Seven novels that celebrate pop music

Elvin James Mensah was born and raised in South East London.

He graduated from Bournemouth University, where he began writing his first novel, Small Joys.

At Electric Lit Mensah tagged "seven novels [that] unashamedly celebrate the joys of contemporary pop music. Quite a few of them also inspired me in my own writing, and creating a world scored with music that felt authentically me." One title on the list:

Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez

I read this novel in the early stages of writing Small Joys. At the time, I was still struggling to find my voice and was desperate to see what kind of fiction other Black male writers were producing. Rainbow Milk came along at just the right time. The novel is a bold meditation on religion, class and sexuality, following a young Black gay man, Jesse, as he makes a new life for himself in London. I was utterly entranced by how deeply contemporary pop and R&B music was infused into the story—from cocaine being done off Mary J. Blige’s My Life album, to a Sugababes single being bought in the hopes that it might be number one on the charts.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top suspense novels set in the entertainment world

New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist Joshilyn Jackson writes page-turning suspense novels that revolve around timely women’s issues, raising questions about justice, motherhood, career, class, and the thorny mechanics of redemption. She previously penned eight works of Southern fiction, all of which have a murder mystery or thriller lurking inside the family drama. Her critically acclaimed work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and Jackson is also an award-winning audiobook narrator. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her family.

Her new novel is With My Little Eye.

[The Page 69 Test: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming; My Book, The Movie: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming; The Page 69 Test: Backseat Saints; The Page 69 Test: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty; The Page 69 Test: The Opposite of Everyone; My Book, The Movie: The Opposite of Everyone]

At CrimeReads Jackson tagged five "favorite mystery and suspense titles [that] unfold in the worlds of dance, broadcast news, high fashion, magic, and music." One title on the list:

Maddalena and the Dark by Julia Fine

Get this novel on your radar! While it is likely to be marketed as historical fiction, there is such palpable malice, such a growing sense of dread, that I kept finding myself holding my breath as I read. Set in lush, wild Venice at the beginning of the 18th century, it’s a violent and suspenseful tale of a young, ambitious violinist who meets the titular Maddelena at a prominent music school that is also a convent. Maddalena has been stored there to protect her “value” as a prospective bride, and as she plots a heist to steal back her life and gain control over her own future, their fates entwine. Envy and ambition and obsession drive the novel to a bloody conclusion that haunts me still.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books on desire

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of novels The Water Cure (2018), Blue Ticket (2020), and Cursed Bread (2023). The Water Cure was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Dazed, Guardian, and The Stinging Fly, among others. In 2020 she was picked as "a face set to define the decade ahead" by Vogue UK, alongside writers Jia Tolentino and Oyinkan Braithwaite.

At the Waterstones blog Mackintosh tagged six favorite "books that deal with themes of desire in all its manifold forms," including:

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

Probably the sexiest book ever written, A Sport and a Pastime looks on the surface like a story of a doomed love affair in sixties France between a rich American and a working-class shop girl. But as they travel the country, and we travel with them, observing the most intimate moments in hotel after hotel, we realise we’re being let in on a stunning narrative trick: a projection of the loneliness and inadequacies of the narrator (an acquaintance of the American) as he imagines a love affair that he’s never truly involved in. It’s a beautifully written account of both the desires and discoveries of the central couple and the secret desires of the narrator himself, watching from a distance.

Read about the other entries on the list.

A Sport and a Pastime is among Alex Christofi's top ten books on postwar France, Chris Killen's top ten novels about lost friendships, Emma Straub's top ten holidays in fiction, Thomas H. Cook's five must reads on the writing life, Adam Ross's favorite books under 200 pages, Lorin Stein's six Paris Review book picks, and Jeff Gordinier's list of five books that will make you question the wisdom of ever falling in love.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten spy novels to read before you die

Patrick Worrall was educated in Worcestershire and King’s College, Cambridge, UK.

He has worked as a teacher in Eastern Europe and Asia, a newspaper journalist, a court reporter at the Old Bailey, and the head of Channel 4 News's FactCheck blog.

The Partisan is his first novel.

At Publishers Weekly he tagged ten spy novels to read before you die, including:

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (1953)

Fleming comes with a warning, too: for most of my life, I believed you really could murder someone by covering them with gold paint. "Skin suffocation," you see. I was also aghast when Sky Marshals, armed cops posing as airline passengers, became a thing in the early 2000s. A shootout on a plane, where a hole would depressurize the cabin and suck us all out into oblivion? Hadn't the authorities read Goldfinger?

The bad science of Bond is symbolic of the whole series: very silly, as soon as you stop to think about it, but utterly irresistible.

Imagine reading a first edition of Casino Royale in 1953, in smog-bound London, with wartime rationing still in force. The cocktails, the easy sex, the baccarat tables. The Taittinger ’45 with dinner, something called an “avocado pear” for dessert. Why Casino Royale and not the (demonstrably better) From Russia with Love? It's the brevity, the nastiness of the torture scene, and Bond's vulnerability and subsequent coldness, captured beautifully in the book’s brutal last line.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Casino Royale also made Henry Jeffreys's top ten books on booze, Jeff Somers's list of eight books or series that make great party themes, Alan Judd's list of five favorite spy novels, Maddie Crum's top ten fictional characters who just might be psychopaths, Lee Child's list of six favorite debut novels, Danny Wallace's six best books list, Mary Horlock's list of the five best psychos in fiction, John Mullan's list of ten of the best floggings in fiction, Meg Rosoff's top ten list of adult books for teenagers, and Peter Millar's critic's chart of top spy books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 aunts in fiction

Annabelle Thorpe has been a travel and features journalist for over twenty years, spending six years on The Times Travel desk, before becoming deputy travel editor for Express Newspapers, and then taking the same role at the Observer. She was named one of the top 50 travel writers in the UK and has visited almost sixty countries, including crossing China by train, driving solo across the Omani desert, and nearly getting run over in Tripoli. Her first novel, The People We Were Before, was set in the Croatian civil war of the 1990s, her second, What Lies Within, is set in Marrakech. She has also written two travel books.

Thorne's latest novel is The Enemy of Love.

At the Guardian the author tagged ten top aunts in fiction, including:

Aunt March in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Never quite as hard-hearted as she likes to make out, Aunt March is a rich widow who disapproves of her daughter-in-law’s charitable work and the amiable poverty in which she and her four daughters live. But in spite of her disapproval she brings spectacular changes to two of the girls’ lives.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Little Women also appears among Kate Young's top ten fictional feasts for Christmas, Mary Sebag-Montefiore's ten classics every child should read before they are 10, Jeff Somers's five books that are arguably the first in their respective genres, Kate Kellaway's ten best Christmases in literature, Bea Davenport's top ten books about hair, nine notable unsung literary heroines, Sophie McKenzie's top ten mothers in children's books, John Dugdale's ten notable fictional works on winter sports, Melissa Albert's five favorite YA books that might make one cry, Anjelica Huston's seven favorite coming-of-age books, Bidisha's ten top books about women, Katherine Rundell's top ten descriptions of food in fiction, Gwyneth Rees's ten top books about siblings, Maya Angelou's 6 favorite books, Tim Lewis's ten best Christmas lunches in literature, and on the Observer's list of the ten best fictional mothers, Eleanor Birne's top ten list of books on motherhood, Erin Blakemore's list of five gutsy heroines to channel on an off day, Kate Saunders' critic's chart of mothers and daughters in literature, and Zoë Heller's list of five memorable portraits of sisters. It is a book that disappointed Geraldine Brooks on re-reading.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books that feature twins

Becky Chalsen is a film/TV development executive at the production company Sunday Night. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and now lives in New York City. Chalsen is a quadruplet and married to her high school sweetheart — an identical twin — whose family has spent summers on Fire Island for more than three decades.

Kismet is her first novel.

At Lit Hub Chalsen tagged ten favorite books that feature twins, including:

Raymond Fleischmann, How Quickly She Disappears

Raymond Fleischmann’s debut, How Quickly She Disappears, is a fast-paced and instantly captivating literary mystery set in Alaska, in 1941. The novel follows a woman named Elisabeth whose twin sister Jacqueline disappeared twenty years ago.

Elisabeth has always sensed that Jacqueline was out there, that they’d be reunited one day, though no one else believed it. When an unexpected visitor arrives in her small town, claiming to know the truth about Jacqueline’s whereabouts—and confirming that her sister is still alive—Elisabeth is willing to do anything in exchange for his answers.

Told through present-day plot and flashbacks to the twin sisters’ childhood, How Quickly She Disappears is an atmospheric look at sacrifice, duty, grief, loneliness, and obsession.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six crime titles that feature natural disasters

Samantha Jayne Allen is the author of the Annie McIntyre Mysteries. She has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University, and her writing has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Common, and Electric Literature. Raised in small towns in Texas and California, she now lives with her husband and daughter in Atlanta.

The newest Annie McIntyre mystery is Hard Rain.

At CrimeReads Allen tagged six favorite crime novels that feature natural disasters, including:

The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke

Another portrayal of Hurricane Katrina in crime fiction, this powerful entry in the Dave Robicheaux series takes place right as the storm hits New Orleans and in its immediate aftermath, when the power grid is down across the city, looters have entered, and bodies are floating in the streets. It captures the disorientation of a disaster—what happens when an event like Katrina alters our foundations—and how in the absence of law and order, vigilantes will take advantage of the most vulnerable. This was the first James Lee Burke novel I read and what made me a fan. What I love about his work is on full display here, namely, what I think of as his intensity: vivid settings, electric and detail-heavy prose, and a way of writing the South with complexity and poignancy.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Tin Roof Blowdown is among C.J. Box's top ten US crime novelists who "own" their territory.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best Indigenous suspense novels

At B&N Reads Brittany Bunzey tagged ten "Indigenous novels will keep you on the edge of your seat," including:

Winter Counts: A Novel by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

Winter Counts is an award-winning debut, equal parts gritty and thrilling crime novel and cutting social commentary about power and justice. Heroin addiction is spreading through the Rosebud Reservation. When it comes to his family, local vigilante Virgil Walking Bear takes it upon himself to hunt down the source, come hell or high water. Once you’ve finished, you will want to return to this unforgettably honest and lyrical look at Indigenous culture, power, and violence all over again.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Winter Counts is among Tracy Clark's top ten crime books by writers of color, Erin E. Adams's seven novels that use mystery to examine race, S.F. Kosa's top ten psychological thrillers, Stephen Miller's favorite crime fiction of 2020, Molly Odintz's six favorite titles from the "new wave of thrillers where the oppressed get some well-earned revenge," and Jennifer Baker's top twelve mystery novels featuring BIPOC protagonists.

The Page 69 Test: Winter Counts.

My Book, The Movie: Winter Counts.

Q&A with David Heska Wanbli Weiden.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about falling in (& out) love in London

Genevieve Wheeler is an American writer and communications director. Her bylines have appeared in publications like VICE, Cosmopolitan, Vogue Business, Teen Vogue, Elite Daily, Business Insider, MASHABLE, and POPSUGAR, with her work and words cited in The New York Times, Vox, the BBC World Service, Cheddar News, Jezebel, and beyond. She currently lives in London, holding an MA in Marketing Communications from the University of Westminster and a BS in Advertising from Boston University. Her debut novel is Adelaide.

At Electric Lit Wheeler tagged seven books with some "version of what it means to fall in and out of love in the British capital." One title on the list:

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

When Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity opens, Rob Fleming—a 35-year-old record shop owner in London – is reflecting on his ‘all time, top five most memorable split-ups’

(his most recent split—from a woman named Laura – doesn’t make the list). We then join Rob as he revisits these past relationships, attempting to understand what’s led him to a rather lonesome present.

Like most of Hornby’s work, it’s full of charisma and self-effacing humor, seeking to understand the very nature of what it means to love and be loved.

Read about the other entries on the list.

High Fidelity also made Amazon Book Review's list of ten titles for fans of Daisy Jones & the Six, Glenn Dixon's top ten list of novels about fictional bands, Robert Haller's list of six top novels referencing pop music, Brian Boone's list of five classic books Hollywood should adapt into corny sitcoms, Lisa Jewell's six best books list, Jen Harper's list of seven top books to help you get through your divorce, Chris Moss's top 19 list of books on "how to be a man," Jeff Somers's lists of five of the best novels in which music is a character and six books that’ll make you glad you’re single, Chrissie Gruebel's top ten list of books set in London, Ted Gioia's list of ten of the best novels on music, Melissa Albert's top five list of books that inspire great mix tapes, Rob Reid's six favorite books list, Ashley Hamilton's list of 8 books to read with a broken heart, Tiffany Murray's top 10 list of rock'n'roll novels, Mark Hodkinson's critic's chart of rock music in fiction, and John Sutherland's list of the best books about listing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten espionage novels centering women’s stories

Kim Sherwood is an author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she lives in the city. Her first novel, Testament (2018), won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing (2022), is the first in a trilogy commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond. Sherwood's latest novel, A Wild & True Relation (2023), was described by Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”

At CrimeReads Sherwood tagged ten top espionage novels centering women’s stories, including:

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (2019)

Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel interrogates what it means to be a spy for a system that is trying to preserve a national identity that excludes you. Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer for the FBI in 1968. As a black woman, her career is thwarted by the all-white boys’ club, until she’s sent on a mission that will change how she sees herself and her nation. A riveting exploration of belonging, race, gender and the Cold War, with another beguiling use of point of view.

Read about the other entries on the list.

American Spy is among Sarah Stewart Taylor's five mystery novels about characters searching for relatives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven provocative titles of feminist history

Vanessa Wilkie is the William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. She earned her PhD in British history from the University of California at Riverside and was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Redlands before joining The Huntington in 2013. Wilkie has curated two exhibitions: "Magna Carta: Law & Legend" and "The Reformation: From the Word to the World." She has published on female editorial practices, patronage, and death rituals. Wilkie's new book is A Woman of Influence: The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England.

At Lit Hub she tagged seven "provocative histories about women and their communities," including:

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Books are often the tools for dialogues within feminist histories, and Beck and Mikki Kendall should be read in conversation with one another. Kendall writes, “[w]hen white feminism ignores history, ignores that the tears of white women have the power to get Black people killed while insisting that all women are on the same side, it doesn’t solve anything.”

Her book is a history of the devastating impact “white feminism” has had on communities of color and argues that issues that are central to the lives of women of color must also be central to feminist discourses.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 medical memoirs … by patients

In 2008, Rebecca Fogg walked away from her New York life and career in financial services to move to London, where she co-founded the Institute of Pre-Hospital Care at London’s Air Ambulance and continues to work, write and learn Scottish fiddle.

Fogg's new book is Beautiful Trauma: An Explosion, an Obsession, and a New Lease on Life.

At the Guardian Fogg tagged ten "books written by patients who, for their own unique and fascinating reasons, also chose to incorporate the science underlying their experiences of illness." One title on the list:

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

With keen insight and devastating clarity, Esmé Weijun Wang describes the delusions, hallucinations and panic attacks that characterise her experience of schizoaffective disorder; the disease’s influence on her identity and ambitions; and the medical establishment’s struggles to define, diagnose and treat the different kinds of schizophrenia. Eschewing a comfortingly false recovery arc, she instead meditates on what it means to live with our limitations, not despite them.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue