Ten thrilling titles about women on the verge

Holly Baxter is an executive editor and staff writer at the Independent in New York. She has experience in generating clicks on both sides of the Atlantic, having worked in the Independent’s London office as a reporter for three years. Her work was shortlisted for a Press Award for Feature of the Year in 2019 and she often appears on British radio and television.

Baxter lives in Brooklyn, New York. Clickbait is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged ten thrilling books about women on the verge. One title on the list:

The New Me by Halle Butler

The New Me is a dark novel with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge light-sounding title. It follows Millie, a young woman whose anxieties and depressive tendencies interfere with her ability to pretty much bond with anyone or anything, as she navigates a job she hates yet can’t help wanting to succeed in.

The petty characters Butler writes feel familiar, and even though most of their behaviors and impulses are loathsome, you can often understand exactly how they got there. Millie refuses to feel grateful for her own fairly privileged position—the financial support of her parents, for instance—and she has a serious superiority complex about the people who she encounters at her awful job. She’s someone you want to pick up and shake, but she’s also someone you end up feeling sorry for, despite yourself. The gap between what she expected her life to look like and what it looks like for the duration of the novel is painful, and we’ve all felt a semblance of that pain.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue