Oak Park, Illinois, lies at the center of journalist and NPR contributor Rachel Louise Snyder’s riveting debut novel, What We've Lost Is Nothing. This community, situated on the border between Chicago’s declining, predominantly black west side and the affluent suburbs, precariously bridges those two enclaves, with all their racial, monetary and cultural disparities. The story opens just after one quiet cul-de-sac of homes—Ilios Lane—is shocked by an afternoon of home invasions, all eight families affected to varying degrees, from a single cell phone taken, to the loss of multiple electronic devices, to one house completely trashed.

The only person home at the time of these nearly simultaneous break-ins is Mary McPherson, 15, who was skipping school with her best friend Sofia, a neighbor; both were high on ecstasy at the time. Mary’s mother Susan works at the Oak Park Community Housing Office, trying to convince young, urban white couples to move to the area in a program called Diversity Assurance. Long assuming herself to be prejudice-free, she is devastated by the burglaries, and assumes they were perpetrated by a gang from the nearby west side.

Mary’s father, Michael, sees himself as “the de facto leader of the Ilios unfortunates,” and calls a meeting that first night of all eight families on the street, where he tells them that “What we’ve lost is nothing . . . compared to what we’ll lose if we don’t unite.” But unite is just what these families don’t do, as fear and suspicion creep into their psyches. The author deftly delves into the rippling effects of the crimes on this disparate group, which includes an aging, nearly blind loner; an unsuccessful restaurant owner and chef whom Michael labels a “Francophile freak”; and Sofia’s parents, a Cambodian couple who barely speak English, and whose nephews become Michael’s prime suspects, targets of his blatant racial profiling.

Over the course of a day and night this seemingly tolerant, racially blind group of neighbors—most of whom barely know one another—gradually comes apart, forced to face the reality of their previously-hidden fears and prejudice. Snyder’s portrayal of the disintegration of this one quiet block is masterful, forcing the reader to examine the possibility of his own stereotypical behavior if faced with a similar situation.

From the gritty, hardscrabble streets of early 19th-century Manhattan, to the brazen brothels and barrooms of Gold Rush-era San Francisco, readers will find author Phillip Margulies’ rollicking debut novel Belle Cora as exquisitely seductive as its enigmatic heroine.

Disguised as a memoir, Belle Cora is actually an ornately constructed family saga tucked within a framework of well-researched 19th-century historical anecdotes. In a clever twist on the rags-to-riches formula, Margulies’ novel is a riches-to-rags-to-riches tale that opens with the upper-middle-class, 12-year-old Arabella Godwin enjoying a privileged life that is marred only by her tubercular mother’s lingering illness. But while her mother’s passing is grievous, her beloved father’s sudden and mysterious death is what proves devastating, as Arabella and her youngest brother, the rapscallion Lewis, are soon exiled by their maternal grandparents to a farm owned by relatives in upstate New York.

This rollicking historical novel is as exquisitely seductive as its courtesan heroine.

Readers who cherished every gentle word of their Laura Ingalls Wilder collections might recognize the daily rhythm of American agrarian life here—the cramped farmhouse, the communal pig slaughter, the one-room schoolhouse—but be forewarned: Margulies’ dark depiction has none of the pastoral wholesomeness of Little House on the Prairie. When Arabella finally frees herself from these physically and mentally abusive relatives to follow Lewis to the city, her escape does not, alas, end happily. Once in New York, Arabella discovers that her brother’s violent temper has landed him in jail.

Desperate, destitute and determined to raise the money needed to free Lewis, Arabella throws off her Puritanical upbringing to become a high-class prostitute. Neither sexy nor sentimental, Margulies’ depiction of the madams and girls immersed in the world’s oldest profession is grim and hopeless, despite the promise of wealth, glittering gowns and attention from legions of rich, famous and, above all, hypocritical men.

Weaving an evocative tale in a nonlinear, flashback-style narrative, Belle Cora will captivate readers from start to finish, evoking a bittersweet blend of compassion and contempt for a heroine who defies tradition, and often pays a heavy price.

A good debut novel can deliver a compelling story, well-formed characters, interesting dialogue and a solid thematic punch—but a great debut novel also introduces an unforgettable voice. With The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel, Magdalena Zyzak has done all of the above, creating a modern folktale that’s both delightfully strange and remarkably sensitive.

Zyzak’s titular hero is a simple swineherd in the fictional Eastern European nation of Scalvusia who, in his own mind, is a legend in the making. Barnabas finds his reflection so remarkable that it actually hurts to turn away from it. He finds the fact that he’s failed at every job he’s ever had to be proof not that he’s inept, but that his mind is filled with thoughts too lofty for manual labor. Most importantly, though, Barnabas is in love with the beautiful gypsy Roosha, who is unfortunately living in the home of one of the richest men in town.

Determined to win his beloved, Barnabas saddles his noble steed Wilhelm and sets off on a series of attempts at romance that never end well. Meanwhile he must deal with, among other things, a murder investigation, a mad priest, a man who married a goat and the looming specter of World War II.

Zyzak, who came to the U.S. from her native Poland to attend university in 2002, has a remarkable gift for prose. She regularly crafts phrases that feel simultaneously fresh and familiar—like her claim that Barnabas’ mother died of “acute incomprehension.” The story’s quirkiness is unapologetically front-and-center, but eccentricity is not Zyzak’s main goal. Instead, she makes us feel for this quixotic young adventurer and the community of oddballs around him.

With a fascinating blend of literary deftness and Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) zaniness, Zyzak has delivered an absurdist page-turner that’s also thoroughly human and moving.

The gentle, folktale-like narrative style of Ishmael Beah’s compelling debut novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, belies the endemic injustice and brutality in the story it tells. The Sierra Leone-born Beah, now living in the U.S., first shared his country’s dark reality with A Long Way Gone, a memoir of his violent experiences as a child soldier during its harrowing civil war. For his first work of fiction, Beah again takes readers to his West African homeland with the story of a rural village, ravaged and abandoned during the war, attempting an uneasy rebirth.

The author of the bestseller 'A Long Way Gone' presents a soaring work of fiction.

The first to return to Imperi are three elders, who honor the unidentifiable dead by burying their bones. Soon others begin to come back and repopulate the town, including two teachers, Bockarie and Benjamin, both idealists who believe in the future despite the ugly past they have witnessed. A former child soldier, simply called the Colonel, becomes the “Man in Charge” of a group of damaged orphans like himself, including a repentant boy once forced to amputate the hands of the innocent.

At first the town enjoys a degree of success in getting back on its feet, but everything changes when a foreign-owned mining company returns to extract the rich vein of rutile from the earth. The exploitation of the land and the cheap, expendable labor force drawn from the native population devastates the town, the mining company paying little heed to local traditions. Each successive tragedy—a polluted water source, the rapes of local girls, the unrecorded deaths of workers in industrial accidents—further tears the fabric of Imperi. Still, the elders hold onto a diminishing hope.

Beah writes with a quiet confidence that borrows much from the oral tradition in which he was raised. His arresting style also bears a debt to an earlier generation of post-colonial writers such as Chinua Achebe. The last few chapters, when Bockarie and his family leave Imperi and try their luck in the capital city of Freetown, are less successful than the rest of the book—hurried and a bit overstuffed with incident—but Radiance of Tomorrow is an impressive fiction debut by a talented writer with a singular tale to tell.

James Franco, an actor, director, producer, teacher and author, can add another occupation to his life’s work: novelist. Actor’s Anonymous, Franco’s debut novel (following a successful short story collection), proves that his ambtion reaches beyond the big screen to the literary circuit.

Using an assortment of writing styles, ranging from dark poetry to disjointed confessionals and screen plays, Franco gives the reader a voyeuristic look into the “soul-crushing” experience of the Los Angeles actor.  These raucous tales include that of a child actor who engages in anonymous orgies at the beach; a recovering addict who works the night shift at McDonald’s, using the time to practice foreign accents on his customers; and a poetic chapter involving the ghost of River Phoenix.

Actors Anonymous is divided into chapters that seem to be a parody of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. For example, step one is “we admitted that life is a performance—and that our ‘performance’ has left our control.”  The first chapter appears to be a memoir of sorts, causing the reader to wonder if the whole book is autobiographical. Although Actors Anonymous is said to be a fictionalized account of his acting career, perhaps Franco is really giving us a window into his soul?

Regardless of how much fact is involved, Franco’s debut novel is just as much of a roller coaster ride as his personal and professional life. His use of a variety of literary techniques isn't an unqualified success; a few chapters feature heavily stylized prose that is at times difficult to follow. However, fans of Franco will want to follow his journey every step of the way.  

Genetics professor Don Tillman is a man of science. His days are meticulously scheduled, his weekly meals pre-planned for maximum nutritional value and his choices made in logical consideration of best possible outcomes. So when he decides it’s time to find a suitable life partner, he does what any rational scientist would do—he creates an extensive dating questionnaire and embarks on “The Wife Project.” The results, of course, are not quite what Don expects, and that’s the fun of reading Australian author Graeme Simsion’s charming debut novel.

When Don meets Rosie Jarman, a gorgeous, free-spirited bartender searching for her biological father, he doesn’t need a questionnaire to tell him that they are not a match—she smokes, drinks and has a serious issue with punctuality. But Rosie is intriguing, and despite his better judgment, Don puts “The Wife Project” aside to embark on a quest to find Rosie’s father.

As Rosie and Don dig through her mother’s past, Don starts to have a little non-scheduled fun—eating meals outside his weekly menu plans, staying out late and talking over drinks, and even bending university rules to use the genetics lab after hours. Before Rosie, no woman had ever seemed to understand Don or appreciate his unique point of view. But with Rosie, things are just different, and whether it’s fate or science, Don finds himself falling for the most unlikely of women.

With The Rosie Project, Simsion has created a wacky, wonderful love story that is just plain fun to read. The ways in which Don and Rosie challenge and complement each other is downright inspiring—not to mention hilarious. Simsion writes with humor and heart, and his story is both original and endearing. The Rosie Project teaches us that it’s never too late to discover who we are, and empowers us to find the people who will love us—quirks and all.

Is there anything that Koren Zailckas can’t write? The young author first crashed onto the literary scene with her iconic best-selling memoir, Smashed, which chronicled her years of teenage alcoholism. Now, she is making her fiction debut, and it is just as captivating as her memoirs.

Mother, Mother introduces the Hurst family, living in upstate New York. There’s William, the 12-year-old autistic (and highly intelligent) son, who spends his days being homeschooled. Violet, his teenaged sister, would rather get high with her friends than spend another minute at home. Their father, Douglas, is an alcoholic programmer who’d prefer to hide behind office doors instead of showing his face at the dinner table. And there’s Josephine, the controlling, manipulative matriarch.

But there’s a family member on the periphery of this portrait that the rest are unable to think—let alone talk—about. Rose, a struggling perfectionist, had a budding career as a stage actress. However, when Rose runs away from home with her mysterious boyfriend Dante, breaking all contact with her family, it sets off a chain of events that threatens to tear the Hursts apart.

As the novel opens, Violet has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. Josephine claims that Violet stabbed William while high on acid, yet Violet has no recollection of having attacked her brother. Violet and William recount their memories of that chaotic evening in alternating chapters. As they struggle to uncover their family’s darkest secret, the siblings begin to question everything, especially their mother’s motives. Is William as ill as Josephine claims? Is Violet really dangerous? And what was the true impetus for Rose’s escape?

Mother, Mother is an exquisitely written psychological thriller. Readers will root for Violet and William as the siblings struggle to escape their mother’s terrifying clutches.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Koren Zailckas for Mother, Mother.

What if people, long-dead people, started reappearing all over the world? Not as zombies, but just as they were when they left?

The first one, quite rightly, would be regarded as a miracle. The first few hundred, an anomaly. A few thousand turns into a trend. And beyond that, it becomes a problem.

In The Returned, award-winning poet Jason Mott drops us into the small-town lives of Harold and Lucille Hargrave, just as they find out that their 8-year-old son, who died in 1966, has come back from the beyond. Lucille is religious and accepting of this new stranger, while Harold is skeptical and distant, at least initially. Still, at first they present a united front against Agent Martin Bellamy of the International Bureau of the Returned. After all, he’s got two strikes against him: He’s from New York, and he works for a quasi-governmental agency, neither of which plays well in the North Carolina town of Arcadia.

Mott captures the complex awkwardness of their early meetings with a poet’s ear for nuance. While the Hargraves wrestle with integrating these two new interlopers into their lives, Southern hospitality is strained to the breaking point. And what starts as an intensely personal circumstance quickly morphs into a civic one, as Arcadia struggles to cope with the ever-increasing influx of the Returned into a town that has gone largely untouched by time.

Tensions flare as a loosely organized militia known as the True Living Movement attempts to take the law into their own hands, dispatching the Returned back to the graves from which they came. Standing in their path is an equally improvised coalition of the local Baptist church (represented here by the conflicted pastor Robert Peters), the International Bureau of the Returned and the U.S. government, whose emergency management skills seem not to have improved much since the days of Hurricane Katrina. As the drama plays out, the sense that things aren’t going to end well is palpable.

The Returned takes us on a journey into our own hearts and souls, exploring shared grief over absent loved ones and posing questions that are troubling on a variety of levels: How would you react if you were confronted by the sudden reappearance of a deceased loved one? How would it affect your faith, or lack thereof? And when political necessity comes in conflict with personal responsibility, which side would you find yourself on?

In his debut novel, Mott has thrust us into a “Twilight Zone” parallel universe whose door is unlocked with the key of his own remarkable imagination. What happens when one crosses the threshold is up to the reader almost as much as the storyteller.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Check out our Meet the Author interview with Jason Mott for The Returned.