hasn’t had a son either. Cromwell senses the shift in the wind. Mantel’s writing is propulsive, and her dialogue shimmers with acerbic wit. She promotes a revisionist view of Cromwell who is generally depicted as treacherous. Was he a civilized man trying to manage a volatile king or a consigliere pursuing his own ends?

Read about another entry on the list.

Wolf Hall made Tom Lamont's top five list of books featuring unconventional families, the Amazon Book Review editors' list of twelve of their favorite long books, Mark Skinner's top ten list of books featuring English and British monarchs, Emily Mitchell's list of five of the best historical novels to remind you how strange the past really was, Jody Hadlock's list of nine historical novels featuring real people as main characters, Benjamin Myers's top ten list of mentors in fiction, Jessie Burton's list of eleven of the best books about/with cats, Pete Buttigieg’s ten favorite books list, Ruby Bentall's six best books list, Rula Lenska's six favorite books list, Deborah Cadbury's top ten list of books about royal families, Peter Stanford's top ten list of Protestants in fiction, Melissa Harrsion's ten top depictions of British rain, the Telegraph's list of the 21 greatest television adaptations of novels, BBC Culture's list of the 21st century’s twelve greatest novels, Ester Bloom's ten list of books for fans of the television series House of Cards, Rachel Cantor's list of the ten worst jobs in books, Kathryn Williams's reading list on pride, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of books on baby-watching in Great Britain, Julie Buntin's top ten list of literary kids with deadbeat and/or absent dads, Hermione Norris's 6 best books list, John Mullan's list of ten of the best cardinals in literature, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on dangerous minds and Lev Grossman's list of the top ten fiction books of 2009, and is one of Geraldine Brooks's favorite works of historical fiction; Matt Beynon Rees called it "[s]imply the best historical novel for many, many years."

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top books about women without children

Nicole Louie is a writer and translator based in Ireland. Her essays have appeared in Oh Reader Magazine, The Walrus, and The Guardian and her curated collections of books, movies and podcasts about women who are not mothers by choice, circumstance or ambivalence can be found on Instagram: @bynicolelouie.

Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children is her first book.

At Electric Lit Louie tagged nine favorite books "by women who placed writing, not babies, at the center of their lives and flourished outside of motherhood." One title on the list:

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up walks us through how Bernardine Evaristo came to be the first Black woman and Black British person to win the Booker Prize, receive over 80 awards, nominations, fellowships, and honours, and have her books named the Book of the Year over sixty times.

Delving into her English, Nigerian, Irish, German and Brazilian heritage, romantic relationships, personal development and activism, Evaristo outlines her trajectory over six decades. Her ninth book also offers glimpses of her decision not to have children. “Instead of becoming a mother, I became an aunt and godmother, roles I’ve loved. I also describe myself as child-free, as opposed to childless, which implies a failure to fulfil my role as a woman rather than an active choice not to have them.”

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels that explore & center female friendship

Disha Bose is the author of Dirty Laundry, which was a Good Morning America Book Club pick and named one of the best books of the year by Harper’s Bazaar and Elle. She received a master’s in creative writing at University College Dublin, where she was mentored by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright. She has been shortlisted for the DNA Short Story Prize, and her poetry and short stories have appeared in The Incubator Journal, The Galway Review, Cultured Vultures, and HeadStuff. Her travel pieces have appeared in The Economic Times and Coldnoon. Bose was born and raised in India and now lives in Ireland with her husband and daughter.

Her new novel is I Will Blossom Anyway.

At Lit Hub Bose tagged five titles that explore and center female friendship, including:

Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

The forty-year friendship between Edi and Ash is the kind of relationship we all want at death’s door. If terminal cancer is the diagnosis I am saddled with, as Edi is given in this book, then I want an Ash by my bedside.

To bring the memories, humor and eccentricity. My family will grieve with me, but I hope I have a best friend there to make me laugh and remind me of a lifetime of inside jokes.

