The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E HarrowRead about another entry on the list.
January Scaller feels trapped in the mansion of her father’s business partner, a man who collects magical and unusual objects. Until, that is, January’s father disappears and she discovers a mysterious book, and an even more mysterious door that can lead her to other worlds.
When I start a book, I make a mood board and cast all the characters—but I never use actors because I’m so easily influenced by what roles they’ve played. I use models, usually from old Vogues or those cheap hairstyle magazines you can buy at Walgreens. It’s only later that I start to think who could pull off the role.Visit Liska Jacobs's website.
For Cilla, I think Chloë Sevigny or Maggie Gyllenhaal would be phenomenal.
And Donato, well, it would have to be...[read on]
Helen Macdonald, H is For Hawk (2015)Read about another entry on the list.
Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk was, to say the least, a surprise phenomenon in America. An erudite, lyric, very British memoir that describes the simultaneous grieving of a beloved parent, the mourning of a particular version of the English countryside, and the attempt to cohabitate with a ferocious raptor? Not what most publishers would consider a license to print money; add to that the embedded retelling of T.H. White’s own deeply troubled account of life with a fractious goshawk and “bestseller” seems unlikely at best. And though a book’s sales should factor fairly low (if at all) when considering its worthiness, one is tempted to make an exception for memoir, the genre that most wants to be read.
But it is neither the familiarity of the circumstances (they are decidedly not) nor the plainness of the language (this is the memoir of a poet!) that makes Macdonald’s memoir so universally accessible—it is the unrelenting honesty of a writer grappling on the page with the hard stuff most of us reserve for 4am: the finality of death, the paralysis of self-doubt, the loss of the natural world, and… the winged killing machine lurking in the other room. That Macdonald manages literary biography, pastoral meditation, grief diary, and falconry how-to all in one book is a true marvel, and will remain so as this nearly perfect memoir takes its rightful place in the canon. –Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub Editor-in-Chief
The American presidency is not what it once was. Nor, Stephen F. Knott contends, what it was meant to be. Taking on an issue as timely as Donald Trump’s latest tweet and old as the American republic, the distinguished presidential scholar documents the devolution of the American presidency from the neutral, unifying office envisioned by the framers of the Constitution into the demagogic, partisan entity of our day.Learn more about The Lost Soul of the American Presidency at the University Press of Kansas website.
The presidency of popular consent, or the majoritarian presidency that we have today, far predates its current incarnation. The executive office as James Madison, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton conceived it would be a source of national pride and unity, a check on the tyranny of the majority, and a neutral guarantor of the nation’s laws. The Lost Soul of the American Presidency shows how Thomas Jefferson’s “Revolution of 1800” remade the presidency, paving the way for Andrew Jackson to elevate “majority rule” into an unofficial constitutional principle—and contributing to the disenfranchisement, and worse, of African Americans and Native Americans. In Woodrow Wilson, Knott finds a worthy successor to Jefferson and Jackson. More than any of his predecessors, Wilson altered the nation’s expectations of what a president could be expected to achieve, putting in place the political machinery to support a “presidential government.”
As difficult as it might be to recover the lost soul of the American presidency, Knott reminds us of presidents who resisted pandering to public opinion and appealed to our better angels—George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and William Howard Taft, among others—whose presidencies suggest an alternative and offer hope for the future of the nation’s highest office.
David Barnett writes about books and comics for the Guardian. The graveyard, he writes,is the main setting for [his] novel Things Can Only Get Better. It’s set in 1996, when Arthur, who is in his 70s, is so grief-stricken by the death of his wife Molly that he refuses to leave her graveside, eventually moving into and fixing up a derelict chapel and becoming a sort of unofficial caretaker.At the Guardian, Barnett tagged his ten favorite books about graveyards, including:
The Graveyard Book by Neil GaimanRead about another entry on the list.
It stands to reason, for those of a certain bent, that cemeteries, being the resting places of the dead, will be home to ghosts. The spirits who haunt Neil Gaiman’s 2008 children’s book are benign, taking in and looking after Nobody “Bod” Owens, the only survivor of his family’s massacre at the hands of a serial killer called Jack. There are supernatural menaces to be overcome, but ultimately the real evil is done by the living.
About the book, from the publisher:FLY HARDRead more about Steel Frame; follow Andrew Skinner on Twitter.
Rook is a jockey, a soldier trained and modified to fly ‘shells,’ huge robots that fight for the outer regions of settled space. When her shell is destroyed and her squad killed, Rook is imprisoned, left stranded, scarred and broken. Hollow and helpless without her steel frame, she’s ready to call it quits.
When her cohort of prisoners are sold into indenture to NorCol, a vast frontier corporation, Rook’s given another shell – a near-decrepit Juno, as broken as she is and decades older – and sent to a rusting bucket of a ship on the end of known space to patrol something called “the Eye,” a strange, unnerving permanent storm in space.
Where something is stirring...
As an agent and an author, I read for a living, so when I read for fun, I read whatever strikes my fancy. Here are just some of the books cluttering my bedside table at the moment.About Blind Search, from the publisher:
The novel I’m reading now
The Far Empty, by J. Todd Scott. I had just started what Craig Johnson calls “a powerful new voice in contemporary western crime fiction” when I found out that the author would be my tablemate at the Speed Dating at Bouchercon. Serendipity! And, happily, I can tell everyone participating what a great writer he is. He knows his bleak Texas borderlands, and it shows. This book is one of those gritty stories that...[read on]
Former Army MP Mercy Carr and her retired bomb-sniffing dog Elvis are back in Blind Search, the sequel to the page-turning, critically acclaimed A Borrowing of BonesVisit Paula Munier's website.
It’s October, hunting season in the Green Mountains—and the Vermont wilderness has never been more beautiful or more dangerous. Especially for nine-year-old Henry, who’s lost in the woods. Again. Only this time he sees something terrible. When a young woman is found shot through the heart with a fatal arrow, Mercy thinks that something ismurder. But Henry, a math genius whose autism often silences him when he should speak up most, is not talking.
Now there’s a murderer hiding among the hunters in the forest—and Mercy and Elvis must team up with their crime-solving friends, game warden Troy Warner and search-and-rescue dog Susie Bear, to find the killer—before the killer finds Henry. When an early season blizzard hits the mountains, cutting them off from the rest of the world, the race is on to solve the crime, apprehend the murderer, and keep the boy safe until the snowplows get through.
Inspired by the true search-and-rescue case of an autistic boy who got lost in the Vermont wilderness, Paula Munier's mystery is a compelling roller coaster ride through the worst of winter—and human nature.
Pam Grossman is a writer, curator, and teacher of magical practice and history. She is the host of The Witch Wave podcast (“the Terry Gross of Witches” - Vulture) and the author of Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power and What Is A Witch.Circe in Circe by Madeline MillerRead about another entry on the list.
Many will recall Circe as the sorceress from The Odyssey who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs. But Miller’s expansion of thissmall episode into an entire book about Circe’s life is an act of great alchemy itself. This Circe is a black sheep—or disdained demi-goddess—whose witchy ways mean she doesn’t quite fit in with her illustrious Olympian family. However, her supernatural skills allow her to tap into the powers of plants and animals, and witchcraft becomes a means for her to protect those she cares about. Circe spends much of the novel in isolation on the island of Aiaia. But rather than feeling imprisoned, she turns her solitude into an oasis of self-actualization. Like any good witch, she relishes having sovereignty over her home—and herself.
About the book, from the publisher:In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today.Visit Anne Nelson's website.
In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.
In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading.
About the book, from the publisher:The secrets of those closest to us can be the most dangerous of all.Visit Siri Mitchell's website.
Months after her husband, Sean, is killed by a hit-and-run driver, physicist Georgie Brennan discovers he lied to her about where he had been going that day. A cryptic notebook, a missing computer, and strange noises under her house soon have her questioning everything she thought she knew.
With her job hanging by a thread, her son struggling to cope with his father’s death, and her four-star general father up for confirmation as the next secretary of defense, Georgie quickly finds herself tangled in a web of political intrigue that has no clear agenda and dozens of likely villains.
Only one thing is clear: someone wants her dead too. And the more she digs for the truth, the fewer people she can trust.
Not her friends.
Not her parents.
Maybe not even herself.
Daniel Jones has edited the "Modern Love" column in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times since its inception in October 2004. His books include two essay anthologies, Modern Love and The Bastard on the Couch, and a novel, After Lucy, which was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award.Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love by Helen FisherRead about another entry on the list.
We are so eager to think about love and romance as being magical and fated that we often forget how chemical and biological attraction can be. If you want to know what’s really happening when we fall in love—or how we keep it, or lose it—you’ll need to read this book. You’ll find out, for example, how when we fall in love, the blood flow actually changes in our brains. And other places too, of course!
With so many great actresses creating great TV and films these days – not to mention producing and directing – well, casting the movie version of my book is like being in a candy store. But I’m not gonna let that sway me. No. Okay, maybe I am. No, I’m not. I’m going to choose the right people, not the most famous ones. Okay, maybe the right people are the most famous ones? Don’t judge me.Visit Kelly Simmons's website.
Where She Went is written from the twin perspectives of a missing college student and her helicopter mother, who is trying to find her. We get to follow each woman’s path, a few days apart, as the daughter’s decisions go from bad to worse and the mother’s go from unhinged to intelligent. So the question becomes . . . who do I want to see unhinge?
For the daughter, Emma, I can’t help but long for Kaitlyn Dever, who is so amazing in the movie Booksmart. Her emotions radiate across her entire face, and her physical ability to play subtle or broad is admirable, too.
For the mom, Maggie, I’d like to see...[read on]
Steven L. Kent and Nicholas Kaufmann are the authors of the bestselling horror novel 100 Fathoms Below.Major Sergei Sergeevich Pribuluda: Gorky Park by Martin Cruz-SmithRead about another entry on the list.
Three bodies are found in Gorky Park, in Moscow, in 1981—a decade before the fall of the Soviet Union. The bodies have been buried in snow. No telling how long they’ve been dead. Their faces have been cut. Their teeth are kicked in. Their fingers have been snipped off. In the pre-DNA days of the 1980s, they are unidentifiable. Only, a lowly inspector isassigned to identify them and catch the killer.
During the investigation the lowly policeman crosses paths with Major Pribluda of the KGB. These boys know each other, but they aren’t pals. They both enforce the law, more or less, but Pribluda’s definition of law enforcement includes driving “criminals” to the lake, stuffing rubber balls in their mouths so they can’t scream for help, and shooting them. . .all to protect the proletariat.
As monsters go, Pribluda is a chubby, dangerous sociopath with a heart. No joke. He is one of the more interesting and noble monsters we have encountered in our reading.
His entry begins:My recent reading tends away from the Civil War and the research required for my new book about the Civil War, Hymns of the Republic. If you had asked this question a year ago, I would have had to choose which of the 275 volumes in my office at that moment (all from the University of Texas Library), all about the Civil War and its era, that I would write about.About Hymns of the Republic, from the publisher:
Here are some things I have been looking at:
The Slough House books by Mick Herron. I am currently reading Dead Lions, having just finished Slow Horses. I have been looking for a replacement for John Le Carre—one of my favorite writers—for a long time. Most spy fiction is cliche-ridden drivel. The good news is I have finally discovered someone who can really write in that genre. Herron does not try to copy Le Carre, exactly, but he...[read on]
From the New York Times bestselling, celebrated, and award-winning author of Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell comes the spellbinding, epic account of the dramatic conclusion of the Civil War.Visit S.C. Gwynne's website.
The fourth and final year of the Civil War offers one of that era’s most compelling narratives, defining the nation and one of history’s great turning points. Now, S.C. Gwynne’s Hymns of the Republic addresses the time Ulysses S. Grant arrives to take command of all Union armies in March 1864 to the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox a year later. Gwynne breathes new life into the epic battle between Lee and Grant; the advent of 180,000 black soldiers in the Union army; William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea; the rise of Clara Barton; the election of 1864 (which Lincoln nearly lost); the wild and violent guerrilla war in Missouri; and the dramaticfinal events of the war, including the surrender at Appomattox and the murder of Abraham Lincoln.
Hymns of the Republic offers angles and insights on the war that will surprise many readers. Robert E. Lee, known as a great general and southern hero, is presented here as a man dealing with frustration, failure, and loss. Ulysses S. Grant is known for his prowess as a field commander, but in the final year of the war he largely fails at that. His most amazing accomplishments actually began the moment he stopped fighting. William Tecumseh Sherman, Gwynne argues, was a lousy general, but probably the single most brilliant man in the war. We also meet a different Clara Barton, one of the greatest and most compelling characters, who redefined the idea of medical care in wartime. And proper attention is paid to the role played by large numbers of black union soldiers—most of them former slaves. They changed the war and forced the South to come up with a plan to use its own black soldiers.
Popular history at its best, from Pulitzer Prize finalist S.C. Gwynne, Hymns of the Republic reveals the creation that arose from destruction in this thrilling read.
Saeed Jones is the author of Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015.
We the Animals by Justin Torres (2011).Read about another entry on the list.
Michael Cunningham rightfully called this autobiographical novel a "dark jewel." When I was working on my memoir, I often thought about how Torres uses lyricism to color the emotional nuances of the main character's coming-of-age experiences.
About the book, from the publisher:From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home.Visit Stuart Schrader's website.
In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance—and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A “smoking gun” book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, “law and order” politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.
Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Costalegre, Touch, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, and the handbook Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting, and surviving your first book, forthcoming from Catapult. Her writing has been widely published in such outlets as BuzzFeed; the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; and Poets & Writers.The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie BenjaminRead about another entry on the list.
When you’ve got a long weekend ahead of you and a brain that needs some candy, treat yourself to Benjamin’s exuberant portrayal of socialite Babe Paley’s headline-making friendship with Truman Capote in the martini-fueled corridors of 1950s high-society New York.
Inspired by a true story, this supernatural thriller for fans of horror and true crime follows a tale as it evolves every twenty years—with terrifying results.Visit Clay McLeod Chapman's website.
Ella Louise has lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, for nearly a decade. Publicly, she and her daughter, Jessica, are shunned by her upper-crust family and the local residents. Privately, desperate characters visit her apothecary for a cure to what ails them—until Ella Louise is blamed for the death of a prominent customer. Accused of witchcraft, Ella Louise and Jessica are burned at the stake in the middle of the night. Ella Louise’s burial site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South: a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses.
Their story will take the shape of an urban legend as it’s told around a campfire by a man forever marked by his childhood encounters with Jessica. Decades later, a boy at that campfire will cast Amber Pendleton as Jessica in a ’70s horror movie inspired by the Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek. Amber’s experiences on that set and its meta-remake in the ’90s will ripple through pop culture, ruining her life and career after she becomes the target of a witch hunt.
Amber’s best chance to break the cycle of horror comes when a true-crime investigator tracks her down to interview her for his popular podcast. But will this final act of storytelling redeem her—or will it bring the story full circle, ready to be told once again? And again. And again...
Deborah Crombie is a New York Times bestselling author and a native Texan who has lived in both England and Scotland. She now lives in McKinney, Texas, sharing a house that is more than one hundred years old with her husband, two cats, and two German shepherds.
Wicked Autumn, by G.M. MallietRead about another entry on the list.
In 2011, G.M. Malliet debuted the first in her Max Tudor series with a fresh take on the village mystery. Max Tudor, former MI5 agent, now ministers to his congregation in the tiny village of Nether Monkslip. But village life is not as idyllic as he imagined, and he soon must call on his old skills to solve a murder. A wickedly humorous skewering of the village trope, with modern sensibilities and depth of characterization.
About the book, from the publisher:Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void. Whereas much attention has (rightfully) focused on the structuring of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, few sociologists have attended to the ongoing process of North American colonialism. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today.Learn more about Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People at the Rutgers University Press website.
organizing food crawls over London and binge-watching Korean dramas. Christo has a BA in Creative Writing and currently lives in England with an abundance of cacti (because they’re the only plants she can keep alive). She is the author of To Kill a Kingdom and Into the Crooked Place.A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. SchwabRead about another entry on the list.
“I’d rather die on an adventure than live standing still.”Lila lives in the real world, where she has to steal to survive. And Kell lives in a world of parallel Londons, where he is one of the last magic-wielders who can travel between them. Lila is a thief. Kell is a smuggler. And when the Londons start falling apart, theyhave to work together to stop the threads of magic from unravelling.
Now, I have a soft spot for Kell BUT… oh, Lila. The queen of thieves and snarky pirates.
Lila makes her living as a pick pocket in book one of this magical series (what? That’s a good pun!), and then she’s thrust into a world of different Londons and a boy with a strange, ever-changing coat, and a battle for magic and the safety of the world. And she takes it in her stride.
Lila longs for adventure, thirsts for the magic, and though she’s used to looking out for number one, when the world’s on the line, Lila has her knives at the ready.
Famous in Cedarville opens with the death of retired silver screen actress Barbara Lace, so cinema plays a big role (pun 100% intended) in this book. Each chapter begins with a glimpse of Barbara’s life, so I imagine the movie would have some flashbacks or film clips. And I just really want to cast this character! I imagine the older version played by someone like Glenn Close. I like how Close chooses unexpected, challenging parts. In real life, she seems tough and glamorous. A little fierce. For the younger version, maybe Rachel Brosnahan? I could watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel every night. Brosnahan is so delightful in the role and also has that element of ferocity.Visit Erica Wright's website.
For my slightly awkward lead Samson Delaware, I’d go with David...[read on]
As a child Kate Kessler seemed to have a knack for finding trouble, and for it finding her. A former delinquent, Kessler now prefers to write about trouble rather than cause it, and spends her days writing about why people do the things they do. She lives in New England with her husband.Sadie by Courtney SummersRead about another entry on the list.
This is a Young Adult novel, but the theme is just as powerful. Sadie is on a quest to avenge the death of her younger sister, Maddie. Sadie is bent, but not broken, despite the instability of the world in which she grew up. Maddie was a bright spot in her sister’s life and someone took her away. They need to pay for that. Told in Sadie’s POV as well as through a podcast about the girls, Sadie is a beautifully written, compelling story about how far we’ll go for the people we love.
About the book, from the publisher:Today's global economy was largely established by political events and decisions in the 1980s and 90s, when scores of nations opened up their economies to the forces of globalization. In Free Traders, Malcolm Fairbrother argues that politicians' embrace of globalization was much less motivated by public preferences than by the agendas of businesspeople and other elites. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with decision-makers, and analyses of archival materials from Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., Fairbrother tells the story of how each country negotiated and ratified two agreements that substantially opened and integrated their economies: the 1989 Canada-U.S. and trilateral 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Contrary to what many commentators believe, these agreements-like free trade elsewhere-were based less on mainstream, neoclassical economics than on the informal, self-serving economic ideas of business. While the stakes in the globalization debate remain high, Free Traders uses a comparative-historical approach to sharpen our understanding of how globalization arose in the past to provide us with clearer trajectory for how it will develop in the future.Visit Malcolm Fairbrother's website.
From the bestselling author of Whisper Me This comes a haunting and lyrical novel about the promises we make and the forgiveness we need when we break them.Visit Kerry Anne King's website.
One tragic twist of fate destroyed Braden Healey’s hands, his musical career, and his family. Now, unable to play, adrift in an alcoholic daze, and with only fragmented memories of his past, Braden wants desperately to escape the darkness of the last eleven years.
When his ex-wife and son are killed in a car accident, Braden returns home, hoping to forge a relationship with his troubled seventeen-year-old daughter, Allie. But how can he hope to rescue her from the curse that seems to shadow his family?
Ophelia “Phee” MacPhee, granddaughter of the eccentric old man who sold Braden his cello, believes the curse is real. She swore an oath to her dying grandfather that she would ensure Braden plays the cello as long as he lives. But he can’t play, and as the shadows deepen and Phee finds herself falling for Braden, she’ll do anything to save him. It will take a miracle of forgiveness and love to bring all three of them back to the healing power of music.
The Trinity SixRead about another entry on the list.
Charles Cumming
An irresistible reimagining of the notorious Cambridge Spies scandal, The Trinity Six sees a Cold War academic on the trail of the sixth member of the traitorous ring. Intelligently written and tightly plotted, Cumming’s thrilling novel takes us into the dark heart of a Europe lethally divided.
About the book, from the publisher:The unforgettable saga of one enslaved woman's fight for justice--and reparationsVisit W. Caleb McDaniel's website.
Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position.
By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount, though the largest ever awarded by an American court in restitution for slavery, was the fact that any money was awarded at all. By the time the case was decided, Ward had become a wealthy businessman and a pioneer of convict leasing in the South. Wood's son later became a prominent Chicago lawyer, and she went on to live until 1912.
McDaniel's book is an epic tale of a black woman who survived slavery twice and who achieved more than merely a moral victory over one of her oppressors. Above all, Sweet Taste of Liberty is a portrait of an extraordinary individual as well as a searing reminder of the lessons of her story, which establish beyond question the connections between slavery and the prison system that rose in its place.
Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including the Tradd Street series, including The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street.Lady Julia Grey, created by Deanna RaybournRead about another entry on the list.
No era or setting shouts “mystery” quite like Victorian England. In the Lady Julia Grey series (Silent in the Grave is the first), Deanna Raybourn uses it to its best advantage.
The second youngest of ten children in the aristocratic March family (her father is an earl), Lady Julia is thrust into mystery-solvingwhen her husband is murdered and she must work alongside the private inquiry agent her late husband had hired to protect him to find the answers behind her husband’s death. Throw in the likeable March siblings as secondary characters and a little romance, and readers will have a very engaging read.
If you’re lucky enough to just be discovering this series now, you can binge read the nine titles currently in publication.
The entry begins:Rook is the character through whom you see the events of Steel Frame, and despite the fact that she’d be the lead in a movie adaptation, someone else will have to cast her! I made a conscious decision to leave her anonymous – there are no glances of herself in reflective surfaces, no one else commenting on her appearance – and I’d like to preserve that here. You could probably infer a lot of what she looks like from the parts of her history you encounter in the story, but given how damaging her past is, she’s probably really difficult to look at. Foremost, though, I wanted her capabilities to be separate from her appearance, and to let her actions define who and what she was.Read more about Steel Frame; follow Andrew Skinner on Twitter.
The other major characters are much easier! Hail and Salt are Rook’s squadmates. They’re other jockeys in the story – other frontier operators, piloting these giant machines.
For Hail, I’d cast somewhere between Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron; Blunt for her hard edges as the Angel of Verdun in Edge of Tomorrow (and maybe also because I enjoyed watching Tom Cruise be shot in the head over and over, who knows?), and Theron for that desert-dry harshness as Imperator Furiosa in Fury Road; Hail’s character is worn and calloused, but she’s survived things you can barely imagine. I want someone who’ll dig in heels, grind teeth, stand straight under the weight of monstrous things.
For Salt, I’m pretty set on...[read on]
Tiffany Francis-Baker is a writer, artist and environmentalist from the South Downs in Hampshire. With a mixed background in the arts, rural heritage and conservation, her work is fuelled by a love for the natural world and a passion for protecting it. She writes and illustrates for national publications and has appeared on BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4.The Taxidermist’s Daughter by Kate MosseRead about another entry on the list.
Mosse is the master of eerie historical thrillers and this 2014 novel, based around a remote stretch of the Sussex coast, does not disappoint. Opening as residents gather in a misty churchyard to celebrate St Mark’s Eve – a night when the ghosts of those fated to die in the coming year are said to appear –it plunges into a shadowy world of murder, secrets and amnesia. Delightfully disturbing, impossible to put down.
About the book, from the publisher:In her 1855 fictionalized autobiography, Mary Gove Nichols told the story of her emancipation from her first unhappy marriage, during which her husband controlled her body, her labor, and her daughter. Rather than the more familiar metaphor of prostitution, Nichols used adultery to define loveless marriages as a betrayal of the self, a consequence far more serious than the violation of a legal contract. Nichols was not alone. In Unfaithful, Carol Faulkner places this view of adultery at the center of nineteenth-century efforts to redefine marriage as a voluntary relationship in which love alone determined fidelity.Learn more about Unfaithful at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.
After the Revolution, Americans understood adultery as a sin against God and a crime against the people. A betrayal of marriage vows, adultery was a cause for divorce in most states as well as a basis for civil suits. Faulkner depicts an array of nineteenth-century social reformers who challenged the restrictive legal institution of marriage, redefining adultery as a matter of individual choice and love. She traces the beginning of this redefinition of adultery to the evangelical ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, when perfectionists like John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, concluded that marriage obstructed the individual's relationship to God. In the 1840s and 1850s, spiritualist, feminist, and free love critics of marriage fueled a growing debate over adultery and marriage by emphasizing true love and consent. After the Civil War, activists turned the act of adultery into a form of civil disobedience, culminating in Victoria Woodhull's publicly charging the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with marital infidelity.
Unfaithful explores how nineteenth-century reformers mobilized both the metaphor and the act of adultery to redefine marriage between 1830 and 1880 and the ways in which their criticisms of the legal institution contributed to a larger transformation of marital and gender relations that continues to this day.
Mallory O’Meara is the author of The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick.The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn KisteRead about another entry on the list.
This spectacularly feminist body horror book (is there any other kind of body horror to read?) won Gwendolyn Kiste last year’sBram Stoker Award for first novels. Two best friends have just graduated high school and are trying to figure their lives out in the industrial wasteland of 1980s Cleveland, Ohio. Meanwhile, the girls in their neighborhood are also changing, but not in a philosophical, college-bound way. These young women are slowly transforming into grotesque creatures made out of glass and corroded metal. No one knows what is happening or why, but our two main characters believe these rust maidens know more than they are telling. This might scratch your Stranger Things itch.
Best friends tell each other everything.Visit Tracey S. Phillips's website.
Even their deepest, darkest secrets–pinky promise.
Right?
Morgan Jewell and Fay Ramsey are enjoying their last summer together before college. Fay is shy, with a controlling mother, and Morgan is the perfect, wild, loud-mouthed yang to Fay’s yin. But when Fay is found dead, Morgan’s entire world crumbles.
Years later, Morgan is still haunted by the abrupt end to her best friend’s life. She knew Fay held a secret in those final days, but Morgan, now a homicide detective, has failed to make a picture out of the crooked puzzle pieces she left behind. Nothing makes sense. The leads have run dry. Until she’s called to the scene of a murder: a woman whose body is left mangled, too similar to Fay’s to ignore.
Could it be? Morgan vowed to do right by Fay. This is the case she’s been waiting for to set her back on the killer’s trail. But the closer she gets, the harder it forces her to confront the memories of herself and her best friend. What was her secret? What got her killed? Maybe Morgan didn’t know her at all.
Erica Wright's new novel is Famous in Cedarville.The Tenth Muse by Catherine ChungRead about another entry on the list.
Perhaps I’m cheating a bit by including The Tenth Muse (one of my favorite books this year) on a noir list, but mysteries abound in this elegant, moving novel aboutfamily, love, and numbers. We meet our mathematician protagonist in the twilight of her life, intent on defying expectations by solving something called the Riemann hypothesis. Chung then takes us through the woman’s eventful life, showing us the lengths she travelled to earn the respect she deserves. Along the way, she tries to understand why her mother left when she was a child, and the surprising discoveries she makes are worthy of any blockbuster thriller.
A wide-ranging argument by a renowned anthropologist that the capacity to believe is what makes us humanLearn more about Why We Believe at the Yale University Press website.
Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities.
But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? A fascinating intervention into some of the most common misconceptions about human nature, this book employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief—the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea—is central to the human way of being in the world.
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