It isn’t easy being the youngest child. And for Isidore Mazal, being the youngest is further complicated by the five people ahead of him. The elder Mazal kids are smarter than average—perhaps genius-level smart—and while he’s no slouch, Isidore has yet to skip a grade. He doesn’t love to read and thinks it’s weird when his siblings deploy “hopeful borrowing”—taking a book and hoping the owner won’t notice, thereby making the book property of the borrower.

Sometimes this odd-man-out mentality leaves the 11-year-old ready to run. He’ll pack his things and plot a way to escape from his family. Hopefully they’ll lift their noses from their books long enough to notice he’s gone. But if he isn’t there, who will notice them?

In her first English-language novel, French writer Camille Bordas examines a lost family from its youngest member’s point of view. Isidore observes his siblings at great length. Simone, only 18 months his elder, assigns him the task of writing her biography. It’s a job that requires him to ask many questions of his sister. Isidore extends his examination to others around him and begins to notice the things that go unsaid. His only friend, Denise, is obviously depressed and anorexic. Isidore turns to his German teacher, Herr Coffin, for insight into the field. It turns out Coffin isn’t so wild about teaching—Isidore’s chosen profession—after all. The Mazal family neighbor Daphne Marlott is poised to become the oldest living woman in the world when the two Indian women older than her die. After she becomes his German conversation partner, Isidore learns a long life may not be everything it seems.

Bordas draws complex characters who face the challenging and sometimes mundane issues of daily life. In the process, she prompts readers to look within.

The little town of Sycamore, Arizona, the locale of Bryn Chancellor’s eponymous novel, is a place where the American Dream goes to die. Many of the denizens are there because of failure: the failures of marriages, families, relationships, careers they thought would be brilliant and have come to nothing. Ironically, they fetched up in Sycamore just to find versions of the same old failures and deferred dreams lying in wait for them. Children who are born there long to leave.

Few know this better than Jess Winters and her mother, Maud, who’ve fled to Sycamore to escape the fallout of a divorce that’s left them struggling both financially and emotionally. When the book opens, Jess is nearly 16 and already wants to be shut of the place where she’s lived for less than 24 hours. Restlessness plagues Jess even when she finds friends and boyfriends and discards them and makes that one last mistake. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that in the first chapter Jess is alive and by the second chapter, set some 18 years later, she’s not.

Much of the rest of the story of Sycamore is told by its women. In scenes that move between 1991 and 2009, we hear from tall, beautiful, fractious Jess; her first bestie, Angie Juarez, who’s blossoming lesbianism was too much for their friendship to bear; Jess’ next best friend, Dani, a brilliant girl whose ambitions are wrecked by betrayal; Esther, the high school teacher turned baker; and Rachel, Dani’s whirligig of a mother. The men around them strive to be decent; they often fail. In one case, the failure can’t be forgiven.

But Chancellor’s compassion for her characters balances their unwillingness to forgive (the event at the novel’s core wasn’t as bad as it could have been, after all) with imperfect impulses to connect and understand. Sycamore is a sad, knowing and timely book.

Two wealthy families, the Hillsingers and the Quicks, have shared the remote Maine island of Seven for generations. Though Jim Hillsinger and Billy Quick are married to sisters, the families aren’t close; in fact, each family views the other as an interloper. But events conspire to draw the families together over the course of three summer days in We Shall Not All Sleep, an unusual and ambitious debut by playwright Estep Nagy.

The date is 1964, and the occasion is “the Migration,” a celebration of the annual departure of the sheep of Seven to a neighboring island. The Hillsingers and the Quicks are there for the summer with their extended families and friends; the young cousins are running wild and the servants are busy preparing for the festivities. Jim has just been ousted by the CIA for reasons that have something to do with the untimely death of Billy’s wife, Hannah, and a financial connection both families had with a mysterious Soviet agent. Grieving her sister’s death, Jim’s wife, Lila, has been spending more time with the Quicks, leading to an intimacy with Billy and a newfound closeness with her nieces. With the adults thus occupied, the Hillsinger’s older son, James, is free to lead his cousins in a series of grotesquely violent games. Most disturbingly, the youngest Hillsinger son, 12-year-old Catta, is banished overnight to the wild, uninhabited island of Baffin in Grandfather Hillsinger’s attempt to, in his words, make a man of him.

It is Catta’s story that makes this difficult novel—with its echoes of Graham Greene and Lord of the Flies—worth reading. The brutal rite of passage undertaken by the young boy is powerfully written; the clarity of his fight against the elements at odds with the complex and often puzzling Cold War politics and the unsavory exploits of the adults. It is Catta’s bravery, resourcefulness and sense of betrayal that the reader will recall long after this portrait of a dissolving privileged class has faded.

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash is a frenetic, frantic, frustrating and, above all, fun read. Habash is the product of an MFA program at New York University and the fiction reviews editor for Publishers Weekly. His complex fictional creation, college wrestler and titular hero Stephen Florida, isn’t so easy to grasp, and that’s what makes him so fascinating. Readers will be thoroughly engrossed by Florida’s whirlwind thoughts, philosophical questions, mood swings, yearnings for success and hapless attempts at finding emotional or social satisfaction with his girlfriend, best friend, teammates and coach.

Habash firmly roots the reader in Florida’s perilous psyche. In the vast openness and plain lifestyle of the Midwest, Florida is in the middle of nothingness, both physically and mentally. All that matters—as if it matters at all—is winning the NCAA wrestling championship in his weight class. Everything he has ever been is predicated on that one goal, that one desire, the one driving impulse. Thoughts of what comes next are hardly top of mind.

At times the story is frustratingly depressing, Florida’s antics aggravating, and his self-imposed isolationism infuriating. When he injures his knee during a match and is sidelined by surgery, his quest for national glory is put in serious jeopardy. He falls into a proverbial funk from which there seems no escape. You want to just hit him across the face and scream, “Snap out of it!” But at other times, you’re right there with him, feeling his pent-up rage, his overwhelming obsession, his need to slap someone else in the face or break their arm on the wrestling mat. You want to be Stephen Florida, if just for a little while, to relive past glories or to just ponder the path not taken.

If good things come in small packages, then Weike Wang’s first novel, Chemistry, is a very good thing indeed. Featuring a struggling scientist and the collapse of her professional and romantic lives, Wang’s short and bittersweet debut packs a devastating emotional wallop despite its slender size.

Chemistry takes readers on a no-holds-barred trip into the dark and choppy waters of a woman’s skeptical mind as it does battle with her heart. When we first meet our anonymous narrator, she is several years into her graduate studies in chemistry only to find her enthusiasm for the subject flagging as her experiments fail to produce publishable results, much to the consternation of her advisor and the exasperation of her austere Chinese parents. Her private life proves no source of comfort, as she and her live-in boyfriend have entered an uneasy standoff due to her reluctance to accept his repeated marriage proposals. When a beaker-fueled breakdown at the lab leads to an indefinite leave of absence and her boyfriend accepts a faculty position in another state, it seems the narrator has finally hit rock bottom. She soon realizes, however, that her downward spiral is only beginning and that the second law of thermodynamics—that systems tend toward chaos—applies not only in the lab but also to life.

Reminiscent of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Chemistry is an intimate and insightful novel that reads more like a memoir than it does fiction, so honest is its portrayal of its central character’s rich internal life. Wang’s own background in academia is an asset, adding authority and veracity to the protagonist and her world. Unafraid to explore the fallibility and foibles of our narrator, Wang exposes and probes her neuroses and insecurities with pithy and precise prose, capably blending in moments of wry comedy and absurd observations that keep things from ever getting too bleak. Emotionally exacting and daring, Chemistry is an astonishing and assured debut from one of fiction’s most exciting new voices.

In The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s assured debut novel, Deming Guo, an 11-year-old Chinese boy living in New York City, experiences a child’s worst nightmare: His single mother, Polly, an undocumented immigrant, goes to work one day and doesn’t come home. That event is the catalyst for a timely story of immigrant families in America.

As a teenager, Polly, born in a poor Chinese province, gets pregnant after a fling with a classmate. She goes into debt to a loan shark for the money to travel to America, where she has the baby. She soon discovers she can’t care for the boy while working to pay off the debt, so she sends 1-year-old Deming back to China, where her elderly father cares for him. But when Deming is 6, he returns to the U.S. after his grandfather dies.

By that time, Polly is living with her boyfriend; his sister, Vivian; and Vivian’s son, Michael. After Polly disappears, Deming spends a brief stint in foster care. He is adopted by a childless white couple, 40ish professors who live upstate and change Deming’s name to Daniel. By age 21, Daniel is an indifferent student, an aspiring rock musician and an inveterate gambler. His adoptive parents encourage him to enroll in classes at their college, but the city and a music career hold greater appeal. All of these plans are upended when Michael, who hasn’t seen Daniel since the adoption, tracks him down with information about Polly.

Some of the story’s contrasts, especially between Deming’s birth and adoptive families, are too stark, but The Leavers (winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver) is a thoughtful work about undocumented immigrants and the threats they endure. Midway through the novel, Polly recalls a subway ride when Deming was little. The train emerges from underground, “tearing straight into the sunlight, and I couldn’t wait to see your face.” That’s a beautiful expression of love that every family should appreciate.