The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham JonesRead about the other titles on the list..
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.
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.
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, WanderersRead about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.
Like Westward Women, Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers features a biologically mysterious contagion that compels people to trek across the UnitedStates 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.
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.
Evergreen – Naomi HiraharaRead about the other novels on the list.
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. Whilesomewhere 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.
novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin Random House India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book, You Can’t Go Home Again, was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India's and The Hindu's best of the year lists. Her third novel, The Giant Dark, was a runaway critical success, won the Mo Siewcharran Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award. Strange Girls is her US debut. She lives in London.
Kamila Shamsie, KartographyRead about the other titles on the list at Lit Hub.
This novel is full of friendship breakups, both past and present. It’s about a quartet of young Karachiites, whose parents all know each otherand have a shared and knotty history that our heroes discover over the course of the book. Shamsie’s early novel is an elegant portrayal of breakups, coloured by many different things: bigotry, misunderstandings and shame are all things that tear people apart in this book. Raheen and Karim are at the heart of the book, friends first and an eventual love story. Even when they both leave Pakistan and move to American, they continue to satellite each other. The friendship breakup in the diaspora is its own particular haunting: representing not just your past relationship but the home you’ve left behind.
Susie Dumond is a queer writer originally from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the author of Queerly Beloved, Looking for a Sign, and Bed and Breakup, and she also talks about books as a senior contributor at Book Riot and a bookseller at her local indie bookstore. Dumond lives in Washington, D.C., with her spouse, Mickey, and her cat, Maple. When she’s not writing or reading, you can find her baking cupcakes or belting karaoke at the nearest gay bar.
The Library of Legends by Janie ChangRead about the other entries on the list.
One of fascism’s most powerful tools is the erasure of history from conflicting viewpoints. Janie Chang puts a magical spin on the real history of a group of Chinese students tasked with protecting ancient books from fascist attacks. As Japanese bombs fell on 1937 Nanking, an entire university’s students, faculty, and staff were forced to walk 1,000 miles west to safety. Each person was tasked with carrying a different volume of the 500-year-old Library of Legends. Their brave journey awakens spirits that accompany them along the way in this luscious, fantastical tale inspired by real events.
Ani Katz is a writer, photographer, and teacher. She was born and raised on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, and lives in Brooklyn.
Gliff by Ali SmithRead about the other titles on the list at CrimeReads.
A harrowing and heartbreaking novel, Gliff, like all great thrillers, demands to be read in a few breathless gulps. Siblings Bri and Rose were raised bytheir mother to reject new technologies and the grasping tentacles of the algorithm in an attempt to hold on to their freedom and humanity, a choice which renders them “unverifiable” and uniquely vulnerable. When their mother is called away, Bri and Rose find themselves running from an authority that is both inexorable and faceless, a threat made visible by the seemingly inescapable painting of red lines around the dwellings of undesirables—a detail both banal and chilling. Gliff explores the terrifying consequences of surveillance and intolerance in a grim, technocratic and totalitarian society that is perilously close in character to the present, and finds possibilities for resistance and resilience in language, art, and connection.
Eric Wagner is a staff writer with the Puget Sound Institute at University of Washington, Tacoma. He is author of After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens and Penguins in the Desert, and wrote the text for Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish.
Maria Mudd Ruth, The Bird with Flaming Red Feet: Seasons with an Uncommonly Common SeabirdRead about the other books on the list at Lit Hub.
The pigeon guillemot is in many ways everything the rhinoceros auklet is not—loud, visually dramatic, gregarious, conspicuous, with a willingness to come to land during the day. In The Bird with Flaming Red Feet, Maria joins a citizen science group devoted to their study and follows the birds for years. Documenting her and her fellow volunteers’ attentions, the book is an ode to the kind of careful, patient natural history that contemporary science practiced at its increasingly rapid pace does not encourage as much anymore.
writing about books on the Internet, listening to audiobooks on the subway, and reading anything with a twisty plot or a happily ever after.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max GladstoneRead about the other entries on the list.
This genre-bending sci-fi sapphic love story features time-traveling spies from warring empires. Red and Blue jump from timeline to timeline and universe to universe. They start out on opposite sides, but start leaving each other messages that slowly morph from adversarial to friendly to loving. Through the letters they write each other, the book takes on a lyrical and often philosophical quality. At just under 200 pages, it’s a short read that will keep your mind occupied with big thoughts long after you finish.
As a passionate advocate of lifelong learning, Frances Crawford was delighted to graduate with distinction at age sixty from Glasgow University’s Creative Writing program. Frances grew up in North Glasgow, and credits the people of Possilpark and Milton as her writing inspiration. She still lives in Glasgow with her family and likes libraries and punk rock.
Angie Thomas, The Hate U GiveRead about the other titles on the list at CrimeReads.
Aimed at young adults, this novel describes the fallout of a racist shooting in inner-city America. Sixteen-year-old Starr is the only witness to the shooting and her ordinary life with loving family comes to a shocking and abrupt end. When Starr makes the courageous decision to testify in court, she faces outrage, danger and threat.
The novel is a powerful depiction not only of a young black life wrecked by one incident, but also by daily injustice and inequality.
Read about the other titles on the list.Judy Blume: A Life
Mark Oppenheimer
For generations of readers, Judy Blume’s novels said what no one else would. With books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Deenie, she transformed children’s literature into something frank, candid, and deeply human. Drawing on extensive interviews and archival material, journalist Mark Oppenheimer traces Blume’s rise from suburban housewife to one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
Pachinko by Min Jin LeeRead about the other books on the list.
In the early 1900s, a Korean immigrant family settled in Japan, beginning with a young pregnant woman named Sunja and the sickly minister Baek Isak. Over the next century, Sunja, as a matriarch, fights to feed and keep her family alive, fostering her sons into what she hopes will be a prosperous future. This modern historical fiction classic covers everything from the temptation and pressures to assimilate and “pass” as Japanese to the institutional, social, and political oppression of Koreans in Japan over the years.
writing classes in New York and St. Louis, and she has volunteered as a writer-in-schools in San Francisco and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is also the author of the novel The Night Gwen Stacy Died. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, and her translations have appeared in the Buenos Aires Review. She lives in Chicago with her family.
Brit Bennett, The MothersRead about the other novels on the list.
The Mothers opens with an abortion and spans the friendship of two motherless girls into adulthood, living in the aftermath of decisions theirmothers have made. When, following her own mother’s suicide, seventeen-year-old Nadia gets pregnant by the pastor’s son, she forges an unlikely friendship with Aubrey, whose mother has left her family behind. The titular mothers of Bennett’s novel—narrating in the first-person plural—offer observations and judgements from the of Upper Room of a Southern California Black church: “We were all mothers by then, some by heart and some by womb. We rocked grandbabies left in our care and taught the neighborhood kids piano and baked pies for the sick and the shut-in. We all mothered somebody.” The novel is haunting, asking what we owe our mothers, the communities given to us by birth, and those we create for ourselves.
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