Can a pair of 10-year-old boys actually build a raft by themselves with nothing but a knife and lumber from an abandoned shed? Can a city-raised, tenderhearted sheriff last three whole days in the wilderness? These are questions a reader may ask while reading Andrew J. Graff’s fine debut novel, Raft of Stars, which begins gently but builds to a thumping climax on a raging river, when all those questions get washed downstream.

The boys are Fish and Bread, significant nicknames indeed. In 1994, Fish spends summers on his grandfather’s farm in rural Claypot, Wisconsin, where his best friend is Bread, a local boy with a mean father. When Fish shoots Bread’s dad to protect his friend, the boys, fearing they are killers, light out for the north woods. In hot pursuit are Fish’s capable grandfather, Teddy; Cal, a burned-out sheriff from Houston, Texas; Tiffany, a purple-haired budding poet with a crush on Cal; and Fish’s Pentecostal mother, Miranda.

The colorful adult characters take supporting roles as the boys, a likable duo, plot their escape by way of the nearby river. On an island, they discover a shed in which poachers have conveniently left a tangle of strong rope, as well as cans of beans. Wet and tired, they manage to assemble a hardy log raft.

There is rough humor in the interactions between Teddy and Cal, a bumbler with no experience riding a horse who fears the woods surrounding the river. There’s fun, too, when Tiffany learns to pilot a canoe with help from denim-clad Miranda. As storms buffet the landscape, Graff crafts a tense adventure; the boys don’t know about the rocks that await them or the adults who are tracking them. Everyone must test their competence and their nerve against the inhospitable wilds.

With bears, waterfalls and more, the novel may be hard to believe at times, but that won’t stop readers from enjoying the boys’ battle with the elements. “Boys need to shake their manes,” Miranda says. Raft of Stars allows these capable kids to demonstrate their grit.

In her fourth novel for adults, Nadia Hashimi details a life upended by Afghanistan’s 1978 Saur Revolution.

Ten-year-old Sitara Zamani lives a charmed life among the rose gardens of Kabul’s presidential palace. Her father, as President Daoud Khan’s most trusted adviser, buoys the existing government—and his family—with his steady wisdom. This all changes the night Sitara leaves her bed to look at the stars, and in doing so evades a coup led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Sitara’s family is murdered in the coup, but at the whim of a dodgy palace guard named Shair, an American diplomat and a vanload of hippies, Sitara begins a new life as “Aryana” in the United States.

Sparks Like Stars is not a novel that looks away from pain. Hashimi has taken an inventory of the toll childhood instability takes on a person’s emotional well-being. After her flight from Kabul, Aryana retreats further into herself as she is funneled into the American foster care system. She eventually becomes a physician (like the author), and when a man named Shair becomes her patient, memories of the coup overwhelm her. Aryana must decide how to best treat a dying man who may have murdered her family, and whether searching for their remains in Afghanistan will bring her the peace she has never found.

Hashimi’s novel conveys its themes through a mix of frank and poetic language. Maxims from Aryana’s father operate as a bridge between past and present, which at times feels contrived given the first-person narration. Still, Aryana is an intriguing character who likens herself to Anastasia Romanov, whose disputed escape from her family’s political execution becomes a kind of obsession for Aryana.

When viewing ancient artifacts from Ai-Khanoum, a city lost to time, Aryana’s father says, “People cannot imagine their civilization will not endure forever. Pride is blinding.” This idea is woven throughout the novel, creating implications for not only the progressive Daoud regime but also the unfolding Cold War and the decadeslong American presence in Afghanistan. The politics of Sparks Like Stars are necessarily close to the heart of its heroine, whose fate is largely dictated by the whims of government agents. The novel is an elegiac tribute to family and civilization—fragile collective entities that should be cherished while they still hold.

The Bad Muslim Discount starts off in darkly comic fashion. “I killed Mikey,” the narrator, Anvar Faris, tells us. “It sounds worse than it was. You have to understand that I didn’t kill Mikey because I wanted to do it. I killed him because God told me to do it.” Mikey is Anvar’s pet goat, which must be sacrificed for the Muslim celebration of Eid. In the opening sections of this novel, author Syed M. Masood mixes humor with tragedy. When it works, it’s captivating. When it doesn’t, it can feel uneven and disjointed.

The plot concerns the lives of two Muslim kids, 14-year-old Anvar in Karachi, Pakistan, and a teenage girl in Baghdad, Azza bint Saqr. For each of them, extremism engulfs their countries, forcing them to flee. Anvar’s coming of age in Karachi and then San Francisco is the lighter tale. His father, frustrated with the fundamentalism gripping Pakistan, pursues the move and is the comic foil to Anvar’s orthodox mother, who is torn between her love for her country and religion and her cultural wifely duty to defer to her husband.

Conversely, Azza’s is much a darker story. Her father is arrested and held by the U.S. military in 2005, forcing Azza to seek refuge with an aunt in Basra, Iraq, before she and her father may finally immigrate to San Francisco. However, Azza is sexually abused by the person producing their illegal passports, and she arrives in the U.S. traumatized.

After a college romance with a Muslim family friend, Anvar becomes a lawyer, tasked with the thankless job of protecting Muslims' civil liberties amid the rise of Western Islamophobia. Both Anvar and Azza live in the same subsidized apartment block, and inevitably a relationship ensues—with devastating consequences.

Pride, religion, personal identity, romance and sexism are just some of swirling themes that Masood addresses in this brave novel. Ultimately, however, its success rests on the characters and our willingness to believe in them, and that is where The Bad Muslim Discount can feel a little short-changed.

In Chang-rae Lee’s wildly inventive comic novel, My Year Abroad, Tiller Boardman spends the summer in his New Jersey hometown waiting to start his college junior year abroad in Italy. His mother left the family years ago. His father is sweet and supportive but entirely hands-off. Tiller thinks of himself as an orphan. He is more unformed than his years, rudderless, waiting for something to jump-start his life.

That something turns out to be Pong Lou, a middle-aged Chinese immigrant, a chemist and a serial entrepreneur. Tiller meets him while working as a fill-in caddy at a local golf course. Pong and his golfing buddies are an unruly bunch of immigrants who are not quite the right fit for this traditional club. Pong is one of the most intriguing figures in recent fiction. He is generous, curious and full of energy and ideas, a kind of life force. We learn later, in one of the book’s most moving chapters, that Pong’s parents were prominent Chinese artists and university professors whose lives were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Pong, whose takeaway from the hardships of his childhood is to seek from life “a quantum of sweetness,” convinces Tiller to skip the grand tour of Europe and go with him to Asia.

Tiller’s travels with Pong are filled with wild, eye-opening, often hilarious adventures. In a wonderful scene in a karaoke bar, Pong urges the tuneless Tiller to sing, and Tiller discovers the singing voice he didn’t know he had. Later, Tiller also discovers that taboo sex is not for him, despite the allure of his partner. Not everything works out quite as he’d hoped, but for Tiller it is a life-altering journey of self-discovery.

A second strand of the novel follows Tiller in his life a year later, as he struggles to take to heart all he has learned about himself and assume responsibility for his own life and for those close to him. He has ended up in a drab, middle-American town, hiding out with a troubled 30-something woman and her difficult 8-year-old son, both of whom are in the witness protection program because her former husband is a gangster. Tiller’s wild year abroad is the memory of a lifetime, but during this following year is when he creates his real life with this makeshift family.

In My Year Abroad, Chang-rae Lee has written a surprising, spirited, keenly observed novel, full of the crazy and the profound.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Chang-rae Lee discusses the wildness and comedy of My Year Abroad.

When it comes to a mystery, is there any better setting than the English countryside? Something about the milieu continues to inspire stories of cunning crimes that readers just can’t get enough of. In the case of Before the Ruins, Victoria Gosling’s devilish debut, an abandoned English manor house sets the stage for a cracking mystery involving a missing friend, a long-lost diamond necklace and the secrets that tie the two together across decades.

When they were children, Andy and Peter were as thick as thieves, but their friendship has only tenuously survived their rocky transition to adulthood. So it is quite unexpected when Andy receives a frantic call from Peter’s mother informing Andy that he has disappeared without a trace. Andy reluctantly agrees to help, and her hunt for Peter leads her to suspect that his disappearance is tied to a game they played as teenagers with two other friends, Emma and Marcus. Andy has tried very hard to move on from her past, but it now seems that in order to find and reconcile with Peter, she must turn to their shared history for answers.

Through Andy’s eyes, we revisit the summer when, galvanized by the story of a priceless necklace that’s gone missing, the four friends played a recurring game of hide-and-seek with a replica of the diamonds around the grounds of a local English estate. Each was convinced that it would only be a matter of time before they stumbled across the real jewels. And perhaps they might have, had not the arrival of a charming stranger and subsequent shocking accident ended the game once and for all—and destroyed their friendships in its wake.

Though the main narrative is propelled by the mysteries of Peter and the diamonds, the true soul of Before the Ruins is found in its contemplation of existential themes such as grief, guilt, desire, friendship and loss. There are plenty of bombshells to titillate and thrill over the course of the story, but many of the most rewarding discoveries come not from the grand reveals in the final act but from moments when Andy gains depth and dimension through revelations of her most closely guarded secrets and memories.

Richly atmospheric and exquisitely written, Before the Ruins is wistful and haunting, hopeful and beautiful. Confidently contributing to the tradition of British mysteries, Gosling has delivered a tale that will satisfy fans of Tana French and Paula Hawkins.

As 15-year-old Libby Gallagher ponders several dark moments in rock ’n’ roll history, she muses, “It all said to me that chaotic and dark forces were spinning around us. One foot wrong, and you’d be pulled into the vortex.” Unfortunately, a multitude of missteps have already affected Libby and her family, and that vortex threatens to loom closer every day in Una Mannion’s taut, richly imagined debut, A Crooked Tree.

Living near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s, Libby is the third of five children whose parents divorced and whose Irish immigrant father has recently died, leaving a gaping hole in their already fractured family dynamic. One evening, tempers flare during an outing, and Libby’s mom stops the car six miles from home and orders 12-year-old Ellen out of the car and into the dark, expecting her to walk the rest of the way. From that fateful moment on, Mannion sets up a series of domino-like events, skillfully building suspense that gains momentum to a dramatic conclusion.

Libby is an insightful, likable narrator who inhabits a teenage world in which adults are largely absent, busy tending to their own issues, allowing unknown dangers to blossom and grow. The Gallagher family struggles to get by emotionally and financially, and their mother has a secret boyfriend who fathered her youngest child. The story tackles many issues, including divorce, parental death, grief and child molestation, as well as class and immigration issues, making this nostalgic 1980s story surprisingly topical.

Despite the surrounding turmoil, the Gallagher clan is full of achievers. Ellen is a talented artist, observant Libby likes to lose herself in nature, and their siblings Marie and Thomas are scholastically gifted. These characters are bolstered by an intriguing supporting cast, including Libby’s close friend Sage and Thomas’ friend Jack, who becomes Libby’s romantic interest. Looming large is a sexual predator roaming the area whom the kids call Barbie Man, creating a sense of constant foreboding and fear.

A Crooked Tree marks the welcome debut of a talented, captivating new voice.

Japanese author Sayaka Murata first made waves with American readers with her 2018 English-language debut, Convenience Store Woman, a startlingly bizarre meditation on Japanese culture and the pressure to conform above all else. Murata’s latest novel, Earthlings, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, continues to explore life on the fringes in Japan through an even darker and weirder lens, one that will take most readers on a wild ride far beyond the outermost limit of their comfort zones.

Superficially, Earthlings is the coming-of-age story of a young girl named Natsuki and her cousin, Yuu, who process and explain their sense of alienation from their families by internalizing the belief that they are both actually from another planet. The subsequent fallout of this mindset is a series of increasingly disturbing and shocking events that heighten the duo’s inability to fit into conventional and conservative Japanese society and their overall disassociation from the world. To say any more would spoil the book, as so much of the story’s grotesque joy depends on the surprise at just how perverse things can get. It is a book that must be experienced firsthand, but it is also a book for which a single trigger warning would not be adequate, as it enthusiastically challenges most of our most deeply held societal taboos.

Whereas Murata’s goal with Convenience Store Woman may have been to gently unsettle her readers, it’s clear that Earthlings’ mission is to actively disturb. By disrupting her readers’ complacency, Murata allows us to better empathize with the misfits she champions. As her characters’ unease and discomfort becomes our own, we gain greater awareness of how it feels to be an outsider looking in.

The journey is often rather harrowing and bewildering and will appeal to few readers. But for adventurous readers who revel in a book that defies expectations and dares to be outlandishly different, Earthlings is a mind- and soul-expanding countercultural battle cry that is utterly one of a kind.

Published in Italy in November 2019 (fans lined up outside bookstores to purchase their copies at the stroke of midnight), The Lying Life of Adults is the first novel from Elena Ferrante since the final installment of the Neapolitan quartet, the series that made her an international literary star, was published in 2016. Set in an upscale neighborhood in 1990s Naples, her new novel is a powerful coming-of-age story like no other.

Dutiful, bookish and sweet, Giovanna is on the cusp of puberty when she overhears her father comparing her to his ugly sister. Used to receiving compliments, Giovanna is alarmed but curious, and despite her parents’ concerns, she initiates a relationship with her tempestuous Aunt Vittoria. As Giovanna learns more about her father’s background, she begins to see how her parents’ lies and treachery have impacted their lives as well as hers.

Giovanna travels between areas of Naples so different, they might as well be opposing planets: from the comfortable, progressive household where she was raised with a secular education, including access to sex education, to her aunt’s working-class neighborhood, which is mired in violence, religion and superstitions, all expressed in the dialect that Giovanna’s parents forbade her to speak at home.

Ferrante’s ability to draw in her reader remains unparalleled, and the emotional story is well served by Ann Goldstein’s smooth and engaging translation. The novel simmers with overt rage toward parental deception, teachers’ expectations and society’s impossible ideals of beauty and behavior. For readers who are familiar with Ferrante’s work, there will be much that is recognizable: the belief that poverty can be transcended through education, the power of a talismanic object (in this case, a bracelet that may or may not have belonged to Giovanna’s paternal grandmother) and the absurd linkage of physical beauty with purity and goodness. There is even an unattainable man who holds the promise of escape.

But The Lying Life of Adults is very much its own story. Giovanna’s self-reliance and her efforts to become the kind of adult she has yet to meet will resonate with thoughtful readers.

The immigrant experience in America is kafkaesque; having to navigate systems with obscure and debilitating rules while maintaining any shred of dignity and humanity has shaped generations of Americans. The debut novel from Lysley Tenorio, The Son of Good Fortune, is a tale of this struggle, one that is unique in its relatability.

Excel, a young Filipino immigrant living in California, is unwillingly at the center of the story. He lives paycheck to paycheck with his mother, Maxima, who was a low-budget movie star in the Philippines. He works at a local pizza parlor, and she scams men online. Then Excel meets Sab, a girl who works at a cemetery flower shop, and the two run away to the desert together. When they reach Hello City, the two struggle to make a living, and after a fiery accident, Excel is forced back home so he can make enough money to pay the town back.

Tenorio, himself a Filipino immigrant, accurately and compassionately portrays the immigrant experience. From Excel’s and Maxima’s daily struggles for money to their fierce if unexpressed loyalty to one another, The Son of Good Fortune captures the lived experience of many new Americans. Excel and his mother face the world with only each other to lean on, and throughout the story, they are reminded of their link.

Despite it universality, The Son of Good Fortune doesn’t lack for originality. With the whimsical excitement of Hello City and the craftiness of Maxima’s online schemes, the story finds a witty voice and sets a unique tone. Despite the drudgery and harshness of immigrant life, Tenorio explores the humanity in the tribulations and creates characters who are as lovable as they are real.

With his debut novel, Tenorio excavates joy from the immigrant experience, though he does his best not to diminish the suffering. If you cannot relate to this story, you can certainly learn from it.