It’s 7 a.m. on December 23, and Madeleine Altimari is shimmying. In 30-second intervals, the girl attempts to perfect her moves, pausing in between for a quick drag from a cigarette. After each interval, she rates her work on a school-letter scale. She has yet to check off the day’s other rehearsal tasks: singing, scales, guitar.

Madeleine is two days shy of 10.

She doesn’t know it yet, but Madeleine is about to embark on one of the most sensational days of her young life. She dreams of life as a jazz singer, and after a particularly challenging day at her Philadelphia Catholic school, Madeleine will set out to make that dream a reality. She may have to break some rules and step on some toes in the process, but Madeline doesn’t mind; her heart is set on song.

Across town, Madeleine’s fifth-grade teacher, Sarina Greene, is preparing a special day for her students and anticipating a dinner party that will reunite her with high school friends. Meanwhile, Jack Lorca faces a fine that could lead to the demise of the Cat’s Pajamas, the legendary jazz club he inherited from his father. As the minutes tick past, their individual paths become intertwined.

2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, the debut novel by One Story editor Marie-Helene Bertino, chronicles the ordinary moments that add up to one memorable day in the lives of Madeleine and those around her. Bertino’s prose easily dips in and out of the lives of her characters as she weaves them together, including insight into secondary figures at each turn. With vivid description and great character development, Bertino brings Philadelphia and its inhabitants to life in an unforgettable tale.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“There are often two conversations going on in a marriage,” short-story writer Robin Black claims in her debut novel, Life Drawing. “The one that you’re having and the one that you’re not. Sometimes you don’t even know when that second, silent one has begun.” One could suggest that there are two conversations going on in this quiet, yet exquisitely crafted novel: the conversation between Augusta (Gus) and her husband Owen, and the conversation they’re not having, about Gus having cheated on him.

Black’s novel is primarily set in an idyllic farmhouse in Pennsylvania, where the couple has moved in order to work on their craft (Gus is a painter; Owen, a writer), and their marriage. Several years ago, during a bout of depression following the death of her sister, Gus had a brief—but extremely passionate—affair with Bill, the father of one of her art students. Determined to make her marriage work, Gus confessed her transgressions to Owen.

What Owen does not know is that Gus has been keeping in touch with Bill’s troubled yet talented daughter, Laine, for years. Keeping this secret weighs heavily on Gus. So when Alison Hemmings, a teacher-turned-painter, moves in next door, Gus finds the female confidante that she didn’t know she was looking for. Their friendship quickly deepens as Gus confides about her affair while Alison reveals her own stories about an abusive ex-husband and her 20-something daughter Nora’s recent turn to religion and writing.

What happens between the neighbors is both expected and yet full of surprises. Black takes precise care with her prose, drawing out the emotional conflicts between her characters as she asks whether a marriage can be saved after the ultimate betrayal. Though the slow pacing may frustrate readers, it’s all part of a buildup to a powerful conclusion. Life Drawing is a memorable debut.

Early on in Rufi Thorpe’s elegant yet intense debut novel, the narrator, Mia, makes a prescient observation: “Normally, friendships between girls are stowed away in boxes of postcards and ticket stubs, but whatever was between me and Lorrie Ann was not so easy to set aside.”

The Girls from Corona del Mar spans multiple births, deaths, continents, and love affairs as Mia does the difficult work of looking back on her friendship with Lorrie Ann, her figurative “opposite twin.” At one point, she sums up the frustration of knowing Lor: “What if I didn’t really know her? What if all those years I just saw what I expected to see, what I wanted to see? . . . Can anyone know anyone?” This novel may convince readers that as much as we love our friends, the answer is no.

"Can anyone know anyone?” This novel may convince readers that as much as we love our friends, the answer is no.

Children of a Southern California “sleepy ocean hamlet” called Corona del Mar, Mia and Lorrie Ann are lifelong friends. In contrast with Lorrie Ann, who grew up “beautiful, pure, and good” with a happy and charming family, Mia always considered herself “the bad one” with the booze-loving mother. So the narrative of their friendship goes off track when Mia is accepted to Yale and Lorrie Ann becomes pregnant, marries a high school beau, gives birth to a severely disabled son, and becomes addicted to opiates. As Mia’s own star rises as a classics scholar, she unspools the concurrent—and increasingly distant—story of her friend, which becomes more and more of a mystery. As she says, “I was given only fleeting glimpses into the labyrinth of her mind, and so was forced to piece together her inner world through inference and observation.”

Not unlike many friends, this novel takes a while to get to know; Thorpe writes descriptive and unhurried sentences, and the character of Lorrie Ann feels alternately vivid and hazy, lovable and loathsome—like Mia, the reader will constantly grasp to understand her better. However, it’s worth it to take the time to get to know The Girls from Corona del Mar and contemplate the beautiful and thorny—even agonizing—sides of friendship.

Eliza Borné is an editor at the Oxford American.

If you've ever wondered whether modern art is trash disguised by critical theory or whether critical theory is trashy modern art, Will Chancellor's debut novel, A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, may settle the wager. It is a spirited sendup of the frauds found in art, academia and their "liminal" intersections.

Owen is a precocious student destined for Olympic fame in water polo when he is blinded in one eye. Instead, he heads to Berlin to try his hand as an artist. There he falls under the sway of a brash amalgam of Damien Hirst and Ai Weiwei, whose work is as lucrative as it is shameless. Increasingly drug-addled, Owen becomes the involuntary subject of a project simulating the Abu Ghraib photos during its American tenure.

Meanwhile Owen's father, Joseph, a traditional but unknown scholar, seizes an opportunity to travel to Athens to be the opening act for the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Chancellor offers a "formula for the new public intellectual,” which includes "say something outlandish seemingly at random” especially "against global capitalism.”  Joseph rises well above the occasion when a rumination on the film Scarface and its lessons for anti-capitalists culminates in a vast riot that puts Joseph on a terrorist watch list.

Chancellor writes in the established tradition of the American absurd, from Pynchon and Gaddis (who mocked Art in V and The Recognitions) to DeLillo and Foster Wallace (who mocked the ivory tower in White Noise and Infinite Jest). Chancellor may be swinging for the former pair, but lands firmly, and thereby accessibly, in the latter. His language is often bracing and his references to "late Heidegger" et al. will please aspiring or ashamed philosophy students.  But he is rarely esoteric for esoterica's sake, eschewing the obfuscating "cult of the difficult" he otherwise lampoons.

But is it art? Or Art? Marcel Duchamp suggested that art is whatever appears in a gallery. So is this a novel or something in a "novel"? Liminalism suggests it may be somewhere in between.

Emily Gould has built a career as a blogger for her own Emily Magazine and Gawker, as well as the part owner of Emily Books. She is also author of the memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever. With her first novel, Friendship, Gould turns her eye toward the spectacle of female adulthood friendships.

For years, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein have faced New York City together. They met while working in low-level publishing jobs. But they became best friends when Amy moved into her tiny Brooklyn apartment below the BQE, and Bev stopped by to keep her from feeling lonely.

In the years since, the differences between the women’s childhoods and current goals have become more noticeable. Amy, an East-Coast girl, became temporarily prominent while blogging for a celebrity gossip site. Although she has since been fired and moved on to other work—work she considers beneath her—Amy still expects a career that will return her to the spotlight.

Midwesterner Bev, on the other hand, has found herself in a string of unsatisfying temp jobs. Her primary goal each day is to find enough down time to talk to Amy on Google Chat. That also happens to be Amy’s biggest dream for Bev.

As the women make their way into their 30s, still living in tiny New York apartments and seeking something more out of work and life, their expectations become divisive. Amy can’t understand how Bev’s Midwestern upbringing influences the decisions she makes now. Bev can’t convince Amy that sometimes she just needs to accept a job with a living wage, rather than worrying about whether it will bring her the media attention Amy believes she deserves.

In Friendship, Emily Gould examines how adulthood and maturity—or a lack thereof—influence female friendships. The dialogue is snappy and true to two still-early career women. Ultimately, Gould’s work is an exploration of how people change with age, and how that affects the relationships and people around them.

Laura Lane McNeal’s debut novel is a gift to readers who long for an iced-tea-sipping, front-porch-swing kind of escape. With Dollbaby, McNeal took this New Orleans native on a trip back to my hometown, complete with the smells, landmarks and traditions that make me proud to call the Crescent City home.

When young Ibby Bell is dropped off at the doorstep of her grandmother, Fannie, in the summer of 1964, she is a child without a family. Her father, Fannie’s son, has died suddenly, and her mother has vanished, unwilling to raise her only child.

Ibby is soon indoctrinated into the ways of New Orleans by Fannie’s black cook, Queenie, and her spunky daughter, Dollbaby. Ibby quickly realizes that her lively grandmother is no Southern wallflower. Still, Fannie’s history was full of tragedy even before the death of her son, and Queenie and Dollbaby must help Ibby navigate the secrets that Fannie has locked away. Over time, Ibby grows to love and understand her quirky, moody, gambling grandmother.

However, Dollbaby is not just a lighthearted Southern novel, it’s also an exploration of the racial and political unrest of the 1960s. McNeal artfully uses the views of both white and black characters to capture an accurate snapshot of the social unrest in New Orleans.

McNeal’s witty prose and expertise on all things New Orleans will enrapture readers of The Help and Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood.

In space, in that weightless environment, any disruption to an object’s proper orbit can result in catastrophe. Within families, those often insular orbits of individuals, the loss of the center causes a similar spiraling out of control. In Everything I Never Told You by first-time novelist Celeste Ng, the Lee family is unanchored by sudden tragedy and then undone slowly by recriminations and regrets.

Like many parents, Marilyn and James Lee carry past hurts and insecurities with them, shaping their children to embody what remains unfulfilled in them. Their daughter Lydia especially “absorbed her parents’ dreams.” The discovery of her body in a lake in their small Ohio town answers none of the family’s questions as to what happened.

Grief binds Marilyn, James and their two other children, Nath and Hannah, but it also threatens to rend them completely. Ng writes lyrically about the interior lives of each member of the Lee family: the father, a still self-conscious son of Chinese immigrants who is desperate to belong; the beautiful white mother, an escapee from a closeted life prescribed for her by her own mother; and their children, the oldest (Nath) frustrated, the middle (Lydia) suffocated, and the youngest (Hannah) ignored. Lydia remains an enigma for much of the novel as Ng pieces the how and why of her death together through her family’s knowledge (of lack thereof) first, and then Lydia’s own perspective near the end. No pain is glossed over, no unpleasantness swept aside. The fracture that Lydia’s death has created splits open the hairline crack already running through her family. Ng’s deftness with detail draws the reader close into the family’s struggle to understand.

While Ng is an eloquent and thoughtful writer, the many shifts from the past to present (the novel is set in the 1970s) can disrupt the continuity at times. But her pinpoint precision on the feelings and actions after loss make for a very strong and emotional debut that will linger in the mind.

Stories of human survival and hope after an apocalyptic event are well worn at this point. As a result, the themes and tropes of these tales often feel so trodden and predictable that they become little more than echoes. Then, there are stories like California.

In the near future, civilization as Cal and Frida know it has crumbled. Hoping for a new life, they flee the ruined city of Los Angeles and settle in a small shed in the wilderness, carving out the best life they can with what little they have. It’s hard, but they have each other, and that seems comfort enough—until Frida discovers she’s pregnant.

Fearing what might happen if they try to survive the pregnancy alone, Cal and Frida set out for a mysterious nearby settlement, but when they arrive, it becomes clear that this hoped-for sanctuary is instead a world where it seems no one can be trusted.

The real secret to the greatness of California, aside from its fully realized characters and thoughtful narration, is an attention to detail that draws you immediately into Edan Lepucki’s mysterious new world. This isn’t a place of easy answers, but it is a place of layered, constantly unfolding ones. Frida and Cal’s journey is a web of secrets, fears and truths old and new, and Lepucki deftly creates the sense that these elements are simultaneously happening all at once and feeding off each other, crafting a truly unpredictable tale of human frailty and determination. Here, the world ends messily, like an ugly relationship, and the ways in which the characters have to put their lives back together are equally fractured. The result is not only a singular post-apocalyptic novel, but a debut you won’t want to miss. California will lure you in with its mysteries, seduce you with its secrets and haunt you long after you’ve finished it.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.