Six top titles set in decadent locales

Alex Hay is a bestselling author whose debut novel The Housekeepers was a Waterstones Book of the Month and Paperback of the Year and won the Caledonia Novel Award 2022. He is also the author of The Queen of Fives and The Midnight Guests, both published to great acclaim.

Hay was born in London and now lives in Brighton, U.K. with his husband.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six brilliant novels that thread the darkest psychology into rarefied settings to completely thrilling effect." One title on the list:

Tom Hindle, Death in the Arctic

Like Agatha Christie, Tom Hindle is a master at taking an intriguing, must-visit setting—a magnificent ocean liner, a fabulous wedding on Lake Garda, a hotel in the Costa Rican jungle—and unfurling a carefully-layered mystery within it. I thought this was such a distinctive and clever setup—a luxury airship on a specially-chartered trip to the North Pole—and when you read a Tom Hindle book you always know you are in safe hands.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books that show that the Great American Road Trip Novel isn’t just for white people

Winnie M Li is an American author and activist living in the UK with her partner and young son. A Harvard graduate, Li has written for travel guidebooks, produced independent feature films, programmed for film festivals, and developed eco-tourism projects. Her first novel, Dark Chapter, was nominated for an Edgar Award and translated into ten languages, followed by the critically acclaimed Complicit. A survivor and advocate against gendered violence, she holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and teaches creative writing and media studies.

Li's new novel is What We Left Unsaid.

At Lit Hub Li tagged "eight books (both fiction and non-fiction) that narrate this most American of stories from the perspective of people of color." One title on the list:

Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon

This is the book I always recommend when asked about US road trip narratives. A bestseller upon publication in 1982, this memoir chronicles Least Heat-Moon’s 13,000-mile road trip around the perimeter of America. He drove only on two-lane ‘blue highways,’ avoiding the large interstates and taking him through small towns and neglected corners of the country. The result offers both beautiful prose and an intimate glimpse of an America which may no longer exist. Least Heat-Moon is part-indigenous, and his sensitive awareness of race, class, and historical inequalities enriches his anthropological, but poetic style.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top nineteenth-century novels

Joanna Trollope was an English writer. Some of her best known works include The Rector's Wife (her first #1 bestseller), A Village Affair, Other People's Children, and Marrying the Mistress. She was awarded the OBE in the 1996 Queen's Birthday Honors List for services to literature.

In February 2000 at the Guardian she tagged ten top nineteenth-century novels, including:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

This has everything - joy, grief, success, failure, wealth, poverty, comedy, tragedy - and above all, atmosphere by the bucketload.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Bleak House is one of Alex Wade's ten top dodgy lawyers in literature, Elizabeth Day's ten favorite books about cities, Daisy Hildyard's ten best poems, books and plays about our human inheritance, George Packer's six favorite books, Oliver Ford Davies's six best books, Ian Rankin's 5 favorite literary crime novels, Tim Pigott-Smith's six best books, James McCreet's top ten Victorian detective stories and one of Rebecca Ford's favorite five fiction books. It is on John Mortimer's list of the five best books about law and literature and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best thunderstorms in literature and ten of the best men writing as women, and is among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top mythology- and folklore-inspired horror titles

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 of the best mythology- and folklore-inspired horror books, including:

Skin Folk: Stories by Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson is a titan in speculative fiction. In 2021, Hopkinson was named the 37th SFWA Damon Knight Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Among her many brilliant works, Skin Folk is a great title to jump into if you’re looking for a place to start with her oeuvre. Hopkinson’s collection shows her mastery not only of the short form but also of a range of genres. From stories inspired by Caribbean folklore to chilling superstitions and mind-blowing science fiction, this is a perfect read for the Fall season.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top thrillers about mothers and daughters and sisters

USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan is the author of more than seventeen thrillers including All This Could Be Yours, One Wrong Word, and The House Guest which have won every major mystery award in the industry and have been translated into multiple languages throughout the world. Her fiction is inspired by a lifetime of groundbreaking true-crime cases from a storied career as an on-air investigative journalist for Boston’s WHDH-TV for which she was awarded multiple journalism honors, including thirty-seven Emmy Awards. A TedX speaker and in-demand literary moderator, she has been called a “master of suspense” (Publishers Weekly). A native of Chicago with roots in Indianapolis, Ryan lives in Boston.

Her latest novel is Mother Daughter Sister Stranger.

At CrimeReads Ryan tagged six favorite thrillers about mothers and daughters and sisters, including:

The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths.

Diaries are supposed to be secret, that’s inviolable. And in this brilliant gothic-adjacent thriller, the mother and the daughter are each keeping one. When there’s a murder and both diaries become pivotal evidence, what the mother and daughter learn about each other’s devastating secrets in these no-longer-private entries will keep you turning the pages as fast as you can. This is a perfect book club book—when the killer uses the daughter as leverage, how will the vulnerable mom stop them?

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

The Stranger Diaries is among M. E. Hilliard's seven best, creepiest old houses in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about the body

Lydia Mathis has an MFA in fiction from New York University. She earned her BA in English Literature with a minor in Classical Civilizations from Agnes Scott College. She has worked as a teacher for Teach for America in Memphis and as a teaching fellow at Coler-Goldwater Hospital in New York City. She is the recipient of A Public Space’s 2023 Editorial Fellowship and is currently an assistant editor at A Public Space. She has stories published in North American Review, Southeast Review, Torch Magazine, Stanchion, Five on the Fifth, and oranges journal.

Mathis's debut story collection is Desperate Bodies.

At Lit Hub she tagged five "books that have an entrancing focus on the body." One title on the list:

Naben Ruthnum, Helpmeet

I’m not one to typically read horror, as I’m a baby and prone to nightmares, but I read this with a friend and lived for the descriptions of a decaying body. The horror here is understated, observational. Emotions are near entirely removed, and we get to watch as if this is a kind of Cronenberg directed nature documentary. Besides the beauty and preciseness of language describing a deteriorating body, there’s also the quiet contemplation of the characters affected. There’s the crumbling husband, who makes you consider what you’d do if your body so viciously revolted against you. And then there’s the wife, who takes care of her husband. How do you bear watching a live decomposition? What must you do to survive that?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top books for fans of "Slow Horses"

At Book Riot Megan Mabee tagged four entertaining espionage books for fans of Slow Horses. One title on the list:

Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart

Like Slow Horses, this action-packed assassin story promises plenty of dark humor, as well as a protagonist trying to move on from his notorious past. While Mark was once known as the most dangerous assassin-for-hire in the world, he’s changed his ways, given up this questionable career, and joined a program to help him turn things around. Unfortunately, there seems to be someone who wants him dead, and this will send Mark on a hunt around the world trying to figure out who’s got it out for him.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Assassins Anonymous is among Isabelle McConville's eight hitman stories you don’t want to miss.

Q&A with Rob Hart.

The Page 69 Test: Assassins Anonymous.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top campus novels

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017), The Ferrante Letters (2019), and The Personality Brokers (2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (2021). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits.

At The New Yorker, where she is a contributing writer, Emre tagged five great campus novels, including:

Possession, by A. S. Byatt (1990)

A swoony double romance. The first love affair is between a Victorian poet and poetess who wrote coded letters and poems to each other in the nineteenth century. The second is between two scholars in the nineteen-eighties who set out to answer the only question worth asking: Did the poets do it? A little-known fact: great chunks of the poems are sentences in blank verse from Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

Possession also appears on Alison Doherty's top five list of literary romance books, Molly O’Sullivan's list of seven works that push narrative boundaries, Ceillie Clark-Keane's list of nine literary mysteries with a big winter mood, Emily Temple's list of the twelve best descriptions of flowers in literature, Jae-Yeon Yoo's list of ten books about the importance of the post office, Paraic O’Donnell's top ten list of modern Victorian novels, a list of four books that changed Charlie Lovett, Michelle Dean's list of the six best books about university life, Kelly Anderson's top five list of books for newlyweds, Rebecca Mead's list of six favorite books that illuminate the Victorian era, Marina Warner's ten top list of fairytales, Ester Bloom's top ten list of fictional feminists, Niall Williams's list of ten of the best books that manage to make heroes out of readers, Kyle Minor's list of fifteen of the hottest affairs in literature, Emily Temple's list of the fifty greatest campus novels ever written, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best fossils in literature, ten of the most memorable libraries in literature, ten of the best fictional poets, ten of the best locks of hair in fiction, ten of the best graveyard scenes in fiction, and ten of the best lawyers in literature, and on Rachel Syme's list of the ten most attractive men in literature, Christina Koning's critic's chart of six top romances, and Elizabeth Kostova's top ten list of books for winter nights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven cozy, "Gilmore Girls"-coded fall titles

Kristy Woodson Harvey is the New York Times, USA TODAY, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of fourteen novels, including Summer State of Mind, Beach House Rules, and the Peachtree Bluff series.

Her new book is Falling for Peachtree Bluff.

[My Book, The Movie: Dear Carolina; The Page 69 Test: Dear Carolina; The Page 69 Test: The Southern Side of Paradise; Writers Read: Kristy Woodson Harvey]

At People magazine Harvey tagged seven of her favorite autumnal reads, including:

The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham

Beach read master Elin Hilderbrand has teamed up with her daughter Shelby Cunningham to take us behind the scenes in the hallowed halls of Tiffin Academy, a fictional New England boarding school filled with secrets, scandals and a multi-generational cast of intriguing, complicated characters. Nothing says fall like back to school — with more than a few twists and turns!

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine must-read near-future novels by women

After graduating from Wellesley College and the Columbia Publishing Course, Leslie Stephens worked on the Editorial team at Food52 in New York before heading west to Los Angeles, where she served as the Vice President of Content for the brand, cupcakes and cashmere. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Eater, Apartment Therapy, and Tasting Table. Her weekly newsletter, Morning Person is among Substack’s most popular paid newsletters and her debut novel You’re Safe Here was released in 2024.

Stephens recently earned her Master's in Professional Mental Health Counseling with a Specialization in Addictions from Lewis and Clark College. With her degree, she hopes to treat adults struggling with technology addiction, through nature-based therapy. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon with her hyperactive pit-mix Toast.

At Tertulia Stephens tagged nine favorite speculative fiction near-future titles by women, including:

Good Morning, Midnight
Lily Brooks-Dalton

The end of the world, from the perspective of people stuck in the most isolated places imaginable—an Arctic research facility and a space ship.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Good Morning, Midnight is among Michelle Anne Schingler's top five books where women in space take center stage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven crime titles that feature outsiders who challenge the status quo

Tanya Grant writes twisty thrillers full of secrets, murder, and gossipy group dynamics. When not conducting highly suspicious web searches (for research!), she also writes romances.

Grant's new psychological thriller is A Beautiful Lie.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "seven novels about characters whose outsider status disrupts the status quo and leads to dangerous places." One title on the list:

Rachel Hawkins, The Wife Upstairs

Jane is an underemployed young woman working as a dog walker in a wealthy community after escaping a traumatic past. She meets Eddie Rochester and feels an instant connection with the handsome man, whose wife is missing and presumed dead. Soon, Jane and Eddie begin dating, and Jane finds herself embedded in his exclusive community, trying to fit in while keeping her secrets safe.

It’s a lot to handle, and that’s before you count the thumping sounds coming from upstairs….

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books to impress a prospective lover

Mariella Frostrup has enjoyed a four-decade career as one of the UK’s most respected broadcasters and journalists. Her ground-breaking BBC documentary The Truth About Menopause (2018) helped to ignite a national conversation. In 2022, she was named one of Vogue’s 25 most influential women in the UK. She is co-founder and Chair of the campaign group Menopause Mandate, and in 2024 was appointed the UK Government’s Menopause Employment Ambassador.

In 2025, Frostrup became a Trustee of both the V&A and the British Council, following six years on the executive board of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Her books include Menolicious (a menopause-focused cookbook co-authored with Belles Berry), Cracking the Menopause (with Alice Smellie), and three anthologies.

Back in 2000 for the Guardian, Frostrup tagged ten books to impress a prospective lover, including:

Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

A columnist and environmental campaigner for the Miami Herald, this is Hiaasen's first novel in what has evolved into a series of blackly comic and utterly readable satires set in his native Florida. Those who saw the dreadful screen adaptation of his novel Striptease shouldn't be put off the author himself. Essential holiday/aeroplane reading.

Read about the other titles on the list.

Tourist Season is among Joy Fielding's five essential thrillers perfect for the aspiring writer.

--Marshal Zeringue