In 1927, the Mississippi River broke free of its banks and flooded parts of its namesake state. The flood scattered the river’s neighbors across the Mississippi Delta region, changing the course of their lives but not separating them for good.

Robert Chatham is a child of 8 when the river destroys his home and his family. Five years after the flood, he’s working as an errand boy at the brothel Beau-Miel in Bruce, 100 miles from Issaquena County, unsure of whether his parents survived. As author Bill Cheng writes, Robert is “thirteen years old and already broken.”

Robert comes to realize he’s “bad crossed,” and trouble follows him wherever he goes. Along the way, one of the characters he meets gives Robert a “devil,” a pinch of rock salt, ash and an Indian-head penny to keep in a pouch around his neck. These will keep trouble away, the man says. But if Robert isn’t exactly trouble-free, well, he’s still alive—a fact that seems miraculous at times, as he traipses through the Mississippi Delta and faces a variety of dangers, including a wild river, angry trappers and a burning building. “He could not count the times he’d come so close to death only to be thrown violently again into life,” Cheng writes. Along the way, Robert stumbles upon people from his past, welcome faces and those not so welcome, and tries to evade the trouble that he can’t seem to lose in search of a happier life.

Chinese-American writer Cheng was raised in New York City and, at the time of writing this book, had yet to set foot in the state of Mississippi. Even so, his lyrical storytelling is reminiscent of tales shared on a front porch. The stories dance through time in this nonlinear, epic adventure tale, skipping between 1927, 1932 and 1941. The rambling story covers an awful lot of territory, emotionally and physically—just like life itself.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read a Q&A with Bill Cheng for Southern Cross the Dog.

Lorca, the excruciatingly vulnerable protagonist of Jessica Soffer’s first novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, is, like so many teenage protagonists, burdened with a couple of seriously bad parents. Her mother Nancy, a chef, notices her when she feels like it. When the novel opens, she’s beginning to feel like it less and less. Lorca has been caught cutting herself and is to be packed off to boarding school. Nancy can’t wait, but the thought of being so discarded terrifies Lorca. As for Lorca’s absent father, he obeys and is cowed by his ex-wife.

On the other side of New York City is another lousy mother, Victoria, a woman with a self-obsession that sucks the air out of any room she’s in. (One mark of Soffer’s talent is that she makes the reader stick with Victoria even at her worst.) Victoria wants to believe that her love for her late husband, Joseph, with whom she used to run a restaurant, was so overpowering that there was no room in their marriage for anyone else. This was why she gave up their child at birth. But now Joseph, as subservient to his wife as Lorca’s dad is to his, is dead, and she has no one but her somewhat scattered upstairs neighbor Dottie. To get over her grief, Victoria starts a cooking class in her own kitchen. To finally win her mother’s affections, Lorca decides to learn how to cook a meal Nancy once rhapsodized over. When she sees a flyer announcing Victoria’s cooking school, she thinks it’s a reprieve.

Well, yes and no. Victoria and Lorca take to each other right away, gently circling each other physically and emotionally as they put together meals from Victoria’s native Iraq. The reader roots for Lorca as she begins to emerge from her isolation. She befriends not only Victoria, but also an equally lonely boy named Blot and maybe even Dottie.

Indeed, we root for all of Soffer’s rich and complex characters, with the exception of Nancy, perhaps—Soffer dislikes her too much. Sometimes families just don’t work, the author seems to say. The good news is you can always find another.

In 1946 North Carolina, during a raging winter rainstorm, young Evelyn Roe discovers a man buried in the rich red clay of her farm. Impossibly, he’s alive. She frantically digs him from the muck and thinks he’s a burned, lost soldier. But as she warms him, feeds him, clothes him, his gnarled skin “heals” illogically fast, and he acts like he’s never eaten food, taken a bath or even heard language before. This can’t simply be a man with amnesia.

Riley contemplates the mysteries of those we love in a standout debut.

In fact, he’s not even a man.

Rhonda Riley’s marvelous debut, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope, spans 50 years and chronicles the relationship between Evelyn and this guileless being, who goes through more than one strange metamorphosis. Eventually, they marry. They raise five daughters. And in all those years, despite their passion, their happy, ordinary life and their profound bond, Evelyn’s husband never ceases to be a mystery to her.

Richly drawn and tenderly delivered, what’s perhaps loveliest about Riley’s story is that Adam doesn’t know any more about his origins than Evelyn does. And he doesn’t care—he just is. Captivating in his joy and openness, he’s worldly and innocent, not to mention otherworldly, all at the same time. Meanwhile, Riley creates in Evelyn a wonderfully real narrator, a subtle masterpiece. With a loving but unobtrusive voice, Evelyn inspires instant, unnoticed loyalty in the reader, allowing for a complete suspension of disbelief that is a great feat given the book’s premise.

Enhanced by gorgeous depictions of the land Evelyn and Adam love, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope evokes the wonder of being alive, of loving, of finding one’s home. By the end, it feels like you have truly listened in on a life—that these things have occurred somehow, in some realm. Combining terrific writing with mass appeal, this should be one of 2013’s most deserving hits.

Fantasies that span centuries, time travel, epic romances, secret societies and ancient conspiracies—Bee Ridgway’s debut novel has all of these things, but despite these familiar tropes, The River of No Return provides some exhilarating surprises.

Nobleman Nick Falcott died on a Napoleonic battlefield in 1812. Or at least, that’s what everyone in 1812 thinks. Somehow, Nick actually jumped forward in time to the year 2003, where a mysterious organization known as the Guild took him in, taught him how to live in the 21st century, and told him he could never return to either his own time or place. Ten years later, Nick is suddenly summoned by the Guild and asked to break the rules and travel back to the year 1815 in search of a mysterious Talisman, something of great power that the Guild must find before its enemies, the Ofan, get their hands on it.

In 1815, Falcott’s former neighbor Julia Percy is grieving the loss of her extraordinary grandfather and suffering under the yoke of his heir, her cousin Eamon, when she finds that she’s been blessed with an incredible gift. When Nick returns, suddenly back from the dead, Julia finds that his mission and her gift are linked, and the two embark on an adventure across time to unravel the secrets of the Guild, the Ofan and the Talisman.

Establishing a firm set of rules for the way time travel works is arguably the most important part of building a story like The River of No Return, but too many restrictions can turn a story stale before it even gets started. It’s a fine line to walk, and though this is her first attempt, Ridgway navigates it like a master. Her tale and the world she’s crafted unfold gracefully and compellingly through precise yet lush prose. The result is a novel that fans of hardcore fantasy and literary fiction alike can get behind. The River of No Return is a gorgeous, sweeping debut that is easy to get lost in.

Kate Baron’s daughter Amelia is dead. She fell off the roof of her tony private school in Brooklyn. At first the death is ruled a suicide; then Kate gets an anonymous text that claims it wasn’t a suicide at all. Though shocking to the already shattered Kate, she suspected that her daughter—bright, pretty and fairly well behaved—wouldn’t have thrown herself off a roof. What happened?

Kimberly McCreight’s Reconstructing Amelia is a page-turner, but it’s not only the mystery of how Amelia died that keeps readers going. The chapters alternate between Kate’s point of view and Amelia’s, which includes postings from her Facebook page, text messages to and from her friends—including a mysterious boy named Ben—and missives from her school’s nasty online gossip sheet. We find in Amelia a delightful but deeply needy young woman. Indeed, nearly everyone in the book is needy. Kate, whose own neediness led to her unplanned and unwelcome pregnancy with Amelia, needs to get to know the truth about her daughter. The other adults, many of whom betray Amelia in some way, need to keep up appearances or cover their tracks. The other kids, even the posse of mean girls who torment Amelia during the last weeks of her life, need to belong.

Speaking of kids, McCreight is one of those rare writers who gets teenagers with the sort of specificity and accuracy that can put an ex-teenager’s teeth on edge. She makes you remember the good and bad craziness of those years. She makes you ache for the harrowed single mother Kate, and she makes you want to put your arms around Amelia and tell her everything gets better. But then you realize Amelia is gone, and your heart hurts. Reconstructing Amelia will keep you hooked till the last page.

These days, polygamous sects are dominating the news and entertainment headlines. Playwright Peggy Riley feeds that fascination with her debut novel, Amity & Sorrow, the suspenseful story of a mother and her two daughters after their escape from a polygamous, fundamentalist cult.

Amity & Sorrow hooks readers from its riveting opening: Amaranth has just escaped the cult with Sorrow and Amity, fleeing across the country by car. Hysterical and sleep deprived, Amaranth totals the car when they reach rural Oklahoma, leading her older daughter Sorrow to flee from the wreckage. When Amaranth, Amity and a widowed farmer named Bradley discover Sorrow locked in Bradley’s gas station bathroom, she is miscarrying. Who could have gotten Sorrow pregnant? Without a car or provisions, where will Amaranth and her daughters go? And what exactly are they running from?

Told from the viewpoints of all three women, the novel gradually reveals a troubling history of abuse. Amaranth is terrified that her husband will hunt them down. Sorrow—the most religious of the three and a zealous pyromaniac—not only demands to return to the compound, but also is convinced that she is an oracle, set forth on earth to deliver God’s message. Amity is merely attempting to join the real world by learning how to read, with Bradley’s aging father acting as her teacher. And then there is Bradley, who must ultimately decide what to do with these women who refuse to leave his front porch.

However, Sorrow will stop at nothing to return to what she sees as her rightful place by her father’s side. But the reasoning behind her desire to go back is more complicated than it appears.

What makes Amity & Sorrow so fascinating is Riley’s compassionate portrayal of these women. Whether she’s explaining the pull that drew Amaranth to her husband in the first place, the power he holds over his many wives or the shock that both daughters face when dealing with the outside world, each emotion is captured exquisitely. This novel is not sensationalist, but rather realistic and frightening as it captures the horrors of real-life cults.

Novelist Taiye Selasi coined the word Afropolitanism eight years ago to refer to educated, multilingual, multiethnic Africans living around the globe. In her ambitious debut, Ghana Must Go, she brings us into the world of bright, urban professionals, raised in the United States, but with roots in Africa.

When Kwaku Sai drops dead from a massive heart attack, he is living in Ghana with his second wife. His four children are scattered all over the world: His oldest son Olu is a doctor in Massachusetts and youngest daughter Somayina is a student at Yale. Twins Kehinde and Taiwo are in London and New York respectively. His ex-wife Fola has settled in Ghana as well, after staying in the United States long enough to get the youngest into college.

At first, the fortunes of the Sai family appear to hinge on a single incident, a race-based injustice in their adopted home. Originally from Ghana, Kwaku was a surgeon at a prestigious Boston hospital when he was asked to perform an emergency operation on an elderly white woman from an affluent family of longtime hospital donors. When the operation was unsuccessful, Kwaku was fired, leading him to abandon both his family and his career.

Concerned about her ability to continue the education of all the children and struggling with her own depression, Fola sends the twins back to her half-brother in Nigeria, with truly horrifying results. Olu’s fear of becoming like his father seeps into his own marriage. Somayina, just a baby when her father left, is at loose ends, having to mourn a man she never really knew.

“Ghana must go” is a Nigerian phrase from the early 1980s, when millions of Ghanaians fled to Nigeria due to political upheaval. Though the novel does not concern itself overtly with politics, both Kwaku and Fola came to America because of the violence and lack of professional opportunity. For all their cultural sophistication, the Sai children wonder if their lives as perennial outsiders made it impossible for them to feel at home anywhere.

Because there is so much dramatic tension in the novel, the structure of flashbacks can be confusing and some of the richer conflicts lose their impact. Still, Ghana Must Go is an engaging novel about the children of upwardly mobile African immigrants and the price they pay for being disconnected from their mother country.

No matter how you and your family choose to celebrate the holidays, chances are it doesn’t involve burying your parents in the backyard on Christmas Eve. Alas, the same cannot be said for the sibling protagonists in Lisa O’Donnell’s first novel, The Death of Bees.

Setting the tone for what is to come, the book opens with 15-year-old Marnie telling readers that not only is it Christmas Eve, but it is also her birthday, and the parents that she and her sister have just buried in their backyard were anything but beloved.

O'Donnell is a brazen new voice in the literary world.

Rest assured, this is no saccharine, gentle story of a loving family torn asunder. As far as Marnie is concerned, her parents’ deaths are just one more mess they have left for her to clean up, just one more burden far too heavy for her and 12-year-old Nelly to have to carry. Yet carry it they must, leaving readers to root for these two newly minted orphans as they attempt to outwit child protective services, settle debts with their father’s drug dealer—who is owed money they don’t have—and keep their lonely next-door neighbor from discovering the truth about what his dog keeps trying to dig up in their back garden. Through it all, the girls navigate the more traditional hardships of adolescence with pluck and determination, proving that though they may be damaged, they can never be fully broken as long as they have each other.

From its first line to its last, The Death of Bees is unapologetically candid and heralds a brazen new voice in the literary world. O’Donnell, a Scot who now lives in L.A., is also  an award-winning screenwriter. Her prior career experience shows in her novel: She imbues Marnie and Nelly with voices that are honest and authentic, and the narrative flows with the exact right current to hook readers early and then slowly reel them in.

This is a dark and mordant novel, yet despite its fighting words, a tender heart beats deep at its center. Although undeniably bleak at times, Marnie and Nelly’s story is not devoid of hope and has much needed punches of humor throughout. The result is a riveting and rewarding read.

Robin Sloan’s funny debut novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, is both a celebration and a send-up of the clashing worlds of technology and those who cling to dead-tree books. After losing a job at the corporate headquarters of NewBagel, where “ex-Googlers” developed software to create the perfect bagel, Clay Jannon gets hired at an unconventional bookstore in San Francisco. Unconventional because it’s open 24 hours, has very few customers, is vertical—there are three stories worth of books you have to climb a ladder to retrieve—and the books are written in secret code. What at first seems to be a front for an illegal operation turns out to be connected with a cult, and Clay goes on a mission to solve the mystery that has been plaguing its members for centuries, enlisting the help of a quirky team, like the Google acolyte he’s dating, the friend who got rich by developing “boob-simulation software” and Mr. Penumbra himself, the hopeful store proprietor.

Though there’s a code to be cracked in these pages, the real treat of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is Sloan’s energetic storytelling—and the many, many lines that you will surely want to share on Facebook and tweet to the masses. (“He has the strangest expression on his face—the emotive equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.” Or: “If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.”) Readers who don’t know a hashtag from a wiki will still appreciate the book’s ultimate message about friendship, and the conclusion that nothing—not even a world full of programmers and hackers—can substitute for a cunning mind.

Within the pages of novels, authors can preserve the world at one specific moment in time, like a dragonfly in amber. In The Orchardist, first-time novelist Amanda Coplin accomplishes an even trickier feat, blending past and present by weaving modern concerns into an old-fashioned narrative. The result is a drama of truly epic proportions.

The titular character of Coplin’s novel is a man named Talmadge, whose ties to the Pacific Northwest are as strong and gnarled as the roots of the ancient fruit trees he tends in his orchards. Although this land has borne witness to the struggles of his family across the decades, at the novel’s opening, Talmadge’s existence is a solitary but uncomplicated one. All this changes when he comes upon two pregnant and vagrant teenagers stealing apples from his trees. When Talmadge fails to give chase, Jane and Della ultimately return to the safety of his land, and an unlikely alliance forms as Talmadge’s compassion and long dormant desire to connect with others prompts him to take the two sisters under his protection. Alas, the tentative family they forge is not meant to last: A tragic event teaches the trio that there is nowhere you can go where your past will not find you.

This is one of those rare novels in which the individual parts are so brilliantly rendered that together they form a near-perfect reading experience. The characters are written with such compassion and the writing rings with a conviction and emotional honesty that belies Coplin’s youth. In the end, The Orchardist shares much in common with the fruits its protagonist nurtures: The succulent flesh of the novel will intoxicate readers early on, but delving deeper reveals a hard core that is vital, bittersweet and ultimately timeless.

The sparse lyricism of The Yellow Birds elevates that most essential and dissembled aspect of warfare—the individual human spirit—to its rightful place on the dais of our conscience. If Kevin Powers had given us only the title, its allusive origin and the first thousand words of this novel, that would have been enough for a timeless contribution. And yet he goes on, wringing from this trope every last drop of imagination.

The novel is the first-person account of Private John Bartleby, alternating between his tour in Iraq and the time just before and just after. Ultimately Bartleby must reconcile these three disparate realities and come to terms with the self who has traversed this dynamic moral landscape.

Powers, who served in Iraq before studying English at Virginia Commonwealth University, is palpably vivid with his language, efficient, even if he occasionally favors a weak image—this isn’t a flawless book. And yet the blemishes serve as a testament to the overall power of his prose, which trades readily in perfect phrases, underscoring the effect of his soaring minimalism.

Read The Yellow Birds and hope: for the lives of our men and women in service, for the lives of those whom they fight and for the grace of further gifts from this budding master craftsman.

For the five generations of women who inhabit Courtney Miller Santo’s elegant debut novel, The Roots of the Olive Tree, the ties that bind are often tangled. From the fiery and preternaturally robust centenarian, Anna, to the youngest and pregnant member of the family tribe, Erin, the evolving relationships between mothers and daughters are at the heart of this story, which is set against the lush backdrop of an olive tree farm in Northern California.

With nary a man around the farm—all of the men in the Keller family are either dead, confined to a nursing home or determined never to return—the female quintet find themselves the subject of a visiting research geneticist, who is determined to unlock the secret behind the women’s incredible resistance to the ravages of old age. The story unfolds as the youngest member of the family, Erin, returns home from Europe where she has found success as an opera singer. Pregnant and bereft, Erin declines to explain her predicament, but is determined to rekindle her relationship with her mother, Deborah, who has been languishing in jail for years after murdering her husband—Erin’s father—in a jealous rage.

Erin’s wish is granted, but Deborah’s return to the farm is not the joyful family reunion her daughter imagined. Old wounds are reopened, and it is soon clear that jail has not reformed the family’s proverbial black sheep, a damaged narcissist with a violent temper. The women are soon at odds, with daughters shunning their mothers in favor of the nurturing, unconditional love of grandmothers, great-grandmothers and—in the Keller family—even great-great-grandmothers.

Santo is well aware of the mystical nature of longevity, as well as the blessings bestowed by grandmothers: Her own great-grandmother, Winifred Rodgers White, was almost 104 when Santo wrote her novel. This exploration of the mysteries of aging and the human heart will resonate with readers.