In this book, Newman successfully captures the essence of what true friendship looks like, and she made me laugh out loud and sob in the same paragraph. An emotional release no romance novel has been able to achieve.

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top Christmas crime novels

Denzil Meyrick was educated in Argyll, then after studying politics, joined Strathclyde Police, serving in Glasgow. After being injured and developing back problems, he enterred the business world, and has operated in many diverse roles, including director of a large engineering company and distillery manager, as well as owning a number of his own companies, such as a public bar and sales and marketing company. "D. A. Meyrick has also worked as a freelance journalist in both print and on radio. Well-known for his gritty series of police procedurals centred on the maverick DCI Daley," writes Mark Skinner at the Waterstones blog. "Meyrick has displayed his versatility in the past couple of years with his festive cosy crime mysteries - Murder at Holly House and The Christmas Stocking Murders."

One of Meyrick's favorite Christmas crime reads:

Snow by John Banville

Banville is a hugely respected Irish screenwriter and novelist, a Booker Prize winner, no less. His writing is a joy, both poetic and beautiful.

Banville dishes up a sometimes-gritty novel, set in the fifties in an Ireland dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. When the local priest dies in a small, tight-knit community in County Wexford, Inspector St. John Strafford is called in to investigate. He is from the Protestant tradition, and the juxtaposition between him and the locals creates a haunting, occasionally disturbing read.

Banville’s compelling, meandering prose and dry wit draws you into a story with its fair share of red herrings. It’s a real modern classic, which richly deserves the praise and success that has come its way. One to curl up with beside the fire.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about complicated desire

Kate Hamilton is a Professor of English at a university where she teaches literature, literary theory, and women’s writing. She has published numerous books and dozens of academic articles and chapters on a wide array of authors, and she has given talks and keynote speeches about literature, pedagogy, and sexual violence at conferences and workshops throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Her first trade publication, Mad Wife uses these decades of work on literature and sexual violence to clarify her own dark past and illuminate clearer paths forward for other women.

At Lit Hub Hamilton tagged eight books "concerning women’s desire, consent, and autonomy, especially as distorted by marriage." One title on the list:

Han Kang, The Vegetarian (trans. Deborah Smith)

The Vegetarian has gotten a lot of attention as a Man Booker winner whose English translation differs dramatically from its Korean original (and now as the best-known work by our newest Nobel Prize laureate in literature). But little attention has been paid to the novel’s serious treatment of the role unwanted marital sex plays in a husband’s socially sanctioned disregard of his wife’s personhood and in her profound suffering.

Yeong-hye never tells her own story. First, her callous husband describes her mystifying disobedience; then her brother-in-law transforms her into an object for his own creative and sexual pursuits. Finally her sister, In-hye, understands the rationale and bravery of Yeong-hye’s efforts to “shuck off the human” by attempting to transform—Daphne-like—into a tree, first refusing to eat animal flesh and then to ingest anything but sunlight.

This manifestation of Yeong-hye’s attempt to elude male objectification is a version of the anorexia that often accompanies sexual or domestic abuse, which I describe experiencing in Mad Wife. If Yeong-hye can’t be saved, her example can inspire In-hye, and all of us, to “wake up” from the trance of patriarchy that renders women as subhuman from the start.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Vegetarian is among Monika Kim's five best body horror novels, Adam Biles's top ten allegories, M. S. Coe's eleven titles about women on the brink, and Amy Sackville's ten top novels about painters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books translated from Polish

Antonia Lloyd-Jones graduated from Oxford University in 1983 with a degree in Russian and Ancient Greek, and has been teaching herself Polish ever since. She has translated works by many of Poland's leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children's books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators' Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

Lloyd-Jones is the translator of Warsaw Tales, a short-story anthology.

She tagged five of the best books translated from Polish, including:

The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński, trans. William Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand

Kapuściński was the father of Polish reportage, which describes societies through the accounts of their most humble citizens in literary, not newspaper, style. This mesmerising portrait of the fall of Haile Selassie, based on conversations with his courtiers, was criticised for factual embroidery, but perhaps it’s a veiled denunciation of Poland’s communist regime? Either way, who wouldn’t want to believe in the courtier who wiped the dignitaries’ shoes with a satin cloth when the Emperor’s lapdog peed on them?

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books featuring families

Paul Murray was born in 1975 in Dublin. His novels include An Evening of Long Goodbyes, short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award; Skippy Dies, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Mark and the Void, joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the year; and The Bee Sting, one of The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year.

At the Waterstones blog Murray tagged six favorite books featuring families. One title on the list:

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying was one of the first ‘grown-up’ novels I read. A kind of a Gothic road trip through the Deep South, it recounts the Bundren family’s journey from the badlands of Mississippi to Jefferson to bury their mother, Addie. They carry the coffin on a horse and cart and encounter many obstacles. It’s one of Faulkner’s shorter and less difficult novels – relatively speaking – and has a sly line in black humour. It ended up being a big influence on my novel The Bee Sting, both tonally and structurally; Faulkner lets his characters take it in turns to tell the story, and the conflicting, even contradictory perspectives that emerge within a single family are brilliantly brought to life here.

Read about another entry on the list.

As I Lay Dying is on a list of four books that shaped Carmel Reilly's love of literature, a list of four books that changed Elizabeth J. Church, Jesmyn Ward's list of six favorite books featuring absent parents, Emily Ruskovich's top ten list of rural American novels, Jeff Somers's top five list of books written in very unlikely places, Shaun Byron Fitzpatrick's list of eight of the most badass ladies in all of banned literature, Nicole Hill's lists of nine of the biggest martyrs in fiction and five books that, like country and western songs, tell "stories of agony and ecstasy, soaring highs and mighty powerful lows, heartache and hard living," Laura Frost's list of the ten best modernist books (in English), Helen Humphreys's top ten list of books on grieving, John Mullan's list of ten of the best teeth in literature, Jon McGregor's list of the top ten dead bodies in literature, Roy Blount Jr.'s list of five favorite books of Southern humor, and James Franco's six best books list.

The “My mother is a fish.” chapter in As I Lay Dying is among the ten most notorious parts of famous books according to Gabe Habash.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best postcolonial novels

Geneva Abdul is a reporter and feature writer for the Guardian. One title from her list of five of the best postcolonial novels:

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Set in the foothills of the Himalayas, the novel – close to the author’s own family story – tells of a 1980s rebellion of the ethnic Nepalese in the town of Kalimpong, revolving around an affair between 17-year-old Sai and a maths tutor.

A revealing moment comes when two Anglophilic Indian women discuss VS Naipaul’s Bend in the River, describing the author – often a divisive Nobel laureate known for exploring exile and colonialism unsparingly – as “strange” and “stuck in the past”. At 35, the novel made Desai the youngest woman to win the Booker prize in 2006.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is M.M. DeLuca reading?

Featured at Writers Read: M.M. DeLuca, author of The Night Side.

Her entry begins:

I like to keep up with shortlisted and Booker prizewinning books, so I've just finished reading this year's winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. I'm a huge fan of dystopian novels. I started out my writing career in that genre and Prophet Song ranks up there with classics like Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, sharing many parallels like a strong, heroic woman as the main character and the fact that every horrific and unimaginable incident portrayed in the story is happening somewhere in the world today . This is an incredibly important novel for our times, aimed at jogging us out of our complacency. Many of us have become desensitized towards the horrors that brutal political regimes can unleash on a country. We're accustomed to watching the devastation of war and the resulting societal collapse, on TV from the safety of our living rooms. We witness the agonies of streams of displaced men, women and children driven from their homes, and risking their lives to reach safety, and we believe it can never happen to us. Reading this book sends us...[read on]

About The Night Side, from the publisher:

Twenty years of secrets. One deadly truth.

When Ruby Carlson was eighteen, she ran away from her home in Stoneybrook, Montana, and vowed she'd never return. Never return to life under the control of her manipulative mother, Ida, a self-styled medium and psychic scammer who made a career out of ruining people's lives. Never return to the small town where enemies lurk at every turn.

But now, twenty years later, Ruby is back. Her mother is missing, presumed dead, and Ruby reluctantly returns to a home filled with chilling memories to settle Ida's affairs. Did she really commit suicide by drowning, or is this another dark scheme? Ruby thought she knew everything about her mother, but finds herself unraveling a web of lies and secrets to reveal a story more twisted than anyone could have imagined...

Visit M.M. DeLuca's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Night Side.

The Page 69 Test: The Night Side.

Writers Read: M.M. DeLuca.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books that feature mediums & the spirit world

M. M. (Marjorie) DeLuca spent her childhood in the beautiful cathedral city of Durham in North-Eastern England. She attended the University of London, Goldsmiths College, studied psychology, then became a teacher. She immigrated to Canada and lives in Winnipeg with her husband and two children. There she also studied writing under her mentor, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Carol Shields.

She loves writing for all ages and in many genres—suspense, historical, sci-fi for teens. She's also a screenwriter with several pilot projects in progress.

DeLuca enjoys teaching workshops in Creative Writing and the writing process.

Her new novel is The Night Side.

[My Book, The Movie: The Night Side; The Page 69 Test: The Night Side]

At CrimeReads DeLuca tagged five great books that feature mediums and the mysteries of the spirit world, including:

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

A darkly comic but sinister tale of wicked spirits and suburban mediums from the late Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light. Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London’s orbital ring road with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, passing on messages from beloved dead ancestors. But behind her genial, smiling persona hides a desperate woman whose ability to communicate with spirits is a torment rather than a gift, since her days and nights are haunted by the men she knew in her childhood: thugs and petty criminals who preyed upon her hopeless, addled mother. These nasty, unwelcome spirits gradually infiltrate her body and home, becoming stronger and more persistent the more she resists. The story is told in Mantel’s brilliantly lyrical language with a master writer’s perception of the follies of the human condition.

Read about another entry on the list.

Beyond Black is among Isaac Fellman's five books that feel like a trippy haunted house, Laura Purcell's ten top books about spirit mediums, Jess Kidd's ten essential supernatural mysteries, and Sarah Porter's five top books with unusual demons and devils.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books about women working together

Sarah Davis-Goff was born and raised in Dublin. Her writing has been published in The Irish Times, The Guardian, and LitHub.

Silent City is her second novel.

At CrimeReads Davis-Goff tagged six books about women working together, including:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

This Booker-winning novel, Everisto’s eighth, is a celebration of intersectional feminism; though many 12 of the women are related to each other, I include because the women work in tandem in such interesting ways – creating a theatre company or cleaning business, creating families. There’s something so rare and enriching about seeing that on a page. There’s unconditional love here despite the societal forces often working to keep the women apart.

Read about another entry on the list.

Girl, Woman, Other is among Ore Agbaje-Williams's seven books featuring very, very complicated friendships, Cecile Pin's seven novels featuring displacement in multicultural London, and Kasim Ali's nine top books about interracial relationships.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that defined the Obama era

Andrew Ridker was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1991. His second novel, Hope, is now out from Viking.

[Q&A with Andrew Ridker].

His debut novel, The Altruists, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Paris Review staff pick, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, and the People Book of the Week. It won the Friends of American Writers Award and was longlisted for the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Prize.

Ridker is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Le Monde, Bookforum, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ridker lives in Brooklyn, New York.

At Electric Lit he tagged seven novels that capture the cultural moment of Obama’s America, including:

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The historical novel, once considered fusty and stale, was gut-renovated in the 2010s. During Obama’s two terms, novelists (and especially Black novelists) turned history (and especially Black history) on its head in a series of formally inventive books. James McBride’s National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird was a comedic reimagining of the life of John Brown and his raid on Harper’s Ferry. Marlon James’s Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings was a polyphonic telling of (among many other things) a real-life assassination attempt on the life of Bob Marley. And then there’s Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which won pretty much every prize there is. To focus on the premise underpinning Whitehead’s novel—what if the Underground Railroad was, in fact, a functioning railroad?—is to miss his even more audacious thematic gambits, collapsing centuries of oppression into one phantasmagoric journey.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Underground Railroad is among Andrea Wulf's top ten books about unlikely revolutionaries, Chris Mooney's six intelligent, page-turning, genre-bending classics, Rachel Eve Moulton's top ten literary thrillers, Nathan Englander’s ten desert island books, Greg Mitchell's top ten escapes in literature, and President Obama's summer 2016 reading list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten locked-room thrillers

Will Dean, author of The Last Thing to Burn, which was shortlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, grew up in the East Midlands of the United Kingdom. After studying law at the London School of Economics and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden where he built a wooden house in a vast forest, and it’s from this base that he compulsively reads and writes. His debut novel, Dark Pines, was selected for Zoe Ball’s book club on ITV, shortlisted for the National Book Award (UK), The Guardian’s Not the Booker prize, and was named a Telegraph book of the year. His latest thriller is The Last One.

At CrimeReads Dean tagged ten top locked-room thrillers, including:

THE LOCKED ROOM by Elly Griffiths

A book in the fantastic Ruth Galloway series, the locked room element of this book comes by way of the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. Ruth and Nelson investigate a series of murder-suicides connected to a fascinating archaeological find.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see: Alice Feeney's seven top locked room mysteries, Tom Mead's ten best locked-room mysteries, Jeff Somers's six best locked-room mysteries and ten best sci-fi locked-room mysteries, and Adrian McKinty's ten top locked-room mysteries.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten essential works of Northern Irish literature

Alexander Poots was born in London in 1985. After studying at the University of Manchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, he worked as a bookseller.

The Strangers’ House: Writing Northern Ireland is his first book.

He lives in Belfast.

At Publishers Weekly Poots tagged ten works with the "tact, nuance, and deep historical understanding" essential to capturing the "predicament" (Seamus Heaney's term) that is Northern Ireland. One title on the list:

Milkman by Anna Burns

No one—well, almost no one—has a name in Burns’s glorious black comedy. The narrator is middle sister. There's also first sister, and Somebody McSomebody, and tablets girl. The place is unnamed, too, though it is Belfast, or a kind of Belfast. Middle sister—bookish, wry, blunt—describes her claustrophobic world, a place in which people are ruled by gossip and violence. It’s a compelling premise, but it could have become too abstract in the wrong hands. Burns makes the reader care, but crucially, she also makes the reader laugh. Despite the subject matter, this book is a scream—and a worthy winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books featuring very, very complicated friendships

Ore Agbaje-Williams is a British Nigerian writer and book editor from London.

The Three of Us is her first novel.

At LitHub she shared a reading list of "books featuring very, very complicated friendships to make you and your friends feel like the normal, stable people you undoubtedly are." One title on the list:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

This is one the of the most realistic portrayals of friendship I’ve ever read, spanning generations and multiple characters whose stories are intertwined. From Amma and Dominique’s bond and how it withstands Dominique’s abusive relationship, to Carole and LaTisha’s differing paths after being friends for so long at school, to Shirley and Penelope’s journey from despising one another to becoming friends, Bernardine’s Booker Prize-winning novel shows how friendship can shape, drive and affect us, sometimes without us even realizing it.

Read about another entry on the list.

Girl, Woman, Other is among Cecile Pin's seven novels featuring displacement in multicultural London and Kasim Ali's nine top books about interracial relationships.

--Marshal Zeringue