Five top sci-fi books about competitions

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged five great sci-fi titles about competitions. One title on the list:

The Blood Trials by N. E. Davenport

When Ikenna’s grandfather, the former Legatus, is murdered, she knows that someone on the Tribunal must be responsible. But the only way to get answers is to get close, and she decides to do that by joining the Praetorian Trials of Mareen. They’re a grueling challenge that only one-quarter of the contestants survive, and subjecting herself to not only the danger but also Mareen’s racist and sexist society, Ikenna fights to get her revenge.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine memoirs about dating, desire, and reclamation

Estelle Erasmus, an award-winning journalist and 2025 TEDx Speaker, is the author of Writing That Gets Noticed (named a "Best Book for Writers" by Poets & Writers Magazine), as well as the host/executive producer of the podcast Freelance Writing Direct. She is an adjunct instructor for NYU’s School of Professional Studies/Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts, and has written for over 150 publications, including the New York Times, Next Avenue, WIRED, Slate, The Independent, the Washington Post, and AARP: The Magazine.

At Electric Lit Erasmus tagged nine memoirs that "offer a realistic counterpoint to Valentine’s Day myths, and a clearer understanding of what it really meant to search for love." One title on the list:

And You May Find Yourself... by Sari Botton

Sari Botton’s memoir-in-essays speaks directly to her experience of reevaluating love, ambition, desire, and reinvention later in life, when familiar romantic narratives no longer fit. The memoir moves between youthful missteps made to fit in with mean girls, misguided efforts to please men, fraught friendships, and professional dissatisfaction, alongside a present-day reckoning with who she has become. Botton writes with humor and clarity about bad therapists, “Mr. Wrongs,” and the exhaustion of contorting herself to meet expectations that were never really hers. As old identities fall away, she explores how desire shifts with age and self-acceptance. Grounded in feminist reflection and emotional honesty, the book offers a reassuring perspective, showing that intimacy and fulfillment can emerge from inhabiting one’s authentic self, flaws and all, with patience and self-awareness. Once Botton reaches that realization, she ultimately finds the intimacy she was seeking in a satisfying relationship and marriage.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top cult thrillers

Jennifer Brody, also known as Vera Strange, is the award—winning author of the Disney Chills series, the Continuum Trilogy, and Stoker finalist Spectre Deep 6, which prompted Forbes to call her “a star in the graphic novel world.” She is the coauthor of All Is Found: A Frozen Anthology and Star Wars: Stories of Jedi and Sith, in which she penned the Darth Vader story. A graduate of Harvard University, Brody is also a film/TV producer and writer and a creative writing instructor. She began her career in Hollywood working for A—list directors and movie studios on many films, including the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Golden Compass. Brody lives and writes in Joshua Tree, California.

Her new novel is Namaste and Slay: A Dark Romantic Thriller.

At CrimeReads Brody tagged six top cult thrillers that "aren’t just escapist reads; they’re cautionary tales about the perils of seeking salvation in the wrong places." One title on the list:

Janelle Brown, I’ll Be You

Janelle Brown’s I’ll Be You (2023) explores sibling bonds through the lens of a California wellness cult. Identical twins Sam and Elli, former child stars, have drifted apart: Sam’s battling addiction, while Elli’s embraced motherhood and self-help. When Elli vanishes after joining a secretive group called GenFem—promising empowerment through seminars and “enlightenment”—Sam impersonates her to infiltrate it. What unfolds is a twisty tale of identity theft, manipulation, and buried family secrets. Brown’s pacing is relentless, highlighting how cults prey on vulnerabilities, layering luxury (think Ojai spas and guru-led retreats) with coercion. The seductive vibe comes from GenFem’s promise of reinvention, much like the transformative allure in Namaste and Slay. It’s a gripping study of twins as mirrors, reflecting how cults distort self-perception.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven fake dating 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 Iwasaki tagged seven favorite fake dating romance novels to read for Valentine’s Day, including:

Naina Kumar, Say You’ll Be Mine

Meghna has been in love with her best friend since college. When he announces that he’s engaged and asks her to be his best man, Meghna is determined to move on even if it’s Karthik, the boring matchmaking prospect her parents set her up with. But Karthik and Meghna have much to discover about each other during their fake engagement. This one is a slow burn and has an unexpected villain!

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirteen titles that celebrate female friendship

Elizabeth Wellington Rollins is a writer and author of the forthcoming novel The Three Graces of Pearl Street, slated for publication in fall 2026. Her work has appeared in BBC, Condé Nast Traveler, The Week, Travel + Leisure, and Vogue.

At People magazine she tagged thirteen novels "that capture the complex friendships between women in every shade of light and dark." One title on the list:

Kin by Tayari Jones

In this breathtaking dual coming-of-age story, two motherless girls from the Jim Crow South take different paths into adulthood while holding onto the bond that sustained them through childhood.

Read about the other novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven Sri Lankan novels haunted by the nation's past

Yosha Gunasekera is a Sri Lankan-American attorney who represents people who have spent decades behind bars for crimes they did not commit. She teaches a course at Princeton University focused on wrongful conviction and exoneration. Gunasekera is a former Manhattan public defender and has written and spoken extensively on the criminal legal system. She lives in New York City with her husband.

Her debut mystery is The Midnight Taxi.

At Electric Lit Gunasekera tagged seven Sri Lankan novels haunted by skeletons in the nation’s closet. One title on the list:

My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa

Jayatissa’s My Sweet Girl is a sharply plotted psychological thriller. It centers on Paloma, a woman adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage into a vastly different life in the United States. But like most compelling thrillers, her adopted life is built on a buried truth and Paloma carries a secret that trails her like a shadow. Paloma’s roommate begins to uncover this past, but before Paloma can pay him for his silence, she finds him dead in their apartment. By the time police arrive, the body has disappeared. The novel’s ghosts include the past Paloma has tried so hard to outrun, the identity she tried to abandon, and the lingering spectre of people who refused to be erased. In My Sweet Girl, the truth always catches up and it never arrives quietly.

Read about the other titles on Gunasekera's list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the best time-travel titles

Michelle Maryk graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English and attended the Yale Writer’s Workshop.

For the better part of twenty-five years, she’s been a successful voiceover, on-camera commercial, and comedic actor, and she is a dual Swedish and US citizen.

The Found Object Society is her debut novel.

At Oprah Daily Maryk tagged six of the best time-travel books. One entry on the list:

The Paradox Hotel, by Rob Hart

Time travel for the ultrarich? Check. Powerful government entities privatizing the technology for their dubious gain? Check. A grieving female security officer trying to solve a murder while slipping between timelines against her will? Check and check. The time portal is starting to glitch; baby dinosaurs keep popping up; and things are going all kinds of wrong at the Paradox Hotel. Hart masterfully melds noir, sci-fi, and thriller genres in this wild and fast-paced ride.

Read about the other titles on Maryk's list.

The Paradox Hotel is among Molly Odintz's seven top novels set in supernatural hotels.

The Page 69 Test: The Paradox Hotel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles featuring the most unhinged women in fiction

Marisa Walz is a psychological suspense author who writes books about people behaving badly. She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two young children.

Good Intentions is her debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six novels featuring gloriously unwell female protagonists—women I would absolutely invite to brunch, after I hid the knives." One title on the list:

R. F. Kuang, Yellowface

Struggling author June Hayward steals the unpublished manuscript of her literary rival—the brilliant, beloved, deceased Athena Liu—and publishes it as her own. When the stolen book becomes a sensation, June’s guilt escalates into paranoia and terrible, desperate decisions as the internet, the industry, and her own unraveling psyche close in.

Razor-sharp and savagely funny, the novel exposes ambition, envy, and the monstrous lengths one woman goes to claim the success she believes the world owes her.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

Yellowface is among Disha Bose's five novels that explore and center female friendship, Taylor Hutton's five top novels with tantalizing anti-heroes, Elizabeth Staple's eight books about youthful mistakes that come back to haunt you, Lauren Kuhl's eight top novels about toxic relationships, Elly Griffiths's top ten books about books, Toby Lloyd's seven books that show storytelling has consequences, Sophie Wan's seven top titles with women behaving badly, Leah Konen's six top friends-to-frenemies thrillers, and Garnett Cohen's seven novels about characters driven by their cravings.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about the cost of burial

Becky Robison (she/her) is a writer living in Louisville, Kentucky. A graduate of UNLV's Creative Writing MFA program, her work has appeared in Salon, Slate, Business Insider, and elsewhere. She’s also the mind behind My Parents Are Dead: What Now?—a project that aims to help people navigate the dizzying labyrinth of post-death bureaucracy based on her own experience.

Robison's new book is My Parents Are Dead: What Now? A Panic-Free Guide to the Practicalities of Death.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven "books that show how the invisible hand of the market reaches far beyond the grave." One title on the list:

The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans

While Too Poor to Die covers funeral poverty in the United States more broadly, Prickett and Timmermans focus on a specific case study in The Unclaimed: four Angelenos who join the ranks of the abandoned dead for dramatically different reasons. Their reporting reveals that the poor aren’t the only ones who end up in the care of the overworked and bureaucracy-burdened civil servants we meet in the book. Like many cities, Los Angeles prioritizes immediate family when it comes to claiming a body—and some families refuse to claim their dead. Even if friends or other communities wish to step in, they often aren’t legally allowed to do so. When I saw Pamela Prickett speak at last year’s Funeral Consumers Alliance conference, she emphasized another cause: fraying social ties. Our culture promotes self-reliance, which can easily turn into isolation. As communities dissolve, more people die alone.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about work

Daniel Poppick is a poet and novelist. His debut novel is The Copywriter (2026).

He is also the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description (2019), selected for the National Poetry Series, and The Police (2017). His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Drift, Harper's, BOMB, The New Republic, Chicago Review, and other journals.

At Lit Hub Poppick tagged seven books about work. One title on the author's list:

Kathryn Scanlan, Kick the Latch

In this novella about an Iowa woman’s lifelong career training horses, the most haunting characters are the horses themselves: an unpaid shadow workforce at the racetrack, the rodeo, and in stables, empathically and mysteriously buoying the human souls who love them. At times, Kick the Latch seems to suggest that injured racehorses and their exhausted caretakers might share a parallel fate. “Priests came on race days to bless the horses’ legs before they ran,” Scanlan’s shrewd narrator observes, “but there’d be plenty of times it didn’t work.” Everywhere you go, even and especially if they can’t speak, somebody is always working.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top contemporary nonfiction books for Black History Month

At People magazine senior books editor Lizz Schumer tagged ten inspiring and educational nonfiction books to read this Black History Month. One title on the list:

Until the Last Gun Is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America's Soul by Matthew F. Delmont

Even as the Civil Rights movement was in full swing at home, more than 300,000 Black troops were drafted and sent to fight in the Vietnam War. These often impoverished soldiers left pervasive racism back home only to find themselves thrust onto the frontlines of a hotly contested war many saw as unjust. For Black Americans, the Vietnam War led a generation to question what justice really means. It's an indelible portrait of a fractured movement, a generation of veterans failed by the very country they fought for and the bravery of Black servicemen and advocates.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six historical fiction books based on true stories

Katie Moench is a librarian, runner, and lover of baked goods. A school librarian in the Upper Midwest, Moench lives with her husband and dog and spends her free time drinking coffee, trying new recipes, and adding to her TBR list.

At Book Riot she tagged six historical fiction titles based on real people and events, including:

How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

Set in Singapore during World War II, How We Disappeared sheds light on a lesser-discussed aspect of the Japanese occupation and weaves together the past and present. In 1942, 17-year-old Wang Di is kidnapped and taken to a Japanese military brothel where she is forced to work in sexual slavery as a “comfort woman.” In 2000, her grandson Kevin hears a mumbled admission from his ailing grandmother, which drives him to begin searching for the story of her life. The novel flows between 1942 and 2000, showing how the tragedies Wang Di suffered during the war have affected her and her family’s lives. As she grows more ill, even more secrets are revealed. Praised for its skilled structure and evocative writing, the book was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Read about the other novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue