Six top crime novels set in small towns

Samantha Jayne Allen is the author of the Annie McIntyre Mysteries. She has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Common, and Electric Literature. Raised in small towns in Texas and California, she now lives with her husband in Atlanta.

Allen's new novel is Next of Kin.

[Q&A with Samantha Jayne Allen]

At CrimeReads she tagged six "titles that use crime as the vehicle and small towns as the fuel, all in service of a well-told story." One entry on the list:

Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy

A beautifully written, sharply observed novel told in alternating viewpoints of the residents of Colliersville, Indiana, Tornado Weather’s plot centers around the disappearance of a five-year-old girl who is last seen at the bus stop near her home during a tornado watch. But the real small-town mystery here is actually how the people in a community—in much of America, really—are both disparate and interlocked. Using the kaleidoscopic framework of many different voices, Kennedy examines the forces that both connect and divide the town’s residents: race, class, the feeling of being trapped (by poverty or sheer inertia), gossip, and perhaps even more powerfully, what’s left unsaid and unknown.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Tornado Weather; The Page 69 Test: Tornado Weather; Writers Read: Deborah E. Kennedy (July 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Caroline Leavitt’s "Days of Wonder"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Days of Wonder: A Novel by Caroline Leavitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

New York Times bestselling author Caroline Leavitt returns with a tantalizing, courageous story about mothers and daughters, guilt and innocence, and the lengths we go for love.

As a teenager, for a moment, Ella Fitchburg found love—yearning, breathless love—that consumed both her and her boyfriend, Jude, as they wandered the streets of New York City together. But her glorious life was pulled out from beneath her after she was accused of trying to murder Jude’s father, an imperious superior court judge. When she learns she’s pregnant shortly after receiving a long prison sentence, she reluctantly decides to give up the child.

Ella is released from prison after serving only six years and is desperate to turn the page on a new life, but she can’t seem to let go of her past. With only an address as a possible lead, she moves to Ann Arbor, Michigan, determined to get her daughter back. Hiding her identity and living in a constant state of deception, she finds that what she’s been searching for all along is a way to uncover—and live with—the truth. Yet a central mystery endures: neither Jude nor Ella can remember the events leading up to the attempted murder—that fateful night which led to Ella’s conviction.

For fans of Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace and Allegra Goodman’s Sam, Caroline Leavitt’s Days of Wonder is a gripping high-drama page-turner about the elusive nature of redemption and the profound reach of love.

Learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.

The Page 69 Test: Days of Wonder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kristalyn Marie Shefveland "Selling Vero Beach"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Selling Vero Beach: Settler Myths in the Land of the Aís and Seminole by Kristalyn Marie Shefveland.

About the book, from the publisher:

Separating “Old Florida” myths from realities in a tourist haven with a deep Indigenous past

Themes of unspoiled paradise tamed by progress can be seen in stories about pioneer history across the United States, especially in Florida. Selling Vero Beach explores how settlers from northern states created myths about the Indian River area on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, importing ideas about the region’s Indigenous peoples and marketing the land as an idyllic, fertile place of possibilities.

In this book, Kristalyn Shefveland describes how in the Gilded Age, Indian River Farms Company and other boosters painted the region as a wild frontier, conveniently accessible by train via Henry Flagler’s East Coast Railway. Shefveland provides an overview of local Aís and Seminole histories that were rewritten by salespeople, illustrates how agricultural companies used Native peoples as motifs on their fruit products, and includes never-before-published letters between Vero Beach entrepreneur Waldo Sexton and writer Zora Neale Hurston that highlight Sexton’s interest in story-spinning and sales.

Selling Vero Beach unpacks real and fabricated pasts, showing how the settler memory of Florida distorted or erased the fascinating actual history of the region. With a wide variety of stories invented to lure investors and tourists, many of which circulate to this day in a place that remains a top vacation destination, Vero Beach is an intriguing example of why and how certain pasts were concocted to sell Florida land and products.

Learn more about Selling Vero Beach at the University Press of Florida website.

The Page 99 Test: Selling Vero Beach.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about unconventional situationships

Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American.

Her work and writing have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

The Band is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Ma-Kellams tagged seven books that feature situationships "replete with the kind of sexual tension that makes you wonder: will they or won’t they?" One title on the list:

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Some readers went crazy over the fact that at the end of 432 pages, Selin and Ivan (the protagonist and her love interest) seems to have never consummated their relationship. I found it the most relatable thing I read all year because I, too, spent all my college years in the same kind of sexual repression driven by a cocktail of being the good daughter of immigrants meets excessive intellect meets nerd school. Like the elusive Hungarian mathematician that is the (potentially underserved) target of Selin’s desires, the book can come off like a giant tease—the literary equivalent of blue balls—but then again, that might be part of its appeal.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Idiot is among Lauren Hutton's ten books about young women in (and out) of love and Katherine Heiny's eight of the best books about modern dating.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt

From my Q&A with Caroline Leavitt, author of Days of Wonder: A Novel:

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

Days of Wonder is a little deceptive as a name of a book because it’s a title of hope. The book is about two 15-year-olds from different classes in NYC who fall madly in love and are about to be separated by the boy’s abusive father, and so they start fantasizing about killing him. And then the fantasy veers into something realer, and both kids are accused of attempted murder. Both kids were sleep-deprived and drugged-up the night of crime, and neither can really remember just what happened. Jude, with a wealthy dad and a good lawyer, goes free, but Ella gets 25 years. When she’s early released after six years, she’s desperate to find Jude, to find her child, and to find out what really happened that night, and why?

Doesn’t seem like the stuff of wonder, does it? But I wanted to focus on the bright glints of life or hope that appear in a lot of the novel’s darkness. Yes, this great gorgeous young love is destroyed, but like that great old movie, Splendor in the Grass, there is always the memory of it. Things don’t work out the way any of the characters imagine they will, and there is a tremendous cost to everyone, but out of that darkness, there is growth, understanding, and yeah, a sense of wonder about how the world works. I wanted that wonder to be revealed at the end when...[read on]

Visit Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Regina Kunzel's "In the Shadow of Diagnosis"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life by Regina Kunzel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.

In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

Learn more about In the Shadow of Diagnosis at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Criminal Intimacy.

The Page 99 Test: In the Shadow of Diagnosis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books for fans of David Nicholls's "One Day"

British author David Nicholls is best-known for the globally bestselling love story One Day, adapted first as a feature film and more recently as a major Netflix production. It charts the lives of two people over 20 years on the same day. People magazine called it an "instant classic.... One of the most ...emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter."

Nicholls's new novel is You Are Here.

At the Waterstones blog Mark Skinner tagged nine literary love stories for fans of One Day. One title on the list:

Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Rootless Hannah finds her future split two ways as she decides whether or not to spend the night with her high school boyfriend in this escapist romance from the bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

Read about another entry on the list.

Maybe in Another Life is among David M. Barnett's top ten summer love stories and Phoebe Fox's seven books to help you cope with heartbreak.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Helen Benedict's "The Good Deed"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Good Deed by Helen Benedict.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set in 2018 against the ironic backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful, Homeric island of Samos in Greece, The Good Deed follows the stories of five women: Amina, who is nineteen and has just been released from one of Bashar al-Assad's secret and torture-ridden prisons in Syria; Leila, a Syrian widow with two little sons, who has lost her daughter and granddaughter to smugglers on a Turkish beach; Nafisa, who survived civil war and gang rape in Sudan only to see her entire family murdered, save for one daughter; Farah, Leila's lost daughter; and finally, an American named Hilma, who came from New York to Samos to escape her own dark secret, only to become entangled in conflict with the very people she wishes to help.

Drawing from four years of interviews with refugees on Samos, along with twelve previous years of work on the Iraq War, Benedict has written The Good Deed as a series of lyrical, intensely felt alternating voices, following these women’s everyday lives in the camp, as well each of their backstories—stories of families, love, secrets, violence, war, and flight. When Hilma, the American, unwittingly does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

In essence, The Good Deed is about the struggle never to lose hope, even in the face of war and the world’s hostility to refugees; the complexities that arise out of trying to help others; the healing power of friendship; and the everlasting bonds between mothers and children.

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

The Page 69 Test: The Good Deed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Charles Trueheart's "Diplomats at War"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict by Charles Trueheart.

About the book, from the publisher:

For two Americans in Saigon in 1963, the personal and the political combine to spark the drama of a lifetime

Before it spread into a tragic war that defined a generation, the conflict in Vietnam smoldered as a guerrilla insurgency and a diplomatic nightmare. Into this volatile country stepped Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, the US ambassador, and his second-in-command, William “Bill” Trueheart, immortalized in David Halberstam’s landmark work The Best and the Brightest and accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern US history.

Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart—Bill’s son and Nolting’s godson—who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States’ headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point—that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, served as a dramatic preface to the United States’ disastrous involvement in the Vietnam conflict.

Visit Charles Trueheart's website.

The Page 99 Test: Diplomats at War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five great murder mysteries set in college towns

Harry Dolan is the author of the mystery/suspense novels Bad Things Happen, Very Bad Men, The Last Dead Girl, The Man In The Crooked Hat, and The Good Killer. He graduated from Colgate University, where he majored in philosophy and studied fiction-writing with the novelist Frederick Busch. A native of Rome, New York, he now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Dolan's new novel is Don't Turn Around.

At CrimeReads he tagged "five crime novels that have entertained and influenced me—all of them set in college towns." One title on the list:

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Scarlett Clark is a professor of English literature at Pennsylvania’s Gorman University—and a killer who targets men who abuse Gorman’s female students. She’s been getting away with it for sixteen years, but her most recent kill prompts the university to set up a task force to look into the suspicious deaths that keep happening on campus. Now she’ll need to take special care as she plans her next murder and strikes up a relationship with the head of the task force, Mina Pierce. In a parallel storyline, Gorman student Carly Schiller witnesses an assault on her roommate Allison at a party and begins to think about taking revenge on the fellow student who’s responsible. Fargo writes in short, propulsive chapters that ratchet up the tension on the way to a conclusion that’s both disturbing and satisfying.

Read about another entry on the list.

They Never Learn is among Katherine A. Olson's five top books with righteous female rage, Laura Picklesimer's seven dark and thrilling novels about women who kill, Julia Bartz's five thrillers featuring female psychopaths, Misha Popp's eight recent novels featuring truly fatal femmes fatales, Lesley Kara's six top crime novels about settling old scores, Heather Levy's top eight books on those darkest guilty pleasures we love to devour, Melissa Colasanti's six deliciously duplicitous female characters in thrillers, Amy Gentry's novels of the new Dark Academia canon, and Molly Odintz's six best vigilante thrillers.

My Book, The Movie: They Never Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jo Perry reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jo Perry, author of The World Entire.

One title she tagged:

Matt Phillips’s latest, A Good Rush of Blood (Run Amok Crime) delineates delicate, complicated and sharp-edged persons and places in a stark, sexy thriller about family estrangement and liberation, trust and betrayal, and the search for the mirage we call freedom in a world as unnourishing and beautiful as the desert Phillips conjures to life. It’s no surprise that AGROB is a 2024 Thriller Award finalist. Phillips also...[read on]

About The World Entire, from the publisher:

Ascher Lieb (PURE) returns in a fast-moving, intense, and layered mystery about a dog accused of murder and a violent group that targets the man Ascher loves.

But love is complicated. And to save the dog, Ascher must find the murderer on her own and risk everything to fulfill an impossible and dangerous promise.

Visit Jo Perry's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Jo Perry & Lola and Lucy.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Better.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Better.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Best.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Best.

My Book, The Movie: Dead Is Good.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Is Good.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Beautiful.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Beautiful.

Writers Read: Jo Perry (February 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Pure.

Q&A with Jo Perry.

The Page 69 Test: Pure.

The Page 69 Test: The World Entire.

Writers Read: Jo Perry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Leavitt's "Days of Wonder," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder: A Novel by Caroline Leavitt.

The entry begins:

Days of Wonder is about two fifteen-year-old kids, Jude and Ella, who fall passionately in love, and when the boy’s father threatens to separate them, they fantasize about killing him. Until it’s no longer fantasy. But both are exhausted and sleep deprived, and using drugs to stay awake, and on the night of an attempted murder of the dad, neither one can remember what really happened. Ella goes to jail, gives up a baby, and is let out early, but Jude vanishes. As Ella struggles to create a new identity, she is desperate to learn what happened that night? What is the truth?

One of my favorite movies is Rust and Bone, a French film about a woman who used to train Orcas, who loses her legs in an accident with them and falls for a very tough, very wounded guy. Directed by Jacques Audiard, it...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Douglas Dowland's "We, Us, and Them"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump by Douglas Dowland.

About the book, from the publisher:

When Americans describe their compatriots, who exactly are they talking about? This is the urgent question that Douglas Dowland asks in We, Us, and Them. In search of answers, he turns to narratives of American nationhood written since the Vietnam War—stories in which the ostensibly strong state of the Union has been turned increasingly into an America of us versus them. Dowland explores how a range of writers across the political spectrum, including Hunter S. Thompson, James Baldwin, and J. D. Vance, articulate a particular vision of America with such strong conviction that they undermine the unity of the country they claim to extol. We, Us, and Them pinpoints instances in which criticism leads to cynicism, rage leads to apathy, and a broad vision narrows in our present moment.

Learn more about We, Us, and Them at the University of Virginia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: We, Us, and Them.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top thrillers about dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships

K.T. Nguyen's features have appeared in Glamour, Shape, and Fitness. After graduating from Brown University, she spent her 20s and 30s bouncing from New York City to San Francisco, Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei, and has now settled just outside Washington, D.C. with her family. Nguyen enjoys native plant gardening, playing with her rescue terrier Alice and rooting for the Mets.

You Know What You Did is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit Nguyen tagged eight thrillers that "explore the darker side of mother daughter relationships ...[and] deliver raw emotion, tension, and complexity." One title on the list:

Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel

Loosely inspired by the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case, Darling Rose Gold quickly departs from its real-life source material to create an even more twisted mother-daughter relationship, predicated on coercive control, simmering rage, and the blinding need for validation. The novel opens as Patty Watts is released from prison after serving five years for poisoning and abusing her daughter Rose Gold in a case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome. Patty makes the chilling declaration, “My daughter didn’t have to testify against me. She chose to.” So why is Rose Gold now welcoming her mother back into her life? Wrobel expertly wields dual timelines and head-to-head POVs to craft a taut cat-and-mouse story, only the roles of predator and prey shift constantly between mother and daughter in a delightfully destabilizing turn.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Darling Rose Gold.

My Book, The Movie: Darling Rose Gold.

Q&A with Stephanie Wrobel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Victor Lodato's "Honey"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Honey: A Novel by Victor Lodato.

About the book, from the publisher:

Meet a woman as tenacious as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and as irresistible as Andrew Sean Greer’s Arthur Less: Honey Fasinga, the glamorous daughter of a notorious New Jersey mobster, is returning home at last, ready to reckon with her violent past.

As a rebellious teenager, Honey managed to escape her father’s circle of influence and reinvent herself in a world of art and beauty, working for a high-end auction house in Los Angeles. Now in her twilight years, she decides to return home and unexpectedly falls in love. But in her family, nothing has changed. When her grandnephew Michael bursts into her life in what appears to be a drug-fueled frenzy, and her Lexus gets jacked, it’s hard to keep minding her own business. As old cruelties begin to resurface, Honey is no longer sure what she really wants—to forgive or to avenge.

This electrifying literary breakout from PEN USA Award-winning author Victor Lodato is a masterful and deeply moving portrait of love in all its forms, of moral ambiguity, and of inspiring change—a story of female rage that asks the question: What are the limits of compassion in a world gone mad?

Visit Victor Lodato's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mathilda Savitch.

The Page 69 Test: Honey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Kinley's "The Liberty Paradox"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Liberty Paradox: Living with the Responsibilities of Freedom by David Kinley.

About the book, from the publisher:

How do we balance freedom with the responsibilities we owe each other as members of society?

Are we free to do whatever we want? This idea challenges us throughout our daily lives, from how to tackle pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates to how to respond to technological innovations and climate change warnings. In The Liberty Paradox, David Kinley argues that we must rehabilitate the notion of liberty by rescuing it from the myopic demands of freedom without limit and reinstating the essential ingredient of social responsibility.

Combining political, philosophical, and personal reflections as a global human rights lawyer, Kinley examines the implications of this liberty reset for how we negotiate freedom's boundaries in the realms of wealth, work, health, happiness, security, voice, love, and death. With chapters dedicated to each of these life-defining domains and written in a style both engaging and insightful, The Liberty Paradox explores how we try―and often fail―to balance personal desires and public interests. Kinley concludes that preserving liberty and protecting it from radical individualism requires new ways of respecting each other and rebuilding trust in the institutions and people that govern us.

Learn more about The Liberty Paradox at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Liberty Paradox.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books to understand modern China

Amy Hawkins is the Guardian's senior China correspondent.

One of five books she tagged that "are a good place to start if you want to know more about [China] and its people:"

Red Memory by Tania Branigan

What was the Cultural Revolution? The decade of mass killings, political purges and the ruthless assertion of power “is impossible to understand”, writes Branigan, the Guardian leader writer and former China correspondent. Nevertheless, it is central to understanding China today. Rather than focusing on a historical analysis of how such fervour and hatred tore across the country, Branigan focuses on the people whose lives were upended by that period of social remoulding. Crucially, she argues convincingly, the Cultural Revolution is not just a historical curiosity: its terror, and efforts to forget the depravity wreaked by campaign, continue to be felt.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Helen Benedict

From my Q&A with Helen Benedict, author of The Good Deed:

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

I think titles are of utmost importance to the writer and the reader. For the writer, they serve to distill, even if subliminally, what the book is actually about and even its mood and point of view, so it's essential to get it right. If the title is ironic or funny, that sets an inescapable tone for the whole book. Likewise, if the title is poetic, quirky, funny, weird, surreal, or deadly earnest. For the reader, the title signals all that and more because basically it's calling out, "See how intriguing I am? Read me!"

Because of all this, I often go through dozens of titles before I find the right one. But best is when a title comes to me right away and sticks. That happened with The Good Deed. It is ironic but serious, implying that a good deed is not all it seems, that it might even be the opposite, just as that road of good intentions is. I hope readers will find the title intriguing and just mysterious enough to make them want to read the inside of the book, too, especially when they see those words over the picture on the cover, which shows an empty lifejacket floating in the sea. Is the book about the good deed of...[read on]

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas M. Larkin's "The China Firm"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society by Thomas M. Larkin.

About the book, from the publisher:

What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong Kong–based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm’s rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China’s American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks.

Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire.

Learn more about The China Firm at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The China Firm.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven of the best books about John F. Kennedy

Emily Burack is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, and a range of other subjects.

At Town & Country she tagged eleven top books about John F. Kennedy, including:

JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 by Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall focuses in on JFK's childhood through his time in the Senate in this biography, the first in a two-part planned series. Lovegall explains, "the conceit of the book is that I can tell two stories together: the story of John F. Kennedy’s rise and the story of America’s rise. I believe we can better understand the first half of the so-called American Century through the lens of Kennedy’s life."

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue