by NPR and named by Booklist as one of the "Top Ten Crime Debuts" of 2021. Her second novel, Breakfall, a domestic thriller surrounding a mysterious death at a close-knit Jiu Jitsu gym, came out last month.
At CrimeReads Slor tagged three novels "that explore the why’s and how’s of infidelity," including:
Anna Karenina by Leo TolstoyRead about the other entries on the list.
The literary gamut is filled with shamed women from across the ages; but Russian was my first language, so I can’t have a list about literary affairs without one of the most famous literary affairs—Tolstoy’s poor doomed heroine, Anna Karenina, who is so tormented by public humiliation she famously throws herself in front of atrain. Set in late 19th-century Imperial Russia, Anna was rather doomed from the start, as it was not an easy time to be alive regardless of who she was bedding. (The same can be said for her French counterpart Madame Bovary, who poisons herself to death.) Here, too, Anna’s Count Alexei, who is at least equally responsible for the fallout of their relationship, manages to turn out just fine. One has to wonder why, across the centuries, only women are scorned for getting involved with the wrong guy. If it’s an issue of morality, then the man should get thrown under the bus too; and yet, generally, they’re not. Like Nietzsche once said, “fear is the mother of morality.” People fear what they don’t know or what they might not understand, and one of those things has always been female sexuality. Perhaps that’s why so many of the greatest novels featuring risqué behavior these days are written by women!
Anna Karenina also appears on Anna Orhanen's list of eleven of the very best literary evocations of winter, Cathy Rentzenbrink's top ten list of bookworms in fiction, Amanda Craig's list of ten of the best-dressed characters in fiction, Ceri Radford's list often of the finest literary romances ever told, Tessa Hadley's list of six favorite examinations of art in fiction, Kathryn Harrison's list of six favorite epic novels, Jane Corry's list of five of literature's more fearsome families, Neel Mukherjee's six favorite books list, Viv Groskop's top ten list of life lessons from Russian literature, Elizabeth Day's top ten list of parties in fiction, Grant Ginder's top ten list of the more loathsome people in literature, Louis De Berniéres's six best books list, Martin Seay's ten best long books list, Jeffrey Lent's top ten list of books about justice and redemption, Bethan Roberts's top ten list of novels about childbirth, Hannah Jane Parkinson's list of the ten worst couples in literature, Hanna McGrath's top fifteen list of epigraphs, Amelia Schonbek's list of three classic novels that pass the Bechdel test, Rachel Thompson's top ten list of the greatest deaths in fiction, Melissa Albert's recommended reading list for eight villains, Alison MacLeod's top ten list of stories about infidelity, David Denby's six favorite books list, Howard Jacobson's list of his five favorite literary heroines, Eleanor Birne's top ten list of books on motherhood, Esther Freud's top ten list of love stories, Chika Unigwe's six favorite books list, Elizabeth Kostova's list of favorite books, James Gray's list of best books, Marie Arana's list of the best books about love, Ha Jin's most important books list, Tom Perrotta's ten favorite books list, Claire Messud's list of her five most important books, Alexander McCall Smith's list of his five most important books, Mohsin Hamid's list of his ten favorite books, Louis Begley's list of favorite novels about cheating lovers, and among the top ten works of literature according to Peter Carey and Norman Mailer. John Mullan put it on his lists of ten of the best erotic dreams in literature, ten of the best coups de foudre in literature, ten of the best births in literature, ten of the best ice-skating episodes in literature, and ten of the best balls in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
