If you need evidence that there are still great things happening in the world, a fun coincidence: turns out today’s #read99women guest is our second in a week to have one of her books optioned for the screen by Nicole Kidman! Janelle Brown’s PRETTY THINGS — out today! — is the latest, and I for one can’t wait to see an adaptation. The book is twisty, dark, delicious fun, following a desperate con artist and her Instagram-influencer target in a constantly escalating game of secrets, manipulation, competition and conflict. Thriller fans will want to snap this one up immediately.

Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels WATCH ME DISAPPEAR, ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE, and PRETTY THINGS, now available from Random House. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, Wired, Self, RealSimple, Lenny, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. Previously, she worked as a senior writer at Salon, and began her career as a staff writer at Wired during the dotcom boom years, working on seminal Web sites like HotWired and Wired News. In the 1990s, she was also the editor and co-founder of Maxi, an irreverent (and now, long-gone) women’s pop culture Webzine.

A native of San Francisco and graduate of UC Berkeley, she has since defected to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband Greg and their two children.

Janelle’s #read99women recommendation is THE HUNDRED-YEAR WALK by Dawn Mackeen, which she calls “one of the most visceral, gripping non-fiction books that I’ve read in recent years.”

It sounds simply stunning: “Dawn MacKeen traces the path that her grandfather - a survivor of the Armenian Genocide - took when he was managed to escape the Turks in 1915. As a refugee, he walked naked through the Syrian desert, hid from the death squads hunting him, was taken in by a tribe of nomadic Sheikhs, and managed over and over to survive through the moments when death seemed inevitable. Dawn MacKeen visits Syria herself -- a perilously journey through a war-torn landscape -- on a quest to retrace his steps; and even includes excerpts from his long-lost journals. The resulting book is half-memoir and half investigative reporting. It’s wrenching and beautifully written and more relevant than ever when we think of our modern refugee crisis.”