King’s property, king’s property, everything is correct. Elimane, Khoudiemata, Ndevui, Kpindi and Namsa—a family born of necessity, rather than blood—whistle this phrase to signal to one another, warning against potential invaders in their postcolonial African nest. Living by their wits, the group manages to eke out something approaching survival in the hulk of an abandoned airplane, a self-contained minisociety at the fringes of a much larger, glaringly dysfunctional and indiscriminately hostile one. 

In Little Family, Ishmael Beah, author of the bestselling A Long Way Gone, draws a vivid, disturbing and yet life-affirming picture of five young people who band together when abandoned by their families, their government and even society itself. Fortune, they discover early on, favors the prepared. First, Elimane hooks up with a mysterious figure he calls William Handkerchief, who employs the group to render certain confidential—and possibly illegal—services. Not long thereafter, Khoudiemata is able to deploy a combination of beauty and backbone that lands her among the unnamed country’s smart set. 

At one juncture, a former professor and government official turned rabble-rouser delivers an impassioned speech with sentiments shared by many in former colonies: “Look at all you fools, including me, celebrating an Independence Day we didn’t fight for. Some foreigners who didn’t own this land decided that today you were free in a land where your ancestors lived before they arrived. This is why we are not free, because we have allowed someone else to decide when and how we should be free.” With such a universal message, Little Family could easily have been set in Mumbai or Hong Kong, London or New York City—any place where untold riches exist cheek-by-jowl with soul-crushing poverty.

Sometimes, as both Elimane and Khoudiemata discover, all it takes is a chance meeting and the skill to deliver an essential commodity at exactly the right time to propel someone from the outside into the inner circle. And for myriad reasons, it might not be easy—or even possible—to ever go back. But every bird is forced at some point to abandon its nest, and people are much the same—even if, unlike the song, everything is not correct. 

It’s tough to feel like you don’t belong. Most people experience this sensation at some point, but imagine how intense it would be if you were a gay man coming of age under a government that expected allegiance you weren’t prepared to offer.

That’s the situation in which Polish university student Ludwik Glowacki finds himself in Swimming in the Dark, a moving work set in 1980 and 1981. These were the early years of Solidarity (the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country), which led to communist Poland’s declaration of martial law. When the government crackdown begins in ’81, Ludwik is living in New York. Radio reports of unrest rekindle memories of his homeland, specifically of the young man with whom he fell in love.

Most of this novel consists of flashbacks to events of the previous year. Ludwik meets Janusz at a work education camp shortly after they graduate from university. The two young men develop a friendship and swim together at a nearby river. Ludwik recommends Giovanni’s Room, the James Baldwin novel he hoped to make the subject of his dissertation. Soon they fall in love, an affair they have to hide.

But reality disrupts their idyll. As Ludwik’s mother and grandmother teach him about their country’s oppressive postwar history, Janusz becomes an enthusiastic member of the ruling party. Ludwik is forced to choose between the love of a man whose politics he questions and his desire to emulate Baldwin’s gay protagonist and leave his country to escape oppression.

First-time author Tomasz Jedrowski, born in Germany to Polish parents, sometimes tries too hard to be poetic (“the sun was already up, soft and new like a freshly peeled egg”), and Swimming in the Dark is a simpler affair than such recent works of gay literature as Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. But Jedrowski is a sympathetic observer of politics, the personal as well as the governmental. Readers will find much to admire in this sensitive depiction of the awareness that is created when your sexuality and politics run up against society’s norms.

In Amy Jo Burns’ lyrical first novel, the sheltered life of 15-year-old Wren Bird bursts open under the weight of family secrets hidden deep in the mountain hollers of West Virginia.

Wren is the daughter of snake-handling preacher Briar Bird, who holds services in an abandoned gas station outside of the appropriately named town of Trap. Local lore says Briar lost sight in one eye during his youth after being struck by lightning, an incident that has granted him mythical status in his small congregation.

The superstitious Briar is protective of Wren and his wife, Ruby, forcing them to live in seclusion. Their main contact with the outside world is through Ivy, Ruby’s lifelong friend. When Ivy trips on the hem of her dress and falls into an open fire, Briar heals her by hovering his hands over her body and whispering in her ear. This apparent miracle enhances Briar’s reputation, but it also further distances him from Ruby, who resents the isolation he has imposed on his family and now fears Ivy is becoming Briar’s acolyte.

As Wren tries to grasp the consequences of her father’s miraculous intervention, she delves into the story of her mother, how Ruby met Briar and the traumatic events that took place on the eve of their wedding day. Burns intersperses Wren’s first-person narration with the backstory of how Ivy and Ruby’s friendship blossomed, and how Briar and his childhood friend Flynn grew apart. Through this kaleidoscopic approach, Burns gives each of her characters the opportunity to shine. Wren learns more about her mother’s past by uncovering an unsent letter Ivy wrote to Ruby, and these revelations solidify Wren’s image of her mother as a strong woman whose will has been suppressed by solitude. Wren begins to gain her own sense of agency as she faces the future.

Burns—whose first book, Cinderland (2014), is a haunting memoir of growing up in a deindustrialized town in western Pennsylvania—is clearly no stranger to Appalachia. Her evocative, poetic prose contrasts with the gritty world of snake handlers, moonshiners and opioids. At times reminiscent of books by Bonnie Jo Campbell and Ron Rash, Shiner is a powerful novel of generations linked by trauma, and of the hope and resilience needed to break a cycle of misery.

On one level, Kate Milliken’s dark and beautifully written debut is the story of three young women whose lives become inextricably entangled one summer. On another level, it’s a meditative, multigenerational saga about love, loss, the inheritance of trauma and decades-long secrets. The novel alternates between two different periods, settings and perspectives, offering insights into how one generation’s actions shape the next.

The coming-of-age storyline unfolds over the summer and fall of 1993, when wildfires ravaged the Southern California landscape. Rory, June and Vivian occupy radically different socioeconomic worlds, but emotionally, their lives are similar. All three girls are grappling with their sexuality, and all three have difficult, neglectful parental relationships.

Rory is the talented and hardworking daughter of a barmaid and an unknown father. (All her mother will tell her is “Your father wasn’t anything.”) She develops intense, complicated relationships with both June and Vivian. Rory’s loving but deeply flawed stepfather, Gus, cares for Rory and takes her under his wing, bringing her with him everywhere and teaching her about horses. Their bond and much of the novel’s action revolve around the world of ranching.

Unfortunately, Gus is also an alcoholic who ends up failing himself and those he loves. The negative consequences of Gus’ actions reverberate far and wide, yet he’s one of the most sympathetic characters in the book. That duality is part of what makes this novel so absorbing, even as tragedies accumulate to an almost overwhelming extent.

In the second timeline, which takes place in Wyoming two decades later, at least two of the main characters have made it out alive, but an undeniable sense of loss still hangs over them. It’s in that context that Rory’s daughter, Charlie, investigates the events that have shaped her family, including what happened to her mother that summer in California. 

These questions, and an indelible sense of mystery, propel the story forward despite its sometimes languid pacing and sense of incipient tragedy. Vivid, lyrical prose further enriches the novel’s appeal. It’s fitting that this novel bears an epigraph from a short story by Annie Proulx, as Milliken’s style is sometimes reminiscent of Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” Much like Proulx’s masterpiece, Kept Animals is a wonderfully complex story that’s well worth reading, but no one should go into it expecting romance.

Rufi Thorpe has made a name for herself as a heavyweight in the literary world with her incisive, morally complex coming-of-age stories. Her debut novel, The Girls From Corona del Mar, was long-listed for several major literary prizes in 2014, and her follow-up, Dear Fang, With Love, was published to wide acclaim two years later. Now Thorpe comes back swinging with her best novel yet, a darkly comedic and tragic tale of a friendship between two outsiders.

Set in sunny Southern California, The Knockout Queen is narrated by Michael, a closeted gay teen sent to live with his aunt after his mother is sentenced to prison for stabbing Michael’s father following one of the father’s violent outbursts. With long hair, a nose piercing and a penchant for eyeliner, Michael doesn’t fit neatly into the glossy world of his suburban North Shore neighborhood. Then again, neither does his next-door neighbor, Bunny, infamous for her dead mother and her extremely tall height.

Thrown together by proximity and a shared sense of alienation, Michael and Bunny forge a fierce friendship and navigate their early high school years as an inseparable duo. Bonded by a mutual love of drag queens and a keen understanding of what it means to be rejected and relegated to the fringes, the two are ferociously protective of each other, and their love for one another is unconditional—or so Michael thinks, until a shocking act of violence triggers a devastating sequence of events that tests the limits of their friendship and changes the trajectory of their lives.

From the very start, the story is infused with an unsettling sense of menace, which Thorpe skillfully wields to pierce through the veneer of her shiny California setting to honestly examine weighty topics such as friendship, sexuality, identity and belonging. Michael tends to see things in black and white, but the canvas of Thorpe’s novel is textured with shades of gray, its world morally ambiguous.

With charismatic characters and a surprising and devastating storyline, The Knockout Queen is a moody and mordantly funny contemplation of the rigors of growing up that will leave readers reeling.

Girl with songs in her heart moves from Ohio to New York City. Girl meets guitarist with hypnotic eyes and a deep voice. Girl falls hard for guy, who falls harder—for the drugs and alcohol that permeate the “rise to stardom.” Perfect Tunes begins here but isn’t just about the connection between Laura and Dylan, fueled by lust, alcohol and drugs. The tragedy of Dylan’s death not long after the 9/11 attacks turns Laura’s life into one she never could’ve envisioned.

Pregnant at 22, grieving the death of someone she barely knew but was admittedly obsessed with, Laura sets aside her dreams of recording an album to become a mother to Marie. Duty engulfs her, and in a blink, 14 years pass, her musical talent relegated to teaching others or playing classes for babies. When teenaged Marie starts experiencing some dark moods similar to Dylan’s, Laura is drawn back to the past as she wrestles with where she is in the present.

Author Emily Gould covers much ground through Laura’s and Marie’s relationships and inner dialogues, ruminating on how we see ourselves, from that euphoric anything-can-happen attitude that accompanies youth to the mundanity common to all lives. The trappings of Gould’s writing are millennial, but her portrayal of the desire for self-actualization and understanding is universal. This ground isn’t new in fiction, certainly, but Laura’s and Marie’s voices each stand out for their honesty and poignancy. Gould’s women are as fearless as they are fearful, as full of bravado as nagging doubt and depression. The crush of expectations and the need to perform (in all senses of the word) never let up, and Laura’s drive to return to music gets a kick in the pants just as Marie is grappling with life’s hard edges.

Emotional and at times cringingly self-conscious, Perfect Tunes explores the mother-daughter bond through a distinctly youthful lens. Gould’s strength lies in her powers of observation, her ability to wrap words around a specific time and place in the lives of these particular women.

We’ve all seen them: people with charismatic personalities who seem to brighten a room. When they speak, we listen. In Peaches, California, that man is Pastor Vern, who leads Gifts of the Spirit Church—and the shine is often literal. When Vern wants to bring his congregants to a spiritual climax, golden glitter falls from the church’s rafters.

In the eyes of his congregation, Vern often has just cause to call down god glitter, but the rest of Peaches’ residents mock the churchgoers for their blind obedience to a man who claims he’ll save their parched land. Fourteen-year-old Lacey May often faces that ridicule at school, but within the church, she and the other girls who recently became “women of blood” stand in a place of honor.

Lacey May doesn’t remember the days before Peaches’ drought. She hadn’t been born yet when Pastor Vern first called down the rains that made the congregation devote itself to him. She follows this faith because the people who love her do, and because she’s heard the stories of what life could be without Vern and without his church.

Some novels tackle issues with a light hand, drawing the reader into a fun story even as the author tackles difficult topics. Godshot takes another approach. Debut novelist Chelsea Bieker leans into her story’s heft. It’s a deeply affecting picture of a megalomaniac who treats his congregation as his puppets. It’s a portrayal of what can happen when people are so hungry for hope that they abandon reason. It shows a world where women’s bodies are not their own, where one man has the authority to determine what happens to those bodies.

It’s a heightened portrait, but Godshot is a story that parallels some of the challenges faced in the United States today. Bieker, a native Californian, has already established her voice with bylines in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, Catapult magazine and others. Her debut novel, though, is a shout to the world: I’m here. I have something to say. And I can capture your imagination as I do it.

A heartwarming, enlightening novel that won the 2018 Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts, The Girl With the Louding Voice examines the plight of underage girls in Nigeria, robbed of an education by early marriage.

On her deathbed, Adunni’s mother makes her father promise to continue 14-year-old Adunni’s schooling. Adunni’s mother was the breadwinner for the family, so with bills piling high, Adunni’s father quickly forgets his promise, instead viewing his young daughter as a strategic escape from his financial woes. To receive money in the form of a dowry, he marries off Adunni to the brutal, elderly Morufu as his third wife. The flame in Adunni’s heart to continue her education—now only a flicker—lives on, even after landing in Lagos and working as a domestic worker for a cruel, abusive family.

Abi Daré’s skillful examination of the causes and effects of corruption, child labor and child marriage forms the foundation of the novel. Child labor and marriage are driven by poverty, misinformation and outdated beliefs, as when Adunni’s father fails to educate her because he believes that education makes a woman headstrong rather than yielding and submissive to her husband.

The story is told in a distinctive, grammatically imperfect style by an innocent but perceptive main character who has yet to be indoctrinated by her society’s commonly held ideologies. Adunni realizes that the ability to speak English does not reflect a speaker’s intelligence, and she discovers that English, though important in her quest for knowledge, is like any other language. She also questions why far fewer African people appear on TV than white people.

Through the moving story of a girl’s persistent struggle to acquire an education, The Girl With the Louding Voice brings deep, significant issues into focus.

In Dear Edward, author Ann Napolitano deftly navigates the psychological and physical trauma of 12-year-old Edward Adler in the aftermath of a plane crash, of which he is the only survivor. He grapples with the loss of his family, his near-celebritylike status and the adjustment to living with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey. In his new home, Edward’s lifeline becomes his next-door neighbor’s 12-year-old daughter, Shay, and the novel follows their deepening friendship through the subsequent six years.

Chapters alternate between Edward’s post-crash life and the flight itself, from its takeoff on the East Coast to its end, three-quarters of the way to Los Angeles. The novel homes in on the lives of several of the passengers, including Edward’s family—his professor dad, screenwriter mom and 15-year-old brother. There’s an elderly but curmudgeonly billionaire, a beautiful flight attendant who engages in a tryst with a passenger, a New Age Filipina who remembers past lives and an injured soldier who’s beginning to understand his sexuality.

Dear Edward isn’t a page turner with cliffhangers at the end of every chapter. Instead it’s a slow burn that draws you in to Edward’s interior life, the melancholia of his loss and of the fractured lives around him. Years after the crash, Edward’s healing begins to accelerate when he finds bags of unopened letters from the crash victims’ families. He is able to empathize and grieve with them, and so come to terms with his own loss.

It’s hard for a novel to thoroughly capture a reader’s attention while simultaneously meditating on profoundly complex issues. In Dear Edward, Napolitano, a creative writing professor in New York and author of two previous novels, including A Good Hard Look, manages to achieve this. The delicate sparseness of her prose slowly peels back the layers to reveal a warm, fulfilling center that is a true reward for readers.

Read more: Ann Napolitano discusses her tenderhearted novel.

Two days into reading Brian Allen Carr’s hilarious, heartbreaking Opioid, Indiana, I made an omelet for the first time in a while. I made it because the teenage hero of Carr’s book, Riggle, is an ace at making omelets. His mother taught him, but she’s dead. So is Riggle’s father. Since then he’s bounced from one foster home to another until ending up in Opioid, Indiana, at the home of his Uncle Joe, a junkie.

Soon after the book opens, Joe goes missing. The rent is due, and between Joe, his girlfriend Peggy and Riggle, Joe is the only one who has anything resembling money. At the same time, Riggle is suspended from school because of a medicinally enhanced vape pen. No one is particularly concerned about him being out of school and at liberty. Indeed, it’s shortly after this that he gets a job at the local restaurant after flourishing his mad omelet skills. Peggy insists he use his free time to hunt for Joe.

To an outsider, nothing much happens in Opioid, until it does. It’s gray and cold, with everyone just trying to get by. Readers are privileged to be inside Riggle’s head, as this bright, fractious, hurting, lovable boy muses on everything from race and class to drugs and sex. To make sense of a world that makes no sense, he employs a shadow puppet named Remote. Riggle’s mother used to play the Remote game with him when he was little, using the puppet to tell a story of how the days of the week got their names. The book even includes illustrations of hands forming the all-knowing shadow puppet.

Carr’s style is delightfully straightforward, and he takes special pleasure in absurdity. The climax of the story is so strange, horrifying and darkly hilarious that you may have to put the book down because you’re laughing so hard.

The story offers no clear answers as to what’s going to happen to Riggle, Peggy and all the other characters. But the reader will wonder for quite some time—and there’s really no higher compliment to give a book.

Ana Canción is only 15 when her parents convince her to marry Juan Ruiz, a man twice her age whom she barely knows, and move with him from their home in the Dominican Republic to New York City. They hope she will be able to get a job and that she and Juan will eventually save enough to send for the rest of Ana’s family to join them.

Ana’s story, inspired by author Angie Cruz’s own mother’s experiences, is undoubtedly a familiar one. When Ana arrives in the Washington Heights neighborhood of NYC in 1965, she quickly realizes the brutal reality of her new life. Juan is a strict disciplinarian and physically abuses Ana for breaking his many rules. She’s rarely allowed out of the sixth-floor apartment they share with Juan’s younger brother, César, so she spends her days cleaning, cooking and washing their work clothes by hand.

Ana’s dreary life greatly improves when Juan returns to the politically tumultuous Dominican Republic to ensure that the Ruiz family’s assets remain safe. With her newfound freedom, Ana begins taking English lessons at a neighborhood church, goes dancing with fun-loving César and even sees a movie at Radio City Music Hall. With César’s help, she sells her homemade Dominican delicacies outside his workplace three days a week. She saves every penny, with the ultimate goal of escape, until unexpected family developments threaten to squelch her dream.

In her third novel, Dominicana, Cruz writes with warmth, empathy and remarkable perception about the immigrant experience. Engaging and illuminating, Dominicana will appeal to readers who’ve enjoyed novels by Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez.

Debut novelist Tope Folarin, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, crafts a powerful story that is equal parts loneliness and hope.

Tunde is the young son of Nigerian immigrants growing up in a very white Utah in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Despite his college education, Tunde’s father constantly shifts from one job to another, unable to find one that can support his family. When Tunde and his brother are young, their mother begins showing symptoms of schizophrenia. She sometimes hits or pinches Tunde, which he learns to accept as an expression of love. One day, she kidnaps her sons, and they flee to a women’s shelter, disrupting Tunde’s relationship with his father. Eventually, she returns to Nigeria, leaving Tunde, his brother and his father behind.

Understanding the social structures between black communities and white communities is especially difficult for Tunde, as he grows up surrounded by white people in Utah, some of whom consider him a servant or rub his skin, expecting the black to come off. His misguided attempts to fit in continue through high school and into college, such as when he forces himself to listen to Creed until he starts to like it. He is always an outsider, narrating his surroundings almost like he believes himself to be watching a movie, not watching his life unfold. Still, his admission that he is struggling between two contrasting yet seemingly real sets of memories comes as an interesting surprise and takes the book in a slightly surreal direction.

The title refers to the “kind of black man” who is acceptable to white people. As Tunde slowly unravels the layers of implications of his desire to be this type of man, he begins to understand that his fragmented sense of home must be rectified before he can grow as a person.

While juggling themes of the struggles of immigrant families and the effect of parental mental illness, Folarin plays with structure and pacing, sometimes filling a page with only one poignant line. Once Tunde realizes that he can’t trust his memory, less is more. “And I’m learning that memory isn’t just a catalog of things past; in times of desperation or loss or exile a memory can be a passageway into the future.”

It’s an insightful and moving novel, through and through.

In Sarah Elaine Smith’s debut novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, main character Cindy Stoat is almost 14, an observant and lonely teen in northern Appalachia whose mom has left home for a job without saying when she’s coming back. Parentless, Cindy and her two older brothers, Virgil and Clinton, cobble together a life, eating canned food and bathing once in a while in a nearby retaining pond. That might seem enough for a coming-of-age novel, but an outside event—the disappearance of Jude Vanderjohn, a more glamorous and privileged teen—sets the story in motion. Not long ago, Jude went out with Virgil, and now Virgil feels compelled to help out Jude’s unhinged mother, Bernadette, who can’t accept that her daughter is missing. Cindy tags along with Virgil, and before long she’s found a way out of her own sad house and into Bernadette’s. Because Bernadette’s memory is shot, she accepts Cindy’s growing presence in her house, at least some of the time.

It’s a compelling premise for a suspenseful novel, and short chapters keep the story moving, as Cindy makes a choice that harms others. But Smith isn’t solely interested in plot; she’s a poet as well as a fiction writer (she holds two MFAs, one fiction and another in poetry), and her interest in language shows. “Dark came on earlier,” Cindy remembers, midway through the novel. “The blue light had a glassy depth to it. Bernadette said it was the hours before the moon rose that made the color reverberate in its vaulted bowl over us. The first stars were scrawled in, and Virgil was late getting me.” Marilou Is Everywhere’s language mixes the inventive with the plain, which adds another dimension to the first-person narration, making Cindy’s lonely world more vivid.

Smith handles the darkness in the novel (rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect) with a light touch, offering plenty of humor in Cindy’s narration. The story comes to a lovely conclusion, allowing Cindy and the novel’s other characters some redemption.

Smith is a writer to watch.