Elizabeth L. Silver’s gripping and introspective first novel analyzes capital punishment from the intertwined viewpoints of those involved in a murder trial that took place years before the novel opens. Noa P. Singleton, now 35, has been in the Pennsylvania Institute for Women for a decade, found guilty of killing Sarah Dixon, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

The mystery posed by the author is not whether Noa committed the crime, for she begins her story with: “I know I did it. The state knows I did it, though they never really cared why.” Instead, the book revolves around the “why”—and all the factors, past and present, that eventually led to a tragic and senseless outcome.

The main narrative is in Noa’s words—a first-person journal written in the months before her scheduled execution, which she calls X-day. She writes of her mother, who has not visited her in prison, and her non-relationship with her father—a one-night stand whom her mother calls a sperm donor, a man Noa never heard from growing up. She writes of childhood friends, and of the women who surround her on death row, whose stories she knows well. X-day is six months away, when out of the blue Noa is visited by Marlene Dixon, mother of the murder victim and a high-profile Philadelphia lawyer. Marlene claims to have had a change of heart—she no longer believes in the death penalty, and is in the process of filing a clemency petition that would reduce Noa’s sentence to life in prison. All Noa has to do is reveal why she committed the crime—something she refused to discuss during the trial, or since.

By means of chapters written in Noa’s words and letters written by Marlene Dixon to her deceased daughter, the reader gradually pieces together the puzzle of what happened the day Sarah died. It is an emotion-packed style, similar to that used by Lionel Shriver in her acclaimed novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), as the reader tries to come to grips with how much weight should be given to mitigating circumstances in determining guilt or innocence.

For a first-time novelist, Anthony Marra has a lot going for him. Currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Marra holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has won The Atlantic’s Student Writing Contest, the Pushcart Prize and the Narrative Prize. If that isn’t enough to convince you of Marra’s extraordinary talents, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena has already been awarded the 2012 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Set in contemporary Chechnya—a republic in southern Russia—the novel opens with 8-year-old Havaa hiding in the freezing-cold forest. She is forced to witness the burning down of her home and the abduction of her fingerless father by Russian soldiers. When Havaa’s father’s lifelong friend and neighbor Akhmed discovers her, he decides that the only guarantee for her safety is to take her to a physician he has only heard rumors about: Dr. Sonja Rabina.

For Sonja, her day-to-day life is a furious routine of staying hopped up on methamphetamines, running the town’s bombed-out hospital and desperately searching for her heroin-addicted sister, Natasha. Akhmed—a doctor as well, although his passion lies in portraiture—offers his assistance to Sonja, in exchange for her harboring Havaa. The Russians have already begun hunting down the girl, and Akhmed has sworn to protect her, for reasons deeper than Sonja initially suspects.

Marra delicately weaves together several narratives against the backdrop of this bleak, war-ravaged country. Over five days filled with dying rebels, mysterious black-market con men, friends-turned-traitors and ghostly visitors, Marra allows the stories of Sonja, Natasha, Akhmed and Havaa’s father to intersect in incredibly imaginative ways. Readers will become convinced that each subsequent piece in the puzzle of Marra’s narrative is not coincidence but surely must be fate.

If you’re a fan of beautifully composed, internationally set fiction like The Tiger’s Wife or The Orphan Master’s Son, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a worthy next pick. The Whiting Writers’ Award selection committee dubbed Marra’s ambitions “Tolstoyan,” and there could not be a better word to describe his all-too-real cast of characters. This is an exquisite debut.

Rose Baker is the kind of girl who prides herself on the knowledge that the only remarkable thing about her is just how very plain she is. Often overlooked, prizing moral rectitude above all else and fastidious to a fault, Rose is a natural at her somewhat outré job as a typist in a 1920s New York City police station, where she dutifully types up the confessions and reports that put guilty men behind bars. Upon the hiring of a vivacious new typist named Odalie, Rose’s perch on her principled pedestal becomes precarious when she falls under the spell of this magnetic and irresistible young woman. Swept into an opulent but forbidden world of bootleggers and back-alley drinking halls, Rose starts to loosen her grip on her precious rules, only to find that reality and her own sense of self are soon to follow.

A prim typist finds her dark side in Rindell’s devilish, delicious debut.

The Other Typist is Suzanne Rindell’s debut novel, but what a deliciously devilish debut it is! Rindell’s prose is rich with vivid turns of phrase and imagery that dazzles like the tassels on a flapper’s frock, but her real coup is the creation of meek little Rose—who is actually anything but. In contrast to her drab exterior, Rose’s inner monologue is satisfyingly tart and her world view slyly subversive. Readers will swiftly realize that she is more than what she seems—but the one thing she is not, is to be trusted. With shades of Notes on a Scandal and a dash of The Great Gatsby thrown in for pizzazz, Rindell has concocted a potent psychological thriller that is downright addictive and more than a little twisted. The Other Typist is an excellent game of cat and mouse, one made all the better for never knowing exactly who is the hunter and who is the prey. Only one thing is for certain: Few readers will escape the mind-bending trap Rindell has set—and even fewer will be interested in trying.

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.