The best books about pandemics

Laura Spinney is an author and science journalist. She has published two novels in English, The Doctor (2001) and The Quick (2007). Her third book of non-fiction, Rue Centrale, came out in 2013, and her fourth, a tale of the Spanish flu called Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, was published in 2017.

At the Guardian, Spinney tagged five of the best books about pandemics, including:

David Quammen’s Spillover serves as a rousing wake-up call, because he conjures up the complex web of microbial ecosystems through which humanity stumbles blindly. Mostly the microbes mind their own business, but occasionally we blunder into their finely tuned arrangements for survival and provoke the spillover of a pathogen from its usual animal host to us. It takes time for them to find a sustainable way to colonise their new host, or hosts, so the initial fallout can be carnage – a trail of gorilla carcasses in an African forest, for example, that heralds an outbreak of Ebola in people.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Middle Grade fantasy titles that feature characters of color

Marti Dumas is a mom, teacher and writer from New Orleans. She is best known for her Jaden Toussaint, the Greatest, series.

Her latest books, Jupiter Storm and The Little Human are middle-grade fantasies being heralded for their skillful combination of science, family, and magic.

For EmbraceRace, Dumas tagged more than ten Middle Grade fantasy fiction titles that feature characters of color, including:

The Black God’s Drums
by P. Djèli Clark*

In an alternate New Orleans of orisha and airships, a wall-scaling girl named Creeper yearns to escape the streets for the air—in particular, by earning a spot on-board the airship Midnight Robber. Creeper plans to earn Captain Ann-Marie’s trust with information she discovers about a Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God’s Drums.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten titles where the setting is a character

Sarah Pinborough is the number one Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of the psychological thriller Behind Her Eyes, and more than twenty other novels and novellas, including The Death House and a young adult thriller, 13 Minutes.

Her new novel is Dead to Her.

At CrimeReads Pinborough tagged ten "books [that] bring time and place alive in unforgettable ways," including:

My Sister the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite
Lagos

Gosh, I loved this much celebrated book. Darkly funny, swift and sharp, this tale of two sisters, one who cleans up the mess for the other who has a habit of killing her boyfriends, brings the Nigerian capital to life. Without lingering on long descriptions it’s more through their daily way of life, work, home and personal, that the reader gets an insight into life in the city.

Read about the other entries on the list.

My Sister the Serial Killer is among Tiffany Tsao's top five novels about murder all in the family, Victoria Helen Stone's eight top crime books of deep, dark family lore, and Kristen Roupenian's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top tales about the rich

Sarah Blake is the author of Full Turn, a chapbook of poems, Runaway Girls, an artist book in collaboration with the artist, Robin Kahn, and three novels: Grange House; and the New York Times bestsellers, The Postmistress, and The Guest Book. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, the poet Joshua Weiner, and their two sons.

At the Guardian, Blake tagged ten "big, juicy stories of love, betrayal and memory; rich in the stuff and sorrow of dreams." One title on the list:

Run River by Joan Didion

Didion’s first novel begins with the sound of a gunshot heard by a woman calmly fastening a watch to her wrist in her bedroom, and takes us back through the events leading up to that shot – back through her memory, and further back into the history of her family, among the first settlers of the state of California. The novel combines Didion’s characteristically minute observation of class and power with a plot that spins relentlessly forward, never letting you forget that it must return to the moment of that opening shot.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirteen of the creepiest families in literature

Sophie Hannah is the New York Times-bestselling author of numerous psychological thrillers, which have been published in 51 countries and adapted for television, as well as The Monogram Murders, the first Hercule Poirot novel authorized by the estate of Agatha Christie, and the follow up The Closed Casket. Hannah is also the author of a self-help book, How to Hold a Grudge, and hosts the podcast of the same name. She lives in Cambridge, UK.

Hannah's new novel is Perfect Little Children.

At CrimeReads she tagged thirteen of her favorite creepy and dysfunctional families in literature, including:

See Jane Run, by Joy Fielding

The protagonist of this novel finds herself in a store, covered in blood, in possession of $10,000 and with no memory of who she is or how she came to be there. Her only chance of finding out the truth and getting her life back comes in the form of a stranger who says he’s her husband. There’s nothing scarier than a family that wants to claim you as its own when you have no way of knowing if you truly belong to it. This is a flawless and desperately gripping psychological thriller.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books that were nearly lost to history

Michael Zapata is a founding editor of the award-winning MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction; the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program award; and a Pushcart Nomination. As an educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa and has lived in New Orleans, Italy, and Ecuador. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

Zapata's new novel is The Lost Book of Adana Moreau.

At Electric Lit he tagged "ten works of literature that were lost and then saved by a hair," including:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

Famously, Bolaño wrote his meteoric, apocalyptic magnum opus while waiting for a liver transplant, pursued both by his own impending biological (if not literary) death and visions of an impressionistic global literary future full of soccer matches “between a team of the terminally ill and a team of the starving to death.” Published a year after his death, 2666 is everything a novel could ever be and it leaves its readers blinking, like Bolaño, into the abyss.

Read about the other entries on the list.

2666 appears on Jeff VanderMeer's list of six favorite big, challenging reads, Kevin Barry's 6 favorite books list, Alex Clark's top ten list of long reads, and Gillian Orr's reading list of top unfinished novels; it was #1 in one tabulation of the critics' consensus book of the year for 2008.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books to help us through tough times

Elif Shafak / Elif Şafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, and Three Daughters of Eve. In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better.

Shafak's latest novel is 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

Shafak is also a political scientist and an academic. She holds a degree in International Relations, a masters’ degree in Gender and Women’s Studies and a PhD in Political Science and Political Philosophy. She has taught at various universities in Turkey, the UK and the USA, including St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow.

At the Guardian, Shafak tagged six works full of wisdom, heart and hope to help us through tough times, including:

George Monbiot’s Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning is a solidly researched, well-presented answer to climate deniers everywhere. For anyone who cares about the survival of our biosphere, anyone trying to find the right balance between preserving lifestyle and cutting carbon emissions, it is the perfect guidance.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the best Cold War thrillers

M.L. Huie is a writer, teacher and actor. In addition to working ten years as a features journalist he has written several plays that have been performed throughout the US and in the UK. He is a proud member of Actor's Equity Association, and teaches theatre and acting at the university-level. He is married to a brilliant woman and has two genius kids.

Huie's new novel is Spitfire.

At CrimeReads he tagged six "murky Cold war thrillers by some of the best writers in the genre." One title on the list:

The Other Side of Silence, Philip Kerr

It doesn’t get much more noir than the late Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series. Most of Kerr’s Gunther stories put Bernie reluctantly at the beck-and-call of such infamous Nazis as Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich. Kerr’s later novels brought his German detective into the 1950s where he often found himself entangled with East and West spy agencies. Here, Bernie is working as a concierge on the French Riviera, but pretty soon he encounters tough customers including British spies, Markus Wolf, the notorious leader of the East German Stasi and, naturally, a beautiful woman. Kerr’s books simmer with uneasy alliances and sudden betrayal. No one navigates moral minefields quite like the brooding, sardonic Gunther.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four excellent shorter novels

Ayòbámi Adébáyò is the author of Stay With Me, which was shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Project as a work in progress in 2013. After it was published in 2017, it was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Wellcome Book Prize and the 9mobile Prize for Literature. It was also longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Stay With Me was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Ayọ̀bámi was born in Lagos, Nigeria.

At the Guardian she tagged four books shorter than 250 pages "because of the remarkable characters that make them so unforgettable," including:

“You, though, are as beautiful as light splitting through glass,” writes Janice Pariat in her poignant and exquisite The Nine-Chambered Heart, foregrounding the novel’s splintered yet luminous portraiture of one woman’s life through the perspectives of her lovers and would-be lovers. As the nine narrators recall their interactions with this woman, what emerges is a figure who is at once real and mythical, the pulsing heart of an enthralling book.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about the human cost of war

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of a new book, The Shadow King, called “a brilliant novel … compulsively readable” by Salman Rushdie. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by the Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications.

At the Guardian, Mengiste tagged ten titles that provided her "with a vocabulary to conceive anew what it means to be a soldier, to be a woman, to be in conflict with a force greater than oneself." One book on the list:

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

Set near the end of Sierra Leone’s civil war in 2001, Forna’s gripping novel examines its aftermath in the lives of her characters. The novel opens with a dying man telling a story about a past love, before the narrative branches into other voices counting the many ways that violence devastates a human being. Forna asks us to look at her characters and see not deadened beings but people who, in spite of their losses, insist on the possibilities of a new existence.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven crime novels where murder is a group activity

C. J. Tudor is the author of the newly released The Other People as well as The Hiding Place and The Chalk Man, which won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel and the Strand Magazine Award for Best Debut Novel. Over the years she has worked as a copywriter, television presenter, voice-over artist, and dog walker. She is now thrilled to be able to write full-time, and doesn’t miss chasing wet dogs through muddy fields all that much. She lives in England with her partner and daughter.

At CrimeReads, Tudor tagged seven "books where murder is not a solo event but a shared experience," including [spoiler alert]:

My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing

Millicent and her husband have it all: beautiful family, lovely home, and many happy years of marriage. But things have gotten a little stale in their relationship. So, what’s a couple to do to spice things up? Murder people together, of course.

Here is a husband so thoroughly devoted to his partner that he’s happy to indulge his wife’s darkest desires. From stalking potential victims to figuring out how to dispose of a body, Millicent’s husband will do whatever it takes to keep his beloved satisfied.

Well, almost. Even devotion has a line and when it’s crossed, husband and wife find that ‘till death do us part’ may be the only way out of their homicidal wedded bliss.

Read about the other entries on the list.

My Lovely Wife is among Lisa Levy's top seven psychological thrillers with manipulative male narrators, Kaira Rouda's top seven literary couples whose relationships are deeply disturbing in the most fascinating ways possible, and Margot Hunt's top five villains who have had about enough of domestic life.

The Page 69 Test: My Lovely Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine titles celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

At Electric Lit Diana London tagged nine books that celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., including:

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

The poems of Danez Smith will leave you altered. Don’t Call Us Dead leaves readers with a deeper, more dimensional understanding of what motivated Dr. King and what motivates his successors to fight for what’s right. With lines like this one (from “Summer, Somewhere”),“we asked for nothing but our names / in a mouth we’ve known / for decades,” each stanza of these poems insists that we look directly at the injustice that’s become synonymous with our nation’s name, reminds us that “our decades betrayed us.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue