Nine titles about female friendship in every decade of life

Michelle Herman's latest book is the essay collection If You Say So. Her books include three earlier essay collections – The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song – as well as four novels (Missing, Dog, Devotion, and Close-Up), the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, and a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life.

At Electric Lit Herman tagged "a list of books in which it’s friendship that matters most, in every decade of a woman’s life." One title on the list:

Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories by Lore Segal

No round-up of books about women’s friendship would be complete without this one by Lore Segal. Brilliant, witty, fierce, full of surprises, this book was published a year almost to the day before her death, in 2024, at 96. (Full disclosure: Lore Segal and I were longtime friends.) If you don’t know her work, I urge you to read all of it, but there’s no reason not to start with this final collection, most of which is about a group of friends, now in their 90s, who’ve been close for decades. They meet regularly for lunch, where they tell each other everything. “We are the people to whom we tell our stories,” one of them tells the others. And so, when they can no longer meet in person, they talk on the phone and over Zoom—they persevere. As Lore Segal did.

Read about the other books on Herman's list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight thrillers with beach & jungle settings

Jo Morey is a graduate of the Faber Academy and the Curtis Brown Mentoring Scheme. The manuscript for Lime Juice Money was awarded the 2023 Claire Mannion Literary Endeavour Prize, came runner-up in the Cheshire Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the Primadonna Prize, the Plaza First Pages Award and Killer Nashville's Claymore Award in the literary category. Morey lives in West Sussex, England at the foot of the South Downs with her husband, two boys, and two Portuguese Water Dogs.

Lime Juice Money is her first novel.

[The Page 69 Test: Lime Juice Money]

At CrimeReads Morey tagged eight favorite thrillers with beach and jungle settings, including:

Alex Garland, The Beach

The Beach by Alex Garland is arguably the ultimate backpacker classic. When it was first published, I was on a two-year trip around the globe and remember reading it on the beach on Gili Trawangan, Indonesia. Every other person was reading it too, and everyone was talking about it.

Set in Thailand, The Beach charts a young backpacker, Richard’s search for a legendary, idyllic and hidden island beach untouched by tourism. The paradise he finds here soon starts to unravel into a Lord of the Flies hallucinatory hellfest.

This one also features in Lime Juice Money and two of my characters bond over its “tropical horror.” A true literary thriller.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

The Beach appears on Ivy Pochoda's lit of five books that dive into the drug-fueled darkness of the club scene, Andrea Bartz's list of seven psychological thrillers for White Lotus fans, Lucy Clarke's top ten list of books about castaways, Hephzibah Anderson's list of eleven previously hip books that have not aged well, S J watson's list of six novels that could only take place at the seashore, Cat Barton's top five list of books on Southeast Asian travel literature, Kate Kellaway's ten best list of fictional holidays, Eleanor Muffitt top 12 list of books that make you want to pack your bags and trot the globe, Anna Wilson's top ten list of books set on the seaside, the Guardian editors' list of the 50 best summer reads ever, John Mullan's list of ten of the best swimming scenes in literature, and Sloane Crosley's list of five depressing beach reads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven green flag books

Certain books are a "red flag" -- they are a sign that you might not want to date the person who has them on display. The staff at GQ (UK edition) and some literary friends tagged a few green flag books -- books that indicate the reader may have more positive qualities. Josiah Gogarty's contribution to the list:

The best books are at least a little bit unhinged, and you want a dash (not too much) of the same spirit in a relationship. Save us, please, from the mediocre Hinge dates who are still stuck on the bland “sad girl lit” on special displays at Waterstones. Patricia Lockwood’s pyrotechnic memoir Priestdaddy, about her dad who’s also a priest (he became a Catholic after having kids), is suitably deranged: very funny and very emotional – and sometimes at once, just like infatuation should be.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Priestdaddy is among Tom Perrotta's six favorite funny books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books to explain the weirdest parts of religion to non-believers

Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist. She received her BA and PhD from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Spellbound (2025), is a history of charisma as both a religious and a political concept from the Puritans to the Trump era. Apostles of Reason (2013) examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945, especially the internal conflicts among different evangelical subcultures. Her first book, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost (2006), is a behind-the-scenes study of American diplomacy and higher education told through the lens of biography.

[Writers Read: Molly Worthen (November 2013); The Page 99 Test: Apostles of Reason]

At Shepherd Worthen tagged five of the "best books to help a secular person understand the weirdest parts of religion," including:

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

I read this book during a very intense summer a few years ago when I was trying to figure out if Christianity could possibly be true, and how a nerdy secular academic like myself could even begin to ask that question.

I found a kindred spirit in Sheldon Vanauken. In this memoir set mainly in the 1950s, he tells the story of how he took a sabbatical from his teaching job at a little college in Virginia to go to Oxford with his wife. Neither of them was religious at the time. In fact, the first part of the book is a very intense (some might say: cloyingly sentimental) account of their romance, when they basically worshipped each other instead of a deity.

If you’re like me, you’ll want to shout “get a room already” and throw the book at the wall during the first few chapters. But I’m glad I stuck it out, because the story gets much more interesting once they get to Oxford and meet various smart, fun Anglicans, including C.S. Lewis.

Pretty soon, they realize that being a smart, fun Christian is not a contradiction in terms. They start investigating the claims of Christianity, doing a lot of reading, having late-night conversations with thoughtful Christians, and so on.

“The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!” Lewis writes to Vanauken in a letter. I love how he captures the agony of a seeker, especially when he realizes that he’s reasoned his way to this awkward middle ground: sure, accepting Christianity would mean a leap of faith, but (it turns out) going back to his old worldview would be an even bigger leap, in the other direction. He’s on this little plateau between two chasms, and he has to make a choice because it’s crumbling fast.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that prove writers can make the best protagonists

Megan Cummins is the author of the novel Atomic Hearts and the story collection If the Body Allows It, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Bingham Award. The managing editor of Public Books and an editor at large at A Public Space, she lives in New York City.

At Electric Lit Cummins tagged seven novels showing that writer-protagonists can be a tool of versatility in a novel. One title on the list:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

It’s made clear at several moments in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that the first-person narrator known to us only as Offred is offering the reader a story. (“Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”) We know from Offred’s telling that before her capture and conscription as a handmaid to one of Gilead’s “commanders” she worked in a library. She loved books when she was still allowed to have them. While perhaps not professionally a “writer,” Offred is certainly a storyteller with a literary sensibility, one whose voice the architects of Gilead are trying their hardest to silence. In the book’s epilogue, set in 2195 at an academic conference, a Professor Pieixoto of Cambridge University delivers a keynote address on the subject of his discovery and transcription of a collection of thirty cassette tapes found in a footlocker in what used to be Maine, which his partner academic has coined “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is an intentionally vulgar pun on tail: “That being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of contention, in that phase of Gileadean society of which our saga treats.”

Near the end of his keynote, Professor Pieixoto scolds Offred for not describing more of the “workings” of the Gileadean empire, or better yet, printing off pages from Commander Waterford’s computer. From this epilogue we learn, for certain, that Gilead has fallen; that Offred was able to record her story, and possibly make it as far as Maine in her escape; and that the world after the fall of Gilead is just as misogynistic, that the academics have little regard for their “anonymous author,” and that Gilead’s worldview was not eradicated, just made, once again, latent.

This postscript changes one’s reading of the pages before it, but to me Pieixoto’s callous critiques enhance the feeling that Offred’s voice is her own. She tells her story as she wishes, and as she is able in her circumstances to tell it. And in Offred’s time, as in our own, telling one’s story is an act of resistance.

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

The Handmaid's Tale made Max Barry's list of five top books that are secretly science fiction, 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

Five essential thrillers perfect for the aspiring writer

Joy Fielding is the New York Times bestselling author of The Housekeeper, Cul-de-sac, All the Wrong Places, The Bad Daughter, She’s Not There, Someone Is Watching, Charley’s Web, Heartstopper, Mad River Road, See Jane Run, and other acclaimed novels.

Her new novel is Jenny Cooper Has a Secret.

[The Page 69 Test: Shadow Creek; My Book, The Movie: Shadow Creek; The Page 69 Test: Someone Is Watching; My Book, The Movie: Someone Is Watching; My Book, The Movie: The Bad Daughter; The Page 69 Test: The Bad Daughter; My Book, The Movie: All the Wrong Places; The Page 69 Test: All the Wrong Places; Writers Read: Joy Fielding (March 2019)]

At CrimeReads Fielding tagged "five of my favorite books – in no particular order – that have helped me in various way and that I would recommend for aspiring writers." One title on the list:

Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiassen is one of those rare suspense or crime novelists for whom humor is the key ingredient. His novels, all of which are set in South Florida, and deal with varying degrees of crime and corruption, are full of laugh-out-loud funny shenanigans. Tourist Season was Hiaasen’s first book and my personal favorite, although I suspect this will apply to whatever book you read first because the plots are largely interchangeable and not all that important. What makes these books special are the characters that Hiaasen creates, a bunch of not-quite-believable but somehow all-too-real, one-of-a-kind creations that you delight in spending time with. He taught me that humor is key to likeability.

Read about the other titles on Fielding's list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight titles in which a party changes everything

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s debut novel, The Other Wife, was included in The New York Times list of “The Summer’s Best Beach Reads.” A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Her work has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Harvard Review, Star Tribune, The Millions, and on the Ploughshares blog. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, Ucross, and Saltonstall. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts.

At Electric Lit Thomas-Kennedy tagged eight books that use "a party’s celebratory chaos as a backdrop for something important, whether dramatic conflict or quiet realization, to brilliant effect." One title on the list:

Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian

Haroutunian’s collection of linked stories focuses on friends Taline and Valerie (“Tal and Val”) as they navigate college and the years that follow. In “Twenty-One,” the opening story, an egg strikes Val in the temple as she and Val make their way to a Halloween party, presaging more extreme events to come. Once they finally arrive, the festivities themselves take a surprising and violent turn that will haunt Val for years. Haroutunian’s precise, understated prose sets up the questions that expand in the fourteen stories that follow: what does it feel like to grow older, to mature? How do people grapple with ambition, both artistic and personal? How do the relationships of early adulthood evolve? How does one salvage the pleasure and wash away the rest? That last question is top of mind for Val in “Twenty-One” as she cleans her face: “I want to remove egg, retain glitter.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles where competitive parenting goes off the rails

Jennifer Jabaley is the award-winning author of Lipstick Apology and Crush Control. She won Georgia Author of the Year in the young adult category and was nominated for the Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Award. Jabaley is a practicing optometrist. She brings sharp focus to eye care by day and to storytelling by night. She lives in the north Georgia mountains with her sports-obsessed family and two rescue dogs.

Jabaley's new novel is What's Yours Is Mine.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six novels that depict various worlds of cutthroat parenting. One title on the list:

Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me

This book explores inside a tightly knit community of gymnasts and their hyper-involved families whose lives revolve around their children’s athletic futures. This was the first book I read that demonstrated how parents become consumed with their children’s accolades outside of an academic setting.

Being that I spend a lot of time inside the world of high-pressure sports, this story spoke to me. It really encapsulated how parents will sacrifice everything—time, money, emotional stability—to support their children’s athletic success. In a world where every parent thinks their child is the best, tension and competition boil at every opportunity for playing time, recruitment, and scholarship opportunity.

This book revolved around gymnastics and the strive for the Olympics, but it could so easily take place inside of any athletic endeavor. Her dark, tense writing style effectively portrayed the stress simmering inside parents, praying for their kids to win.

Read about the other entries on the list.

You Will Know Me is among Zach Vasquez's seven top dark novels about motherhood and Alison Wisdom's nine coming-of-age stories about girls who do bad things.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles that explore the inner lives of animals

Case Q. Kerns is the author of Habitat (2025), a novel of interconnected narratives beginning in a near future New England and ending a century later. Originally from Buffalo, NY, he received a BS in Cinema & Photography from Ithaca College and an MFA from Emerson College where he served as fiction editor for the literary journal Redivider. His work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Harvard Review, and West Branch. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.

At Electric Lit Kerns tagged seven "books that engage with animals in different ways, probing their behaviors and our relationship to them, our sympathies for and atrocities against them." One title on the list:

An Immense World by Ed Yong

Of all the books on this list, Ed Yong’s exploration of animals’ senses brings me closest to the experience of communicating with them. Yong begins by imagining a human joining an elephant, mouse, robin, owl, bat, rattlesnake, spider, and mosquito in a room, and then describes the sensory experience of each animal. While all occupy the same space, their individual experiences highlight the different ways in which they sense an environment and alter our understanding of how they might feel.

An important distinction Yong makes concerning what we understand and don’t understand about animals’ behavior and senses is that while we may be able to discover, biologically, how an animal “reacts to what it senses,” we don’t know “how it feels.” In the chapter on “Pain,” Yong writes: “Imagine your entire body became delicate to the touch whenever you stubbed your toe: That’s a squid’s reality.”

For anyone seeking a better understanding of how animals experience the world—not how we experience animals in a vast network of ecologies making up a world that we think belongs to us but how they might feel—I can’t recommend An Immense World enough. It’s a wondrous journey.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Five dark books for long summer days

Sara Ochs is an author, law professor, and avid traveler. Born and raised in Upstate New York, Ochs and her husband now split their time between the United States and Sweden.

When she’s not turning one of the many places she’s visited into the setting of her next thriller, she can usually be found trip planning.

Ochs’s debut novel, a thriller set on a remote Thai island, was published as The Dive in the UK and territories and as The Resort in the US.

[Q&A with Sara Ochs]

Her new novel is This Stays Between Us.

At CrimeReads Ochs tagged five "dark books that are perfect to balance out the cheeriness of summer." One title on the list:

ALL HER FAULT by Andrea Mara

The very first chapter of this addictive thriller by Andrea Mara begins with every parent’s worst nightmare: a mother turning up to a playdate to find her son missing. What unfolds is an intrinsically plotted web of secrets and lies that will leave you second guessing every single character. An underlying feeling of unease runs through the entire novel up to the very last page, and I stayed up racing through the pages well after the sun went down.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The twenty-five best dystopian novels ever

At Entertainment Weekly Robert English and Kevin Jacobsen tagged the 25 best dystopian novels of all time. One title on the list:

The Wall by John Lanchester (2019)

Among the more contemporary dystopian literature is this suspenseful and satirical 2019 novel by John Lanchester. The Wall takes place on an island nation in a world ravaged by climate change, insulated from the widespread disaster by the titular Wall. Protagonist Joseph Kavanagh's role as a Defender on the island is to protect a section of the Wall from the Others, survivors looking to escape the rising seas on the outside. Suspenseful and timely, Lanchester's work is a compelling read of modern sociological issues seen through an affecting lens only the best fiction can achieve.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Wall is among Anne Charnock's five recent novels about climate catastrophe.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten great titles for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid

At People magazine senior books editor Lizz Schumer tagged ten "books to read while we wait for [Taylor Jenkins Reid's] The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo movie adaptation," including:

The Education of Kia Greer by Alanna Bennett

As the daughter of a reality TV star, Kia has grown up under a media microscope. She would gladly give up the fame if it meant she could experience life as an ordinary teenager — go to parties, gossip with her friends, apply to college and make mistakes in private. Then she meets Cass, who’s his own kind of rising star, and now her first love has only pulled her deeper into the spotlight. Teenage romance is complicated enough without constant rumors and speculation. The pressure starts to take a toll, and Kia must decide what she wants for herself and what her choices might mean for their budding relationship.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue