Beth Morrey

Beth Morrey‘s work has been published in the Cambridge and Oxford May Anthologies and shortlisted for the Grazia Orange First Chapter competition. Her novels include The Love Story of Missy Carmichael and Delphine Jones Takes a Chance

Morrey's new novel is Isabella's Not Dead.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Morrey's reply:

I tend to read in fits and starts – maybe three books in a week and then nothing at all for three weeks; it’s very erratic. I also don’t read very much when I’m writing, as it’s too tempting to copy the style of the book I’m reading. On holiday, I binge-read, and I’ve just been to Cornwall for two weeks, so I’ve got a few stone-cold bangers under my belt:

Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer

This was recommended by a writer friend and is absolutely outstanding. It’s a lightly speculative novel about the relationship between a man and a robot-woman. She’s virtually indistinguishable from a human and is programmed to be autodidactic so she learns from cues and interactions with others. The relationship between Annie and her ‘owner’ Doug is fascinating, creepy and completely gripping, exploring coercive control, autonomy and equality. It’s like Westworld meets Anora, but so much more – a tale told incredibly tightly, with great nuance and compassion. I really loved it and it was one of those books that felt like it was written just for me.

Once Was Willem, by MR Carey

I’m such a fan of Mike Carey – The Girl with All the Gifts is one of my favourite books of all time. He builds worlds so effortlessly, making the unreal so real that you never question it. This is the story of a boy, Willem, who becomes something else entirely – not alive, and not dead; a monster, but also a saviour. It’s a mighty and profoundly mystical medieval tale, with the supernatural element woven through elegantly and matter-of-factly. Carey’s narrative is dense with detail, wildly inventive and deeply weird. It’s funny but also moving, and I found myself quite tearful at the epic finish, uplifted by its power and audacity. One of my favourite writers at the top of his game.

The Art of a Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

I follow Laura on social media and really like her style, so thought I’d probably enjoy her books, and this latest one is getting a great buzz, with good reason. It’s historical crime fiction, which is a juicy genre, and she’s pulled off something really special – a twisty, unexpected tale that constantly wrongfoots you. Stuff happens when it shouldn’t! It’s so deliciously unpredictable, riotous, yet impeccably plotted, plus the period detail is spot-on. A terrific yarn.

Just Like You, by Nick Hornby

I picked this up in the holiday cottage I was staying in and sank into it within about three seconds flat. Nick Hornby is another of my favourite writers – I particularly loved About a Boy. This is an unusual romcom – an age gap relationship between a middle-aged single mother and a 22-year-old man. I felt a bit uncomfortable about the idea – if it was the other way round, gender-wise, would it be a dodgy? – but I liked the challenging nature of the set- up. Hornby is such an engaging writer – his prose is so intensely readable, funny and resonant. I also felt that the female characters were very well-drawn – nice, funny, decent grownup women; no manic pixie dream girl in sight.

Next, I’m reading The Greengage Summer, by Rumer Godden, because I felt like something sumptuous, and I’ve recently discovered that I own a greengage tree. Life is full of surprises.

Visit Beth Morrey's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Beth Morrey & Polly.

The Page 69 Test: The Love Story of Missy Carmichael.

My Book, The Movie: The Love Story of Missy Carmichael.

Q&A with Beth Morrey.

The Page 69 Test: Delphine Jones Takes a Chance.

My Book, The Movie: Delphine Jones Takes a Chance.

Writers Read: Beth Morrey (April 2022).

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on America Revised by Frances FitzGerald:

At the beginning of the novel, The Prosecution, the defense lawyer, Joseph Antonelli, tells the story of what happened when, a small boy, he broke his mother’s favorite crystal bowl and tried to hide the evidence of his crime.

“Holding one of the largest pieces in his hand, my father asked me that evening if I knew anything about it. I did what anyone would have done: I denied it.

“He did not seem to believe me. Sitting in his chair, he put his hand on my shoulder and started telling me about George Washington and the cherry tree. I knew then I was finished. That story was everywhere. You couldn’t run away from it. Every father told it to his son, and every schoolteacher told it to her class. You might go all the way through grade school without knowing anything about American history, but you knew young George had ruined it for the rest of us when he made his famous confession, ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie.’”

It does not occur to the young Antonelli - or to anyone else who was ever taught that story as a child - to ask why George Washington chopped down the cherry tree in the first place. Washington could not lie, but he could destroy for no apparent reason a tree that may have taken ten, or even twenty or thirty, years to grow! It is worse than you might think. Cutting down a tree in an orchard was no innocent boyhood escapade. Under the English common law, damage to an orchard was a felony. Felonies in the l8th century were punishable by death. George Washington, the Father of our country, was not just a felon, he should have been hung!

If no one knows this, it is because of what we were taught in school; what, to be more precise, we learned from the American history textbooks we were given to read. We are always talking about history, debating what really happened in the past, but no one stops to wonder how much of our disagreements are because what we were taught in grade school and high school has changed; that what we think our history has a history of its own. No one, that is, until Frances FitzGerald wrote America Revised in 1979 and made the dull and prosaic business of textbook publishing come alive. FitzGerald begins with what seems obvious: Each generation reads only one generation of schoolbooks. “That transient history is those children’s history forever - their particular version of history.” More important than the historical facts they are taught are the impressions created, impressions which, like other things learned in childhood, become the unexamined assumptions on which most of us think and act for the rest of our lives.

FitzGerald grew up in the l950s when, according to the textbooks she was given to read, “America was perfect: the greatest nation in the world, and the embodiment of democracy, freedom, and technological progress;” a country that “never changed in any important way.” When she read the textbooks that had been published over the two hundred years of American history, she discovered that there had been a number of different, and substantial, revisions. The history books of l890, for example, appeared to have originated in a different world than the ones written before. The American educational system had been completely transformed after the Civil War. Education had become public. For the first time public high schools had more students than private academies. One consequence was that the basic history textbooks became “a kind of lowest common denominator of American tastes.” This, in part, was because in the l890s three major publishers formed the American Book Company and almost immediately controlled between 75 and 80 percent of the market. Everything was treated with a dull uniformity, even the way Americans defined themselves.

In the nineteenth century, textbooks defined Americans by religion; in the twentieth, Americans were defined by race and culture. This was reflected most profoundly in the distinction drawn between ‘we Americans’ and ‘the immigrants.’ Immigrants, especially Irish and Germans, had been coming to America in large numbers since the 1840s, but between l881 and 1890 more than five million had arrived, a number that rose to more than fifteen million by 1920. This not only increased the population, it “altered the ethnic composition.” After 1900, immigrants from southern and eastern countries in Europe “vastly outnumbered those from northern and western ones.” Some textbooks went so far as to insist that some immigrants were undesirable; nearly all of them agreed with the law establishing quotas based on the national origin of the American population in l890. The texts asked the question: “‘Would it be possible to absorb the millions of olive-skinned Italians and swarthy black-haired Slavs and dark-eyed Hebrews into the body of the American people.’” The answer was, “Yes, probably.”

Like most other things taught in the history textbooks, this gradually changed. In the l940s, the notion that the country was a ‘melting pot’ entered major history textbooks. Then, in the l960s, came the new orthodoxy, that America was a “nation of immigrants,” a change reflected in the often overlooked, and always under appreciated, fact that it was only in the late 1960s that history textbooks used in American high school contained pictures of Americans who were not white anglo Protestants. But the real “shattering of the single image of ‘an American’ took place with the civil rights movement of the l960s. To include a section on the civil rights movement, however, meant that “the whole of American history had to be rewritten to include blacks and their perspective on events. It was as if Tolstoy had first written War and Peace without the character of Pierre.” The most serious rewriting dealt with Reconstruction. Until 1900, Northern texts treated the South “almost as a foreign country.” The Confederacy was “the slave power;” the Civil War was “the great rebellion.” After 1900, the textbooks insisted that the situation in the South “improved only after ‘Reconstruction” ended, and “the Southerners regained control of their governments.” The speed of this change of perspective had been astonishing, but “it was matched by the one that took place in the nineteen sixties.”

With every change in what the textbooks taught about American history there was, almost always, a protest from an outraged public; protests which increased in size and intensity “with the establishment of universal secondary education in the twentieth century.” In 1939 the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Legion complained that a textbook by Harold Rugg intended for elementary and junior high school students, a book that had sold 239,000 copies that year, was socialistic and even communistic. Their protest was successful. In 1944, Rugg’s book sold only 21,000 copies. In the l950s, at the height of the ‘red scare,’ Ada White, a member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, decided that Robin Hood, with his policy of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, was clearly a Communist and urged that any book that included the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.

The most important protest, however, was the protest of the Detroit Board of Education in l962 demanding that a text treating slavery in a favorable light be withdrawn from the city’s schools. This protest began what FitzGerald describes as “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place in American schoolbooks.” In addition to changing what American history included, there was a new emphasis on economic forces, social groups and political institutions. Social and political problems became the central focus. Foreign policy, urban blight, racial discrimination were given more extensive treatment than they had been given before. American history, according to one textbook, was “a gnarled experience involving problems, turmoil, and conflict.” What changed in the textbooks, according to FitzGerald, was “nothing less than the character of the United States.”

The emphasis on movements, on structural changes, whether the massive influx of immigrants at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, or the changing relation of the races, changed not just what history included but how history was written. With all the attention now on the movement of forces, no one seemed very concerned with the question of who might have moved them. FitzGerald grasped what few others understood: “serious people who wield political power or influence are never credited by the textbooks with having thought anything.” A foreigner who read them “would have to conclude that American political life was completely mindless. For instance, the texts report that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was an influential pamphlet without ever discussing what it says.” Major figures like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster “are stick figures deprived of speech,” while the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which involved some of the most brilliant men ever assembled to discuss the principles of government, “appears mainly as a product of interest group compromises….”

Contrary to the general belief that things are always getting better, that there is some kind of progressive movement always working beneath the surface of things, Frances FitzGerald does not hesitate to insist that earlier generations of American had the benefit of textbook writers who not only had a deeper understanding of history, but knew how to write. The best of them was David Saville Muzzey whose American History was read by perhaps a majority of schoolchildren from the time it was published in l911 until the mid-nineteen seventies. The book is “wonderfully lively and colorful,” full of characters, “people with beliefs, emotions, and voices of their own.” He tells the story of Lincoln’s assassination in a way that makes the reader - especially the schoolchildren who were reading it - remember it as if they had seen it themselves:

“As Booth leaped down onto the stage after firing his fatal shot, his spur caught in the folds of the American flag which decorated the Presidential box, and he fell, breaking his leg. He made his escape from the theatre on a horse that was waiting at the stage door, but was afterward trapped in a barn in Virginia and shot.”

No one writes textbooks like this anymore, and perhaps for this reason no American textbook has ever come close to its popularity. It makes a difference how a story is told. In the old schoolbooks the young George Washington speaks in his own name, and the young reader sees with his own eyes, and hears with his own ears, that remarkable confession that ruined it for so many would be liars, “Father , I cannot tell a lie.” Told now in the flat dull prose of the social scientists who have come to dominant the American educational scene that same story would read something like: “Washington as a young man was said to have admitted to a violation of a legislative statute affecting the right to property. There is no record that this resulted in a formal prosecution or that he served any period of incarceration.”

And no one has written a book like the one Frances FitzGerald wrote, giving us the history of the history we have learned and, given our ignorance, think we know. Faced with the differences in the history we have been taught, we are forced to ask, not just which version of history is true, but to go deeper and ask what kind of history we should have. It is question seldom asked by anyone since it was asked, almost a hundred fifty years ago, not by an American, but by a European in a now largely forgotten essay appropriately entitled, The Use and Abuse of History. But that is a matter for a later discussion.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Darcie Wilde

Darcie Wilde is an award-winning and bestselling author of over 30 novels in multiple genres including science fiction, young adult, cozy mysteries, and historical mysteries. A Useful Woman — her debut mystery novel, and the first to feature her popular sleuth Rosalind Thorne — was a national bestseller, and the sixth book starring the Regency sleuth, The Secret of the Lost Pearls, was declared “a must read” by USA Today. Wilde's new novel is The Heir, the first novel in her new A Young Queen Victoria Mystery series.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Wilde's reply:

What am I reading? That’s always a complicated question. I’m an ecclectic and enthusiastic reader, not to mention a semi-pro history nerd. That means there are a whole lot of books opened at once. Here’s a sampling of the most recent:

The Wharton Plot by Mariah Fredericks

It is really hard to write a good mystery centered around a live person (something I learned while working on The Heir). But Mariah Fredericks does a fantastic job balancing the factual and the possible without straining credulity and while presenting a believable and compelling, if not always likeable, heroine. She’s also got a deft touch with the prose, bringing the reader into the time period without shading into parody of her heroine’s actual prose. But there’s something else here. One of the hardest parts of tracking a real life or real events is that reality doesn’t follow the pacing we expect in novels. This book is a master class in how to handle that partic.

The Lost Orchid by Sarah Bilston

Did I mention I’m a history nerd? This book details the Victorian era’s obsession with orchids. It digs into colonialism, capitalism, upward mobility, elite snobbery and an unexpected connection to the development of the theory of evolution. I am constantly fascinated by pieces of history like this, and how they fit into the larger picture of a given time period. And if the writing is good (which it is here), so much the better.

Lost Among the Living by Simone St. James

I am a huge fan of the Gothic. One of my all time favorite books is Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. It’s a book that rewards rereading. (P.S. Avoid all adaptations. They all get it wrong). Simone St. James speaks to this part of my reader-heart. I love Simone St. James work. Gothic and ghostly and some of the very best haunted houses I’ve ever read. While I am waiting impatiently for her latest release, I’m re-reading my absolute favorite. This books take all the gothic tropes, including all the ones in Rebecca and then subverts them beautifully, originally and believably.

A Gentleman and a Thief by Dean Jobb

Part of the job of the mystery writer is to research real crimes, and the people who committed them. Obviously, the writer needs to know about things like the state of the law, law enforcement, and social concerns of a give period. But it’s more than that. Real criminals are astonishingly creative, or foolhardy. Or both. This makes historical crime a constant source of inspiration and fiction writers like me owe non-fiction writers like Dean Jobb a huge debt. Now, I love a historical heist and have read a lot about them, but I’d never heard of Arthur Barry who, in the 1920s, boosted tens of thousands of dollars of diamonds and other jewels from private homes. Frequently while the residents were sitting down to dinner.

The Detection of Secret Homicide by J.D.J Havard

Remember at the beginning when I said I was a semi-pro history nerd? That means in addition to reading popular accounts, like Dean Jobb and Sarah Bilston write, I end up doing things like reading other people’s Ph.D. theses, including the footnotes (all the best stuff is in the footnotes). Which is where I found mention of this book. Published in 1960, it is a dense and academic look at the evolution of the coroner’s office and the UK’s unique medico-legal system. Would I recommend it for the casual reader? No. But if you want, or need, to get waaaaay too deep in the weeds of how the UK’s unique medico-legal system evolved, and how murder was really investigated (or not) from medieval times up through the 1950s, then this book is worth tracking down.

Visit Darcie Wilde's website.

My Book, The Movie: And Dangerous to Know.

The Page 69 Test: And Dangerous to Know.

The Page 69 Test: A Lady Compromised.

Q&A with Darcie Wilde.

Writers Read: Darcie Wilde (November 2021).

The Page 69 Test: A Counterfeit Suitor.

The Page 69 Test: The Secret of the Lost Pearls.

Writers Read: Darcie Wilde (January 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue

Maria Malone

Born in the North-East of England, Maria Malone worked in print journalism and television news and features. She has written TV companion books, ghosted celebrity autobiographies, and is a former Yorkshire Press Awards Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year.

Malone's new novel is Death in the Countryside.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Malone's reply:

The Winds from Further West by Alexander McCall Smith

“Sometimes you want to get away from something that’s become too much. You want to put something behind you.”

I picked this up recently, shortly after returning from a holiday in Scotland, during which a trip to the Isle of Mull was cancelled due to ferry problems. The book was the perfect read, leaving me determined one day to visit Mull. The story perfectly evokes island life and illustrates the ease with which something entirely innocent can abruptly get out of hand in today’s society.

During a lecture, Dr Neil Anderson unknowingly offends a student and finds himself the subject of a complaint. All he has to do to make the problem go away is apologise … for something he never said. Madness. He can’t, he won’t.

With one seemingly small event, a single flimsy allegation, everything is about to change.

Soon, his life in Edinburgh – ordered, settled, happy, unremarkable – is in a state of collapse. Discredited, facing an uncertain future, he resigns. On impulse, he decides he needs a break to get away from things, and escapes to the Hebridean island of Mull, off Scotland’s west coast, where he plans to live simply in a remote spot surrounded by the sea. A chance to think, to evaluate his old life. Society has changed, he believes, tolerance replaced by anger and hostility, mob justice. On Mull, his nearest neighbour, Maddy, says the island will enable him to put things into perspective. She’s right, and soon he discovers, “Time had become different, elongated somehow, the hours moving at a slower pace than they had done in his previous existence. Perhaps people lived longer here … an island life being drawn out by the simple fact of its insularity.” At some point, however, he must confront the unfinished business in his past – which may well involve another life-changing decision.

Alexander McCall Smith is an absolute master when it comes to handling big subjects like love, betrayal, injustice. This gorgeous book left me thinking we all need to be better, more tolerant – and that in tough times escaping to an out-of-the-way cottage on the Isle of Mull (or similar) is sometimes the best, the only, thing to do.

Visit Maria Malone's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Chessler

Michael Chessler was born and raised in Los Angeles. He graduated from Harvard College with a degree in English and American literature, and also studied Italian literature at the Università di Firenze. After working various odd jobs in the entertainment industry—perhaps the oddest being a short stint as a motion picture literary agent—he began a career writing, producing, and directing television. Chessler has developed pilots for all the major networks, and has been a showrunner, producer, director and writer on a number of TV series.

His new novel is Mess.

Recently I asked Chessler about what he was reading. The author's reply:

I recently devoured both of Robert Plunket’s novels, My Search for Warren Harding and Love Junkie. They’re riotously funny, but also moving in a tragicomic way that sneaks up on you. I was left wondering why I hadn’t heard about this great writer sooner. I just finished Old Filth by Jane Gardam, which we read in my book club. It is such a fantastic book—so rich in detail, slyly humorous and profoundly moving. It is the first novel in a trilogy, so I am looking forward to reading the next two, The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends.

For inspiration for my work-in-progress novel, I have been re-reading Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books, as well as reading Jerzy Kosinki’s Being There for the first time. The 1979 movie is fantastic and a favorite of mine, but I’d never read the source material.

Visit Michael Chessler's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mess.

Q&A with Michael Chessler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carla Malden

Raised in Los Angeles, Carla Malden began her career working in motion picture production and development before becoming a screenwriter. Along with her father, Academy Award winning actor Karl Malden, she co-authored his critically acclaimed memoir When Do I Start?

Carla Malden’s feature writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, highlighting the marvels and foibles of Southern California and Hollywood. She sits on the Board of the Geffen Playhouse. Her previous novels include Search Heartache, Shine Until Tomorrow, and My Two and Only.

Malden lives in Brentwood with her husband, ten minutes (depending on traffic) from her daughter.

Her new novel is Playback.

Recently I asked the author about what she reading. Malden's reply:

Like half the country (thanks, Oprah!), I’m currently reading Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability. Aside from absorbing the general buzz around the book, I felt compelled to read it because my husband – who does not tend to be an avid reader of fiction – zipped through it in a few days. Now that I’m halfway through the book, I understand what snared him: the theme of AI which happens to be a particular interest of his. Regardless, as someone more interested in interpersonal relationships and the landscape of the human heart than in the insidious perils of quasi-sentience, I am absorbed by the family dynamic illuminated in the book, particularly that of the couple at its core. The shining wife, the slightly less-than husband, and the tension that lies therein – these elements are holding me (although, currently at 70% in accordingly to my kindle) I’m wondering if the plot is teetering on melodrama.

Visit Carla Malden's website.

My Book, The Movie: Playback.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leigh Dunlap

Leigh Dunlap is the screenwriter of the hit Warner Bros. movie A Cinderella Story. A native of Los Angeles, she attended film school at the University of Southern California. She now splits time and personalities between South Carolina and South Kensington and dreams of one day giving it all up and searching for buried treasure. Until then, she writes movies and books. Including Bless Your Heart, her debut novel.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Dunlap's reply:

I’m a big reader of non-fiction. I love nothing more than a 900-page book on, say, Andrew Carnegie. Having written a murder/mystery, however, I’ve been playing catch up on all the current writers in that genre.

Such a Lovely Family - Aggie Blum Thompson

Spoiler alert – they really weren’t all that lovely. The members of the Calhoun family were complicated and devious and funny and awful and a wonderful family to spend a book with. The characters in this upper-crust Chevy Chase family spin around the murder of the family’s patriarch. I loved that the novel weaved so much humor into a not so humorous premise. Thompson is great with detail and brings richness to the pages as well as red herrings and fantastic plotting that kept me turning the pages and trying to guess who did it in this whodunnit.

