Ten books featuring complex mother-daughter relationships

Christina McDonald's new novel is The Night Olivia Fell.

At The Strand Magazine she tagged her ten favorite books that cover the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, including:

Tear Me Apart, J.T. Ellison

When competitive skier Mindy Wright is in a horrific crash, she is raced into surgery, only for doctors to find out she has a severe form of leukemia and needs a stem cell transplant immediately. But when her parents are tested to see if they’re a match, they learn that Mindy isn’t their biological daughter.

Was Mindy switched at the hospital? Was she kidnapped? Does either parent know the truth? All these questions and more bombarded me when I first picked up this fast-paced thriller. Ultimately, this is the powerful story of a mother who will move heaven and earth to protect her daughter, even as the search for the answers to these questions threatens to tear everything she’s built apart.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels that reexamine literature from the margins

Katharine Duckett hails from East Tennessee, has lived in Turkey and Kazakhstan, and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she majored in minotaurs. Miranda in Milan is her first novel.

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog she tagged eight "compelling literary works that reimagine the experiences of women who were silenced, sidelined, or slandered in their original appearances in the canon." One title on the list:

Circe, by Madeleine Miller

Circe is an antagonist of The Odyssey, a predatory woman who transforms Odysseus’s crew into swine when they have the misfortune of visiting her island and turns a romantic rival into a monster with the use of poison. But Miller gives us a more nuanced view of the daughter of Helios, making her into both a believable woman and a being whose concerns and views on the nature of her story extend beyond the mortal world. Miller, who also gave Achilles and Patroclus a love story in her first book, The Song of Achilles, infuses Circe with mythological allusions and inventive twists on the old gods and demigods of Greece.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Circe is among Steph Posts' thirteen top novels set in the world of myth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve top books on Greece, by Greeks and philhellenes

Mary Norris joined the editorial staff of The New Yorker in 1978 and has been a copy editor and proofreader there for more than thirty years. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she lives in New York and Rockaway.

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen is her first book.

Her new book is Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen.

At LitHub Norris tagged "books by or about modern Greeks, though the authors may, of course, reflect on ancient history," including:

Anne Zouroudi, The Messenger of Athens

Zouroudi, who is from the North of England, is to the Greek islands what Donna Leon is to Venice. Her series features Hermes Diaktoros, a detective known as the fat man—he has been described as the Greek Hercule Poirot—who works in mysterious ways. The books (The Doctor of Thessaly, The Lady of Sorrows, among others) conjure the superstitious atmosphere of the Greek islands.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pete Buttigieg’s ten favorite books

Pete Buttigieg, born in Indiana in 1982, is currently serving his second term as mayor of South Bend. A dynamic national lecturer and TEDx speaker, as well as a Rhodes Scholar and Navy veteran, Buttigieg was educated at Harvard and Oxford. He and his husband, Chasten Glezman, live in South Bend, Indiana.

His new book is Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future.

One of Buttigieg’s ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I wrote my thesis on this prophetic Graham Greene novel about the dangers of American involvement in Vietnam, set in the 1950s before most people knew we were operating in Vietnam at all. In a very jaded, British way, Greene points out the dangers of well-intentioned interventions.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Quiet American is among Cat Barton's five top titles on Southeast Asian travel literature, Richard Haass's six top books for understanding global politics, Sara Jonsson's seven best literary treatments of envy, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's top ten classic spy novels, Tom Rachman's top ten journalist's tales, John Mullan's ten best journalists in literature, Charles Glass's five best books on Americans abroad, Robert McCrum's books to inspire busy public figures, Malcolm Pryce's top ten expatriate tales, Catherine Sampson's top ten Asian crime fiction, and Pauline Melville's top 10 revolutionary tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six mythology-inspired YA books for fans of Madeline Miller’s "Circe"

At the BN Teen blog, Jenny Kawecki tagged six Greek mythology-inspired YA books for fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, including:

The Cold Is in Her Bones, by Peternelle van Arsdale

Like Circe, The Cold Is in Her Bones offers a chilling retelling of the backstory of another ostracized woman in Greek mythology: Medusa. Milla has spent her entire life within the confines of her family’s farm, a precaution against the demon that possesses girls in the nearby village. When village girl Iris comes to stay at the neighboring farm, Milla finally has a chance at friendship. But when the demon comes for Iris, Milla is determined to rescue her friend and end the possessions, even if it means learning some terrible truths about her family and the world around her.With a focus on friendship and sisterhood, The Cold Is in Her Bones is the perfect feminist follow-up to Circe.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven modern classics of small town mystery

Olivia Kiernan is an Irish writer living in the UK. She was born and raised in County Meath near the famed heritage town of Kells and holds an MA in creative writing awarded by the University of Sussex.

Kiernan is the author of Too Close to Breathe and, most recently, The Killer in Me.

At CrimeReads she tagged seven favorite modern classics of small town mystery. One title on the list:

The Dry, by Jane Harper

Set in the fictional town of Kiewarra, Aaron Falk returns to his hometown having left it under suspicious circumstances in his teens. His childhood best-friend is said to have murdered his wife and son before turning the gun on himself. The trauma of the family murder sears through the town, old wounds are opened and it seems that for Kiewarra loyalty is a scarce as rainfall.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Dry is among Sarah J. Harris's top eight mysteries with images that might stay with you forever and Fiona Barton's eight favorite cold-case mysteries.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten fictional takes on real lives

Will Eaves’s Murmur and Alex Pheby’s Lucia are the joint winners of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness prize for small presses. At the Guardian they each tagged five fictional takes on real lives. One of Eaves’s picks:

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

On the brink of death, the Roman emperor Hadrian writes to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, about his life, his victories, and his philosophy: a proto-stoicism of self-critical candour that values stability above triumph. It is this political sangfroid, the reverence for ancient ideals of culture and conservation ranged against the tumult of events themselves, that gives the emotional centre of the book – Hadrian’s relationship with the Greek boy Antinous – its surprising depth. Yourcenar’s research is fully absorbed, and the lapidary style, learned but intimate, evokes a monumental figure in glimpses, or perhaps cries. Above all, said Yourcenar, her novel was to be thought of as the “portrait of a voice”.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Memoirs of Hadrian is among Alix Christie's ten favorite historical novels, Rabih Alameddine's six favorite novels, John Mullan's ten best emperors in literature, and Teju Cole's top 10 novels of solitude.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books ever written by fictional characters

At the B&N Reads blog Molly Schoemann-McCann tagged five of the best "books that were published under the names of some famous and famously not-real individuals," including:

Marriage Vacation, by Pauline Turner Brooks

At the center of the TV Land show Younger is Broadway legend Sutton Foster as Liza Miller, a woman in her early 40s who pretends to be a woman in her 20s so she can land a job as a PR assistant at a youth-obsessed publishing company. Eventually, she gets the chance to edit Marriage Vacation, a salacious, tell-all by Pauline Turner-Brooks, ex-wife of the company boss, Charles…whom Liza happens to be having a fling with. Liza needing to make a good book that pleases the writer without upsetting her boss raises all kinds of ethical and professional quandaries, and now Younger fans can actually read the long-talked about book, which provides both backstory to several Younger characters as well as many subtle and obvious references to the show, which, amusingly…is based on a novel by Pamela Redmond Satran.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five juicy, complicated, and otherwise strange family tales

Maura Roosevelt is the author of the new novel Baby of the Family.

One title on her "all families are complicated" reading list, as shared at LitHub:

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

This lyrical novel focuses on Nikolai Gogol, the only son of a couple who moves from Calcutta, India, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order for Gogol’s father to study engineering. The novel follows Gogol’s life as he grows up in America, struggling with the balance between his American identity and the Indian culture that his parents—and potentially he—hope to preserve in his life. It’s an in-depth, moving story of reckoning with one’s family and expectations.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about motherhood

Sarah Knott is a British-born feminist, writer and historian. Her first book explored how sensibility, a way of being that celebrated human sympathy, was central to the American Revolution. Sensibility and the American Revolution suggested that revolutionaries sought the transformation of citizens and society, as much as to create new republican forms of government.

Her second book, Witnessing the Age of Revolutions, 1776-1804, explores first-person narratives of events in the United States, France and Saint Domingue, as a means of telling the cultural history of the Age of Revolutions.

Knott's new book is Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History.

At the Guardian, she tagged five of the best books about motherhood, including:

“Safe delivered of a very fine Daughter”. We go back even further, to 18th-century Maine, in the hands of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. A Midwife’s Tale draws on a terse diary kept for 27 years by the New England midwife Martha Ballard. She slipped the folded half-sheets of her diary into her bag when she headed out, and numbered deliveries down the diary’s left-hand margins. The women gave birth in the arms and laps of the midwife and neighbours: perhaps three women around the bed, perhaps five. Rum, sugar and tea were the usual labouring comforts. The midwife added an “XX” to the diary’s margin each time the charge was paid, in shillings, textiles or food. In almost 1,000 births, she never lost a mother during delivery.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten novels that detail religious missions to the stars

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Ceridwen Christensen tagged ten science fiction books featuring interplanetary religious missions, including:

The Sparrow, by Maria Doria Russell

Russell makes the case that a religious mission will be the first to make contact with alien societies in the very prologue: “It was predictable, in hindsight,” read the opening lines. While the temporal governments of the world were debating could and should, the spiritual government in the Vatican had already decided to send priests off to a newly discovered, inhabited planet. The only questions were who and how. The story of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat that unfolds from this decision is as much a spiritual story as a science fictional one. The aliens’ biology and society are carefully constructed—the one arising from the other—and come into deep and abiding conflict with human biology and society. The motives of the people who mission to visit Rakhat aren’t necessarily pure, and things only get messier on the ground.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books about unfamiliar places

Barry Lopez is the author of two collections of essays, several story collections, Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award, Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist, and Crow and Weasel, a novella-length fable. His new book is Horizon.

One of the author's six favorite books about unfamiliar places, as shared at The Week magazine:

The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 by John D. Unruh Jr. (1979).

Many of us are still unfamiliar with the historical undercurrents of our own country as well as those of foreign lands. Unruh's meticulously researched history of western migration exposes the folklore shaping much of what has been written about the American West — but also suggests that cherished lore masquerading as authentic history can be found in every country.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue