Five mysteries that skewer the worlds of wellness and self-help

Asia Mackay is the author of A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage and two additional novels published in the UK. After a career in television in China, she returned to London, where she worked for Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their round-the-world motorbike documentaries. She started writing her debut novel, Killing It, on maternity leave—it was the runner-up in Richard and Judy's Search for a Bestseller competition and runner-up and exceptionally recognized for the Comedy Women In Print Prize.

Mackay's latest novel is Self-Help for Serial Killers.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five "excellent books [that] focus on what happens when the wellness world and the criminal world collide." One title on the list:

Lawrence Block, Hit Man

John Keller is an ordinary New York City resident who does crosswords, watches television, and visits a therapist when he has a mid-career crisis. He is polite, deeply introspective, and entirely relatable—except for the fact his chosen profession is contract murder.

Hit Man is a linked collection of stories with Keller at the center of each and we’re given such a complete picture of him we start to not only understand but forgive him for his violent occupation. Keller might be an incredibly efficient hitman, but he also collects stamps, frets over the price of earplugs, and frequently turns to his handlers and life coaches to reconcile his mundane personality with his grim profession. He frequently daydreams about retiring to a peaceful life in the countryside.

Block brilliantly pulls off making a ruthless assassin thoroughly charming and deeply sympathetic.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven notable dark academia thrillers

Ande Pliego began writing stories when she discovered she could actually wield her overactive imagination for good. A lover of stories with teeth, she writes books involving mind games, dark humor, general murder and mayhem, and most importantly, finding the hope in the dark.

When not reading or writing, she can usually be found dabbling in art, scheming up her next trip, or making constant expeditions to the library. Born in Florida, raised in France, and having left footprints all over the globe, Pliego is settled in the Pacific Northwest, USA, with her craftsman husband and little son.

She is the bestselling author of You Are Fatally Invited and The Library After Dark.

At Oprah Daily the author tagged seven top dark academia thrillers. One title on the list:

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill

Strikingly creative and delightfully crafted, The Woman in the Library follows four strangers—an aspiring writer, a psychology student, a law student, and a mysterious established author—whose peaceful moment in the Boston Public Library comes to a screeching (screaming?) halt when they hear the shriek of a woman soon found dead. Their friendship blossoms in the unlikeliest of circumstances, and they band together to use their individual skills and studies to uncover—or conceal—which of them is the killer.

Even more delightful than this cat-and-mouse setup is the meta-narrative of the novel. Between each chapter, we have a one-sided correspondence from a reader named Leo to Hannah, an Australian author writing the story of the woman killed in the library we are in the process of reading. Leo’s letters grow increasingly sinister as he argues with her decisions for the characters and offers, shall we say, alarmingly specific advice on writing crime scenes. Whip-smart, tongue-in-cheek, and full of bookish debates, Gentill’s novel is an academia-infused murder mystery with a delicious twist.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Coffee with a Canine: Sulari Gentill & Rowly, Alfie, Miss Higgins and Pig.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six historical fiction titles set in the Middle East

Katie Moench is a librarian, runner, and lover of baked goods. A school librarian in the Upper Midwest, Moench lives with her husband and dog and spends her free time drinking coffee, trying new recipes, and adding to her TBR list.

At Book Riot she tagged six historical fiction novels set in the Middle East, including:

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

In seventeenth-century Isfahan, Persia, a young woman’s future is shattered when her father dies without leaving her with a dowry. With a lack of marriage prospects, she must move in with her uncle, a rug designer for the Shah’s court, and work in his household as a servant. Told with an emotional, first-person narrative style, The Blood of Flowers follows her growth as a gifted rug maker and the choices she must make in order to achieve autonomy in her life.

Read about the other novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six crime fiction books set in Florida

Erica Wright's novel Hollow Bones, a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, came out in 2024. "Daniela Petrova called it a "twisty and engrossing thriller." Snake was released as part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. Her mystery Famous in Cedarville received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was called "a clever little whodunnit" in The New York Times Book Review. She is the author of five other books, including the poetry collections Instructions for Killing the Jackal and All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Wright was the senior poetry editor at Guernica Magazine for more than a decade and currently teaches at Bellevue University. Her latest novel is The Museum of Unusual Occurrence.

[My Book, The Movie: Famous in Cedarville; The Page 99 Test: Snake; Q&A with Erica Wright]

At Novel Suspects Wright tagged some her favorite crime fiction books set in Florida, including:

Silent City by Alex Segura

Fans of down-on-their-luck PIs can do no better than Pete Fernandez. Silent City, the first in Alex Segura’s critically acclaimed series, finds Pete in pretty dire straights, mostly of his own creation. A missing person’s case pulls him back from the brink of self-destruction only to be thrown into the path of a vicious killer. One of the delights of this series is watching Pete evolve from an unlikely PI into a bonafide hero. Also a delight is the way Segura leans into the noir vibes of Miami.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six suspense novels about art, museums, and forgers

Called “an author to watch” by Booklist, Carol Snow has written numerous novels for teens and adults. A former contributor to Salon’s “Mothers Who Think” column, her writing has also appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Park City Magazine.

Snow holds a BA in psychology from Brown University and a MAT in English from Boston College. A native of New Jersey, she now splits her time between Cape Cod and Southern California.

[My Book, The Movie: Just Like Me, Only Better; My Book, The Movie: What Came First; The Page 69 Test: Bubble World]

Snow's new novel is The Girl on the Beach.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six "suspenseful reads about art and artists worth checking out." One title on the list:

Katie Lattari, Dark Things I Adore

If you’ve ever fantasized about spending the summer at a picture-perfect art retreat, complete with towering pines, a glistening lake, and, best of all, not just “a room of your own” but your own log cabin, this one’s for you…assuming your fantasy also includes simmering class tensions, mental illness, and a young woman who may or may not have been murdered.

At the book’s center, Max Durant, a professor and renowned painter whose best work is behind him, acts as mentor—and aspiring lover—to Audra Colfax, an MFA student as inscrutable as she is gifted. When Audra takes Max to her house in the wilds of Maine, prey becomes predator as Audra’s motivations, revealed in a split timeline, become clear. Lattari uses Audra’s MFA thesis as a narrative device while exploring themes of control, authenticity, and exploitation among artists.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifty of the greatest summer titles of all time

The staff at Literary Hib tagged fifty of the greatest summer novels of all time, including:

Alex Garland, The Beach

Nothing says summer like a nice beach, and there are few literary beaches beachier than the titular beach from The Beach. Beach. Alex Garland’s 1996 debut—now rightly considered one of Gen X’s Mount Rushmore novels—is the darkly hallucinogenic tale of a restless English backpacker’s search for a fabled island paradise off the coast of Thailand, and the nightmarish unraveling of the utopian community he discovers therein.

I, like thousands upon thousands of similarly gormless Banana Pancake Trail-ers, read The Beach while backpacking around Southeast Asia. It was the summer of 2008, and I was young and wild and free… sigh… Anyway, The Beach holds a special place in my heart, as does the flawed-but-fun 2000 movie adaption. I heartily recommend both.

Read about the other novels on the list at Lit Hub.

The Beach appears on Jo Morey's list of eight thrillers with beach & jungle settings, Ivy Pochoda's lit of five books that dive into the drug-fueled darkness of the club scene, Andrea Bartz's list of seven psychological thrillers for White Lotus fans, Lucy Clarke's top ten list of books about castaways, Hephzibah Anderson's list of eleven previously hip books that have not aged well, S J watson's list of six novels that could only take place at the seashore, Cat Barton's top five list of books on Southeast Asian travel literature, Kate Kellaway's ten best list of fictional holidays, Eleanor Muffitt top 12 list of books that make you want to pack your bags and trot the globe, Anna Wilson's top ten list of books set on the seaside, the Guardian editors' list of the 50 best summer reads ever, John Mullan's list of ten of the best swimming scenes in literature, and Sloane Crosley's list of five depressing beach reads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top horror retellings of well-known stories

Lyndsie Manusos’s fiction has appeared in PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has worked in web production and content management. When she’s not nesting among her books and rough drafts, she’s chasing the baby while the dog watches in confused amusement. She lives with her family in a suburb of Indianapolis.

At Book Riot she tagged six horror retellings of well-known stories, including:

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
Retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s notoriously racist story “The Horror at Red Hook.”

Victor LaValle is one of the best writers of the century, hands down. His works have been adapted to the screen. His novel, The Devil in Silver, will be airing as a miniseries on AMC later this year.

This year marks the ten-year anniversary of the novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook.” Lovecraft’s tales were often racist, reflecting Lovecraft’s own prejudices, but LaValle takes Lovecraft’s story and molds into this stunning, dark, magical tale. It follows Charles Thomas Tester, a hustler who tries to keep a roof over his father’s head and food on the table. Charles knows how powerful magic can be, and when he’s sent to deliver a magical tome to a sorceress, a journey full of sorcery and things better left buried begins.

This novella has sorcery and LaValle’s signature wit and commentary. You don’t want to miss this.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Ballad of Black Tom is among Erica Ezeifedi's six books for fans of the movie Sinners, Brittany K. Allen's ten top books for fans of Sinners, Chase Dearinger's seven horror titles where the setting is a monster, and Colleen Kinder's ten titles about chance encounters with strangers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top thrillers where writers are at the center of the action

Jamie Day, author of the new Beach Thriller, lives in one of those picture-perfect, coastal New England towns you see in the movies. And just like the movies, Day has two children and an adorable dog to fawn over. When not writing or reading, Day enjoys yoga, the ocean, cooking, and long walks on the beach with the dog, or the kids, or sometimes both.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "five books I’d recommend that give an inside look at the life (and grief) of a wordsmith," including:

The Writing Retreat — Julia Bartz

In this gripping psychological thriller, Bartz takes the cutthroat business of writing the best book quite literally when ambition turns to murder. Alex, the writer taking her last career gasp, can’t pass up the invitation to the isolated Blackbriar estate, the home of her idol, controversial feminist horror writer Roza Vallo. But when the competition is announced and the best book written in a month is guaranteed a life-changing contract, the typically collegial and supportive writing community turns inward, revealing our darker human nature.

Read about the other novels on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top soccer titles

One title on Tertulia's list of ten soccer books to read during World Cup 2026:

The History of the World in 12 Soccer Matches
Stefano Bizzotto

An Italian broadcaster and veteran World Cup commentator explores moments when soccer collided with war, revolution, dictatorship, and social change. From the Christmas Truce of World War I to matches shadowed by coups and national upheaval, these twelve games reveal how events on the pitch often echo far beyond it.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nonfiction books for Caribbean Heritage Month

At Book Riot Kendra Winchester tagged three top nonfiction books for Caribbean Heritage Month, including:

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat is truly a treasure of Haitian Literature, and this is her story. When she was just a girl, her parents left her in the care of her uncle, Joseph. When her parents finally sent for her, she struggled to remember them and grieved for the parental figure she had left behind. Later in 2004, when the political situation in Haiti began to deteriorate, Uncle Joseph was forced to flee to Miami in search of safety. In a whirlwind story of family connection and the tender ties that bind one person to another, Danticat illustrates the strength of familial love, even from across the ocean.

Read about the other titles on the list.

Brother, I’m Dying is among Joe Meno's seven true tales about the journey to seek asylum in the U.S.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six thrillers with troubled parent-child relationships

Leah Rowan is an author living in Brooklyn and the Catskills.

Marion is her new thriller.

Megan Collins, author of Cross My Heart, called Marion a "pitch-perfect thriller that feels like the primal scream every woman has been holding back her entire life."

At CrimeReads Rowan tagged "six scintillating stories where the parent-child relationship is a little (or a lot) off." One title on the list:

Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

We’ve all heard of the mother-in-law from hell trope, but what if your vengeful mother-in-law was actually a ghost? Abby had a traumatic childhood, and so when she marries Ralph, she’s desperate to heal old wounds and bond with the new maternal figure in her life, her mother-in-law, Laura—but Laura’s cruelty and vitriol make that impossible, and when she takes her own life, her ghost threatens to destroy all that Abby cherishes.

Equal parts fierce and funny, Motherthing is a cathartic balm for anyone who’s ever had issues with their in-laws.

Read about the other thrillers on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five Gothic novels about cults

Catriona Silvey was born in Glasgow and grew up in Scotland and England. After collecting an unreasonable number of degrees from various universities in the UK and the US, she moved to Edinburgh where she lives with her husband and children. She is the author of Meet Me in Another Life (2021), Love and Other Paradoxes (2025), and the newly released Vervain Hollow.

At The Nerd Daily she tagged five "Gothic novels about cults, where the aesthetic and thematic tropes of the Gothic marry perfectly with the authors’ explorations of brainwashing, groupthink, and coercive control." One title on the list:

Bunny by Mona Awad

Like Catherine House, Bunny takes an elite college as its setting. But the focus here, as in Bunny’s Gothic predecessor Frankenstein, is on the perilous allure of creation. When misfit MFA student Samantha discovers that the other women in her cohort, the creepily identical Bunnies, are transforming rabbits into uncanny simulacra of men, she gets sucked into their world and into their hive-mind. As Samantha gradually loses her identity, the Bunnies cannibalize her creativity, rooted in hardship, to lend some grit to their insipid creations.

Bunny is both an allegory about privilege and authenticity, and a very funny satire of critique workshop culture. It’s also extremely Gothic, from the aching isolation that pushes Samantha toward the Bunnies, to the eldritch, horrifying version of Providence, RI that she scurries through ‘like prey from some unknown but imminent beast’. Like a classical Gothic heroine reclaiming her agency, Samantha can only escape from the Bunnies’ control once she discovers the extent of her own creative power.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Bunny is among Isabelle McConville's six novels for novelists, Chris Wheatley's six top dark academia novels, and Gnesis Villar's seven books about the struggle of being a writer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about deep human-animal connections

Lauren Acampora is the author of The Animal Room, The Hundred Waters, The Paper Wasp, and The Wonder Garden. Her work has won or been nominated for the GLCA New Writers Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Story Prize, and the New England Book Award, and she’s been named an Artist Fellow in Fiction by The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, One Story, and The New York Times Book Review and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories.

At Lit Hub the author tagged "seven standout works of fiction that illuminate the inextricable links we share with our animal compatriots." One title on the list:

Lydia Millet, Love in Infant Monkeys

Madonna hunts pheasant in the English countryside, Thomas Edison electrocutes an elephant, Harry Harlow conducts callous experiments on monkeys, and Jimmy Carter fends off a swamp rabbit attack. Millet’s collection of tight and unsettling short stories operates through the conceit of fictionalized true tales about famous people and the animals associated with them. At times comical, each of these stories swerves and plunges deep into dark truths of human nature. Here, animals serve as vessels for our worst impulses, suffering at the point where curiosity turns to sadism, domination to cruelty, and self-interest to neglect. In the brilliant story “Sir Henry,” a dedicated dogwalker to the stars remarks, “Dogs were the martyrs of the human race.” And yet, while the animals in these stories are sacrificed to selfish purpose and whim, the human characters are astonished and haunted by them. Like Thomas Edison’s electrocuted elephant, they glow like saints, symbols of innocence and divinity, embodying the impossibility of human perfection and the original sin of our nature. As the guilt-ridden Edison imagines of his executed elephant: “I hear you. You say: I do not forgive. You say: this is my gift to you. I will never forgive.”

Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five dual-timeline historical fiction titles

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

At Book Riot she tagged "five dual-timeline historical fiction novels that bring past and present together." One entry on the list:

The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams

1917, 1934, 1980s, and 1995 United States

In this multi-generational saga, seven generations of women in the Dupree family navigate love, loss, and generational trauma even as the ties that bind them prove to be the strongest force of all. When fourteen-year-old Tati begins asking questions about the identity of her father in 1995, she’s met with secrets and silence. Her mother and grandmother don’t talk about the past. They won’t talk about who Tati’s father is or why Gladys left Alabama in the 1950s. As the narrative weaves back through generations of women, it becomes clear why the Dupree women keep their secrets close and their family even closer.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top mysteries set in the Boston area

Hannah Selinger is a James Beard Award-nominated lifestyle writer and mother of two based in Boxford, MA, and the author of the memoir Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly. Her print and digital work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Eater, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Her 2021 Bon Appétit essay, “In My Childhood Kitchen, I Learned Both Fear and Love,” is anthologized in the 2022 Best American Food Writing collection.

Selinger's new novel is Valley of the Moms.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "five titles, set in Massachusetts towns, [that] bring together people, plot, and place." One novel on the list:

Hank Phillippi Ryan, All This Could Be Yours

The 2026 winner of the Edgar Award, All This Could Be Yours traces the fly-by-night success of debut New York Times-bestselling author Tessa Calloway. Calloway, who recently relocated from Boston to the North Shore’s Rockport with her family, must dodge nefarious forces at every stop of her tour: apparent stalkers, fans who want to dig deep into her hidden past, and even duplicitous livery drivers.

Rockport makes a pivotal appearance in this work, a place meant to provide respite but that haunts the protagonist as she spins farther and farther from the life she knows.

Read about the other books on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles with actually realistic sex

Brodie Crellin lives in London and is an editor at Granta Magazine.

A Sense of Occasion is their first novel.

At Lit Hub the author tagged six books by "writers whose depictions of sex had most closely held my attention." One title on the list:

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

Telephones, in any era, carry a specific erotic potency. Everyone can relate to a character waiting for a phone call, or a text, that feeling of being stuck in a purgatorial gap that won’t end until the other person has made contact. It’s so intense, and carries so much weight, that it’s unsurprising that for Ernaux, the waiting starts to feel like a precursor to the sexual act itself. The sex is brilliantly written in this book—intentional and unabashed—but the strength of Ernaux’s obsession makes every moment feel sexual. Whether she is getting dressed, sitting in the kitchen, or going to the university, each small gesture or decision is implicated in the game of her desire. It can’t really even be argued that this is a game unfolding between two adults. This pair seem incompatible, with little chance at a future, but Ernaux is so immersed in her passion, that she is can quite easily sustain the narrative singlehanded. A perfect object lesson in the distorting impact of good sex.

Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

Simple Passion is among Bronwyn Fischer's seven obsessive love affairs in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four books where the dog survives

Camille Perri is the author of The Assistants and When Katie Met Cassidy. She has worked as a books editor for Cosmopolitan and Esquire. She has also been a ghostwriter of young adult novels and a reference librarian. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from New York University, where she majored in English and gender and sexuality studies, and a masters of library science degree from Queens College. She splits her time between New York City and the Hudson Valley with her wife and their Brussels Griffon named Pip.

Perri's new novel is Social Animals.

At People magazine the author tagged twelve books, shows, and movies where the dog survives. One book on the list:

Six-Thirty from Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Six-Thirty, named after the time he was found by Elizabeth Zott, is a highly intelligent Goldendoodle who has a key role in the story and serves as its narrator. Although not all the novel’s major characters make it to the end of this uplifting yet tear-jerking work of historical fiction, Six-Thirty safely perseveres.

Read about the other dogs that survive.

Lessons in Chemistry is among Ruth F. Stevens's five novels on smart, quirky women facing personal struggles, Lorna Graham's seven top workplace novels, and Claire Alexander's five books to read for when you’re lonely.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six YA thrillers about friendship

Katie Moench is a librarian, runner, and lover of baked goods. A school librarian in the Upper Midwest, Moench lives with her husband and dog and spends her free time drinking coffee, trying new recipes, and adding to her TBR list.

At Book Riot she tagged six thrillers about friendship, including:

The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson

A modern twist on the Golden Age mysteries of Agatha Christie, The Agathas starts off with the disappearance, and then reappearance, of Alice Ogilvie. After getting dumped by her basketball star boyfriend Steve, Alice disappeared for five days and then came back, refusing to talk about where she went and what happened. Then, Steve’s new girlfriend, and Alice’s ex-best friend, Brooke, disappears as well, but Brooke doesn’t come back. Armed with the complete works of Agatha Christie and the motivation of a hefty reward for information about what happened to Brooke, Alice becomes determined to solve the mystery of Brooke’s murder with the help of her new friend Iris, a less popular girl from her school who has become Alice’s tutor.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven thrillers that mine the depths of confession and revenge

Christine Carbo is a recipient of the Women’s National Book Association Pinckley Prize, the Silver Falchion Award, the High Plains Book Award, and has been a finalist for the Barry Award. She has an MA in English/Linguistics and taught college-level courses for over a decade. She still teaches, in a vastly different realm, as a Pilates instructor. She lives in Montana where she finds inspiration from the wild beauty surrounding her.

Carbo's new novel is The Confession Artist.

At CrimeReads the author tagged seven thrillers that let "us imagine someone taking matters into their own hands and then asks what it cost them to do so." One title on the list:

Alison Gaylin, The Collective

Revenge as identity is also carefully crafted by Alison Gaylin in The Collective (2021), where a grieving mother is drawn into an underground network of women whose children were killed by men the courts let walk. Gaylin is shrewd about how the seductiveness of finally being accepted can quietly transform into permission, and how easily a movement built on grief can curdle into something harrowing.

Read about the other entries on Carbo's list at CrimeReads.

The Collective is among Sian Gilbert's nine novels featuring complex female friendships and Wendy Corsi Staub's six top twist endings in contemporary fiction.

The Page 69 Test: The Collective.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles about the thrilling dynamics of girls’ friendship

Sonia Feldman lives in Cleveland, Ohio. She won the PEN America PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Waxwing. She also runs Sonia’s Poem of the Week, a popular email newsletter.

Girl’s Girl is her first novel.

At Lit Hub Feldman tagged six "excellent books about girl friendship, all of which invite you into a dynamic, the feeling of being among—a thrilling place to be." One title on the list:

Andrea Abreu, translated by Julia Sanches, Dogs of Summer

This short novel about feral ten-year-olds gave me permission to write a book about teenage girls for an adult literary audience that doesn’t bother justifying its interest in exactly the things the girls themselves are most interested in.

Set in the Canary Islands, Dogs of Summer has Gameboys and frantic masturbation, song lyrics and eating disorders. Isora and Shit—the moniker given by Isora to the novel’s unnamed narrator—melt into and out of one another in an exhilarating depiction of the boundarilessness of friendship at that age. Their relationship vibrates with power imbalance and unarticulated desire. This novel’s depiction of sapphic friendship and the pleasures and miseries of that infinite summer feeling have remained with me since I read the book in a single, rapt sitting.

Read about the other titles on the list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eighteen titles that explore the complexity of motherhood

The editors at Oprah Daily featured a list of eighteen books to help explore the complexity of motherhood. One title on the list:

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

Despite loving—and feeling deeply loved by—her white adoptive parents, Chung always wondered about the Korean strangers who, in a narrative that was repeated to her endlessly growing up, made the ultimate sacrifice to give her a better life. In her overwhelmingly white community in Oregon, she faced prejudice that her adoptive family could neither see nor relate to. It wasn’t until she was pregnant, expecting a child that would be “connected to me in a way no one else had ever been,” that she decided to pry open the black box of her biological family and peer inside. This memoir is at once an account of her search, a nuanced critique of “colorblind” adoptions, and an exploration of what happens when the tidy “legends” that supposedly keep a family together finally break down.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six notable thrillers about marriage

At Book Riot Addison Rizer tagged six thrillers about marriage, including:

Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson

Thom and Wendy have been married nearly three decades, childhood sweethearts who managed to find their way to each other after Wendy’s first husband died. Despite infidelity and fighting, they stay married because of a secret binding them together. Told in reverse chronological order, you’ll trace their love story back all the way to its secretive beginning.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Courtney Rodgers's nine chilling thrillers about marriage and L.K. Bowen's top ten marriage-gone-bad thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top thrillers set in the near future

A former white water kayaker who competed on the World Cup circuit, Perrin Pring is now a park ranger. She has worked and lived across the U.S., riding horses in the Rocky Mountains, driving Jeeps in the wilds of the desert, greeting the sunrise in Hawaii, and running chainsaws in the Sierra Mountains. She holds an MFA in creative writing and screenwriting from UC Riverside Palm Desert and a BA from Tufts University. Her writing has appeared in Backcountry Journal, the Coachella Review, and Kelp Literary. She lives in the Rocky Mountain West.

Pring's new novel is Cash and Gravity.

At CrimeReads the author tagged ten "page-turning, edge of your seat, near-ish future thrillers that span the gambit of tastes." One title on the list:

Mason Coile, Exiles

Novella. Horror. Sci-Fi. What happens when the robots sent to Mars to build the base for the first humans go offline? Dive into Exiles and you’ll find out.

Read about the other titles on Pring's list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles centered around art that doesn’t actually exist

Melissa Albert is the New York Times and indie bestselling author of The Bad Ones, Our Crooked Hearts, and the Hazel Wood series.

Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and included in the New York Times list of Notable Children’s Books.

The Children is her first adult novel.

At Lit Hub Albert tagged "six books I’ve loved that have made-up art inside them." One title on the list:

Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

A slender, riveting oral history about the disappearance of Julian Blake, lead singer of an invented 1970s acid-folk band. In order to finish their second album, the band takes up residence in a creaky old house in the British countryside. Decades after Julian’s vanishing there, the band and various hangers-on recall eerie incidents both in and out of the house—rooms full of occult literature; pub full of haunting photographs—as well as the glimmering stranger circling the Orpheus-esque Julian. As an appreciator of freak folk and tolerator of mandolins, I want to hear the album made in this pressure cooker.

Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

Wylding Hall is among Sam Reader's nine top modern SFF rock mythologies, Robert Brockway's five weird books for the jaded reader, and Meghan Ball's eleven top fictional bands in sci-fi & fantasy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six romance reads for book lovers

At Book Riot Nikki DeMarco tagged six "romance reads for book lovers, featuring librarians, booksellers, and writers." One title on the list:

Kiss Me, Maybe by Gabriella Gamez

Angela Gutierrez is a librarian who has never been kissed—and after accidentally going viral for coming out as an asexual lesbian, she decides to do something about it. Her plan: a scavenger hunt where the winner earns her first kiss. Her problem: pulling it off requires the help of Krystal Ramirez, the bartender she’s had a crush on for five years and who is absolutely, definitely not interested in love. Except, the more time they spend together planning Angela’s romantic future, the harder it gets to pretend there’s nothing between them. This book has the very specific joy of watching someone who has spent years organizing other people’s stories finally get to star in her own.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten titles about African Americans reclaiming the South

Kortney Morrow is a poet and writer creating from her studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has received support from 68to05, The Academy of American Poets, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Transition Magazine.

Her debut poetry collection, Run It Back, was the winner of the 2024 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

At Electric Lit Morrow tagged ten books that "guided my thinking around place-based liberation, the hopes we put into geography, and the complexities of reclaiming an ever-changing place in search of freedom." One title on the list:

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Broom’s debut memoir, The Yellow House, recounts the post-Katrina transformation of New Orleans East through the material history of her titular family house. On and off again, Broom returns to, journeys away, against, from, and towards the mythology of her city, her family, and the South. When Hurricane Katrina displaces Broom’s family—going from 24 family members in New Orleans to two brothers in all of Louisiana—her family’s house receives a letter from the city government announcing its demolition. Broom is forced to come to a new understanding of home beyond materiality. The Yellow House ends with the line “the story of our house was the only thing left.” In doing so, it becomes clear that the stories we hold and share can act as an embodiment and a transference of memory, of foundation, and shelter.

Read about the other books on Morrow's list at Electric Lit.

The Yellow House is among Juliet Patterson's eight titles that tackle the subject of ancestral legacy, J.R. Ramakrishnan's seven New Orleans books that go beyond Mardi Gras, and Lit Hub's ten best memoirs of the decade.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six mysteries featuring miniatures, effigies, and tiny scenes

Diane Josefowicz is the author of Guardians & Saints: Stories, L’Air du Temps (1985), and Ready, Set, Oh: A Novel. She is also the author, with Jed Z. Buchwald, of two histories of Egyptology: The Zodiac of Paris and The Riddle of the Rosetta. She serves as managing editor of the Victorian Web, the internet’s oldest and largest website devoted to Victoriana. A graduate of Brown University, she holds a PhD in History of Science from MIT and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Josefowicz's new novel is The Great Houses of Pill Hill.

[Q&A with Diane Josefowicz]

At CrimeReads the author tagged six favorite mysteries featuring miniatures, effigies, and tiny scenes. One title on the list:

Elise Hooper, The Library of Lost Dollhouses

The Belva Curtis Lafarge Library is a landmark Beaux Arts building that conceals many secrets about its founder and her collections of books and art. One morning Tildy Barrows, the head curator, stumbles into one of these secrets: a hidden room where she discovers a collection of spectacular and perfectly preserved dollhouses—in which Tildy is shocked to find a miniature framed portrait of her own mysterious mother.

As Tildy unravels the connection between the artist who made the dollhouses, the wealthy benefactress who tucked them away, and her own family’s history, Hooper takes the reader on a whirlwind tour from fin-de-siècle Paris to the hospital wards of shellshocked soldiers returning from World War I. Through it all, author Elise Hooper shows women quietly keeping explosive secrets, shunning the limelight while holding everything together.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six can’t-miss thrillers for fans of "Black Mirror"

At Book Riot Addison Rizer tagged six top thrillers for fans of Black Mirror, including:

The Warehouse by Rob Hart

Cloud is an all-encompassing, all-seeing company that delivers packages via drone to customers around the world. Its employees live at the company, work at the company, and do everything there. Everyone is happy and taken care of, and nothing is ever wrong at Cloud. But when Zinnia goes undercover as an employee to ferret out the company’s sinister secrets, the visage of this grand empire threatens to reveal a dark underbelly.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Warehouse is among Preety Sidhu's eleven novels featuring essential workers.

The Page 69 Test: The Warehouse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books about the American Dream and social striving

Heather Eng is a third-generation Chinese American who grew up in Queens, New York. A lifelong writer, she graduated from Boston University with a journalism degree, and worked as a newspaper journalist, web editor, and senior marketing leader in the tech industry.

Eng lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.

Double Happiness is her first novel.

At Lit Hub the author tagged six titles about the American Dream and social striving, including:

Susie Yang, White Ivy

People assume Ivy Lin is a quiet, obedient, young Chinese American woman. But that’s the problem with conflating stereotypes with reality: the truth is much more complex. In White Ivy, Ivy Lin is actually a dogged social climber who becomes infatuated with Gideon Speyer, a wealthy former classmate from an old-moneyed Boston family. Over fancy brunches and Cape Cod vacations, Ivy gradually integrates herself into the Speyer clan. But just when Ivy is on the brink of becoming Mrs. Gideon Speyer, an old flame from her working-class past threatens to dismantle the new life she’s created.I tore through this novel. Yang smashes the model minority stereotype by creating a deeply flawed antihero and deliciously twisty tale.

Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

White Ivy is among Robyn Harding's seven top unlikely friendships in crime fiction and Rebecca Kelley's nine titles featuring female villains who lean into their wickedness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles in which obsession is the plot

Emily Haworth-Booth teaches at the Royal Drawing School and is an illustrator, graphic novelist, and the author of three children's books: The King Who Banned the Dark (short-listed for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Illustration, and the Klaus Flugge Prize), The Last Tree, and Protest.

Mare is her debut adult novel. She lives in Devon with her husband, dog, and several horses.

At Electric Lit Haworth-Booth tagged seven books, written by women, in which obsession is the plot. One title on the list:

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

When Keiko begins her job at the convenience store she becomes what she most wants to be: “a normal cog in society.” Not only has the store supplied her with a personality, a purpose, and a behavioural code in the form of the store manual, it is literally the stuff she is made of: “When I think that my whole body is made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.” She thinks of the store on her days off; she even dreams of it at night. When the novel begins, Keiko has been working at the convenience store for 18 years. What follows, as the events of the novel threaten to dismantle her obsession, is not the whimsical comedy we might expect from a story set in a supermarket, but a provocative investigation into societal pressure.

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

Convenience Store Woman is among Sarah Maria Griffin's seven titles that turn the workplace into a nightmare, Eliza Browning's ten novels about resisting productivity culture and Anne Heltzel's seven books about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six horror titles where the setting itself is evil

Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, where she was a Graduate Excellence Fellow, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University.

Her short works have been published in Cicada, PseudoPod, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere.

Until Death is Berman's debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six horror novels where the place is the problem." One title on the list:

Giorgio de Maria, The Twenty Days of Turin

This 1977 Italian novel, detailing a “phenomenon of collective psychosis” in the gothic city of Turin, is packed to the gills with ambitious, weird, bizarre imagery that chills the bones. A mysterious Library that eerily foreshadows social media; mass insomnia; people killed by someone picking them up by the ankles and smashing them into trees; anonymous letters from a man whose stairwell is filling with human excrement and trash; a man with a dried-up lake inside of him, and he can see bas-reliefs on the bottom, and they fills him with terror and dread.

De Maria’s Turin is the truest kind of horror setting there is, both haunted and doing the haunting. And the mass psychosis of the citizenry underscores a fact that we—thanks, Internet—now know only too well. De Maria knew it too. “What is shared can never be unshared.” In fact, it can haunt you.

Read about the other entries on Berman's list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue