Six works that warn us to seek the roots of violence in history

Karen Lord has been a physics teacher, diplomat, part-time soldier, and academic. She is now a writer and research consultant, BSc, MSc, MPhil, PhD. Her novella Redemption in Indigo won the Frank Collymore Literary Award and the William L. Crawford Award, among others. Her novel The Best of All Possible Worlds won the Frank Collymore Literary Award, RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and Locus Awards Best Science Fiction Novel. She has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her new novel is Unraveling.

At CrimeReads she tagged six works that warn us to seek the roots of violence in history, including:

The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross

Published in 2016, written by award-winning Grenadian author Jacob Ross, this police procedural murder mystery takes place on a fictional Caribbean island. The population lives with the weight of history—descendants of an enslaved people who were for centuries denied marriage, family, or even consent; children of revolution and conflict still trying to make sense of what befell their parents; youth with potential but no prospects walking a tightrope between law and crime, with corruption and violence endemic in both systems. And yet, with all this burden, and all the bodies, the tale is told with fondness, humor, and hopefulness for humanity.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top novels about pariahs

Richard Zimler's novels include The Search for Sana, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, and The Seventh Gate. He has won many prizes for his writing and has lectured on Sephardic Jewish culture all over the world. He now lives in Porto, Portugal, where he teaches journalism and writes. His latest novel is The Gospel According to Lazarus.

At the Guardian Zimler tagged his ten favorite novels about pariahs, including:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

While serving a prison term for assault, Randle McMurphy fakes insanity in order to win a transfer to a psychiatric hospital. There, his rebellious antics, zest for life and sexual allure put him in conflict with the despotic and puritanical head of his ward, Nurse Ratched, who comes to see him as a disruptive misfit and rival. McMurphy soon earns her fury by encouraging his fellow patients to live more adventurously, and though readers know that he is unlikely to win this battle of wills, the length to which Ratched goes to ensure victory still comes as a terrible shock.

Read about the other entries on the list.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is on Kim Hood's top ten list of interesting characters who just happen to have a disability, Rebecca Jane Stokes's list of seven books for fans of Orange Is The New Black, Gavin Extence's list of ten of the best underdogs in literature, Melvin Burgess's list of five notable books on drugs, and Darren Shan's top ten list of books about outsiders for teenagers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that explore the relationship of time travel & portal narrative

Fran Wilde’s new novella is The Fire Opal Mechanism.

At Tor.com she tagged five "books that explore the paradoxical relationship of time travel and portal narrative," including:

The Time Traveler’s Wife — Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife is an interesting play on the time travel as portal narrative theory. Niffenegger’s novel reveals much about what life is like for those close to portal narrative characters. The ones who aren’t taking the trip to another dimension. Claire, the titular character, stays in a single timeline, while her—well Henry’s a LOT of things—is deposited in different times by a genetic disorder.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is among Jenny Colgan's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve of the best retellings of classic novels

Meg Donohue is the USA Today bestselling author of Every Wild Heart, Dog Crazy, All the Summer Girls, How to Eat a Cupcake, and the newly released You, Me, and the Sea. Her novels have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. Donohue has an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Dartmouth College. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she now lives in San Francisco with her husband, three young daughters, and dog.

At LitHub Donohue tagged her twelve favorite retellings of classic novels. One title on the list:

Lisa Gabriele, The Winters

Writers of Gothic fiction are known for using place and weather to create a dark, spellbinding tone, and Gabriele’s retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca pays tribute to the classic with its eerie, secluded-mansion setting. The Winters is the kind of homage that I love—it hues closely to the original while still managing to have enough twists to keep even fans of the classic guessing.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Winters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top slow-burn thrillers

USA Today bestselling author Charlie Donlea was born and raised in Chicago. He now lives in the suburbs with his wife and two young children. His latest novel is Some Choose Darkness.

At the heart of every great thriller is an unforgettable climax, [Donlea writes at CrimeReads]. This pinnacle moment in a thriller is what defines the genre. It’s where the action takes place, where the reveal is laid bare, and where the twist is sprung on us. But there is an art to creating the climax.... Before the best reveals, in front of the most stunning twists, and ahead of the greatest unveilings of a killer’s identity, is a staircase. Climbing it is where the real fun happens, because it is with each successive step up this staircase where readers find the suspense in a thriller.

One of the author's ten best slow-burn thrillers:

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

Josh Bazell was offered a million dollar advance for his debut novel, and it’s not hard to see why. Beat the Reaper tells the story of Peter Brown, a New York doctor with good looks, a talent for saving lives, and a buried past he’d like to keep underground. Dr. Brown’s new patient is Nicholas LoBrutto, a mafia wiseguy with three months to live. But Mr. LoBrutto is not entirely without his wits. It seems he recognizes Peter from back in the day and believes that before his doctor was saving lives, he was ending them as a hitman for the mob.

The genius of Bazell’s novel doesn’t come from Peter going on the run, the chase scenes, or the shark tank where Peter spends an entire night fending off dorsal fins and jagged teeth. Instead, the white-knuckled reading comes from the slow building tension of Dr. Brown’s identity becoming known to those who’d rather see him dead than benefit from his life-saving abilities.

Staircase level: Extreme

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

The Page 69 Test: Beat the Reaper.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on holding power to account

Stephen William "Billy’ Bragg" is an English singer-songwriter and left-wing activist. His music blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs, with lyrics that span political or romantic themes. His music is heavily centered on bringing about change and getting the younger generation involved in grass-roots activist causes. His book Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World was a bestseller in 2016.

Bragg's new book is The Three Dimensions of Freedom.

At the Guardian he tagged five books about holding power to account, including:

By breaking the power of the crown to grant economic monopolies, the English were able to establish a political system more responsive to the aspirations of business, which led in turn to the industrial revolution taking off in Britain earlier than in nations that continued to be ruled by absolute monarchs. This process is analysed in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson, in which the authors argue that successful countries require accountable institutions that practise transparency and probity.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five pedal-to-the-metal apocalyptic stories

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog, Nicole Hill tagged five gonzo apocalypses to make you feel better about your week, including:

The Prey of Gods, by Nicky Drayden

Two words to describe Drayden’s first novel: delightfully disorienting. It wages a pitched battle between two very different demigoddesses in an alt-future South Africa: one a girl only just reaching her deadly potential, the other a fallen hellbeast hell-bent on clawing her way back into power. Their encounter promises to have cataclysmic consequences for the unfortunately mortal as it plays out against a bonkers near-future backdrop littered African folklore and scads of incongruous SFF tropes, from sentient robots, to genetically engineered animals, to hallucinogenic superdrugs with nigh-spiritual effects. Plus murder. Lots and lots of murder.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books that explore the world's most awe-inspiring jungle

Erica Ferencik's new novel is Into the Jungle.

At CrimeReads she tagged eight favorite books that explore the world's most awe-inspiring jungle, including:

Ruthless River, by Holly FitzGerald

This is the stunning true survival story of a married couple, Holly and Fitz, who survive a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle in the early ‘70s. Setting off on the river with only a rickety raft at their disposal, they fought starvation, insects and predators, racing against time to navigate the deadly waters of the Amazon to find a river town before it was too late.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the best bad women in fiction

Sara Collins is of Jamaican descent and grew up in Grand Cayman and studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before doing a Master of Studies in Creative Writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. Her debut novel is The Confessions of Frannie Langton.

At LitHub Collins tagged six favorite bad women in fiction, including:

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge is irascible, ill-tempered and at times plain abusive. She’s guilty of an emotional affair (at least) with a man whose “wariness” and “quiet anger” reminds her of herself: “We’re both cut from the same piece of bad cloth.” When she overhears her son’s new wife just after their wedding insulting her dress and hinting at her bad parenting, her “mouth begins to secrete” and she invades her daughter-in-law’s closet to scrawl on one of her sweaters with a Magic Marker. Yet no one is at more the mercy of her dark moods than Olive herself, who longs to tell that same daughter-in-law: “there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me.” Her own desires are far more soft-bellied and complicated than that: “…there had been times when she’d felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist’s gentle turning of her chin with his big soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.” This book evokes the pain and anger of the kind of loneliness that runs that deep.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Olive Kitteridge is among Laura Barnett's ten top unconventional love stories and Sophie Ward's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books to read while staring death in the face

Michael Blumlein is the author of several novels and story collections, including the award-winning The Brains of Rats. He has twice been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and twice for the Bram Stoker. His story "Fidelity: A Primer" was short-listed for the Tiptree. He has written for both stage and film, including the award-winning independent film Decodings (included in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and winner of the Special Jury Award of the SF International Film Festival). Blumlein's novel X,Y was made into a feature-length movie. Until his recent retirement he taught and practiced medicine at the University of California in San Francisco.

Blumlein's new novella is Longer.

At Tor.com he tagged five books to read while staring death in the face, including:

Clay’s Ark, by Octavia Butler

Biological SF at its finest. Written 35 years ago and reads as if it were penned yesterday. Unputdownable. Chilling, unflinching, humanistic and then some. It turns out that love and tolerance do help when you’re dealing with…well, with anyone.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten teenage friendships in fiction

Kate Hamer's new novel is Crushed. "The three girls in the novel are from very different backgrounds," the author writes, "but the various alchemies of home life, coupled with their emotional trajectories, collide and explode and what could have become simply a rueful memory of youthful difficulties turns abruptly toxic and marks them forever."

At the Guardian, Hamer tagged ten top teenage friendships in fiction, including:

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

The book begins with a teenager setting fire to a house in Shaker Heights – a progressive, affluent suburb where seemingly well-intentioned liberalism keeps society ticking quietly forward with safely shared values. When a white family attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby it rips this community apart. What’s fascinating is how the group of teenagers at the core of the book react to the events. Brilliant on the loves, friendships and dreams of adolescents.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven suspenseful literary thrillers

J.S.Monroe is the pseudonym of the British author Jon Stock. Stock is the author of six spy novels. His standalone psychological thrillers, written under the pseudonym J.S. Monroe, include Find Me, Forget My Name, and the newly released The Last Thing She Remembers.

At CrimeReads Monroe tagged seven favorite literary thrillers, including:

The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel is the godfather of the modern psychological thriller, its influence stronger today than ever. The central idea of someone—Tom Ripley—assuming another’s identity is an ancient trope but Highsmith gives it a new spin. Despite Ripley’s obvious immorality, the reader roots for him, hoping that he’ll evade police capture and live the life he always wanted. It’s a phenomenal authorial achievement, particularly as Ripley’s envy leads him to murder, but there’s no happy ending. Ripley concludes the book in a state of paranoia and fear, a reminder that Highsmith’s moral compass may often be hidden but is still firmly in tact.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Talented Mr Ripley is on Simon Lelic's top ten list of false identities in fiction, Jeff Somers's list of fifty novels that changed novels, Olivia Sudjic's list of eight favorite books about love and obsession, Roz Chast's six favorite books list, Nicholas Searle's top five list of favorite deceivers in fiction, Chris Ewan's list of the ten top chases in literature, Meave Gallagher's top twenty list of gripping page-turners every twentysomething woman should read, Sophia Bennett's top ten list of books set in the Mediterranean, Emma Straub's top ten list of holidays in fiction, E. Lockhart's list of favorite suspense novels, Sally O'Reilly's top ten list of novels inspired by Shakespeare, Walter Kirn's top six list of books on deception, Stephen May's top ten list of impostors in fiction, Simon Mason's top ten list of chilling fictional crimes, Melissa Albert's list of eight books to change a villain, Koren Zailckas's list of eleven of literature's more evil characters, Alex Berenson's five best list of books about Americans abroad John Mullan's list of ten of the best examples of rowing in literature, Tana French's top ten maverick mysteries list, the Guardian's list of the 50 best summer reads ever, the Telegraph's ultimate reading list, and Francesca Simon's top ten list of antiheroes.

--Marshal Zeringue