Ten top books about gardens

Vivian Swift is a travel writer. Sort of. Her first book was a travel story, sort of; it was all about staying put: When Wanderers Cease to Roam. Her latest book is Gardens of Awe and Folly: A Traveler's Journal on the Meaning of Life and Gardening.

One of Swift's top ten books about gardens, as shared at the Guardian:

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Here is a garden that is not only scary, but lethal. You probably already know the story of the orphaned Mary Lennox, “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen”, and her rehabilitation of the spooky walled-in garden with the killer tree (the one the late Mrs Craven fell out of). But you probably did not know that Hodgson Burnett wrote this iconic English fable in the US, in her home on Long Island, less than three miles from where I live. This fact inspired me to believe that great garden writers can come from anywhere, even one’s own dull suburb.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Secret Garden is one of Mary Sebag-Montefiore's top ten classics every child should read before they are 10.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Alecia Whitaker's "The Way Back Home"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Way Back Home by Alecia Whitaker.

About the book, from the publisher:

Music sensation Bird Barrett is hitting the road, headlining her first national tour after the launch of her second album. Singing to sold-out crowds can mess with a girl's sense of perspective, though. Luckily, Bird has her older brother, Dylan, and her best friend, Stella, along for the ride to keep her grounded.

Then Dylan and Stella pair off as more than friends. Feeling left behind, Bird throws herself completely into her performances, cover shoots, and high-profile interviews. And the more she tries to distract herself with her career, the further she pushes everyone away-including her longtime crush, Adam Dean, who joined the tour as her opener. When Bird breaks down, she'll need help to find her footing again. But has she pushed everyone too far? In a life like this one, a country girl needs her family and friends-and maybe an old flame-most of all.

A foot-stompin' finale to Alecia Whitaker's irresistible Wildflower series.

Learn more about the book and author at Alecia Whitaker's website.

The Page 69 Test: Wildflower.

The Page 69 Test: The Way Back Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best whodunits

John Verdon's newest mystery-thriller featuring retired NYPD homicide detective Dave Gurney is Wolf Lake. One of the author's ten best whodunits, as shared at Publishers Weekly:

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

A lively sense of place captivates me. Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park gave me a visceral experience not only of the weather and geography of Moscow but of the corrupt culture, tricky politics, and dangerous pressures of life there in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Insert into that twisted environment an honest, relentless detective pursuing against all odds a truth that seemingly no one in power wants him to discover, and the result is a deeply absorbing thriller.

Read about another entry on the list.

Gorky Park is among Ann Shevchenko's top ten novels set in Moscow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Gareth Dale's "Karl Polanyi"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left by Gareth Dale.

About the book, from the publisher:

Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) was one of the twentieth century's most original interpreters of the market economy. His penetrating analysis of globalization's disruptions and the Great Depression's underlying causes still serves as an effective counterargument to free market fundamentalism. This biography shows how the major personal and historical events of his life transformed him from a bourgeois radical into a Christian socialist but also informed his ambivalent stance on social democracy, communism, the New Deal, and the shifting intellectual scene of postwar America.

The book begins with Polanyi's childhood in the Habsburg Empire and his involvement with the Great War and Hungary's postwar revolution. It connects Polanyi's idealistic radicalism to the political promise and intellectual ferment of Red Vienna and the horror of fascism. The narrative revisits Polanyi's oeuvre in English, German, and Hungarian, includes exhaustive research in five archives, and features interviews with Polanyi's daughter, students, and colleagues, clarifying the contradictory aspects of the thinker's work. These personal accounts also shed light on Polanyi's connections to scholars, Christians, atheists, journalists, hot and cold warriors, and socialists of all stripes. Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left engages with Polanyi's biography as a reflection and condensation of extraordinary times. It highlights the historical ruptures, tensions, and upheavals that the thinker sought to capture and comprehend and, in telling his story, engages with the intellectual and political history of a turbulent epoch.

Learn more about Karl Polanyi at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Karl Polanyi.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Gail Carriger reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Gail Carriger, author of Imprudence.

Her entry begins:

Lately I've been rereading some of my favorite Space Opera. I go through phases sometimes where I just want to escape anything to do with what I write (steampunk, comedy of manners, historical). I yearn to read something completely different and space opera always seems to satisfy.

I just completed my third go round of The Paradox Series by Rachel Bach. Devi is a badass mercenary with a core set of moral values who generally bumbles along killing things until she kind-of accidentally-on-purpose saves everyone. Why I love it? I get to...[read on]

About Imprudence, from the publisher:

Rue and the crew of the Spotted Custard return from India with revelations that shake the foundations of England's scientific community. Queen Victoria is not amused, the vampires are tetchy, and something is wrong with the local werewolf pack. To top it all off, Rue's best friend Primrose keeps getting engaged to the most unacceptable military types.

Rue has family problems as well. Her vampire father is angry, her werewolf father is crazy, and her obstreperous mother is both. Worst of all, Rue's beginning to suspect what they really are... is frightened.

Learn more about the book and author at Gail Carriger's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Soulless.

The Page 69 Test: Changeless.

The Page 69 Test: Waistcoats & Weaponry.

The Page 69 Test: Prudence.

My Book, The Movie: Prudence.

The Page 69 Test: Manners & Mutiny.

Writers Read: Gail Carriger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ruth Downie's "Vita Brevis"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Vita Brevis: A Crime Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie.

About Vita Brevis, from the publisher:

Ruso and Tilla's excitement at arriving in Rome with their new baby daughter is soon dulled by their discovery that the grand facades of polished marble mask an underworld of corrupt landlords and vermin-infested tenements. There are also far too many doctors--some skilled--but others positively dangerous.

Ruso thinks he has been offered a reputable medical practice only to find that his predecessor Doctor Kleitos has fled, leaving a dead man in a barrel on the doorstep and the warning, “Be careful who you trust.” Distracted by the body and his efforts to help a friend win the hand of a rich young heiress, Ruso makes a grave mistake, causing him to question both his competence and his integrity.

With Ruso's reputation under threat, he and Tilla must protect their small family from Doctor Kleitos's debt collectors and find allies in their new home while they track down the vanished doctor and find out the truth about the heiress's dead father--Ruso's patient--and the unfortunate man in the barrel.

Learn more about the book and author at Ruth Downie's website.

The Page 69 Test: Caveat Emptor.

The Page 69 Test: Tabula Rasa.

Writers Read: Ruth Downie.

The Page 69 Test: Vita Brevis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven can't miss YA books set in Los Angeles

At the BN Teen Blog Dahlia Adler tagged seven top YA books set in Los Angeles, including:

American Girls, by Alison Umminger

Anna needs to get away from home, and there’s no better place to run for the summer than to her half sister in LA. But all is not golden sunshine on the left coast, and Anna finds herself slipping further into darkness when a research project takes her deeper into the lives of the Manson girls. Umminger’s debut is an artful homage to sisterhood and a nuanced look at teenage girldom—different kinds of emotional abuse, complicated relationships between all sorts of family members, the dark side of Hollywood and celebrity, the lack of sympathy and humanization we have for girls we deem to be stronger than us, and the all-important question of who’s worthy/capable of redemption and what it takes to get it.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see Becky Ferreira's list of seven of the best books set in Los Angeles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Egan's "Julia Vanishes," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Julia Vanishes by Catherine Egan.

The entry begins:

It must be incredibly strange (and exciting, of course!) for authors to watch screen adaptations of their books, the settings and characters reimagined by somebody else and surely deviating wildly from the author’s own vision.

The idea of “casting” my book stumps me almost completely; my characters are so themselves in my head that it’s impossible to imagine them any other way. However, I was able to think of actors for the older members of Julia’s gang of crooks. Csilla and Gregor, the glamorous con artist duo, are the easiest to cast, since I always imagined them as a kind of “golden age of cinema” dreamy-looking pair. I’d say Gregory Peck for Gregor and Jayne Mansfield for Csilla. Esme, the crime boss who adopted Julia and Dek after their mother’s death, is trickier. She’s a large, powerful presence, somebody capable of being tender but also turning on a dime to be truly menacing. Maybe an even-taller-than-she-really-is...[read on]

Visit Catherine Egan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Julia Vanishes.

Writers Read: Catherine Egan.

My Book, The Movie: Julia Vanishes.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is John Gregory Brown reading?

Featured at Writers Read: John Gregory Brown, author of A Thousand Miles from Nowhere.

His entry begins:

I spent the last nine months teaching at the prep school Deerfield Academy, most famous in literary circles for distinguished alumnus John McPhee’s The Headmaster, a wonderful biography of Frank L. Boyden, the tiny man and towering presence who helmed the school from 1902 to 1968. Although I’d spent more than two decades in academia at the college level, this was my first experience as a high school teacher, a responsibility that seemed weighty indeed: What works would I choose for my juniors in their one year of American Lit? I was tormented by having to leave so many great authors off the syllabus, by all the great works these young men and women might never encounter on their own. We dipped into Whitman and Dickinson, of course; we compared August Wilson’s Fences to Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman; we gave Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby its full due. We tackled stories by Alice Munro and Amy Hempel, by Raymond Carver and Ron Rash. But the five works I truly loved teaching – and that the students thus loved back – were these:

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

For better or worse, young people these days know their way around despair. They know well how it crouches in the shadows of lives that appear to be fulfilling. And they’ve got a clear notion of what it might mean to find oneself constrained by circumstances one apparently chose of one’s own volition. Thus they see Edna Pontellier’s crisis as a familiar one, arising not just out of a society that narrowly defines who women should be but also...[read on]

About A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, from the publisher:

A tragicomic tour de force about one man's redemption through love and art.

"You have lost everything, yes?"

Everything? Henry thought; he considered the word. Had he lost everything?

Fleeing New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Henry Garrett is haunted by the ruins of his marriage, a squandered inheritance, and the teaching job he inexplicably quit. He pulls into a small Virginia town after three days on the road, hoping to silence the ceaseless clamor in his head. But this quest for peace and quiet as the only guest at a roadside motel is destroyed when Henry finds himself at the center of a bizarre and violent tragedy. As a result, Henry winds up stranded at the ramshackle motel just outside the small town of Marimore, and it's there that he is pulled into the lives of those around him: Latangi, the motel's recently widowed proprietor, who seems to have a plan for Henry; Marge, a local secretary who marshals the collective energy of her women's church group; and the family of an old man, a prisoner, who dies in a desperate effort to provide for his infirm wife.

For his previous novels John Gregory Brown has been lauded for his "compassionate vision of human destiny" as well as his "melodic, haunting, and rhythmic prose." With A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, he assumes his place in the tradition of such masterful storytellers as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, offering to readers a tragicomic tour de force about the power of art and compassion and one man's search for faith, love, and redemption.

Visit John Gregory Brown's website.

Writers Read: John Gregory Brown.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Shawna Yang Ryan's "Green Island"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan.

About the book, from the publisher:

A stunning story of love, betrayal, and family, set against the backdrop of a changing Taiwan over the course of the twentieth century.

February 28, 1947: Trapped inside the family home amid an uprising that has rocked Taipei, Dr. Tsai delivers his youngest daughter, the unnamed narrator of Green Island, just after midnight as the city is plunged into martial law. In the following weeks, as the Chinese Nationalists act to crush the opposition, Dr. Tsai becomes one of the many thousands of people dragged away from their families and thrown into prison. His return, after more than a decade, is marked by alienation from his loved ones and paranoia among his community—conflicts that loom over the growing bond he forms with his youngest daughter. Years later, this troubled past follows her to the United States, where, as a mother and a wife, she too is forced to decide between what is right and what might save her family—the same choice she witnessed her father make many years before.

As the novel sweeps across six decades and two continents, the life of the narrator shadows the course of Taiwan’s history from the end of Japanese colonial rule to the decades under martial law and, finally, to Taiwan’s transformation into a democracy. But, above all, Green Island is a lush and lyrical story of a family and a nation grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival, raising the question: how far would you be willing to go for the ones you love?

Learn more about the book and author at Shawna Yang Ryan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Water Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: Green Island.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top YA novels for mythology lovers

At the BN Teen blog, Jenny Kawecki tagged six top Young Adult novels for mythology lovers, including:

Helen of Troy: Starcrossed, by Josephine Angelini

Helen has always been different. And keeping her strange powers secret on the super-small island of Nantucket isn’t easy. So when a new family moves to town and Helen’s first instinct is to contemplate murdering their son Lucas, well, it comes as a bit of a surprise when it turns out Lucas may be the only one who knows what’s going on with her. It’s even more of a surprise when she realizes she might be falling in love with him. But things get complicated when an entire pantheon of Greek gods seems to be out to get them, and it looks like history just might repeat itself. Starcrossed is for anyone who ever read The Iliad and wondered what the hell was up with Helen and Paris.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's "Seinfeldia"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong.

About the book, from the publisher:

The hilarious behind-the-scenes story of two guys who went out for coffee and dreamed up Seinfeld—the cultural sensation that changed television and bled into the real world, altering the lives of everyone it touched.

Comedians Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld never thought anyone would watch their silly little sitcom about a New York comedian sitting around talking to his friends. NBC executives didn’t think anyone would watch either, but they bought it anyway, hiding it away in the TV dead zone of summer. But against all odds, viewers began to watch, first a few and then many, until nine years later nearly forty million Americans were tuning in weekly.

In Seinfeldia, acclaimed TV historian and entertainment writer Jennifer Keishin Armstrong celebrates the creators and fans of this American television phenomenon, bringing readers behind-the-scenes of the show while it was on the air and into the world of devotees for whom it never stopped being relevant, a world where the Soup Nazi still spends his days saying “No soup for you!”, Joe Davola gets questioned every day about his sanity, Kenny Kramer makes his living giving tours of New York sights from the show, and fans dress up in Jerry’s famous puffy shirt, dance like Elaine, and imagine plotlines for Seinfeld if it were still on TV.

Visit Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's website.

My Book, The Movie: Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted.

The Page 99 Test: Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted.

The Page 99 Test: Seinfeldia.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Winter's six favorite books on girl power

Jessica Winter's first novel is Break in Case of Emergency. For The Week magazine she tagged six favorite books on girl power, including:

NW by Zadie Smith

Smith's 2012 masterpiece paints a wry and rueful portrait of contemporary Britain by zeroing in on a north London housing estate and a pair of lifelong friends: one hardworking but secretly reckless, the other all but sleepwalking through life. Their relationship is unforgettable; the fact that they never fully understand each other makes their mutual loyalty all the more moving.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ruth Downie reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Ruth Downie, author of Vita Brevis: A Crime Novel of the Roman Empire.

Her entry begins:

The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District – James Rebanks

This is a fabulous book on so many levels: a family history, a fascinating chronicle of a way of life that’s barely changed for centuries, and a howl of frustration at the lack of understanding between the education system and its rural consumers. It’s also a demonstration of the value of books. “We needed books by us and about us,” says Rebanks, and...[read on]

About Vita Brevis, from the publisher:

Ruso and Tilla's excitement at arriving in Rome with their new baby daughter is soon dulled by their discovery that the grand facades of polished marble mask an underworld of corrupt landlords and vermin-infested tenements. There are also far too many doctors--some skilled--but others positively dangerous.

Ruso thinks he has been offered a reputable medical practice only to find that his predecessor Doctor Kleitos has fled, leaving a dead man in a barrel on the doorstep and the warning, “Be careful who you trust.” Distracted by the body and his efforts to help a friend win the hand of a rich young heiress, Ruso makes a grave mistake, causing him to question both his competence and his integrity.

With Ruso's reputation under threat, he and Tilla must protect their small family from Doctor Kleitos's debt collectors and find allies in their new home while they track down the vanished doctor and find out the truth about the heiress's dead father--Ruso's patient--and the unfortunate man in the barrel.

Learn more about the book and author at Ruth Downie's website.

The Page 69 Test: Caveat Emptor.

The Page 69 Test: Tabula Rasa.

Writers Read: Ruth Downie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janice Warman's "The World Beneath," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The World Beneath: A Novel by Janice Warman.

The entry begins:

If The World Beneath was made into a film, I’d like Ava DuVernay to direct it. As the brilliant director of Selma, the story of Martin Luther King’s campaign to win equal voting rights with a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, she would be ideal to look at the issues of apartheid and the 1976 Soweto uprising that are the setting for the book.

I’m also a huge fan of David Oyelowo in the Martin Luther King role and would like him to play Tsumalo, the freedom fighter on the run.

I met Ava and David at a screening of Selma at London’s Mayfair Hotel last year, and afterwards gave them each a copy of the book to read. They were both charming. So here’s hoping. We sat in the front row, and during the Q&A I asked whether Ava had thought of making a film about apartheid South Africa. She said she’d consider it; David smiled at me and said, “Why, do you have a script?” I said no, but it had been a leading question, and he laughed and said, “If this was LA, there would be scripts raining down from the back of the room!”

I would like Joshua, the boy hero, to be played by...[read on]

Follow Janice Warman on Twitter.

My Book, The Movie: The World Beneath.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kim Wright's "Last Ride to Graceland"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Last Ride to Graceland by Kim Wright.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lauded for her “astute and engrossing” (People) writing style imbued with “originality galore” (RT Book Reviews), Kim Wright channels the best of Jennifer Weiner and Sarah Pekkanen in this delightful novel of self-discovery on the open road as one woman sets out for Graceland hoping to answer the question: Is Elvis Presley her father?

Blues musician Cory Ainsworth is barely scraping by after her mother’s death when she discovers a priceless piece of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia hidden away in a shed out back of the family’s coastal South Carolina home: Elvis Presley’s Stutz Blackhawk, its interior a time capsule of the singer’s last day on earth.

A backup singer for the King, Cory’s mother Honey was at Graceland the day Elvis died. She quickly returned home to Beaufort and married her high school sweetheart. Yearning to uncover the secrets of her mother’s past—and possibly her own identity—Cory decides to drive the car back to Memphis and turn it over to Elvis’s estate, retracing the exact route her mother took thirty-seven years earlier. As she winds her way through the sprawling deep south with its quaint towns and long stretches of open road, the burning question in Cory’s mind—who is my father?—takes a backseat to the truth she learns about her complicated mother, the minister's daughter who spent a lifetime struggling to conceal the consequences of a single year of rebellion.

Visit Kim Wright's Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Last Ride to Graceland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top alt-world takes on familiar empires

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Kelly Anderson tagged alt-world takes on five familiar empires, including:

The Mechanical, by Ian Tregellis

This one is less alternate world than alternate timeline, but I’m including it because it’s one of the few such tales that uses a lesser-trodden empire for its model: the Dutch. In this timeline, the sun never set on Holland’s, all the way up to the year 1926, by which time it has become the world’s superpower. The empire’s rival and enemy for influence is not England but France, although the content of their conflict—Protestants v. Catholics—is all too familiar. Each empire has mastered different kinds of technology, bolstering their power. For the French, it is chemistry. For the Dutch, it is mechanics and clockworks, and, specifically, robots. One such robot, Jax, is 118 years old and perfectly sentient. He is kept in a state of servitude by his programming, which forbids rebellion and threatens destruction for any deviations. Jax’s capability for free thought comes to seem cruel in the context of his world, and more so the more he uncovers about himself and his kind. This is a book jammed with ideas; anyone looking to engage with issues of identity, freedom, and the effects of colonization on the individual should most certainly give it a try.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Catherine Egan reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Catherine Egan, author of Julia Vanishes.

Her entry begins:

I bought Helen Oyeyemi’s collection of short stories, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, because I loved her novel Boy, Snow, Bird. Sometimes short story writers stumble writing novels, and not all novelists can write short stories, but Helen Oyeyemi can do both. I think she can probably do everything. There is no weak link in this collection, which makes equally deft use of odd fairytale settings, modern England, elements of sci fi, magic realism and straight up contemporary realism. Each story left me unsatisfied, but in a stunned and wide awake kind of way. She is the sort of writer that shakes you up and makes everything look different for a long time after you’ve finished the book. The book feels like a puzzle: characters...[read on]

About the book, from the publisher:

Fans of Marie Lu, Leigh Bardugo, and Kristin Cashore will be captivated by this stunning first book in a must-have new fantasy trilogy about a spy who can vanish at will and who discovers that monsters, mystery, and magic are also lurking—just out of sight.

Julia has the unusual ability to be ... unseen. Not invisible, exactly. Just beyond most people’s senses.

It’s a dangerous trait in a city that has banned all forms of magic and drowns witches in public Cleansings. But it’s a useful trait for a thief and a spy. And Julia has learned—crime pays.

She’s being paid very well indeed to infiltrate the grand house of Mrs. Och and report back on the odd characters who live there and the suspicious dealings that take place behind locked doors.

But what Julia discovers shakes her to the core. She certainly never imagined that the traitor in the house would turn out to be ... her.

Murder, thievery, witchcraft, betrayal–Catherine Egan builds a dangerous world where her fierce and flawed heroine finds that even a girl who can vanish can’t walk away from her own worst deeds.

Visit Catherine Egan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Julia Vanishes.

Writers Read: Catherine Egan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Analiese Richard's "The Unsettled Sector"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Unsettled Sector: NGOs and the Cultivation of Democratic Citizenship in Rural Mexico by Analiese Richard.

About the book, from the publisher:

In late twentieth century Mexico, the NGO "boom" was hailed as an harbinger of social change and democratic transition, with NGOs poised to transform the relationship between states and civil society on a global scale. And yet, great as the expectations were for NGOs to empower the poor and disenfranchised, their work is rooted in much older civic and cultural traditions. Arguably, they are just as much an accomplice in neoliberal governance. Analiese Richard seeks to determine what the growth of NGOs means for the future of citizenship and activism in neoliberal democracies, where a widening chasm between rich and poor threatens democratic ideals and institutions.

Analyzing the growth of NGOs in Tulancingo, Hidalgo, from the 1970s to the present, The Unsettled Sector explores the NGOs' evolving network of relationships with donors, target communities, international partners, state agencies, and political actors. It reaches beyond the campesinos and farmlands of Tulancingo to make sense of the NGO as an institutional form. Richard argues that only if we see NGOs as they are—bridges between formal politics and public morality—can we understand the opportunities and limits for social solidarity and citizenship in an era of neoliberal retrenchment.

Learn more about The Unsettled Sector at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Unsettled Sector.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve books to help make sense of Brexit

The Guardian asked a dozen contributors to share a book that might help readers understand Brexit, Great Britain's vote to leave the European Union. Shami Chakrabarti's pick:

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

“I used to comfort myself with the belief that it was only certain individuals and their peculiar notions that spoilt things for the rest of us. But how many individuals does it take before it’s not the individuals who are prejudiced but society itself?”

So writes Malorie Blackman in Noughts & Crosses (Doubleday Children’s). Recent months have been almost dystopian, revealing a neglected, divided kingdom along lines of wealth, geography and generation. Political and financial elites are watching their holiday homes (if not their principal residences) burning down with far greater cost to their poorer neighbours. The fire-starters have no plan for reconstruction and our media has not served us well. “The news lies all the time. They tell us what they think we would want to hear.”

Blackman is one of our greatest contemporary British writers and her modern classic is capable of inspiring many more generations of “young adult” readers of all ages. Dystopian fiction has often provided the most searing critiques of “real” life, politics and society, and the first book in Blackman’s epic series is no exception.

While it is an unashamedly political novel, its message of hope comes from the central love story between two characters on opposite sides of the racial divide. The secret to Blackman’s book, and our collective futures, perhaps lies in remembering the value of sacrifice and solidarity.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue