The fifty best contemporary novels over 500 pages

Emily Temple is a senior editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, will be published by William Morrow in 2020.

One title from her list of the fifty best contemporary novels over 500 pages:

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (531 pages)

Can’t argue with those receipts—and honestly, despite my supposed literary snobbery, I don’t want to. Sure, it’s a little obvious (blind French girl, orphaned German boy, WWII) but man, it works. The writing is lovely too.

Read about the other entries on the list.

All the Light We Cannot See is among Jason Allen's seven top books with family secrets, Whitney Scharer's top ten books about Paris, David Baldacci's six favorite books with an element of mystery, Jason Flemyng's six best books, Sandra Howard's six best books, Caitlin Kleinschmidt's twelve moving novels of the Second World War and Maureen Corrigan's 12 favorite books of 2014.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable literary romantic comedies

Beth O’Leary is a Sunday Times (UK) bestselling author whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

She wrote her debut novel, The Flatshare, on her train journey to and from her job at a children’s publisher. Her novel The Switch is due out in the US this summer.

She now lives in the Hampshire countryside and writes full time.

At the Waterstones blog, O'Leary tagged five favorite literary comedies bursting with love and optimism, including:

In at the Deep End by Kate Davies

This debut is smart, filthy and totally hilarious. Our protagonist Julia hasn’t had sex in three years… until she finds herself making eyes at a sexually confident lesbian over confrontational modern art. She begins to think that she’s been looking for love (and good sex) in all the wrong places. In at the Deep End touches on some dark topics, but without ever losing its ultimate sense of lightness and joy.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five great diverse crime novels

Originally from Sacramento, Elle Marr explored the urban wilderness of Southern California before spending three wine-and-cheese-filled years in France. There, she earned a master’s degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris, and discovered her love of writing novels.

Currently, she lives and writes outside Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and one very demanding feline; she is hard at work on her second thriller.

Marr's new novel is The Missing Sister.

At CrimeReads she tagged five great crime novels bringing multicultural heroes and representation to mystery, including:

The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani (translated from Chanson douce)

Beginning with the murder of two small children by their nanny—the recounting of which will give you chills—The Perfect Nanny throws the reader into the deep end of this Paris-based, tour de force thriller. When French-Moroccan lawyer Myriam returns to work, she and her husband Paul must find the perfect nanny for their son and daughter. Louise, a devoted woman who plans kiddie parties and sings to the children, turns out to be the caretaker of their dreams, and the couple quickly becomes dependent on her. Jealousy and resentment mount with each chapter until tensions peak, exploding into hot-button issues of class, race, and motherhood. Translated from the French Chanson douce, it was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2016, while The Perfect Nanny was named Best Book of the Year by multiple American lists when it was published stateside in 2018. Whether you read it in French or English, you will be hooked from the first page.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about Londoners

Panikos Panayi was born in London to Greek Cypriot immigrants and grew up in the multicultural city developing during the 1960s and 1970s. A leading authority on the history of migration, he is Professor of European History at De Montfort University.

Panayi's new book is Migrant City: A New History of London.

At the Guardian, Panayi tagged ten books about "the modern history of London, providing an insight into its ethnic and social diversity." One novel on the list:

Small Island by Andrea Levy (2004)

One of the best fictional accounts of the realities of life in wartime and early postwar London for West Indian migrants to the heart of empire, tracing racism, which trumped social status with regard to the way in which the white British reacted to the new arrivals, despite the relatively positive reception for West Indian servicemen during the second world war. The novel also offers an insight into the social and economic realities of London life in the 1940s and 1950s for all ethnic groups.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Small Island is among J.R. Ramakrishnan's seven novels that celebrate the 40% of Londoners who aren't white, Virginia Nicholson's ten top books about women in the 1950s, Martin Fletcher's five best books on nations and lives in transition, and Gillian Cross's top ten books that throw everything you think you know upside down.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six notable literary escapes

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and son.

At The Week magazine Freudenberger recommended six literary escapes, including:

Disoriental by Negar Djavadi (2016).

A woman visits a fertility clinic in Paris, hoping to have a child, while her family's past in Iran rises up before her in dazzlingly precise vignettes. The daughter of intellectuals, Kimia Sadr survives the revolution and a harrowing escape to France, where, Djavadi writes, "we unlearn — at least partially — what we used to be, to make room for what we have become."

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books for bookish girls

Janice Hadlow worked at the BBC for more than two decades, and for ten of those years she ran BBC Two and BBC Four, two of the broadcaster’s major television channels. She was educated at Swanley School in Kent and graduated with a first class degree in history from King’s college, London. She is the author of A Royal Experiment, a biography of Great Britain's King George III. She currently lives in Edinburgh. The Other Bennet Sister is her first novel.

At LitHub, Hadlow recommended a reading list for bookish girls. One title on the list:

Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book

Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book is a classic of Japanese literature. Written in the ninth century, when Shōnagon was a lady in waiting at the imperial court, it’s a collection of observations and anecdotes written in her own unmistakeable voice: sharp, aloof and infinitely amused. Shōnagon was an aristocrat, but not a very distinguished one; it was the quickness of her mind, and the depth of her learning, rather than her background, that catapulted her into favor and fame. Anyone wishing to be taken seriously as a Japanese courtier was obliged to possess a thorough knowledge of poetry, and Shōnagon’s ability to recognize poetic allusions, to improvise upon them, and to compose her own verse made her one of the court’s most glittering stars. Reading The Pillow Book is to enter a world where, contrary to what we think we know about the past, a sprightly form of female creativity was much prized. It reminds us that ideas of what is considered appropriate for a woman to know have not been fixed and immutable and that cleverness has sometimes been a form of currency that could change a life forever.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books besides "To Kill a Mockingbird" that tackle racial injustice

The PBS NewsHour asked educators from different parts of the country to share their picks for books besides To Kill a Mockingbird that tackle racial injustice. One title on the list:

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

“Children of Blood and Bone” is a beautiful book. It reminds me in some ways of “Harry Potter” because of its magical elements and young characters struggling through a difficult journey that tests their ideas of who they are and who they can trust. The author was inspired to write it after so many unarmed black people have been killed by police, but that is not entirely obvious. I thought more of authoritarian governments, women’s empowerment, and coming-of-age issues, but ideas of equality are central to all of those threads.
— Diana Dempsey

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine notable unabashed books about bodies

Cai Emmons is the author of the novels His Mother’s Son (Harcourt), The Stylist (HarperCollins), and Weather Woman (Red Hen Press). A sequel to Weather Woman, called Sinking Islands, is forthcoming.

Her latest book is the story collection, Vanishing, winner of the 2018 Leapfrog Fiction Contest.

At LitHub, Emmons tagged nine books that "are notable for the frank eye they bring to physical pleasure and pain, and the overall messiness of human bodies." One title on the list:

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison’s essay collection The Empathy Exams forays into various corners of human experience, but ultimately its central concern is the female body and pain. As a survivor of anorexia, cutting, alcoholism, as well as abortion, heart surgery, and numerous accidents, Jamison is uniquely equipped to address this subject. Part personal essay and part academic treatise, Jamison composes her pieces by synthesizing her own experiences alongside the work of other writers, thinkers, and artists. “I’ve got this double-edged shame and indignation about my bodily ills and ailments—jaw, punched nose, fast heart, broken foot, etc. etc. etc. On the one hand, I’m like, Why does this shit happen to me? And on the other hand, I’m like, Why the fuck am I talking about this so much,” she says of herself, in the final essay entitled “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” Her final question in this essay is: “How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative?” Both self-disclosing and brainy, the book offers numerous riveting vignettes and deep dives into what it means to possess a body, in particular one of the female persuasion.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirteen essential pandemic novels

The staff at Publishers Weekly tagged thirteen essential pandemic novels, including:

A Beginning at the End
Mike Chen

The rebuild after a plague is the focus of this novel, which follows three San Franciscans trying to put the pieces back together after a disease known as MGS has taken out over half the population. The three acquaintances—a single dad, a former pop star, and a consultant who helps people cope with the tragedy—are put together by chance, but begin to bond as various threats surface. Chen's novel is a more hopeful take on end of the world that "manages to imbue the apocalypse with heart, hope, and humanity."

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top titles in the complicated literature of daughters & mothers

Amy Engel is the author of The Roanoke Girls and The Book of Ivy series.

A former criminal defense attorney, she lives in Missouri with her family.

Engel's new novel is The Familiar Dark.

At CrimeReads she tagged five of her "favorite novels that tackle the complicated bond between mothers and daughters," including:

Carrie by Stephen King

The mother-daughter relationship in this one is a doozy. Carrie and her religious zealot of a mother have a dysfunctional, co-dependent relationship dialed up to ten. There is love between them, but also abuse, fear, and loathing. And Carrie is a daughter who has finally had enough. An extreme example of what happens when the mother-daughter relationship goes horribly awry.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Carrie is on Lizzy Barber's list of five of the most chilling extreme religion believers in fiction, Katie Lowe's top ten list of books about angry women, Jo Jakeman's list of the ten best revenge novels, Ania Ahlborn's list of ten of the scariest books of all time, Jeff Somers's list of the five worst mothers in literary history, Becky Ferreira's list of six of the most memorable bullies in literature, Julie Buntin's list of favorite literary kids with deadbeat and/or absent dads, Gregg Olsen's top ten list of deadly YA books, and James Dawson's top ten list of books to get you through high school.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top Irish gothic novels

Ruth Gilligan is a writer and academic from Dublin now based in the UK. She has published five books to date and was the youngest person ever to top the Irish Bestsellers’ List.

Her most recent novel, The Butchers, is set in 1996 during the BSE crisis and was published in March 2020.

At the Guardian, Gilligan tagged ten “Irish gothic” offerings from which she drew eerie inspiration for The Butchers, including:

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe (1992)

The dysfunctional tale of Francie Brady – a border-town native growing up in the 1960s – is not for the fainthearted. We follow Francie from childhood (cue alcoholic father and suicidal mother), through to industrial school (cue abusive priests), all the way to working life in an abattoir (cue a lot of dismembered pig carcasses). A disturbing portrait of a disintegrating mind, The Butcher Boy gave rise to the phrase “bog gothic” and revealed the sordid realities that often lurked behind romanticised depictions of rural Ireland.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Butcher Boy is on Ray French's top ten list of black comedies, Allen Barra's top twelve list of the best postwar Irish novels, Nick Brooks's top 10 list of literary murderers, Declan Burke's 2008 top ten list of Irish crime fiction, and Edward Hogan's top ten list of stories set outside the city.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten scary good horror novels

At Bloody Disgusting, Meagan Navarro tagged ten scary good horror novels, including:

Meddling Kids – Edgar Cantero

In 1977, the teen detectives of the Blyton Summer Detective Case and their Weimaraner cracked open a significant case that leaves a costumed culprit behind bars for a very long time. Cut to thirteen years later, and the gang has long split up. None of them faring well in adulthood. Police want one of the members across multiple states, another battles alcoholism, and another has spent many years in Arkham Asylum. Nightmares and the suicide of the fourth member bring the gang back together to retrace the steps of their last case; there was something much worse than a masked man behind it all. Something otherworldly and Lovecraftian, and it wants free. Cantero remixes the Scooby-Doo setup with Lovecraftian terror, merging light-hearted horror with Dagon-like beasts. He avoids the pitfalls of oversaturating the prose in pop-culture references in favor of earnestness and action-horror.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Meddling Kids is among Max BoothII's top ten crime books with supernatural elements and comedy, Sam Reader's top ten "books that cast forests in their proper light: dangerous, dark, and deep" and Jeff Somers's six books that will rearrange your childhood memories.

--Marshal Zeringue