Jillian Medoff

Jillian Medoff is the acclaimed author of I Couldn’t Love You More, Hunger Point (both national bestsellers) and Good Girls Gone Bad.

Her new novel is This Could Hurt.

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

I’m a voracious reader. Highbrow literary fiction, airport thrillers, bleak dystopian science fiction, six-hundred page Victorian novels—I don’t discriminate. If a book is lousy—and I’m usually able to tell by the second page—I’ll deconstruct it, and try to find out why it didn’t work. Conversely, if a book is wonderful, I don’t study it at all; I simply read for pure pleasure, and lose myself as the story grabs hold.

Recently, one novel had this latter effect: The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy. It’s coming in May from HarperCollins, and while I know it’s unfair to discuss a book that won’t be available for a few months, The Perfect Mother keeps haunting me and I must, must, must tell the world about it. It’s a domestic thriller and a gripping page-turner, but even more, it’s an authentic look at how women, particularly mothers, can be our own worst enemies. American culture puts so much pressure on women to be perfect, to conform, and to sacrifice ourselves for our families that we occasionally lose sight of what’s genuinely important. Molloy seems to truly understand this, and never condescends to her characters. On the contrary, she infuses her novel with humor and warmth; as a result, The Perfect Mother is an unusually compassionate take on complex female relationships and the cult of motherhood. Molloy’s characters are familiar but unique, and so real it’s as if they’re breathing on the page. Her talent helps her elevate a simple story—a group of new mothers confront their worst nightmare when one of their babies goes missing—into a spot-on illustration of what it means to be a mother in today’s climate, and how far we’ll go to protect our children—and ourselves. Riveting, twisty, and beautifully written, The Perfect Mother is gonna be the big summer book of 2018. Trust me!

PS: Kerry Washington has already optioned the film rights, so I’m not the only reader who loves this book.

Visit Jillian Medoff's website.

My Book, The Movie: This Could Hurt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barry Wolverton

Barry Wolverton has been writing for children for over 20 years, helping create books, documentary television, and online content for Discovery Networks, National Geographic, the Library of Congress, Scholastic, and Time-Life Books, among others.

His debut novel, Neversink, was named the Children’s Book of Choice by Literacy Mid-South for their Read Across America program in 2014.

Wolverton's latest novel in The Chronicles of the Black Tulip is The Sea of the Dead.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:

I am always reading, as I imagine most writers are. I would love to talk about one group of books I am reading right now, but it would give away what I hope is my next project! But I have also started reading Even Brook Trout Get the Blues, by legendary fly fisherman John Gierach. At my day job I work with a number of men and women who fish, which is a hobby I have never attempted. But I have started to realize I may be missing out on something as a writer. The quiet and the solitude of fishing, especially fly fishing (rivers are my favorite waters), is starting to appeal to me mightily. And it seems like a hobby I can take up even though I just turned 50.

Visit Barry Wolverton's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Vanishing Island.

My Book, The Movie: The Sea of the Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Creedle

Laura Creedle writes about her experiences as an ADHD writer at her website and blog. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Creedle's new novel is The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily.

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

My reading list is all over the place, mostly due to my ADHD. I get generally get halfway through a book before losing it at the gym, or somewhere in my house. Then I start another book with the assumption that I will eventually find the first book. I usually have three or four books in process.

Sometimes a book just grabs me and I will read straight through with out putting it down long enough to lose it. I just finished Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan this way. There was never any point when I wanted to put it down.

Right now I’m half way through Night Film by Marisha Pessl. I loved her first book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I’m reading this slowly, because I’m savoring the mystery. It’s a strange and beautiful book. I have the feeling that once this book is gone there won’t be anything like it to take it’s place.

On the YA side I’m reading The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, which is delightful. I’m excited for Gunslinger Girl by Lyndsey Ely which comes out on Jan. 2. I read a lot of contemporary YA this year, and I’m looking forward to a western palette cleanser.

I hope to read IQ84 by Haruki Murakami soon. I love his writing, but I must confess that I have never actually made it all the way through one of his books. When you lose a Murakami book, it stays lost. Maybe people steal them. Who knows?

Visit Laura Creedle's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily.

My Book, The Movie: The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Moreci

Michael Moreci is the creator of numerous original comics series and has written and collaborated on multiple established properties. His most recent original works, Roche Limit (Image Comics) and Burning Fields (BOOM! Studios), were both recognized by many publications as being among the best comics of 2015. Roche Limit was called the “sci-fi comic you need to read” by Nerdist and io9, and Paste Magazine named it one of the “50 best sci-fi comics” of all time.

Moreci's newly released debut novel is Black Star Renegades. Drawing inspiration from the space operatics of Star Wars and the swagger of Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Star Renegades is a galaxy-hopping adventure that blasts its way from seedy spacer bars to sacred temples guarded by strange creatures--all with a cast of misfit characters charged with saving the world..

Recently I asked Moreci about what he was reading. His reply:

An Echo of Things to Come by James Inslington.

Everything they say about this series is true--it's doorstopper epic fantasy that calls to mind both Jordan and Sanderson. It's big in scope, but intimate in character and action. This is the second book--of three--in the series, and I couldn't recommend it more. It's funny, smart, and thoroughly compelling. I'm whipping through all 700+ pages, and I'm already feeling sad to part with it, knowing the third installment won't be out for months!

Visit Michael Moreci's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a capella vocal music on historical themes, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. She writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com.

Palmer's latest book is The Will to Battle, the third book in the Terra Ignota series.

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

Right now I’m reading John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), one of the very earliest works defending freedom speech and the importance of a free press. The tail end of 2017 is a powerful moment to revisit our first articulation of the value of free expression. Milton addressed the book to Parliament because in the 1640s lots of people in England supported tightening control of the press, largely in response to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1641) which was so hated and feared that by itself it sparked a widespread call for more censorship. Publishers hoping to make money from controlling intellectual property were also—contrary to what you might expect—in favor of more censorship since it meant more control. We tend to assume that that notions of copyright have existed since time immemorial, and that censorship tools like the Inquisition existed throughout the Middle Ages, but in fact both developed into their mature forms only in response to the spread of the printing press after 1450, and of the Reformation after 1517. So Milton’s book was written in a moment when huge new information technologies had just come in (much like today), and when religious divisions, violence, and xenophobia were major fears in people’s lives (also much like today). Milton’s England did not have a free press as we might think of it, and one could be arrested and prosecuted for printing any sort of political criticism or controversial religious ideas, but it had a freer press than Catholic regions, where all books were effectively pre-banned and had to be read and approved by a censor (usually a bishop, a royal officer, or a Dominican or Jesuit) before they could be printed. It’s heart-wrenching seeing Milton argue so beautifully for the importance to thought and to art of having a free press, even though the free press he celebrates is so much less free than our own, and it’s powerful revisiting the work now at the end of 2017, when issues of free speech and censorship are so in our own world, and on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation which was such a major cause of people supporting censorship.

As for lighter reading, I’m absolutely loving Fumi Yoshinaga’s Tiptree-wining manga Ōoku: the Inner Chambers. It’s a secret history of Tokugawa Japan, imagining that the reason Japan closed itself off from the outside for 200 years was that a plague which only affected men reduced the male population to 1/5 the female, and Japan was trying to conceal this from the world for fear outside nations would see it as weakness and invade. Yoshinaga brilliantly examines all the cultural, political and social changes that would come with women so outnumbering men, and develops her powerful and three-dimensional characters over multiple generations, so sometimes we see a character’s cherished dream finally come true fifty years after her death thanks to the aftereffects of her hard work, and love is never ever happily after, it’s always still there to be affected by the next historical moment. I’ve never read a volume of Ōoku without tearing up, sometimes at tragedy, sometimes at beauty.

Visit Ada Palmer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Too Like the Lightning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryon MacWilliams

Bryon MacWilliams is an American writer who was a Moscow-based foreign correspondent for more than a decade. His latest book is With Light Steam: A Personal Journey through the Russian Baths.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:

Poet Derek Walcott said so much of his work depended on inspiration that he envied prose writers who returned, day after day, to the same project. But so much of my day-in-day-out prose can feel like Work that I find myself searching out especially imaginative, even playful, reads.

Over the past month I've started, continued, revisited or finished:

In Sandy Gingras's first collection of poems, Not Even Close to What She Planned On, men fall out of the sky (“He hit at her feet like an issue resolved”), God rallies everyone for a Christmas card photo, a giant egg appears in a driveway, a brother brings a stripper to Thanksgiving, and a mother tranquilizer-darts an escaped lion at a local pond. Another (the same?) mother wants her head cryogenically frozen, to which the speaker says: “I go, 'What if they can't grow you a body, / and you're stuck being an alive head forever.' / ' She says, 'Then you'll have to carry me around.' / I knew it. I knew it.” Sometimes factual and emotional truth seem to bob at the same water line in this collection, but who knows? Like all good poets, Gingras knows how to lie.

In The Last Pub on Earth, one of Peter Murphy's two recent poetry collections, Garry Morgan falls off bar stools (and gets up) in Wales in the times of “Thatcher closed mines.” Sometimes he's tossed out – like the time he tries to climb into a painting in a museum: “Apple trees. Soft grass. / A stream he could sink his feet into – ”. Morgan, formerly the author's real-life pseudonym, roams Wales longing for resurrection. But everyone, including Morgan, knows his chances aren't good. Trudging up a valley he tells a(n inquiring) dog, “I am always breathing in two places. / My heart is a symphony of stones.”

The essays and riffs in Barbara Hurd's latest collection, Listening to the Savage, speak nominally to the Savage River near her Allegheny Mountains home. But, really, the collection speaks to acts of listening anywhere – to life examined, and the examined life. The River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies in the subtitle oscillate between discord and dissonance (“completely bred out of domesticated canaries,” we learn), reason and resonance, overfitting and underfitting, presence and nonpresence, extroversion and introversion, loves and past loves. From little-known words (crypsis, dehiscence, ear-soul) and little-known makers (poets, composers, philosophers) to little-known facts (the variations, say, in adaptive silence and acoustical camouflage among the 90,000 species of insects that use sound “to court and to warn”), Hurd knows that “God's in the details,” but “so's the devil.”

Readers have been seeking out books that explain Russia ever since the 2016 U.S. general election, but editors haven't been much help – safely turning to think-tankers and long-familiar names. To really get a feel for today's Russia, though, read Peter Pomerantsev's memoir, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. Pomerantsev, the son of former Soviet dissidents in Great Britain, worked high in the sky in the Moscow television and radio tower, Ostankino, with the brain trust of non-independent airwaves, feel-good stories and fake news (that, yes, even reaches America). That's OK, even good, at first: Who is the West to teach anyone how to behave? But years of navigating the many ways the system “wraps itself around you” – of rewriting history to suit the president, of political opponents designed and paid to make the president seem sane, of businesses and so-called nongovernmental organizations loyal to the president – take their toll on Pomerantsev. When positive stories can no longer be found, and “factual entertainment” yields to sitcoms (and canned laughter) that reflect a life “so spotless and shiny it could almost be teasing the viewer,” he leaves Russia for what might be forever. Ordinary Russians leave, too, even a well-known performance artist: “What role could there be for a performance artist, where to watch a piece of grotesque performance art you just have to switch on the TV?”

Even before I finished (Lee Klein's translation of) Horacio Castellanos Moya's novel, Revulsion, I was buying copies for friends. I haven't laughed out loud, as often, reading a book since, maybe, never. One friend calls it a “romp.” I've never read anything like it, and I've read the novel that inspired it: Thomas Bernhard's The Loser. Moya's Revulsion, subtitled Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, begins in a San Salvador cafe in which the expatriate narrator, Vega, tells his childhood friend, Moya: “I have to tell you what I think about all this nastiness, there's no one else I can relate my impressions to, the horrible thoughts I've had here.” And they are horrible, the thoughts. The slim novel is populated by rare words – vomitous, calamitous, pernicious, detestable, monstrous – that are applied to nearly everything, and everyone: monuments, universities, cities, war, foods, drinks, words, artists, communists, the military, relatives, and especially a sister-in-law. The book is funny in the vein of the Russian saying, “Every joke is only part joke,” the rest is truth. If there weren't so much truth in Revulsion the book's real-life Moya wouldn't have gotten real-life death threats. Whereas Bernhard seemed to love Austria, though, Vega doesn't seem to love anything. A lot of the heart in Revulsion is supplied by the reader, who can't help but look at his or her own country through a Vega-like lens – can't help but see much of the same, not least of which the “party of thieves disguised as politicians.”

Learn more about Bryon MacWilliams at the With Light Steam website.

The Page 99 Test: With Light Steam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Furlong

Susan Furlong is the author of the Georgia Peach Mystery series. She also contributes to the New York Times bestselling Novel Idea Mysteries under the pen name Lucy Arlington. She has worked as a freelance writer, academic writer, ghost writer, translator, high-school language arts teacher, and martial arts instructor. Raised in North Dakota, Furlong graduated from Montana State University with a double major in French and Spanish. She and her family live in central Illinois.

Her new suspense novel is Splintered Silence, the first in the Bone Gap Travellers series.

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

I’ve just picked up a new-to-me author, Jennifer McMahon. I’d heard good things about her work and decided to give her a try. I’m glad I did. The One I Left Behind is a classic psychological thriller about a small town plagued by several gruesome serial killings. The author keeps the pace strong while seamlessly weaving in back story. Her imagery is excellent, and the premise is fascinating. Every time I read a book, I gain something new to improve my own writing; I’m learning a lot from this author.

I’m also reading Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, a collection of her short stories. Recommended by a friend, I was surprised that I hadn’t read this author sooner. Her stories are the perfect combination of satire and humor, and contain a unique mix of both Christian and violently grotesque themes. Most of her stories present morally flawed protagonist. I think this gives her writing realistic depth. And Flannery doesn’t pull any punches, which I like. She’s my new favorite writer.

Also, I’m reading the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I started as a short story writer and can never get enough of short fiction, so I pick this up from the newsstand every month. I’m impressed with a story in this issue by John Gastineau, titled "A Coon Dog and Love." Gastineau’s writing is gritty, realistic and bold. His dialog skill is amazing. I’m going to be looking for more from this author.

I just submitted the second installment in the Bone Gap Traveller series to my editor. This one, titled Fractured Truth, introduces a new character, a FBI psychologist who specializes in criminal profiling. For research purposes, I picked up John E. Douglas’s Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit. Douglas, a renowned FBI investigator, gives true accounts of some of the cases he’s investigated and an inside glimpse into the minds of some seriously sadistic killers. The facts of these true cases are often more bizarre and violent than anything fictional I’ve read. This book truly explores the darkest recesses of the criminal mind. It’s a fascinating book, but don’t read it late at night.

Visit Susan Furlong's website.

My Book, The Movie: Splintered Silence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Reef

Catherine Reef is the author of more than 40 nonfiction books, including Noah Webster: Man of Many Words, Frida & Diego: Art, Love, Life, Florence Nightingale: The Courageous Life of the Legendary Nurse, and other highly acclaimed biographies for young people. She lives in College Park, Maryland.

Reef's latest young adult biography is Victoria: Portrait of a Queen.

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

Right now Sylvia Plath is the subject of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Letters, photographs, original artwork, objects as diverse as Plath’s typewriter and handmade paper dolls—the artifacts reveal a Plath whom readers of her poetry might not know. I was especially intrigued because I had just read a book that showed me another lesser-known side of the confessional poet, Plath the writer of short prose. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, first published in 1977, is a collection of short stories, essays, and diary entries.

Writing fiction did not come as naturally to Plath as composing poetry did. Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, called her ambition to write salable stories a burden to her. It seemed to me as I read this collection that plotting was not one of her strengths, or perhaps one of her interests. She was better at exploring characters and situations on the page. To make a story from what she had written, she often hurried it to an unsatisfying conclusion. Stories she wrote in the late 1950s and early 1960s aimed at women and girls, for example, conform to the formula for those published in women’s magazines of the period and conclude by affirming traditional values. “Initiation” ends with teenage Millicent rejecting admission into an elite sorority because her best friend has been excluded. In “Day of Success,” a housewife who briefly doubts that her husband finds her attractive learns to embrace her ordinariness. Other stories end in trite ironic twists that can only be called amateurish.

Using language to strong effect was what truly interested Plath. Who else would think to personify panic like this: “His love is the twenty-storey leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart”? The reflected sun was “red as a dwarf tomato,” Plath wrote; blood was a “thick, sweet honey.” I savored her stories for their poetry.

Biographies are often in my to-be-read stack. Recently I finished Peter Guralnick’s 2015 book, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll. The title claim is debatable, but Guralnick did a superb job of creating a well-rounded portrait of Phillips, the founder of Sun Records in Memphis, which is what a good biographer should do. Phillips emerges as a charming visionary with a remarkable ability to make possible the life he imagined for himself. He built Sun Records in the belief that the American South was rich in undiscovered musical talent, that he need only open his studio door and wait for tomorrow’s stars to walk in. And it is astonishing how many great names did amble in: Ike Turner, Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Charlie Rich, among others. Phillips knew enough simply to let each one play, to listen as he revealed his strengths, “to recognize that individual’s unique quality and then find the key to unlock it,” as he said. As a fan of early rock and roll, I loved all this history.

Guralnick’s biography is atypical because he was acquainted with his subject; in fact, he knew Phillips well. He acknowledges this friendship in his “Author’s Note,” stating that his book was “written out of admiration and love.” Are these sentiments unusual? I would argue that many biographers grow fond of their subjects, even those who aim for that cold, elusive quality we call objectivity. Guralnick’s affection for Phillips seems not to have kept him from presenting his subject’s less flattering side—Phillips’s alcohol abuse and extramarital relationships are given due attention. And for the twenty-five years that he knew Phillips, Guralnick becomes a character in the story he is telling. His biography takes on aspects of a memoir but remains focused on its subject.

One joy of reading is returning to books loved long ago and reading them again with fresh eyes. I’ve done this with novels that spoke to me in early adulthood, and recently I did it with a set of stories I treasured in childhood, the “Oz” books by L. Frank Baum. Baum wrote fourteen novels set in his “fairy country.” I reread the first five, which Barnes & Noble’s Fall River Press released in a single, seven-hundred-plus page volume in 2014. These stories are nothing if not formulaic: if Dorothy does not end up in Oz by means of a tornado, then she is brought there by an earthquake or a storm at sea. She completes several journeys accompanied by fantastical friends. Most famously, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, she walks the road paved with yellow brick accompanied by the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and Tin Woodman, aka Nick Chopper. On other travels her companions include a talking hen and the rainbow’s daughter. I quickly learned that characters introduced in one book are likely to show up in others, and I looked forward to meeting them again. These books celebrate lasting friendship.

I did encounter stereotypes. An army of girls, for example, carries knitting needles as weapons and cares most about jewelry and new gowns. And there are occurrences that seem bizarre and possibly inappropriate today. I’m thinking of the boy Tip in The Marvelous Land of Oz, who learns that he is really the princess Ozma, that he began life as a girl but was bewitched in infancy. When the truth comes to light he is transformed again despite his protest that “I want to stay a boy,” and “I don’t want to be a girl!” This episode feels very wrong in our time of growing sensitivity to transgender issues.

Still, Baum’s novels for the most part are delightfully imaginative literary comfort food. I find myself missing his magical land weeks after I put on my own enchanted slippers and came home.

Visit Catherine Reef's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Catherine Reef & Nandi.

My Book, The Movie: Victoria: Portrait of a Queen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen Dickson

Helen Dickson lives in South Yorkshire with her retired farm manager husband. On leaving school she entered the nursing profession, which she left to bring up a young family. Having moved out of the chaotic farmhouse, she has more time to indulge in her favorite pastimes. She enjoys being outdoors, traveling, reading and music. An incurable romantic, she writes for pleasure. It was a love of history that drove her to writing historical romantic fiction.

Dickson's new novel is Carrying the Gentleman's Secret.

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

The books I read are many and varied. I am the author of many Historical Romance books but Historical Romance is my least read genre. I read mainly fiction, non-fiction if I am doing research for the books I am writing.

I am currently reading Origin, Dan Brown’s latest book. I have read most of his books, my favourite being The Da Vinci Code, one of the best-selling novels of all time. Right from the beginning to the end of his books Dan Brown’s stories follow the same exhausting, rollercoaster yet exhilarating pattern at a cracking pace. Origin is set in Spain. Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbiology and religious iconology, is a compelling character, claustrophobic and still wearing his Mickey Mouse watch – which I found quite endearing. I didn’t find the story as exhausting as the others I have read but it is equally as compulsive a read. Langdon’s former student and friend, Edmund Kirsch, an inventor, futurist and atheist who is about to reveal to the world his breakthrough that will challenge the fundamentals of human existence, is murdered. Langdon must find the password to unlock Kirsch’s secret. To escape those who are trying to prevent him, he goes on the run with a beautiful woman – the future Queen of Spain. The story is seething with church dignitaries and evil doers, but who is pulling the strings? “Is there a God?” This is one of the fundamental questions everyone asks at some time or other. “Where do we come from? Where are we going?” What Dan Brown has written is powerful and thought provoking. The more I read the more I found myself questioning religion and science. Is it possible to be a scientist and religious? The book provides a good talking point, creating many differences of opinions, often heated, sometimes humorous, but always stimulating. All in all Origin is a brilliant read.

Crime books have made up most of my reading matter for several years, one of my favourite authors being Elizabeth George and the Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley British crime series. The twenty books of the series provide a long and meaty read. Assigned to Scotland Yard, Lynley is also a peer or the realm. He is paired up with working class Sergeant Barbara Havers. Havers is small, overweight, untidy, temperamental, with a bad haircut and a problem with authority, while Lynley is good looking, charming, posh, privileged and often unthinkingly arrogant. They are chalk and cheese - she drives a clapped out Mini and he drives a Bentley - she lives in a one room flat in an unsavoury part of London - he has a house in Mayfair and a country estate in Cornwall. Their working relationship is fraught with class resentment, but often funny and heart-warming. The books take you from the back streets of London to quiet country villages and lovely old manor houses, the Highlands of Scotland and as far flung as Lucca in Italy.

In the early books Lynley struggles to deal with his own traumas. He marries Helen but Deborah, a photographer, is the woman he loves. She is married to his closest friend Simon St James, a forensic scientist, who often helps Lynley in his work. Simon was crippled in a car crash. Lynley was driving the car. He is haunted by what happened and blames himself entirely.

I like the fact that each book in the series has a new crime to solve and Lynley and Havers throw themselves into each case allotted to them. I was intrigued by the interaction between the five lead characters as they navigate their way through the clashes of personality and class, the traumas and complexities of their lives. It is endearing to see how a bond develops between Lynley and Havers as the books progress and a delight to see how they overcome their differences to crack the case and cement their relationship.

I would like to mention one of my favourite books which I have read several times and will do so again. The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye.

M.M Kaye, who lived for most of her life in India, captures the very essence of that vast, mysterious and sunbaked continent. This book is full of intrigue and heartbreak and deeply evocative of India – the sights, the smells, the culture and the colour. You can almost smell the dust on the mornings of the rains. There is also great depictions of India at the time of the Raj – of hatred and bloodshed during the dark days of the mutiny. It’s a fabulous book.

Visit Helen Dickson's website.

My Book, The Movie: Carrying the Gentleman's Secret.

The Page 69 Test: Carrying the Gentleman's Secret.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Perry

Thomas Perry's novels include the Jane Whitefield series (Vanishing Act, Dance for the Dead, Shadow Woman, The Face Changers, Blood Money, Runner, Poison Flower, and A String of Beads), Death Benefits, Pursuit, the first recipient of the Gumshoe Award for best novel, and The Butcher's Boy, which won the prestigious Edgar Award.

His new novel is The Bomb Maker.

Recently I asked Perry about what he was reading. His reply:

I’ve read quite a few books this year that I would say are special in one way or another. The first that comes to mind is Deon Meyer’s Fever. Deon Meyer is a crime writer who has produced some of the most suspenseful fiction of the past few years—books like Thirteen Hours. He’s South African and writes in Afrikaans, but has an able translator. Fever is a departure for him, a post-apocalyptic story about the South African survivors of a worldwide plague who try to survive, then to rebuild a new, practical, and just society. But as always in Meyer’s books, it’s the characters that thrill you. We watch a boy grow into a young man and meet the right girl, not an unfamiliar tale. But it’s a long book, and between readings I actually caught myself worrying about them and those around them.

Jeffrey Siger has a new book called An Aegean April. It’s one of a number of books he’s placed on various Greek Islands. This time it’s Lesbos, where hundreds of thousands of refugees from across the Mediterranean have been washed up or smuggled ashore. It’s a good, thrilling book, but what makes it remarkable is the fact that the crimes, the action, and the moral problems are all natural products of this genuine humanitarian crisis. Siger, who lives in Greece much of the time, manages to educate the reader with the story, not with explanations. It’s a real achievement.

Visit Thomas Perry's website and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue