Five excellent sci-fi & fantasy mystery novels

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged five "exciting sci-fi and fantasy books that dip into the mystery genre." One entry on the list:

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

This is an excellent sci-fi noir that hasn’t received nearly enough attention. It’s like a 1940s mystery set aboard a cruise ship in space! Tesla Crane is a famous inventor and heiress who is traveling on a space liner when her honeymoon is rudely interrupted by a murder. And to make matters worse, her husband is arrested as the lead suspect by the ship’s security. Tesla will have to figure things out herself if she wants her husband to be freed before they arrive at their destination.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sara Cooper's "Ravenous"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Ravenous: A Novel by Sara Cooper.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Breigh is a hot elder millennial who is obsessed with the brands she is ambassading for. Her policy is YES, and her livestreams are viral. But she’s pregnant now, and her body’s changing. It's not that she's hungry. She's definitely not depressed. She just sometimes eats boxes of makeup before passing out.

Daddy’s bought a brand-new home for Breigh and Baby, complete with a Greenguard Gold-certified, twice-imported velvet infant chaise — but is he cheating on her with a hotter, younger coworker? Breigh has to get Baby out before it ruins her. She has to create more and better content than the other Momfluencers. She has to unbox something new. She has to unbox … Baby! Baby approves of her seven-step marketing plan. Welcome to #LiveBirth.

Breigh’s increasingly unhinged life reflects her generation’s anxieties around psychological manipulation through social media platforms. Multi-award-winning author Sara Cooper presents a wild debut novel in this incisive satire of consumerism, performative femininity, and social media.

Visit Sara Cooper's website.

My Book, The Movie: Ravenous.

The Page 69 Test: Ravenous.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Elizabeth Gregory's "The Real Domestic Product"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Real Domestic Product: How Birth Control Built Equality (and Why the Future of the Economy and the Planet Depends on It) by Elizabeth Gregory.

About the book, from the publisher:

An urgent and clear-eyed look at the battle over reproductive control in our tipping-point moment—and how to forge a path forward.

Birth control, which includes contraception, abortion access and more, has not only enabled women to enter civic life in significant numbers for the first time, but it has also expanded our democracy and grown our economy. While many embrace these changes, which aim to share the nation’s economic bounty among all Americans, those who see themselves as benefiting from the old hierarchies do not. They resist this progress with divisive rhetoric condemning “woke”-ness in anything they find threatening.

In The Real Domestic Product, fertility researcher Elizabeth Gregory argues that our battles over abortion and LGBTQ bans and pronatalism are economic at base—that conservatives seek to push women out of civic life through forced childbearing. Their goal? To maintain their discount on domestic labor and a steady supply of low-wage workers. But, she contends, this shortsighted approach overlooks the huge benefits that a caring democracy can engender for our economy and for our fragile planet.

By connecting the dots among fertility patterns, economics, climate change, equitable work, expanding longevity, and the rising status of formerly excluded groups, the author counters reactionary narratives, adding depth and perspective to the incomplete national conversations we’ve had to date. Never more urgently needed, The Real Domestic Product envisions the way forward to an economy of care for our planet and our people.

Learn more about The Real Domestic Product at The MIT Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Real Domestic Product.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top femgore novels

S. M. Hallow’s short story “How to Stay Married to Baba Yaga” was included in the Locus 2023 Recommended Reading List and anthologized in The Year’s Best Fantasy Volume 3, edited by Paula Guran. Other short work can be found in Baffling Magazine, Seize the Press, Taco Bell Quarterly, and We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2023. Her novella, How to Survive This Fairytale, was published in January 2025 and received a special edition in Rainbow Crate, a book box exclusively for queer books. The Halls of the Dead is Hallow’s debut novel.

At People magazine the author tagged eight "femgore novels that reveal the women of horror can be just as Monstrous as the patriarchy." One title on the list:

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling

A miracle happens during the siege of Aymar Castle: with only 15 days until food runs out, a “goddess” arrives to save the people living there from starvation. Suddenly there’s food aplenty, but hallucinogenic magic prevents the people of the castle from realizing their own cannibalism. Told in alternating POVs between a sorceress, a woman knight and a serving girl, this is a fever dream of a fantasy novel with plenty of room for readers to make their own inferences about what’s really going on. I read this book almost a year ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Read about another title on the list.

The Starving Saints is among Lyndsie Manusos’s six best SFF books about gods and demons, Lyndsie Manusos's top six medieval horror books, and Saratoga Schaefer's five novels that use isolation to create horror.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Patchett's five top family saga books

Ann Patchett is the author of novels, works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize for Fiction in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.

