Top 10 environmental disaster stories

Liz Jensen's latest novel, The Rapture, is an ecological thriller about a psychotic teenage girl who warns of an earth-changing cataclysm. Available now in the U.K., The Rapture arrives in America in August.

Among the early praise for The Rapture:

“A first-class apocalyptic thriller of futuristic science, geophysics, and religion. It's clever, intelligent, and—most terrifying of all—plausible”
—Kate Mosse, author of Labryinth and Sepulchre

Jensen named her top 10 environmental disaster stories for the Guardian.

One novel on the list:

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Comedy and horror jostle for supremacy in this masterfully-conjured post-disaster novel. Genetically-modified animal species, defrosted tundras, and a new creation myth to explain it all to a new race of bio-engineered humans: wonderful. But Atwood has a deeper purpose, and while the narrative entertains, the big, dark ideas are whirring as furiously as a wind turbine in a hurricane.

Read about all ten stories on Jensen's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 5 faked memoirs

Benjamin Radford is a writer, investigator, and managing editor for Skeptical Inquirer science magazine. His Bad Science column appears regularly on LiveScience.

For LiveScience, he named his top five faked memoirs.

One book on the list:

"Satan's Underground," by Lauren Stratford

"Satan's Underground" was a 1991 book in which the author described her first-hand experience inside a Satanic cult. Stratford's book included horrific depictions of baby-killing rituals, pornography, torture, rape, and other abuse. Like Anthony Godby Johnson, Stratford claimed to have been continually physically and sexually abused by her parents and forced into prostitution. She also described being locked in a metal drum with the bodies of four babies who had been sacrificed to Satan. The book became a best-seller, helping fuel the "Satanic panic" hysteria that swept across America in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet skeptical investigation revealed that the story was a complete hoax. None of Stratford's claims were true; every gruesome, sensational detail was made up. Stratford later changed her name and began claiming to be a Jewish Holocaust survivor, still trying to wring sympathy from the public.

Read about all five titles on Radford's list.

Also see Iain Finlayson's critic's chart of the best faked memoirs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monica Ali: best books

Monica Ali’s new novel, In the Kitchen, is set in a five-star London hotel. At The Week, the author of Brick Lane and Alentejo Blue named six favorite earlier works that made the most of similar settings.

One title on her list:

Chowringhee by Sankar (Penguin, $14).

A classic of Bengali literature, recently published for the first time in English. Set in a venerable Calcutta establishment, this sprawling saga examines in luminous detail the iniquities of society represented in microcosm at the hotel. Containing the action in a hotel where employees and guests are in physical proximity but a world away from each other heightens Sankar’s every observation.

Read about all six titles on Ali's list.

Learn about Monica Ali's ten favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oprah's 11 unputdownable mysteries

Oprah's book club is touting "11 unputdownable mysteries." One title on the list:

The Grift
by Debra Ginsberg
352 pages, Shaye Areheart

I'm not psychic. There's no such thing; only luck, timing, and observation," Marina Marks, an attractive and highly intuitive "counselor" to the wealthy and influential tells herself. Um, wrong. Marina's second sight—and haunted loneliness—makes Debra Ginsberg's The Grift (Shaye Areheart) an unusually seductive thriller. Read it for the not-so-predictable deceptions and the ghostly elusiveness of love. — Cathleen Medwick

Read about all eleven Oprah picks.

Mystery maven Linda L. Richards shares a few reflections on the mysterious 11 at The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: Debra Ginsberg's The Grift.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: spy books

Alan Furst is the author of Night Soldiers (1988), Dark Star (1991), The Polish Officer (1995), The World at Night (1996), Red Gold (1999), Kingdom of Shadows (2000), Blood of Victory (2002), Dark Voyage (2004), The Foreign Correspondent (2006), and The Spies of Warsaw (2008).

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of spy tales.

Number One on his list:

Our Man in Havana
by Graham Greene
Viking, 1958

Graham Greene’s work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and “Our Man in Havana” may be his best. The problem here is Hollywood: Just as you can’t read Greene’s “The Third Man” without thinking of Orson Welles, “Our Man in Havana” instantly brings to mind Alec Guinness, followed closely by the sublime Ernie Kovacs. But the book itself is a marvel, making fun of the espionage business while still remaining a spy novel. It brings ample suspense and expertly wrought ambience to its tale of a British vacuum-cleaner salesman in Cuba who reluctantly agrees to become an MI6 agent. He begins filing fanciful reports—including sketches of a secret military installation based on a vacuum-cleaner design—that the home office takes all too seriously. “Our Man in Havana” is a honey of a beach read, best served with rum and Coke.

Read about the other books on Furst's list.

Visit Alan Furst's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Foreign Correspondent.

Writers Read: Alan Furst.

Read former MI5 director-general Stella Rimington's five best list of books about spies in Britain and Ben Macintyre's list of top true-life spy stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best pieces of fruit in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best pieces of fruit in literature.

One title on the list:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

No accident that there are fruit in the very title of Steinbeck's chronicle of depression America. The Okies flee the dustbowl for California, where they hope for work picking fruit. There they can only survive by eating the fruit, and make themselves sick. The land of plenty gives you gut rot.

Read about the other nine pieces of fruit on Mullan's list.

Also see Adam Leith Gollner's top 10 fruit scenes in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best fake deaths

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best fake deaths in fiction.

One title on the list:

Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy

Even devotees of Hardy's fiction will find it hard to think of Sergeant Troy's supposed death from drowning without recalling the film version, with Terence Stamp leaving his clothes and his troubles behind him on a Dorset beach. Years later, as Bathsheba teeters on the brink of marriage to Boldwood, Troy, her "dead husband", returns to reclaim her. Boldwood shoots him.

Read about all ten fake deaths on Mullan's list.

The Page 99 Test: Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books on the migrant experience

Elise Valmorbida is the author of the critically acclaimed books Matilde Waltzing, The Book of Happy Endings and The TV President.

Her latest novel is The Winding Stick (Two Ravens Press).

For the Guardian, she named a top ten list of books on the migrant experience.

A little throat-clearing, and Number One on her list:

"If there's one common element in all my writing, it's an interest in migrants and migration. I guess it's natural given my own multicultural origins, but it's also at the heart of storytelling: the migrant brain is prone to metaphor – the perpetual balancing of here and there, different worlds in simultaneous play. And being translated. Being found in translation. Suitcases. Secrets. Invisible cities."

1. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

This slim book took many years to make. It's compelling, painful and exquisite. Here's the story of the Creole heiress who leaves the Caribbean for a life in England as the first wife of Mr Rochester. (Jane Eyre is the second.) Unpicking her like a hidden jewel from the weave, the author releases a minor character from a major text. She is a migrant bride, a misrepresented outsider, "the other woman", a mad thing in the attic …

Read about all ten books on Valmorbida's list.

A different Rhys book appears on Lynn Freed's list of "favorite books evoking the immigrant life."

--Marshal Zeringue

The best gothic novels

At the Guardian, Patrick McGrath tagged the best gothic novels.

One book that made the grade:

Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)

What would become the staples of the genre were introduced in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto with deliberate fanfare and much hilarity. The setting is medieval and the castle itself is riddled with dungeons, cloisters, secret passages and trapdoors, precisely the sort of architectural features that would later come to symbolise, in the gothic, the human mind in its deviousness and complexity. Incest, murder, ghosts, dreams, madness, supernatural events and other elements suggestive of transgression and decay abound. The story concerns the downfall of Manfred, a tyrannical despot consumed with greed and lust who is unable to control his passions or his servants.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books on globalization

Moisés Naím is the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine and author or editor of eight books including Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy.

He named his top ten books on globalization for Foreign Policy. A few books on his list:

For good overviews of the diverse facets of globalization read David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton's Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture as well as The Great Experiment by Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott who, like Fernandez Armesto, argues that the global integration of humanity has been an inexorable historical trend and explains why improving global governance is an urgent priority. Peter Berger and Samuel Huntington's Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) is also worth a read.

Read about all ten books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best graveyard scenes in fiction

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best graveyard scenes in fiction.

One title on the list:

Possession by AS Byatt

Steeped in affairs Victorian, Possession naturally has a stormy climax in a country churchyard. By night, lashed by wind and rain, the novel's modern-day investigators dig in the grave of long-dead poet Randolph Henry Ash to find the final clue to his secret affair with fellow poet Christabel LaMotte. Lightning flashes and the past is exhumed.

Read about the other graveyard scenes on Mullan's list.

Possession also appears on Mullan's list of ten of the best locks of hair in fiction and Christina Koning's critic's chart of top six romances.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five hot summer thrillers

At The Daily Beast, David J. Montgomery tagged five hot summer thrillers.

One title to make the list:

The Scarecrow
by Michael Connelly

One of the most anticipated books of the season is Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow, a followup to 1997’s The Poet, the book that introduced reporter Jack McEvoy. In The Poet, McEvoy teamed up with the FBI to catch a killer preying on cops, making a name for himself as one of the best journalists around.

Now, 12 years later, McEvoy is being forced out of his job at the Los Angeles Times, yet another victim of budget cuts. Hoping to go out on a high note with one last story, he investigates the case of a young drug dealer accused of murder, a crime the teen’s family claims he didn’t commit. What McEvoy uncovers is not just a big story, but a life-or-death situation involving an especially devious serial killer.

There are few authors with both the journalistic background—Connelly was a crime reporter for the Times—and the writing chops to produce such a fascinating thriller. If The Scarecrow isn’t quite as fine as the best of Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, it’s still one of the best books of the summer.

Read about all five books on Montgomery's list.

--Marshal Zeringue