by Jeff VanderMeer

The surprise fourth volume in the Southern Reach series addresses a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises.

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by Miranda July

A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

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by Halle Butler

Margaret Anne (“Moddie”) Yance abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her Midwestern hometown, throwing herself at the mercy of her old friends as they, all suddenly tipping toward middle age, go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious East Coast artist to take up a winter residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become.

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by Marie-Helene Bertino

As a child, Adina Giorno recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

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by Charles Baxter

Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the people in Brock’s life pose increasing challenges to Brock’s sense of self and purpose crash over him.

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by Coco Mellors

Meet the Blue sisters. Avery, a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left the family reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in. But coming home is never as easy as it seems.

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by Bothayna Al-Essa

The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish—allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

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by Kate Greathead

George is a young man brimming with potential but incapable of following through; sweet yet noncommittal to his long-suffering girlfriend; distant from but still reliant on his mother; charmingly funny one minute, sullenly brooding the next. Despite his failings, it’s hard not to root for George at least a little. Beneath his cynicism is a reservoir of fondness for his girlfriend, Jenny, and her valiant willingness to put up with him. Each demonstration of his flaws is paired with a self-eviscerating comment. No one is more disappointed in him than himself (except maybe Jenny and his mother).

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by Kelly Link

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom one year after disappearing from their hometown, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are. In the room with them is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of a bargain their teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been.

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by Gabriel Smith

Gabriel has trouble delivering on his promises: As the moldy, overgrown house deteriorates around him, so does his own health, and large sheets of his skin begin to peel from his body at a terrifying rate. In fragments and figments, Gabriel takes us on a surreal journey into the mysteries of the family home, where he finds unfinished manuscripts written by his parents that seem to mutate every time he picks them up and a bizarre home video that hints at long-buried secrets.

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by Chuck Tingle

After years of trying to make it, Misha’s big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: Kill off the gay characters, “for the algorithm,” in the upcoming season finale. Misha refuses, but he soon realizes that he’s just put a target on his back. Haunted by his past, Misha must risk his entire future―before the horrors from the silver screen find a way to bury him for good.

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by Francis Spufford

One snowy night at the end of winter, Joe Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis containing people of every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. Yet that corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets.

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by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfilment of destiny: A miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires.

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by Haruki Murakami

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears, and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves.

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by Yasmin Zaher

In New York, a wealthy Palestinian woman strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags. But America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions.

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by Danzy Senna

If Jane can just finish her latest novel, she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped, and like countless writers before her Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with a hot young producer to create “diverse content” for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer” to create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy ever to hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.

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by Rachel Kushner

“Sadie Smith” is how an American secret agent introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, who—like everyone she targets—is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

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by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body. It wears your skin. In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face to face with it. They survived—but at Camp Resolution, everybody leaves a different person. Sixteen years later, only the scarred and broken survivors of that terrible summer can put an end to the horror before it’s too late. The fate of the world depends on it.

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by Jennifer Croft

Eight translators arrive at a house belonging to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore her home and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets—and deceptions—of Irena Rey’s that they are utterly unprepared for.

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by ’Pemi Aguda

Among these 12 stories set in Lagos, “Manifest” presents a woman who sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter’s face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In “Breastmilk,” a wife forgives her husband for his infidelity. Months later, she blames herself for failing to uphold her mother’s feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood. And in “Things Boys Do,” a trio of fathers finds something unnatural and unnerving about their infant sons. As their lives rapidly fall to pieces, they begin to fear that their sons are the cause of their troubles.

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by Ferdia Lennon

Amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have herded Athenian prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians—but only if they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the friends hatch a plan to direct a production of Medea. But what started as a lark sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war.

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by Joseph O’Neil

Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.

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by Dolly Alderton

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend’s side of the story.

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by Vinson Cunningham

When David first hears the senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States’s first Black president. Working for the senator’s presidential campaign over the next 18 months, David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

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by J. Robert Lennon

Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine—though she remains remains haunted by her past. Then when her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.

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by Rita Bullwinkel

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of a group of eight teenage girl boxers has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs, the competitors’ pasts and futures come to the fore as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

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by Kevin Barry

October 1891. The city of Butte is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the mine captain. A love affair sparks between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast.

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by Anne Michaels

It’s 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand.

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by Adelle Waldman

Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square, emptying the day’s truck of merchandise and stocking the shelves before customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn’t schedule them for enough hours—most of them are barely getting by. When the store manager announces he is leaving, the members spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies.

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by Ben Shattuck

In these 12 linked stories set across three centuries, two men meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine.

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by Andrés N. Ordorica

When Daniel de La Luna arrives as a scholarship student at an elite East Coast university, he bears the weight of his family’s hopes and dreams, and the burden of sharing his late uncle’s name. Daniel flounders at first—but then Sam, his roommate, changes everything. As their relationship evolves from brotherly banter to something more intimate, Daniel soon finds himself in love with a man who helps him see himself in a new light. But just as their relationship takes flight, Daniel is pulled away, first by Sam’s hesitation and then by a brutal turn of events that changes Daniel’s life forever.

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by Holly Gramazio

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path?

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by Leif Enger

Rainy, a bereaved and pursued musician, embarks under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbling infrastructure, and a lawless society. Amidst the challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder.

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by Martin MacInnes

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, traveling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth’s first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.

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by Sally Rooney

Peter is a lawyer in his thirties—successful and competent. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage relationships with his first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student. Ivan is a 22-year-old competitive chess player who’s always seen himself as a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Then Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

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by Yeji Y. Ham

Yewon dreams of a hotel. In the hotel, there are infinite keys to infinite rooms—and a quiet terror. When Yewon wakes, she sees her life: a young woman, out of her job at a convenience store, trapped in the tiny South Korean village of her birth. Now Yewon’s brother is stationed near the North Korean border, her sister has experienced a life-changing tragedy, and her mother is overwhelmed by anxiety, her health declining. When Yewon begins to drive a local woman, a mysterious and aging North Korean refugee, to visit her brother at a distant prison, Yewon’s dreams intensify.

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by Percival Everett

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place, Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

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by Richard Price

East Harlem, 2008. In an instant, a five-story tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash. As the city’s rescue services and media outlets respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the tenants are missing.

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by Mark Haber

Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life’s work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son’s relentless desire to make an electronic dance album. As he sifts through the contents of his desk, the professor’s memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.

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by Sarah Manguso

When aspiring writer Jane meets filmmaker John, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

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by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Nearly 40 years after wealthy businessman Carl Fletcher was kidnapped and brutalized, he’s still secretly seeking closure. When his family convenes to mourn the dead of Carl’s mother, it’s clear the rest of the family is just as damaged. His wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children are each a mess, as well. As they hover at the delicate precipice of another kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their successes and their failures.

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by Rufi Thorpe

At 20, Margo is alone with an infant and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up and asks to move in with her, she agrees. Then Margo begins to form a plan: She’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems?

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by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

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by Camille Bordas

The Chicago Stand-Up program teachers and students are all afraid to be a punchline. Artie may be too handsome for standup, Olivia too reluctant to examine her own life, and Phil too afraid to cause harm. Kruger may be too vanilla to command his students’ respect, Ashbee too detached. And then we have Dorothy—the only woman on the program’s faculty—who though preparing to launch a comeback tour can’t tell if she’s too abiding, too ambitious, or too ambivalent. Whether a visiting professor—a high-profile, controversy-steeped comedian—will do more to help or harm remains to be seen.

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by Lisa Ko

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. Now adults, their dreams are murkier. Performance artist Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. Coder Jackie must contend with internet’s sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And community activist Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

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by Kaliane Bradley

In the near future, a civil servant is tasked with working at a government ministry gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible. Her job is to work as a “bridge” assisting the expat Commander Gore, who—as far as history is concerned—died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 Arctic expedition. Over the next year, an uncomfortable roommate dynamic evolves into something much deeper. And by the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined.

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by River Solomon

The Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. But right away, bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents’ death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present.

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by Frankie Barnet

Jenlena and Daphne are in their early 20s, trying to find their way in a society that has just eradicated all animals for the safety of humanity. In the post-fauna world, Jenlena transforms from an aspiring poet to a gig worker, capitalizing on other people’s grief by selling house plants and cosplaying as pets for pay. Meanwhile Daphne flounders in a deep depression, smoking weed and ditching work. When Jenlena meets the California billionaire Roderick, and the two become romantically entangled, she is exposed to a new understanding of wealth, power, and the gender economy—just as the world hurtles toward its alleged salvation.

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by Hisham Matar

As a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story on the radio. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. When a chance encounter brings Khaled face to face with Zowa, he is subsumed into a friendship that eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self.

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by M. T. Anderson

The year is 1087, and a pox is sweeping through the Italian city of Bari. When Brother Nicephorus, a lowly monk, is visited by Saint Nicholas in his dreams, he interprets the vision as a call to serve the sick. Enter Tyun, a treasure hunter, who says the 700-year-old bones of Saint Nicholas are rumored to weep a liquid that can heal the sick. For the humble price of a small fortune, he will steal the bones and deliver them to Bari, curing the plague and restoring glory to the fallen city. And Nicephorus will be his guide.

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by Samantha Harvey

A day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts who’ve been selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet.

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by Fernanda Trías

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

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by Richard Powers

Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Rafi Young gets lost in literature. Todd Keane’s work leads to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea.

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by Claire Oshetsky

Margaret’s first memory is of the day she accidentally locked her friend Agnes in an old cooler. No one blames Margaret for her friend’s death. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who listens that her daughter never even left the house that day. Enter Poor Deer: a creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s life. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces her past and confesses the truth. And when teenage Margaret strikes out on her own, Poor Deer offers her a sudden opportunity to atone for her sins.

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by Richard Flanagan

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan’s father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this melding of dream, history, place, and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

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by Rachel Khong

Matthew is everything Lily Chen is not: a native East Coaster and heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn’t be more different: flat broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. Over two decades later, 15-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can’t shake the sense she’s hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

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by Tony Tulathimutte

A novel-in-stories that follows a cast of linked characters. In “The Feminist,” a young man’s allyship turns to nihilism as he realizes it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics” spirals into borderline obsession. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

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by Yael Van Der Wouden

It is 1961 in the rural Dutch province of Overijssel. Living alone in her late mother’s home, Isabel’s life is upended when her brother Louis leaves his new girlfriend Eva at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest. Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession—and when things start disappearing around the house, Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral, leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known.

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by Lauren Elkin

Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, befriends a new neighbor—Clémentine, who is part of a radical feminist collective. In the same apartment 50 years prior, Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood. Two couples, 50 years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy.

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by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away. Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose.

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by Lily Meyer

When 16-year-old Gabriel, an American in Chile, meets Caro, who is Chilean, something clicks. But everybody’s saying there’s going to be a coup—and no one says it louder than Gabriel’s dad, who Gabriel suspects is working with the CIA. Decades later, Gabriel’s American-raised adult daughter Nina heads to Buenos Aires in an effort to save her dissertation. Quickly, though, she gets sidetracked by a controversial book that transforms her sense of her family and identity, pushing her to confront the moral weight of being an American citizen in a hemisphere long dominated by US power.

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by Garth Greenwell

A poet’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

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by Dinaw Mengestu

After abandoning his career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah. Five years later, with his marriage to Hannah collapsing, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, of his childhood. With Hannah and their two-year-old back in Paris, Mamush sets out on a journey across America in search of answers to questions he’d been told never to ask. He begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them.

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by Claire Messud

Over seven decades, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of WWII, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This is a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

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by Tommy Orange

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

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by Alison Espach

Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, alone. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe’s plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

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by Colin Barrett

As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, introspective loner Dev answers his door on Friday night to find Doll English—younger brother of small-time local dealer Cillian English—bruised and in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, County Mayo’s fraternal enforcers and Dev’s cousins. Dev’s quiet homelife is upturned as he is quickly and unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias’ frenetic revenge plot against Cillian. Meanwhile, Doll’s girlfriend, reeling from a fractious Friday and plagued by ghosts and tragedy of her own, sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll.

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by Adam Rapp

As late summer 1951 descends, Myra Larkin meets a young man. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. Later that night, a triple homicide occurs just down the street. As the siblings leave home, each pursues a shard of the American dream. Myra serves as a prison nurse. Her middle sisters find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec drifts into oblivion. As he becomes increasingly alienated, his mother begins to receive postcards full of ominous portent. What they reveal will shatter a family and lead to devastating reckoning.

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by Álvaro Enrigue

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan. Cortés was accompanied by two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma—who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads—the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

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by Sam Sax

In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra’s ever loved, every place they’ve felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. Unfolding in fragments of memory, Ezra dissolves into the family, religion, desire, losses, pains and joys that made them into the person that’s decided on this final act of protest.

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