At Woman's World Patchett tagged five favorite family saga books, including:

Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett

Readers who love stories filled with drama and second chances will devour this book. Asylum lawyer Peter spends his days isolated and alone with only his work to comfort him. But when his newest case forces him to remember difficult parts of his past, things change. Elsewhere, his estranged mother, Ann, runs a women’s retreat center and often thinks about her son. As time goes on, the two are forced to confront the secrets they’ve kept from themselves and each other, all in the hopes of seeing each other again.

What Ann says: “Both moving and deeply compelling, a story about the search for your own humanity, and the lengths we will go to maintain it. Adam Haslett is one of our very best writers.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jehanne Dubrow's "Frivolity: A Defense"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Frivolity: A Defense by Jehanne Dubrow.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why must everything be so important―so dour and solemn, so grim and austere? How about a feather boa, some frilly lace, and a bright splash of pink? In Frivolity, Jehanne Dubrow stands up for the seemingly shallow and trifling, calling for a reconsideration of what we find worthy and what we dismiss.

This book is a provocation. It offers a defense of the pursuits, objects, and people denigrated as frivolous, asking why we so readily scorn them and why, in particular, the label is so often tied to femininity and queerness. Its 101 sections move lightly across literature, art, and popular culture, from Susan Sontag, Sei Shōnagon, Jane Austen, and Mozart to Barbie, Nora Ephron rom-coms, exclamation points, and Dubrow’s own “Year of Perfect Skin.” Written in a lyrical style, this book takes both an intimate and a rigorous approach to thinking about the frivolous, blending personal essay with scholarship.

For Dubrow, frivolity is a way of affirming the importance of joy and silliness. And don’t we need a little more of both these things in an era made all too serious by autocracy and terror?

Learn more about the book and author at Jehanne Dubrow's website.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (April 2010).

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (November 2012).

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow and Argos.

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow & Lola and Bandit.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (August 2022).

The Page 99 Test: Taste: A Book of Small Bites.

The Page 99 Test: Frivolity: A Defense.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Cooper's "Ravenous," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Ravenous: A Novel by Sara Cooper.

The entry begins:

Okay, so, as a playwright, I love dreamcasting. I hadn't actually thought about who would play Breigh in a movie, but I got super excited when I saw this prompt.

Quick summary of the book: Ravenous is about a pregnant influencer who specializes in unboxing and takes things way, way too far. It's very stream-of-consciousness and is kind of a super intense feminist horror anticapitalist fever dream.

First of all, if I was casting for a theatre piece (which I feel I must include here, because, like I said, I'm also a playwright!), I'd cast Sherz Aletaha. She's...[read on]

Visit Sara Cooper's website.

My Book, The Movie: Ravenous.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Schama's top ten history books

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University in New York. His award-winning books include Scribble, Scribble, Scribble; The American Future: A History; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Rough Crossings; The Power of Art; The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution; Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations); Landscape and Memory; Rembrandt's Eyes; and the History of Britain trilogy. He has written and presented forty television documentary films for the BBC, PBS, and The History Channel, including the Emmy-winning Power of Art, on subjects that range from John Donne to Tolstoy.

Back in 1999 Schama tagged his top ten history books for the Guardian. One title on the list:

The Face of Battle by John Keegan

A stunning, extraordinary, fantastic book. It has a wonderful opening. He attempts a different kind of military history and concentrates on three battles: Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. No book until this one had put you right in the middle of the action and asked questions like "Why didn't everybody run away?" It stopped old-style military history, with shaded triangles facing each other, in its tracks.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Face of Battle is one of Stanley McChrystal's six favorite books. John Keegan is one of Max Hastings's five of the best historians of war.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jack Dudley's "The New Believers"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The New Believers: Religion and the Contemporary Novel by Jack Dudley.

About the book, from the publisher:

The New Believers identifies a group of today's most important novelists, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Junot Díaz, and George Saunders, who have challenged the trend of depressing and defeatist novelistic endings by turning to spiritual beliefs, powers, and presences. Through spiritual belief, these writers use the novel to imagine more hopeful and caring ways of being in the world, ones that can challenge Christian Nationalism and neoliberal capitalism and empower leftist and liberal causes, such as women's rights, migrant rights, animal rights, and care for the environment. Through a survey of the current state of novel studies, close readings of key works by each writer, and new archival research on Margaret Atwood and J. M. Coetzee, The New Believers shows how these writers transform novelistic realism through spiritual realism and reshape the current debate about religion, secularization, and literature.

Visit Jack Dudley's website.

The Page 99 Test: The New Believers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the most WTF thrillers and crime novels

Jamie Canaves is a contributing editor at Book Riot. She tagged five great thrillers and crime novels with WTF premises, including:

My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing

Here’s a domestic thriller debut that ensured I read every book that followed.

It’s not rare that a couple married for 15 years, with teenage children, might look for something to, say, spice up their lives. It is however — hopefully! — rare that the new hobby they settle on is murdering young women. Yup. And the story is only told from the unnamed husband’s POV…

Read about the other titles on the list.

My Lovely Wife is among Amy K. Green's five top novels about living near serial killers, Courtney Rodgers's nine chilling thrillers about marriage, Darby Kane's seven top thrillers with couples who don’t get (or deserve) a happy ending, Misha Popp's eight titles featuring truly fatal femmes fatales, Sarah Bonner's thirteen psychological thrillers with gobsmacking twists, Kaira Rouda's thirteen books highlighting the wives in domestic suspense, Alice Feeney's eight top novels featuring odd couples & unexpected partnerships, Pip Drysdale's seven top revenge thrillers featuring women who have had enough, Christina McDonald's seven top thrillers with flawed characters, C.J. Tudor's seven crime novels where murder is a group activity, Lisa Levy's top seven psychological thrillers with manipulative male narrators, Kaira Rouda's top seven literary couples whose relationships are deeply disturbing in the most fascinating ways possible, and Margot Hunt's top five villains who have had about enough of domestic life.

The Page 69 Test: My Lovely Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books about people making art together

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the nationally bestselling author of two books of fiction— Fat Swim and Housemates, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize — and the nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice.

The Page 99 Test: The Third Rainbow Girl.

At Tertulia Eisenberg tagged ten "essential reads that explore the life-changing possibilities of creating things with other people." One title on the list:

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

The ultimate novel of an artistic duo whose collaboration starts with animation and ends with true love. Come for the art school vibes, stay for the complex exploration of an uncategorizable relationship between a queer woman and a straight woman who bring out the best and worst in each other.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Animators is among Antonia Angress's twelve books about the long road to becoming an artist and Rebecca Kauffman's top ten musical novels.

My Book, The Movie: The Animators.

The Page 69 Test: The Animators.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Chin Jou's "Captive Consumers"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food by Chin Jou.

About the book, from the publisher:

Much of what happens inside America’s prisons remains hidden from public view, and the food doled out to incarcerated people is no exception. In Captive Consumers, Chin Jou exposes a system of mistreatment and scandal surrounding prison food: across the country, those behind bars live with chronic hunger, eat foods contrary to their religious beliefs and medical needs, and develop foodborne illnesses at alarming rates. At the same time, corrections systems and prison food services weaponize nutritional claims to protect themselves from charges that the incarcerated are starving.

Using a wealth of sources from untapped historical records to prison newspapers, Jou excavates the voices of the incarcerated and shows that prison food dehumanizes the imprisoned, compounds racial and class inequalities, and induces more violence—ultimately making carceral institutions more dangerous. But this compelling book also illuminates how people behind bars have reasserted their identities, resourcefulness, and humanity through self-prepared food even as prison food services profit from lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts that reward cost-cutting over care. If US corrections systems continue to perpetuate physical and psychological violence through food, Jou argues, Americans will suffer not just wasted tax dollars but the cost of bringing traumatized, ailing, and hungry formerly incarcerated people back into society.

Learn more about Captive Consumers at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Supersizing Urban America.

The Page 99 Test: Captive Consumers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine terrifying Native American & Indigenous horror books

Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. are the editors of Back for Blood: Never Whistle at Night Part II, an Indigenous horror anthology featuring stories by acclaimed Native American and Indigenous authors.

The collection features stories by: Jessica Doe • P.C. Verrone • Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. • Jim Terry • Jessica Johns • A.J. Eversole • Sonia Marie Barry • Shane Hawk • Stephen Graham Jones • Alicia Elliott • Mat RudeWalker • Shaawan Francis Keahna • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Jake Arrowtop • Alina Pete • Debra Magpie Earling • Joshua Whitehead • Tommy Orange • Ramona Emerson • Erica Tremblay • Kimberly Blaeser

At People magazine the editors tagged "some of their favorite horror novels written by Indigenous authors," including:

Hole in the Sky by Daniel H. Wilson

[Wilson] serves up one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time — horror, sci-fi, thriller or otherwise. Things come from a hole in the sky. Hold onto your head and your heart.
— T.V.A.

Learn about another title on the list.

Hole in the Sky is among Megan Mabee's five sci-fi titles like Project Hail Mary and CrimeReads's fifteen best speculative mysteries and thrillers of 2025.

The Page 69 Test: Hole in the Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Jeanne M. Dams

From my Q&A with Jeanne M. Dams, author of A Thief's Folly (A Dorothy Martin Mystery, 28):

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

A Thief’s Folly was not my title. Readers may not realize that titles are the prerogative of the publisher. My title, Deadly Treasure, says a good deal more about the subject of the book, which concerns an object of value in the home of a good friend of the protagonist, Dorothy Martin. Jane, the friend and neighbor, has suffered a stroke and is unable to talk well enough to tell Dorothy what she (Jane) wants Dorothy to find and hide. The search takes Dorothy and Alan to Paris and ends in a death and a criminal’s reform.

What’s in a name?

My protagonist, Dorothy Martin, is named after...[read on]

Visit Jeanne M. Dams's website.

Writers Read: Jeanne M. Dams.

Q&A with Jeanne M. Dams.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: R. Douglas Hurt's "The Country People"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Country People: An Agricultural History of the American Revolution by R. Douglas Hurt.

About the book, from the publisher:

Although historians have given considerable attention to the American Revolution, the agricultural history of the American War for Independence exists only in pieces found in scattered articles and passing references in various books dealing with the war. Nonagricultural historians have ignored it or treated it almost as an aside and unworthy of analysis, even when it is related to other war topics. Yet, the revolution had profound effects on American agriculture during the war and after.

The Country People brings the many pieces of this story together in a synthesis that provides an overview of agriculture during the American Revolution―from 1774 until signing of the Peace of Paris on September 3, 1783. In so doing, preeminent agricultural historian R. Douglas Hurt asks (and answers) three essential questions: What did farmers do in their daily lives during the revolutionary years from 1774 to 1783? How did the war affect farmers and planters, and how did they influence the war? And what were the consequences of the war on American agriculture?

Learn more about The Country People at the University of Georgia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Country People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top epistolary works of historical fiction

Rachel Brittain is a writer, Day Dreamer, and Amateur Aerialist. Her short fiction has appeared in Luna Station Quarterly, Andromeda Spaceways, and others. She is a contributing editor for Book Riot, where she screams into the void about her love of books. Brittain lives in Northwest Arkansas with a rambunctious rescue pup, a snake, and a houseful of plants (most of which aren’t carnivorous).

At Book Riot she tagged five epistolary historical fiction novels, including:

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

Author Priya Parmar imagines a world where Virginia Woolf’s sister, the gifted painter Vanessa, keeps a diary of their lives. When the Stephen siblings, Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrian, leave London behind for a home in Bloomsbury, they bring together a group of gifted friends that will eventually become known as the legendary Bloomsbury Group. Sisters Virginia and Vanessa are the beating heart of the talented group of artists. But when Vanessa falls in love, her brilliant sister, accustomed to Vanessa’s constant attention, begins to unravel. Soon, with the family on the brink of destruction, Vanessa will have to decide whether to finally live her life for herself, even if it means leaving her beloved sister behind.

Read about another entry on the list.

Vanessa and Her Sister is among Jen Harper's ten books celebrating influential women in history.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top cli-fi novels and eco-thrillers

Nicole Brooks has a bachelor of environmental science and a lifelong love of reading, which has enabled her to blend two of her passions - nature and writing - into stories that put people into the thick of environmental disasters. She lives just outside Calgary with her husband and two daughters and can be found curled up with a book during long, cold Canadian winters, searching the skies for bald eagles, or hurting herself while playing pickleball.

No Higher Ground is her thriller debut.

At CrimeReads Brooks tagged "favorite books which tell deeply human stories in a world where Mother Nature is more than a supporting character." One title on the list:

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

An unnamed father and son walk through a decimated, charred postapocalyptic America. They move toward the ocean in the hopes that something better awaits them there, but along the way, it is as treacherous as you can imagine.

The word gray is used about fifty times in this book and that should give you a full picture of the world they precariously inhabit. This profoundly moving story of two people who have little more than each other to keep them going has been seared into my mind. An epic, desolate, ultimately beautiful human journey.

Read about other novel on the list.

The Road appears on Barnaby Martin's list of seven titles featuring parents & children at the end of the world, Nick Newman's list of five novels that feature the uncanny suspense of a third character's arrival, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie's list of thirty of literature's best parents, Robert Lee Brewer's list of the ten best dystopian novels ever written, Pedro Hoffmeister's list of five titles with lessons to turn a post-apocalyptic novel into a thriller, Malcolm Devlin’s list of eight zombie stories without any zombies, Michael Christie's list of ten novels to reconfigure our conception of nature for the better, Emily Temple's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Ceridwen Christensen's list of ten novels that end their apocalypses on a beach, Steph Post's top ten list of classic (and perhaps not so classic) road trip books, a list of five of the best climate change novels, Claire Fuller's top five list of extreme survival stories, Justin Cronin's top ten list of world-ending novels, Rose Tremain's six best books list, Ian McGuire's ten top list of adventure novels, Alastair Bruce's top ten list of books about forgetting, Jeff Somers's lists of five science fiction novels that really should be considered literary classics and eight good, bad, and weird dad/child pairs in science fiction and fantasy, Amelia Gray's ten best dark books list, Weston Williams's top fifteen list of books with memorable dads, ShortList's roundup of the twenty greatest dystopian novels, Mary Miller's top ten list of the best road books, Joel Cunningham's list of eleven "literary" novels that include elements of science fiction, fantasy or horror, Claire Cameron's list of five favorite stories about unlikely survivors, Isabel Allende's six favorite books list, the Telegraph's list of the 15 most depressing books, Joseph D’Lacey's top ten list of horror books, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five unforgettable fathers from fiction, Ken Jennings's list of eight top books about parents and kids, Anthony Horowitz's top ten list of apocalypse books, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five notable "What If?" books, John Mullan's list of ten of the top long walks in literature, Tony Bradman's top ten list of father and son stories, Ramin Karimloo's six favorite books list, Jon Krakauer's five best list of books about mortality and existential angst, William Skidelsky's list of the top ten most vivid accounts of being marooned in literature, Liz Jensen's top 10 list of environmental disaster stories, the Guardian's list of books to change the climate, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and the Times (of London) list of the 100 best books of the decade. In 2009 Sam Anderson of New York magazine claimed "that we'll still be talking about [The Road] in ten years."

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Eranda Jayawickreme's "Is There Always Value to Adversity?"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Is There Always Value to Adversity?: Looking Beyond "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger" by Eranda Jayawickreme.

About the book, from the publisher:

Clear and compelling, Is There Always Value to Adversity? presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the age-old idea that adversity can lead to personal growth.

Can adversity have an upside? Is there a purpose to suffering? Can difficult experiences involving trauma and hardship make us stronger? These age-old questions, both intuitively compelling yet scientifically problematic, have fascinated philosophers and researchers for centuries.

In Is There Always Value to Adversity?, Eranda Jayawickreme examines whether post-traumatic growth--the positive changes people report after adversity--reflects real transformation or is simply a coping mechanism. As Jayawickreme explains, the idea that struggle, trauma, and adversity can be a catalyst for positive outcomes has a long intellectual history. He outlines the history of this thinking, tracking its development in different cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. He then discusses its recent emergence as a popular topic and evaluates the current research, highlighting guidelines for how we should think about this phenomenon.

Throughout the course of the book, Jayawickreme interrogates the quality of the research on post-traumatic growth. In the current age of worries about replication and the credibility revolution in science, can we trust this research at all? Is it possible to do good science on a topic with such intuitive appeal? Ultimately, Jayawickreme asks: is growth through suffering real, or just a comforting story we tell ourselves?

Learn more about Is There Always Value to Adversity? at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Is There Always Value to Adversity?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven books about women who rewrote life & art

Anne E. Fernald is a professor of English at Fordham University. She is a scholar of British and global modernism with a specialty in twentieth-century women artists and is one of the world’s best-known experts on Virginia Woolf. She lives in New York City with her family.

Her new book is Her Own Voice: Eight Women Who Rewrote Life and Art.

At Lit Hub Fernald tagged eleven books that "expand our ideas of what a woman’s life can be and narratives can do." One title on the list:

Asali Solomon, Days of Afrekete

Asali Solomon’s novel spends much of its narrative looking back to the protagonist Liselle’s long-ago relationship with her ex-girlfriend. It’s a surprising and defensive act as Liselle, who is Black, is giving a dinner party on the eve of her white husband’s political downfall. The tension, the uncertainty, the hovering between bravery and cowardice captures some of what fascinated me in Muriel Rukeyser’s novel Savage Coast. Usually, Rukeyser is utterly fearless, but I find it so heartening to read about the moments of hesitation right before being brave, something both Solomon and Rukeyser beautifully convey. Days of Afrekete is also a riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—another single day novel about a rich woman throwing a dinner party. Rukeyser admired Woolf and mentored young Black writers, including Alice Walker, so the connections between Rukeyser, Woolf, and Solomon are rich.

Read about another book on Fernald's list.

Days of Afrekete is among Annie Liontas's seven top books about sex, love, and intimacy.

--Marshal Zeringue