Tell Me What You Did - Carter Wilson

This book has such a great premise. The host of a true crime podcast who interviews people about the terrible crimes they’ve committed has the tables turned on her. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the fun – but what fun! I couldn’t help thinking what a great tv show it would be. I hope Hollywood is paying attention.

All the Colors of the Dark – Chris Whitaker

Whitaker beautifully takes the reader on a journey into darkness. It may be about a serial killer, but it’s about so much more. Imperfect parents and misfit children and the loss of innocence and the need for belonging and connection in a dark world. I felt like I went on a journey to a new place even though it takes place in Missouri, where I’m from.

Gothictown – Emily Carpenter

Like my novel, Gothictown takes place in Georgia, so it was definitely something I wanted to check out. Carpenter’s small-town North Georgia setting, however, is a world away from the upscale Atlanta of my book. An offer of $100 houses in a struggling southern town entices a New York chef in search of a simpler life to move her family to Juliana, a place that isn’t, of course, what it appears to be. One-hundred-dollar mansions usually come with strings attached. Let the buyer beware! This is a suspenseful page-turning thriller that had me believing this fictional town must be real. I had to check the map several times just to make sure it wasn’t!

When Cicadas Cry – Caroline Cleveland

I live in South Carolina, the location of the novel, so that was definitely an extra added reason to read the book. Cleveland is a native of the state and it shows on every page. This is the classic southern murder/mystery. You can almost feel the humidity on every page and see the Spanish moss on every branch of every oak tree. The main characters are a lawyer and his investigator girlfriend and the added element of the dynamics of a couple just trying to live their lives and find equilibrium in their relationship added so much to the story.

Visit Leigh Dunlap's website.

Q&A with Leigh Dunlap.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Williams

Mara Williams drafted her first novel in third grade on a spiral notebook—a love story about a golden retriever and the stray dog who admired her from beyond the picket fence. Now she writes about strong, messy women finding their way in the world. Williams has a BA in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, takes creative writing from Stanford Continuing Studies, and actively engages in writing groups and critique circles. Williams’s novel The Second Chance Playlist was a winner of the 2024 Emily Contest. When not writing or reading, Williams can be found enjoying California’s beaches, redwoods, and trails with her husband, three kids, and disobedient dog.

Her new novel is The Truth Is in the Detours.

Recently I asked Williams about what she was reading. Her reply:

These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean. Sarah is the queen of historical romance, but in this book, she takes on a contemporary story about a dysfunctional billionaire family. After the patriarch’s death, they’re forced to spend a week on the family’s private island and undertake a twisted inheritance game. It’s messy, sharp, and full of all the high-drama and high-stakes I’ve come to expect of a MacLean novel. Her historicals take on issues of class, feminism, and power, and this contemporary one is no different. In this book, she shrewdly, subliminally draws parallels between the historical aristocracy and our current economy of the one percent. Plus, it’s a delicious summer beach read.

Never Been Shipped by Alicia Thompson, which tells the story of a disbanded, one-hit-wonder rock band that reunites for a themed cruise, uncovering old resentments and unfinished business. This book is romantic, nostalgic, and filled with tenderness and wit. While it is ultimately a joyful story of redemption and reconciliation, it leans into the emotional journey of the characters. They're kind and trying their best, but also messy and wounded. It's so satisfying to see them finally get it right. I devoured this book in one weekend and was so sad when it was over.

Sandwich by Catherine Newman, which tells the story of a week in the life of a family during their annual trip to Cape Cod. This book is a quiet tribute to family life and honors the particular moment when children are grown—but not yet independent—when life feels both like a wide-open door and one that’s been slammed shut. I fell in love with the subtlety of the writing and the rich prose.

Dear Writer by Maggie Smith. I will read anything Maggie Smith writes. I find myself highlighting every line of her poetry, memoirs, and in this case, love letter to creatives. This book breaks apart the components of writing into manageable parts, without losing the magic that holds the work together. It’s filled with gorgeous prose, vulnerable insights, and inspiration to pay attention, play, and remain hopeful in pursuit of faithful storytelling. It’s more than a handbook for writers. It’s solid advice on how to live an authentic life.

Visit Mara Williams's website.

Q&A with Mara Williams.

The Page 69 Test: The Truth Is in the Detours.

My Book, The Movie: The Truth Is in the Detours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gabriella Buba

Gabriella Buba is a mixed Filipina-Czech author and chemical engineer based in Texas who likes to keep explosive pyrophoric materials safely contained in pressure vessels or between the covers of her books. She writes epic fantasy for bold, bi, brown women who deserve to see their stories centered. Her debut Saints of Storm and Sorrow is a Filipino-inspired epic fantasy out with Titan Books. Saints has been named one of Spotify’s Best Audiobooks of 2024, and Buba a Spotify Breakout Author of 2024, and Saints was one of Reactor’s Reviewer’s Choice: Best Books of 2024.

Buba's new novel is Daughters of Flood and Fury.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Buba's reply:

Right now I’m deeply into the research part of my writing process for 2 new works I can’t yet discuss in detail so for secret gothic novel I’m doing the following research readings.

I am studying the art history, and religious significance of a number of medieval manuscripts from France, Germany and the Czech Republic. To that end I have been studying the following books. One of my favorite, because it was clearly created by a 14th century French monk who should have been born a comic artist was, The Cloisters Apocalypse 1: An Early fourteen century manuscript in facsimile provided by the metropolitan Museum of Art New York, and The Cloisters Apocalypse 2: Commentaries on an early fourteen-century manuscript by Florens Deuchler, Jeffrey M Hoffeld, Helmut Nickel.

Another highlight has been my study of Liber viaticus Jana ze Stredy, Commentary by Pavel Brodsky, Katerina Spurna, Marta Vaculinova and a reproduction from Knihovny Narodniho Muzea. Although the majority of the work was in Czech and Latin as an example of Czech illuminated art it was an amazing resource.

I’ve also been delving into Slavic and Czech folklore, with a special focus on witches, demons, and seasonal myths and magic. To that end I am reading Panslavonic Folklore Volumes 1 & 2 by W.W. Strickland, translated from Karl Jaromir Erben’s A hundred genuine popular Slavonic fairy stories in the original dialects, my favorite part being a diagram which charted the alignment of different Slavic myths and folklore with the seasons, and Slavic Folklore a Symposium by Lord Albert Bates, which had wonderful drawings and photos of artifacts of early Slavic anthropological studies.

Then as research for secret historical novella I’m reading The Escape: World War 2 by Celedono A Ancheta, containing a firsthand account of survival during the war of a guerrilla fighter and his family. It was especially impactful as it echoed a number of family stories shared with me by my grandmother who grew up during Japanese Occupation. I also read Under Japanese Rule: Memories & Reflections by Angelito L. Santos, Joan Orendain, Helen N Mendoza, Bernard LM Karganilla, edited & with introduction by Renato Constantino. This was a much more academic text, however I found it especially valuable as it contained personal accounts and stories from the war from all ages and stations of life and across the Philippines, especially focusing on children which is often overlooked in war texts.

I’m also reading a number of books on Philippine folklore including: Philippine Folklore, translated from the spoken tagalog by Fletcher Gardner MD, which taught me that if Jack is the most common European folktale hero name, Juan came over from the Spanish and became the most common Filipino one. Girl Who Turned Into A Fish and Other Classic Philippine Water Tales as told by Maria Elena Patern was one of my favorite of the numerous folklore books picked up for this round of research mainly because of the gorgeously illustrated images that accompanied the stories. Huge shout out to the Library of Congress without which I would not have been able to access a tenth of these titles.

Outside of my current research deep dive, I read fiction for my authorial career, both blurbing for other authors and for market research.

Some current highlights include The Gryphon King by Sara Omer, which had man eating Pegasus and satisfied everything the horsegirl in me desired. Black Salt Queen by Samantha Bansil, I fell in love with the twisty complicated Sapphic tragedy playing out with the Queen, and A Spell for Change by Nicole Jarvis who brought the perfect southern gothic vibes for a steaming summer.

And lastly some reading I’m doing just for me, I’ve been slowly making my way through recipes from Filipinx: Heritage recipes from the diaspora by Angela Dimayuga and Ligaya Mishan, an absolutely gorgeous and fascinating cookbook full of diaspora stories about family and food. This week I made sawsawan and a mung bean stew I loved growing up.

Then just for comfort reading, because I can’t read in the genre I’m actively drafting, I’m reading The Sapphire Heiress by Ella Leon, a historical romance with a Filipina lead, that is feeding the void Brigerton being on hiatus left in my soul.

Visit Gabriella Buba's website.

My Book, The Movie: Daughters of Flood and Fury.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Rossi

Amy Rossi received her MFA from Louisiana State University, and she lives in North Carolina, by way of Massachusetts, with her partner and two dogs. The Cover Girl is her first novel.

Recently I asked Rossi about what she was reading. The author's reply:

I just finished the audiobook of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Audiobooks are new for me, but it’s a nice way to get to read more books, especially nonfiction. The fact that Coates does his own narration added an extra layer of intimacy that made me really glad I chose this format; I felt like I was experiencing it as he intended, as he takes the reader to his classroom, then to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. It’s a short book – an introduction and three essays – but it’s a powerful one. This is a book about reading, writing, and storytelling and how those inform the way we walk around in the world – and what our responsibilities are. I’m not sure a title has been more apt.

I’ve also been reading Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis. A lot of what I’ve read this year has been fellow debut books, including this one. I’ve been reading a bit at night before bed, and while I could easily stay up for hours because it’s really excellent, I’m glad to stick around with Abe and his family for a while. A slower read works well with the way the narrator (no spoilers but the use of a narrator here is fantastic) moves back and forth through time, telling stories that enrich the present action. It’s poignant and funny and enlightening – all the things I want in a book.

A couple things that I’m excited to read next include Beasts of Carnaval by Rosália Rodrigo and Matchmaking for Psychopaths by Tasha Coryell. The former is a Caribbean + Latine adult fantasy from another 2025 debut, and the latter is the latest thriller from a writer I very much admire. This really has been such a great year for books.

Visit Amy Rossi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mia Tsai

Mia Tsai is a Taiwanese American author of speculative fiction. Her debut novel, a xianxia-inspired contemporary fantasy titled Bitter Medicine, was published in 2023. Her new novel, The Memory Hunters, is an adult science fantasy.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Tsai's reply:

Aside from books by my colleagues and friends in the industry, which I am always happy to read (Gabriella Buba's Daughters of Flood and Fury; JR Dawson's The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World; LD Lewis's The Dead Withheld; Yume Kitasei's Saltcrop; AD Sui's The Iron Garden Sutra; Jared Poon's City of Others; EM Anderson's The Keeper of Lonely Spirits), I try to keep a mix of personal interest nonfiction and fiction on the desk. Since I work in genre and am basically always reading something speculative or romantic, nonfiction has truly become my escape. I've been collecting books about horses for the next project's research (Susanna Forrest's The Age of the Horse) as well as some architectural books (Chris van Uffelen's Bricks - Now & Then). I also have Lynne Boddy and Ali Ashby's Fungi on the desk in preparation for book two of the Consecrated series. I'm happiest, though, in medical nonfiction, so I am looking forward to reading Carl Zimmer's Air-Borne, though I might need to prepare myself. The last book of his I read, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, was deeply informative but also profoundly upsetting, and I mean profoundly upsetting in the sense of how upset I was to learn, truly, the history of eugenics and heredity. It's ugly truth but still truth we need to face, especially in America.

A younger version of me from twenty years ago had already been exposed to the eugenicist language floating around in the dark corners of the internet. Innocent me had no idea what Stormfront or incels were, or calipers, or the racist and dated language of the West when it came to describing skull shapes and body types. Reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh brought me right back to that time, and it saddened and disturbed me to know there can be a line drawn directly from Henry Goddard's horrific work in the early 1900s to people arguing that marginalized people, whether disabled, queer, of color, or intersections of those categories, don't deserve help and don't deserve to live. I liked the book. I thought it was excellent. I also thought it must have been incredibly difficult to research and write for Carl Zimmer.

That's a really depressing note to end things on, so for levity, I'll also say that I keep up with new chapters of Spy × Family every two weeks, provided Tatsuya Endo's health is okay and he isn't overworked and stressed, as well as the infrequent but always welcome chapters of Inoue Takehiko's Real.

Visit Mia Tsai's website.

Q&A with Mia Tsai.

--Marshal Zeringue