Seven titles with astronaut protagonists

Cecile Pin is a writer living in London. Her debut novel Wandering Souls was published in twelve languages. It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Prix Femina Etranger, and shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. She has won the Fragonard Prize for Foreign Literature, a Somerset Maugham Award, and a London Writers' Award. In 2025, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe. Her new novel is Celestial Lights.

At Lit Hub Pin tagged seven novels with astronaut protagonists, including:

Andy Weir, The Martian

Again, this isn’t the only one of Weir’s book that could have made it onto this list – and many readers might be familiar with Ridley Scott’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of it. Mark Watney, a NASA astronaut, gets stranded on Mars after a

dust storm sweeps through the planet. How will he survive against all odds? I particularly admire how well-researched the novel is. Weir, who has a background in computer programming, checked a lot of the maths and science himself, and initially published chapters on his blog, crowdsourcing readers to correct any inaccuracies.

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

The Martian is among Paulette Jiles's seven top post-apocalyptic sci-fi escapist titles, Joel Cunningham's five favorite invented locations that don’t plan to let you leave, Tim Peake's five top books to take to space, Jeffrey Kluger's five favorite books that make epic drama out of space-faring history, Elisabeth Delp's seven classic science fiction space odysseys, Alexandra Oliva's five novels that get important aspects of survival right, Jeff Somers's seven works of speculative fiction that don’t feel all that speculative and  five top sci-fi novels with plausible futuristic technology, Ernest Cline’s ten favorite SF novels, and James Mustich's five top books on visiting Mars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles that explore whiteness in intimate relationships

Lisa Low is the author of Crown for the Girl Inside, winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest from YesYes Books. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.

Low's full-length poetry collection is Replica.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "cross-genre books explore interracial relationships by inverting the white gaze." One title on the list:

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine

Rankine challenges herself to ask white men what they think of their privilege early on in Just Us, a hybrid text containing essays, poems, images, and research, in the lineage of her 2014 collection Citizen. Several airport/airplane interactions later, Rankine recounts her findings to her white husband, who “believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition.” This white husband is a minor character in a book that advocates for messiness, that probes the intimacy of conversations on whiteness with strangers and friends alike. But “lemonade,” a small section on their relationship and a session with a marriage counselor, deepens previous and subsequent conversations in the book and adds meaning to the title “just us.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six medieval horror books

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 medieval horror books to take you back in time, including:

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

You can’t talk about Medieval horror without mentioning Between Two Fires, which seems to be everywhere I look lately. What began as a BookTok sensation was recently rereleased with the renowned horror publisher Tor NightFire.

Between Two Fires begins in the year 1348, and the knight, Thomas, finds an orphaned girl of the plague in a dead Norman village. The girl believes the Black Plague is part of a larger religious cataclysm, and her visions convince Thomas to escort her to Avignon. But Thomas soon realizes that the girl is more than just promises of salvation for himself and the world. This is a medieval horror-adventure that plays on the religious intensity and upheaval of the Middle Ages.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top titles about running

At PopSugar Helen Carefoot tagged ten books "that tackle running as both a recreational pursuit and a necessity... stories that include running as the catalyst for finding love, building community, finding purpose and oneself, and carrying oneself to safety." One title on the list:

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

You may think of spies as glamorous, skilled professionals, but the spies that populate Mick Herron's "Slough House" series are the opposite: a motley crew of disgraced, dysfunctional agents who've been demoted and suffered some mess up or humiliation that placed them on the outs. But under the guidance of brilliant but curmudgeonly spy Jackson Lamb, they do somehow manage to save the UK repeatedly, despite committing bungling missteps along the way.

River Cartwright, a promising young agent, is constantly trying to prove himself. This means placing himself physically in harm's way, which includes him running all the time: through crowded public spaces to (try) to catch suspects, away when he breaks into high security spaces to gain intel, and even on jogs to clear his head.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Slow Horses is among Mike Lawson's political thrillers where the good guys don’t always win and Bernard Cornwell's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight memoirs about the childhood loss of a mother

Jacque Gorelick is a California native who has moved too many times to count. She’s lived all over the West Coast from Santa Barbara to Alaska. Now firmly rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives beside a creek under redwood trees with her husband, two boys, and a mélange of rescues.

Before freelance writing, Gorelick spent two decades as an elementary school teacher helping students turn ideas into stories. Her debut memoir, Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home, is about hearts (medical and metaphorical) and discovering—through a traumatic medical event and motherhood—the meaning of family.

At Electric Lit Gorelick tagged eight memoirs that "explore the ripple effects of early mother loss on womanhood, motherhood, identity, and belonging. A loss that shapes daughters for a lifetime." One title on the list:

Living Proof by Tiffany Graham Charkosky

Tiffany Graham Charkosky’s girlhood unfolded against the backdrop of her mother’s cancer diagnosis and declining health. Eighteen years later, as a woman finding her footing in marriage and motherhood, Charkosky’s grief and fear resurface when she discovers her mother’s illness was a result of a specific and rare genetic mutation. What follows is a familial excavation, genetic reckoning, and heartrending reminiscence of what is lost when a mother dies, leaving her young children with unanswerable questions that cannot be quieted, no matter the years that pass. Charkosky faces genetic testing and uncertainty as she unravels the mystery of her family’s legacy through her own DNA. Living Proof is a profound story of what we inherit through genetics, memory, and time.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Five crime novels where objects and houses remember

C. L. Miller is the internationally bestselling author of the Antique Hunter Series. She started working life as an editorial assistant for her mother, Judith Miller, on The Miller’s Antique Price Guide and other antiquing guides. She lives in a medieval cottage in Dedham Vale, Suffolk, with her family.

The author's newest novel is The Antique Hunter's Murder at the Castle.

At CrimeReads Miller tagged five crime novels "where houses act as witnesses, objects function as evidence, and history is not background texture but an active participant in the mystery." One title on the list:

S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed is one of my favorite crime reads–although I would argue that it’s not a traditional historical mystery, but it brilliantly uses the legacies of the Southern landscape—its racial fault lines, its layered memory of violence and resistance to anchor its powerful narrative.

The small Virginia town isn’t just a backdrop; its history amplifies the tension and moral conflict faced by a sheriff hunting a serial killer whose crimes feel rooted in long-standing community wounds.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

All The Sinners Bleed is among Amber and Danielle Brown's five top thrillers with social commentary and Publishers Weekly's best mysteries and thrillers of 2023.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles for fans of the "Project Hail Mary" novel and/or movie

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged five "great reads about searching for new habitable planets, or encountering aliens, or both." One entry on the list:

The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

[W]hen the homeland of an alien society is destroyed, they realize their only chance for survival is to ask for help from the indigenous life forms on their adopted planet. Soon, it’s a race to keep the species from dying out, while long-kept mysteries are unraveled and the two cultures are forced to work together.

Read about the other titles on the list.

The Best of All Possible Worlds is among Ceridwen Christensen's eleven adult SF novels to turn teens into genre fans for life.

--Marshal Zeringue

The five best celebrity/normal person romance novels

Haruka Iwasaki is a writer and bookseller living in Brooklyn, NY. She writes personal essays about her Japanese American identity, grief and growing up in NYC. One essay has appeared in print this year in Oh Reader magazine.

At Lit Hub she tagged five favorite celebrity/normal person romance novels, including:

Rachel Reid, Game Changer

Scott Hunter, the star hockey player of the New York Admirals, is having a bad streak of games and steps into a smoothie place after a run where he meets Kip, a twenty five year old who works in food service while he decides what to do with his history degree. Scott wins that evening’s game and, crediting the smoothie with his changing luck, visits Kip at his smoothie shop again (this time with more flirtation), Later they meet again at a fancy gala where Kip is working as a caterer. They decide to go out for burgers after and quickly start a fun, loving relationship but have to operate completely in secret since Scott is not out as a gay hockey player. The happy scenes between Kip and Scott show that happiness and steadiness in a relationship is not boring at all and getting to know your new partner is a fascinating process.

This romance novel explores the long distance part of being in a relationship with a celebrity: there are tons of spicy scenes that involve Skype or old-school talking over the phone and reunions after many days apart. Because Kip feels a little lost in his career, there is a bit more of a Cinderella dynamic with an enormous class difference between the two men and higher stakes because of the danger in publicly outing an athlete before Scott and Kip are ready for what comes afterward. This is a really sweet love story and the first book in the Game Changers series that helped create the popular show Heated Rivalry.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven darkly surreal Irish books

Eoghan Walls is a Northern Irish poet from Derry. He has lived and worked in Ireland, Britain, Germany and Rwanda. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, and his poetry has been shortlisted for multiple international awards, including the Bridport Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize and the Piggott Prize. He has published the first major translation of Heidegger’s poetical works and currently teaches Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Walls's new novel, Field Notes from an Extinction, "deals with ecological disaster, weaponized starvation, and anti-immigrant sentiment."

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven favorite darkly surreal Irish books, including:

The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes

The bleak desperation of a more recent Ireland is conjured in Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter; a novel set in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’s financial collapse, where a father in Roscommon, “the Chief,” is dying of age and poor investments and asks his sons to assist in his suicide. The pains in the book have a grand mythic scope—as of Cain and Abel or Saturn and his kids. There are intimate blood ties: Brothers are troubled in wild fields. Dogs howl at the damp horizons. The wild laughter of the title is the absurd—defiant? hopeful? despairing?—response to the new darknesses that drive us into the earth.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books to read if you loved the movie "Sinners"

Erica Ezeifedi is a writer, editor, and advocate currently serving as an Associate Editor at Book Riot. For the site she tagged six "books that each touch on the major themes and feelings in Sinners," including:

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

The release of this book being so close to Sinners is too perfect. It also has vampirism as an analogy of European violence against Indigenous and non-white populations, but this time, one of the brown bodies it consumes bites back.

Read about the other titles on the list..

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is among V.E. Schwab's five top modern vampire novels.

Also see Brittany K. Allen's top ten books for fans of Sinners.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six thrillers that feature contagions and pandemics

Alice Martin is a writer, reader, and teacher from North Carolina. She holds a PhD in Literature from Rutgers University and works as an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where she teaches fiction writing and American literature. She lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, her son, and too many typewriters.

Westward Women is Martin's debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six novels that are

stories about societies on the edge in the face of contagions, stories made pulse-pounding not only because of the way they demonstrate contagion as a threat but also the way they reveal how contagion can be a catalyst for social change, a reminder of the potential reckless delights in being free of social constraint.

One title on Martin's list:

Chuck Wendig, Wanderers

Like Westward Women, Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers features a biologically mysterious contagion that compels people to trek across the United States in a zombie-like fashion. Unlike in Westward Women, detaining the infected causes those very infected to explode (yes, really). The result is an unstoppable movement that inspires loved ones, called “Shepards,” to join the trek.

The reverberates of this phenomenon are widespread: the development of an AI to predict other pandemics, the formation extremist groups who see the Walkers as a threat, and the rise of a smalltown preacher who tries to take charge of the situation while under the influence of a white supremacist. The outcomes are explosive, but so is the subtler truth the contagion embodies: that sometimes we are drawn to compulsion; that despite our better judgements, sometimes we, too, wish to submit to forces beyond our control.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

Wanderers is among Vanessa Armstrong's seven top books featuring frightening fungi and Mark Skinner's ten top reads for Stranger Things fans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five mystery titles set in the aftermath of WWII

Shaina Steinberg is the author of the Bishop & Gallagher Mysteries, as well as a film and television writer who’s worked on Malcolm in the Middle, Everwood, Cold Case, Bionic Woman, and Spartacus. Named to the Young and Hungry List in 2013 and the WriteHer List in 2017, she has developed pitches, pilots and features with companies such as Temple Hill, Endgame Entertainment, Fremantle, eOne, Blondie Girl, Josephson Entertainment and Alcon.

At The Strand Magazine she tagged five mystery books set in the aftermath of World War Two. One title on the list:

Evergreen – Naomi Hirahara

The follow-up to Naomi Hirahara’s brilliant Clark and Division, Evergreen continues Aki (neé Ito) Nakasone’s story. Aki and her family returned to Los Angeles, after being forced into internment camps. While somewhere able to find housing, many people were forced into camps located in Burbank. They were dirty, crime-ridden places, that proved hard to leave with the shortage of affordable housing.

Aki is working as a nurse’s aide when an old man, who has been badly beaten, is brought into the hospital. To Aki’s surprise, he is the father of her husband’s best friend, Babe, from the war. She cannot help but suspect him of elder abuse. When the old man killed a few days later and Babe goes missing, Aki is determined to unravel this mystery. The bond Aki’s husband developed with Babe while serving as soldiers in the 442nd is something Aki cannot understand. It makes her realize how much she still has to learn about her husband. They got married during the war and are only now living together for the first time.

Aki’s quest to find the killer reunites her with old friends from Chicago as she navigates Los Angeles from Pasadena to Little Tokyo, in search of answers.

Read about the other novels on the list.

Q&A with Naomi Hirahara.

--Marshal Zeringue