Five captivating SFF mystery novels

At Tor.com James Davis Nicoll tagged five favorite recent sci-fi & fantasy novels, including:

Seven of Infinities by Aliette de Bodard (2020)

Scholar Vân struggles to make a meagre living as a tutor despite the challenges she faces as a product of the lower classes. The well-to-do often will not value instruction if it is delivered by someone from the lower orders. As if class were somehow contagious.

She is now faced with an even greater problem: an unexplained corpse found in quarters belonging to Vân’s student Uyên.

The Militia demands that all such deaths have satisfactory explanations, whether true or not. Vân’s personal history, if viewed in an unfavourable light, might make her an acceptable scapegoat. Thus, a reason for Vân and her criminally-inclined shipmind ally The Wild Orchid in Sunless Woods to figure out who the dead woman was, what killed her, and what brought her to Uyên’s quarters.

Detection leads them in an unexpected direction. What begins as a possible murder mystery transforms into a treasure hunt…albeit one that has already left a trail of bodies in its wake.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten thrillers & mysteries full of style, plot & dark humor

Samantha Downing is the author of the bestselling My Lovely Wife, nominated for Edgar, ITW, Macavity, and CWA awards. Amazon Studios and Nicole Kidman's Blossom Films have partnered to produce a feature film based on the novel.

Her second book, He Started It, was released in 2020 and became an instant international bestseller. Her third thriller, For Your Own Good, is now out in the US.

[The Page 69 Test: My Lovely Wife; The Page 69 Test: He Started It].

She currently lives and works in New Orleans.

At CrimeReads Downing tagged ten "books that influenced my style, plot, and the dark humor I love so much." One title on the list:

Dope by Sara Gran

Sara Gran isn’t afraid of anything, or at least that’s the impression I had after reading this book. Her writing is sparse but full of daggers, and her characters have more flaws than virtues. The opening lines hooked me right into this book about a sober heroin addict who sets out to find someone who is also an addict, and who isn’t anything close to sober. Reading Dope makes me want to push my own writing, and stories, further out there—as far as I can—because she taught me it was not only possible, it can make the book better.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books about Sicily

Jamie Mackay is a writer and translator based in Florence. His work has appeared in the Guardian, the TLS, Frieze and elsewhere.

The Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean History is his first book.

At the Guardian he tagged ten books "that show the island’s miscellaneous character, leaving the mafia in the margins where it belongs." One title on the list:

The Council of Egypt by Leonardo Sciascia

Sciascia is best known for his books on the mafia. This slim volume translated by Adrienne Foulke, though, is one of the secret gems of Sicilian literature. It is, in essence, an 18th-century detective story, populated by an intriguing cast of Spanish noblemen, Jacobin revolutionaries, forgers, smugglers and libertines. Yet it’s also a philosophical allegory about the fine lines that separate fact from fiction in Sicily, and the blurring of boundaries between history and legend. Fans of Andrea Camilleri will surely enjoy the affectionate yet cynical humour.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six novels that explore the great & sometimes terrifying outdoors

Elisabeth de Mariaffi is the critically acclaimed author of four books: the Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated short story collection How to Get Along with Women (2012), the literary thriller The Devil You Know (2015), and the 1950s-era Hitchcock-style thriller, Hysteria (2018), both of which were named Globe and Mail Best Books of the year, and shortlisted for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize.

Her newest novel, The Retreat, is about a dancer who must separate truth from lies in order to survive a deadly storm at a remote mountain arts retreat.

At CrimeReads de Mariaffi tagged six favorite "books that use monstrous nature not only as a setting—but as a true character in the story." One title on the list:

The Bear by Claire Cameron

Based loosely around a real-life bear attack that occurred in Canada’s Algonquin Park, this harrowing suspense novel imagines the incident from the point of view of a fictional survivor—five-year old Anna, left to care for her brother in the wilderness after both her parents are killed. Abandoned on the small island where the family had been camping, Anna and her brother are of course not quite alone—the bear is still out there, too.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about childhood pals—and the adults they become

Zak Salih earned his BA in English and Journalism from James Madison University, and his MA in English from the University of Virginia. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Foglifter, Epiphany, Crazyhorse, The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Millions, Apogee Journal, Kenyon Review Online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications.

Let's Get Back to the Party is his debut novel. He lives in Washington, D.C.

At Electric Lit Salih tagged eight books about childhood friendships throughout the years, including:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kathy H., Ruth, and Tommy are friends at an English boarding school that doubles as a factory for clones intended to be organ donors. The sci-fi elements of Ishiguro’s novel take a backseat to the nuanced friendship between these three teenagers, whose love and care for one another, even in the face of unavoidable fates, are proof of the souls in these engineered bodies.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Rachel Donohue's list of seven coming-of-age novels with elements of mystery or the supernatural, Chris Mooney's list of six top intelligent, page-turning, genre-bending classics, James Scudamore's top ten list of books about boarding school, Caroline Zancan's list of eight novels about students and teachers behaving badly, LitHub's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Meg Wolitzer's ten favorite books list, Jeff Somers's lists of nine science fiction novels that imagine the future of healthcare and "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable food memoirs

Katie Yee is a Brooklyn-based writer and the Book Marks associate editor at Lit Hub.

At Lit Hub she tagged five food memoirs to dig into for National Culinary Arts Month. One title on the list:

Priya Basil, Be My Guest

There is no better person to break bread with than Priya Basil, whose book is an ode to, yes, food but also to the kinds of conversations that are possible around a dinner table. Be My Guest combines a generous dose of personal and family history with a few pinches of philosophy. It is a rich rumination on the meaning of hospitality, open-mindedness, and community. Pull up a chair!

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the best absurd(ly entertaining) serial killers in fiction

Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (which is being adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, and the New York Times bestseller The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). Hendrix also authored the Bram Stoker Award-winning nonfiction book, Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the '70s and '80s.

His new novel is The Final Girl Support Group.

At CrimeReads Hendrix tagged some of the most absurd(ly entertaining) and memorable fictional serial killers he encountered when writing the new novel. One entry on the list:

Big Gurl in Big Gurl (Thomas Metzer & Richard P. Scott, 1989)

Years before Joyce Carol Oates and Bret Easton Ellis wowed readers with their big important literary novels, Zombie and American Psycho, told completely from a serial killer’s point-of-view, Metzger and Scott gave us Mary Cup, aka Big Gurl. We’re never quite sure how big Big Gurl is, but she’s so large that when she wants to murder someone she simply picks them up and carries them home, or she yells at them until they meekly follow her to their doom. Mary lives alone in an attic, protected by her social worker who’s in love with her, and she spends most of her days watching TV, licking blocks of frozen SPAM, and worshipping a mutilated baby doll name Vuvu who she sometimes has sex with. When people annoy her, she murders them, like Jerry Jeru the lounge singer at the Golden Gondola. When he won’t take her request that he play “Only the Broken Hearted Know What It’s Like to Cry Cry Cry All Night Long Cause They Lost Their True Loves and They’re Down and Out and in Their Beds Crying Burning Tears of Woe” she leads him back to her apartment, seals his mouth with electrical tape, and rubs baked beans into his chest before shooting whipped cream up his nose until he dies. As she says, “Big Gurl got to be happy every minute of every single day!”

Read about the other serial killers on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten thrilling African noir novels

T. L. Huchu (he/him) has been published previously (as Tendai Huchu) in the adult market, but The Library of the Dead is his genre fiction debut. His previous books (The Hairdresser of Harare and The Maestro, The Magistrate and the Mathematician) have been translated into multiple languages and his short fiction has won awards. Huchu grew in up Zimbabwe but has lived in Edinburgh for most of his adult life.

From Publishers Weekly:

T.L. Huchu’s powerhouse new novel, The Library of the Dead, plunges readers into the dark, supernatural recesses of contemporary Edinburgh while expertly blending SFF, noir, and elements of Zimbabwean and Scottish culture. High school dropout Ropafadzo “Ropa” Moyo works as a ghostalker, ferrying messages between the worlds of the dead and the living. When penniless ghost Nicola pleads for help, Ropa heads out on a dangerous hunt to discover who—or what—is sucking the souls out of the bodies of the city’s children. With plenty of twists, turns, and genuinely eerie moments, this occult thriller is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.

At Publishers Weekly Huchu tagged ten favorite thrilling African noir novels, including:

Nairobi Heat by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Call me Ishmael? Ishmael, an African American detective, travels to Kenya to catch his own whale. A murder in Maple Bluff, Wis., sets off a chain of events leading back to the Rwandan genocide. Teamed up with local detective David Odhiambo, Ishmael discovers they do law enforcement very differently in Kenya. Fast-paced and full of thrills, this novel is written for the silver screen.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about the heartbreak of losing a sibling

Willa C. Richards is the author of The Comfort of Monsters.

She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is the recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers.

At Electric Lit Richards tagged "seven books that showcase the specific horror and heartbreak of loving and losing a sibling," including:

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

In this debut novel, set against the bleak backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness, Chia-Chia Lin portrays a Taiwanese immigrant family of six as they try to make a new home in a beautiful but nearly inhospitable place. Tragedy strikes the family when several of the children contract meningitis. The narrator, Gavin, is so sick that he is unconscious for a spell. When he awakes, he finds out that his sister Ruby has died. Gavin grapples with his grief throughout the novel, believing himself partially responsible for passing the sickness onto Ruby, and thus for her death. Ruby’s death haunts the whole novel’s telling, and remains a powerful vacuum of grief, like a large black hole, that the family struggles not to fall into. The Unpassing is an empathetic, deeply felt, and lyrical portrait of childhood loss, of never-ending grief, and of unbearable unbelonging.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Unpassing is among Jae-Yeon Yoo's top books to combat anti-Asian racism in America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books about the aftermath of empire

Madeleine Bunting was for many years a columnist for the Guardian, which she joined in 1990. Bunting read History at Cambridge and Politics at Harvard. She is the author of many non-fiction books, including The Plot: A Biography of My Father's English Acre, which won the Portico Prize, and Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey, which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize and the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

She has also written the novels Island Song and the newly released Ceremony of Innocence.

At the Guardian Bunting tagged ten of the best books about the aftermath of empire, including:

Imperial Intimacies by Hazel V Carby

This book instantly stood out as the winner of the British Academy Nayef Al-Rodhan prize last year when I was on the jury. Carby is a professor at Yale, but this book is deeply personal as she brings academic research and analysis to bear on her family history. In the 18th century, a Lincolnshire farmer’s lad left home to make his fortune as a plantation owner and gave his name, Carby, to generations of mixed-race Jamaicans. In the second world war, her father joined up to fight for the empire, and then married a white British woman. Carby’s account of how her family were pulled apart by the systemic racism and intolerance of mixed-race marriages in the 50s and 60s is utterly shocking; she poignantly portrays how her father, a man of great dignity, had believed in the promises and ideals proclaimed by the British. Carby moves the reader through every possible response to the complex patterns of family lineage under empire.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books that are secretly science fiction

Max Barry is the author of seven novels and the creator of the popular online game NationStates. He also once found a sock full of pennies. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. Sometimes he coaches kids' netball.

Barry's new novel is The 22 Murders of Madison May.

At CrimeReads he tagged five great books that are secretly science fiction.

The books ... offer reality with a twist: Something about the world is not quite normal. But you may not notice at first, because they’re all about people. At heart, they’re human dramas, which want to show you fully lived-in characters confronted with situations that challenge them in personal ways.

One title on the list:

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

It’s a ruthless, oppressive patriarchy, but not our ruthless, oppressive patriarchy; it’s worse than that. The general absence of technology from this story makes the setting feel far more historical than science-fiction, as the new society of Gilead seeks to return to a simpler, more straightforward time, when a family was a man, a woman, and children, in that order, living their lives for the glory of God. Plus, of course, a few necessary improvements, since infertility is rife, and children are hard to come by. Atwood is a writer of breathtaking talent, and she effortlessly creates a society that feels entirely plausible.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Handmaid's Tale made Louisa Treger's top ten list of great boundary-breaking women of fiction, Claire McGlasson's top ten list of books about cults, Siobhan Adcock's list of five top books about motherhood and dystopia, a list of four books that changed Meg Keneally, A.J. Hartley's list of five favorite books about the making of a dystopia, Lidia Yuknavitch's 6 favorite books list, Elisa Albert's list of nine revelatory books about motherhood, Michael W. Clune's top five list of books about imaginary religions, Jeff Somers's top six list of often misunderstood SF/F novels, Jason Sizemore's top five list of books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, S.J. Watson's list of four books that changed him, Shaun Byron Fitzpatrick's list of eight of the most badass ladies in all of banned literature, Guy Lodge's list of ten of the best dystopias in fiction, art, film, and television, Bethan Roberts's top ten list of novels about childbirth, Rachel Cantor's list of the ten worst jobs in books, Charlie Jane Anders and Kelly Faircloth's list of the best and worst childbirth scenes in science fiction and fantasy, Lisa Tuttle's critic's chart of the top Arthur C. Clarke Award winners, and PopCrunch's list of the sixteen best dystopian books of all time.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven stories about the search for intimacy

Genevieve Plunkett's debut collection of stories, Prepare Her, is now available. A recipient of an O. Henry Award, her short fiction can also be found in New England Review, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, Literary Hub, and The Best Small Fictions 2018. Her novel, In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel, is forthcoming.

At Electric Lit Plunkett claims "that it is the nature of intimacy to be surprising, frightening, and sometimes downright otherworldly..." and tagged "seven books that approach intimacy from this angle, that hunger for human connection in the corners of the unexpected and strange." One title on the list:

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

When intimacy exists in dystopia, it can appear alien, or uncanny, in contrast to its surroundings. In Adjei-Brenyah’s story “The Era,” a high schooler named Ben, begins to fall for a girl despite a life’s worth of programming against emotional decision-making and compassion. It is with a backward, convex, kind of thrill that we watch intimacy for the sake of intimacy become an act of rebellion. By creating a future that is whittled down to the bare, ugly essentials, Adjei-Brenyah makes us crave the complexity and disorder of the heart more than ever.

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

--Marshal Zeringue