Five novels that examine celebrity culture

Olivia Petter is an award-winning journalist, author, and broadcaster based in London.

Petter's first book, Millennial Love, was published in July 2021. Described as “honest and funny” by Pandora Sykes, the book is based on Petter's podcast of the same name and blends social commentary with memoir and interviews.

Her debut novel, Gold Rush, will be published in July 2024.

At the Guardian Petter tagged "five novels that examine celebrity culture." One title on the list:

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic loner renowned for throwing lavish parties for strangers. On the surface, he has everything: wealth, adulation, and a thriving social life. Yet he partakes in none of it, preoccupied instead by the more meaningful pursuit of love, something he slowly realises is never guaranteed, no matter how dazzling a life we purport to live.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Great Gatsby appears among Charlotte Vassell's five favorite books in which rich people (think they can) get away with murder, Charlotte Vassell's top ten cads in fiction, Sarah Blake's top ten tales about the rich, Lupita Nyong’o’s ten favorite books, Christian Blauvelt's five top NYC-set novels that became NYC-set films, Kate Williams's six best books, Jeff Somers's ten best book covers...ever and seven most disastrous parties in fiction, Brian Boone's six "beloved classic novels whose authors nearly cursed with a terrible title," four books that changed C.K. Stead, four books that changed Jodi Picoult, Joseph Connolly's top ten novels about style, Nick Lake’s ten favorite fictional tricksters and tellers of untruths in books, the Independent's list of the fifteen best opening lines in literature, Molly Schoemann-McCann's list of five of the lamest girlfriends in fiction, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books, Elizabeth Wilhide's nine illustrious houses in fiction, Suzette Field's top ten literary party hosts, Robert McCrums's ten best closing lines in literature, Molly Driscoll's ten best literary lessons about love, Jim Lehrer's six favorite 20th century novels, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature and ten of the best misdirected messages, Tad Friend's seven best novels about WASPs, Kate Atkinson's top ten novels, Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition, Robert McCrum's top ten books for Obama officials, Jackie Collins' six best books, and John Krasinski's six best books, and is on the American Book Review's list of the 100 best last lines from novels. Gatsby's Jordan Baker is Josh Sorokach's biggest fictional literary crush.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about families surviving political unrest

Asha Thanki is an essayist and fiction writer. her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Common, Catapult, Hyphen, and more. She is a Kundiman fellow and has received support through scholarships and grants from Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Speculative Literature Foundation. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.

A Thousand Times Before is Thanki's debut novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven books that demonstrate

the consequences of the world we live in, the ways that our political histories are inseparable from how we walk through the world. That the political and the personal are always, always, intertwined.

One title on the list:

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

From the prologue of Brotherless Night and then all the way through, this novel puts forth an experience of conflict and history with the type of voice that makes you feel like the narrator is looking directly at you as she speaks. For Sashi, nearly 18 years old at the novel’s beginning, her four brothers and the neighbor boy, her parents and her grandmother—all fill her world with so much care, love, and joy. Their lane in Jaffna is a place of safety for so much of Sashi’s life, until the growing violence against Tamil people leads to the murder of her oldest brother, spurring both Sashi’s loved ones—and Sashi—to action.

Ganeshananthan writes in a way I can only dream of doing. Sashi’s voice engages the reader directly—indicts them. From the beginning, the novel asks, Who created the labels we use, and what happens when those labels serve to distance the observer so that empathy, humanity, and understanding are erased? And if it were you, what would you do, in order to protect the people you call home?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight sketchy-spouse domestic thrillers

Andrew DeYoung is the author of The Temps, a speculative novel about the end of the world.

He works as an editor at a childrens book publishing company, and he lives with his wife and two children in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota.

The Day He Never Came Home is his first domestic thriller.

At CrimeReads DeYoung tagged eight

fantastic “Who the F did I marry?” books for you to enjoy, if you, like me, can’t look away from the slow-moving trainwreck of someone finding out the complicated, occasionally ugly truth about the person they married.

One novel on the list:

The Wife Before, by Shanora Williams

“He is not the man I assumed he was…”

A prolific writer of both thrillers and romance, Shanora Williams delivers the perfect “Who the F did I marry?” book in The Wife Before. She captures not just the fear of realizing your spouse might not be who you thought they were, but also the fairy tale romance that might lead a person to marry someone they don’t know very well in the first place. Here, it’s Samira falling quickly for Roland, a professional golfer who seems like the perfect man to help her get some direction in her life. But when she moves into his secluded home and discovers diary entries written by Roland’s previous wife, Samira realizes her husband might not be who she believes him to be—and that she might be in danger.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best British political novels

At the Waterstones blog Mark Skinner tagged ten great Parliamentary page-turners. One title on the list:

The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst

A profound panorama of British politics, sex and society in the Thatcherite 1980s, Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel sees naïve Nick Guest enter the orbit of a Tory MP and his glamorous family.

Read about the other titles on the list.

The Line of Beauty is among Deborah Parker and Mak Parker's ten biggest bootlickers from literature and history and Kwasi Kwarteng's top ten books about Thatcherism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top thrillers with shocking twists

Born in the Midwest, Jenna Satterthwaite grew up in Spain, lived briefly in France, and is now happily settled in Chicago with her husband and three kids. Satterthwaite studied classical guitar, English Lit and French, and once upon a time was a singer-songwriter in folk band Thornfield. She loves sushi, reading in her natural habitat (aka her bed), and women taking back their power.

Made For You is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit Satterthwaite tagged seven "novels with surprising plot turns that shatter expectations," including:

The Resort by Sarah Ochs

Welcome to paradise. We hope you survive your stay…

Who doesn’t want to escape regular life and jet off to an idyllic, remote island in Thailand?

Well, ‘escape’ is exactly what the members of the expat community known as “the Permanents” are doing at the Koh Sang Resort. Except, they’re not escaping for fun. Each of the Permanents has a secret to hide and a past to flee from, including Cass, a local dive instructor who has found her own perfect escape and fresh start, not to mention, an amazing boyfriend and the promise of love in paradise.

When a dive student is found dead, suddenly the secrets that everyone has buried are swimming to the top, and Cass can’t help but realize–someone has figured out who she really is.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Q&A with Sara Ochs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five lightly surreal novels

Chandler Morrison is the author of eight books, including Dead Inside, #thighgap, and the recently released American Narcissus. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. He lives in Los Angeles.

At CrimeReads Morrison tagged five lightly surreal novels.

No matter what forms of surrealism they weave into their narratives, the human element is always at the forefront. Each of them exposes some vital, incontrovertible aspect of existence, and whatever weirdness may be present only serves to accentuate that.

One title on the list:

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ottessa Moshfegh’s work is her ability to craft weird, neurotic, and largely unlikable protagonists who feel intimately relatable. There’s often a sense when reading her novels that she has somehow manufactured a horrifying reflection of all the aspects of humanity that we thought no one knew about us. It’s the “she is just like me for real” effect. The narrator of Eileen is by and large an absolute freak, but there’s something so universal about the depiction of her consciousness that she could be anyone. This creates a haunting and extremely tense mood of anxiety and restlessness that permeates throughout the entire novel. There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail toward the end of the book that seemingly calls into question everything before it, or at least it did for me. I asked Ottessa about it the first time I met her, desperate to know I hadn’t imagined it. She stared at me blankly for a few moments and then said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

Eileen is among Lila Savage's top ten caregivers in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the best microhistories

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged eight must-read microhistories, including:

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

Everyone has thought about a butt at one point or another. Whether it’s your own or a crush’s, maybe you’re thinking it’s too big, too small, or just right. Have you ever wondered why we have such a fascination? No need to plug your nose — this cheeky account of the backstory of our butts is a great time.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best titles about literary threesomes

Costanza Casati was born in Texas in 1995 and grew up in a village in Northern Italy, where she studied Ancient Greek, and Ancient Greek literature, under one of the country’s most rigorous academic programmes. She is a graduate of the prestigious Warwick Writing MA in the UK, and worked as a screenwriter and journalist.

Clytemnestra is her debut novel. It has sold into 18 territories worldwide, is a Saturday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Award.

Casati's new novel is Babylonia.

At the Guardian she tagged "five novels featuring some of my favourite literary threesomes." One title on the list:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

In an alternate England where humans are cloned to become organ donors, Kathy H remembers her time at Hailsham boarding school, where she developed a close relationship with two other students: Ruth C and Tommy D. The novel is a heartbreaking exploration of lost chances in love, and how hard it is to let go of those we care for.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Sadi Muktadir's seven novels that give you hope before devastating you, Scott Alexander Howard's list of eight titles from across the world about isolation, Kat Sarfas's list of thirteen top dark academia titles, Raul Palma's list of seven stories about falling into debt, Akemi C. Brodsky's list of five academic novels that won’t make you want to return to school, Claire Fuller's list of seven top dystopian mysteries, Elizabeth Brooks's list of ten great novels with unreliable narrators, Lincoln Michel's top ten list of strange sci-fi dystopias, Amelia Morris's lits of ten of the most captivating fictional frenemies, Edward Ashton's eight titles about what it means to be human, Bethany Ball's list of the seven weirdest high schools in literature, Zak Salih's eight books about childhood pals—and the adults they become, 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

Seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill

Camille Bordas is a novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels in English, The Material (2024) and How to Behave in a Crowd (2017). Her earlier two books, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French.

Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

Bordas has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill, including:

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

This contemporary classic might not need introduction, but I’ll go for it anyway: narrated in turn by Sibylla and her young son Ludo (an absolute prodigy capable of reading ancient Greek and doing advanced calculus at age 5), it is perhaps the most fun novel ever written about the nature of intelligence. Sibylla is extremely smart herself, but can’t always keep up with her son, who’s constantly asking her to teach him something new. Yet her lessons are like magic tricks: when Sibylla teaches her son to read ancient Greek, we learn alongside him, and are entertained the whole way through. The book is smart and hilarious (Sibylla is very judgmental) without ever condescending to its reader. It assumes we are as smart as it is.

In its second half, Ludo goes on a quest to find a suitable father for himself, and the volume of lessons drops, but other types of learning come into play. Namely, he starts hearing a lot about games (chess, bridge), and there is this line that I find absolutely gorgeous in its simplicity when it comes to explaining what teaching is, and what its limits might be:

“When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rule to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you’d had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you’d have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.”

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top toxic-wellness fiction titles

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged seven top "toxic-wellness fiction [titles] to keep you glowing from the inside," including:

Natural Beauty: A Novel by Ling Ling Huang

A musician’s life takes a sharp, devastating turn that leads her to a sales representative job at a luxury beauty and wellness store. Enter the world of creams, lotions, potions and more in Natural Beauty, a story that examines the dark underbelly of what it means to be beautiful and the steep price of aesthetics.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Natural Beauty is among Olivie Blake's five top titles about regretting that cult you joined.

Also see Jamie Lee Sogn's eight top mysteries & thrillers set in the wellness industry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top novels of subtle espionage

Flynn Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of Under the Harrow, winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; A Double Life, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Northern Spy, a Reese’s Book Club pick that was named one of the ten best thrillers of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Northern Spy is being adapted for film by Netflix.

Berry's new novel is Trust Her.

At CrimeReads she tagged four

favorite novels about amateur spies. These characters go undercover, without extensive training, an extraction team, expensive equipment, or any idea of what damage might lie ahead.

One title on the list:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Two men sit over cups of tea in Old Anarkali, a district in Lahore. They are, seemingly, strangers. One has the “short-cropped” hair and broad chest “typical of a certain type of American; but then again, sportsmen and soldiers of all nationalities tend to look alike.” The other man, Changez, has returned to Pakistan after studying at Princeton and working as an analyst in New York. Is one of the men a spy, or both? If so, what might they do to each other? I started reading this absorbing, brilliant novel on a train, and then sat on a bench at my station, reading until the last page.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is among Abir Mukherjee's five top thrillers about terrorism, Ryan Lee Wong's ten best novels about Asian American politics, Maris Kreizman's top twenty-three short books, Colleen Kinder's ten books about chance encounters with strangers, Maris Kreizman's nineteen top short books and stories, Ian MacKenzie's ten top books about Americans abroad, Emily Temple's ten top contemporary novels by and about Muslims, Laila Lalami's eight top books about Muslim life for a nation that knows little about Islam, Porochista Khakpour's top ten novels about 9/11, Jimmy So's five best 9/11 novels, and Ahmede Hussain's five top books in recent South Asian literature.

The Page 69 Test: The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that unpack a complicated family inheritance

Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. She has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University.

Takacs's debut novel, Pearce Oysters, is a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Electric Lit Takacs tagged seven titles "about the ways our family leave their mark on us," including:

Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie

On the heels of a breakup, Kathleen Cheng leaves her psychology PhD program, moves back in with her mom, and takes a job as a professional cuddler. When Kathleen returns home, though, she finds her mother has emerged from a decades-long holding pattern of her own. Her mother transformed her life and is engaged to Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur. After years of grief, longing to return to China, and alcoholism, Kathleen’s mother is now sober, social climbing, and sporting athleisure wear. Kathleen’s cuddling gig begins as an ironic curiosity, but it has an apt emotional resonance in her life. Snuggling safely with strangers seems a natural tendency after a childhood spent caretaking for her mother. This novel delights with humor and heart as it parses the mother-daughter relationship in the run-up to the mother’s wedding day.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue