Previously known for her narrative nonfiction book Inheriting the Holy Land: An American’s Search for Hope in the Middle East, Jennifer Miller returns with a debut novel, The Year of the Gadfly. A little bit Secret History, a little bit Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Miller’s academic thriller is sure to rank among other classic prep-school novels, such as Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep.

The Year of the Gadfly follows Iris Dupont, a high school sophomore suffering from depression due to the suicide of her closest friend. Dupont is forced by her parents to leave her former high school and attend the prestigious Mariana Academy. When she is not secretly confiding in the ghost of Edward R. Murrow (her cigarette-smoking, suspenders-wearing, reporter mentor), Dupont is trying to distract herself from her loneliness by forcing her way onto the school newspaper’s staff.

Dupont gradually learns that Mariana is not quite what its reputation claims. Over the years, a secret society, Prism’s Party, has ruthlessly exposed the misdeeds of students and teachers alike in an underground newspaper, The Devil’s Advocate. Dupont—ever the eager journalist—tries to unmask the members of this secret party by investigating her favorite maniacal teacher, Mr. Kaplan, and his connections to Lily, the former student whose bedroom Dupont now occupies.

Miller intelligently unfurls these mysteries by telling the story from three distinct yet intertwined points of view: those of Dupont, Mr. Kaplan and Lily. The Year of the Gadfly is a riveting story of the highs and lows of adolescence, one that is fit for readers of all ages.

Don’t start The Lifeboat right before bedtime. Charlotte Rogan’s gripping debut won’t let you turn out the light until the last page is turned, and will have you mulling over the questions of survival, sacrifice and responsibility it raises long after that.

Grace Winter has been “married for 10 weeks and a widow for over six” and is on trial for her life when The Lifeboat opens. It seems there are some questions about her actions during the two weeks she spent in a small lifeboat on the Atlantic with 38 other survivors of the sinking of the Empress Alexander. To get the events straight in her own mind, Grace begins an account of the wreck and its aftermath, blending in the story of her courtship with and brief marriage to the wealthy Henry Winter. It gradually becomes clear that this isn’t the first time Grace’s mettle has been tested: Perhaps the steely drive necessary to climb the ranks of Edwardian society is the ultimate survival skill.

Originally, the stunned passengers on Lifeboat 14 continue in the rigidly defined roles of class and gender that they held on the ship. The one seaman on board, Mr. Hardie, takes charge, rationing out the meager stores of food; the men take the oars, the women sit quietly and console one another. But as the days pass, keeping order becomes more of a challenge. Two female passengers ally against Mr. Hardie, questioning his decisions and sowing discontent among the hungry survivors. Pragmatic Grace sees the divisions forming and is determined to be on the winning side. But at what cost?

Survival stories often showcase the beauty of human nature, our ability to rise above circumstances to care for our fellow man. The Lifeboat is not that novel. What Rogan finds under our veneer of civility is pure animal nature, red in tooth and claw—in a way, the sinking of the luxurious Empress Alexandra echoes mankind’s fall from grace. “We were stripped of all decency. I couldn’t see that there was anything good or noble left once food and shelter were taken away,” writes Grace. Her dispassionate narration of harrowing events somehow makes their impact even more powerful.

Though the narrative frame means that Grace’s survival is assured, the suspense of The Lifeboat never lets up, and it is a testament to Rogan’s talent that a novel that so insightfully confronts existential questions is also a complete and utter page-turner. This compelling, smart and resonant work is certain to stand as one of the year’s best debuts.

What compels us to cling to hope in hopeless circumstances? That’s the intriguing question first-time novelist Jennifer duBois explores in a story that evocatively connects two characters whose biographies give little hint of the way their destinies ultimately merge.

The novel takes its title from the name of a hand-produced dissident journal teenager Aleksander Bezetov distributes furtively in the city still known as Leningrad, where he arrives in 1979 as an aspiring chess prodigy. After one of his comrades is killed by Communist operatives, he makes his peace with the regime and begins a meteoric rise to the pinnacle of the chess world, with all the perquisites and soul-destroying compromises that choice entails.

A quarter-century later Irina Ellison, a young woman with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, abandons her life in Boston and flees to Russia. She’s been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, the same affliction that slowly and painfully killed her father, with whom she had watched many of Aleksander’s matches. Before she begins to feel its effects, Irina seeks out Aleksander to answer a question about facing loss gracefully that her father once asked him in an unanswered letter.

Irina and Aleksander finally encounter each other in 2006, in the midst of Aleksander’s quixotic electoral campaign to unseat Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Irina’s grim persistence eventually leads her to Aleksander’s door, where the two are drawn together by their shared sense of desperation.

In a novel that conjures the Russian literary tradition, duBois weaves an intricate web of relationships among characters forced to confront difficult existential choices. Irina, with her “inability to invest in lost causes,” struggles with the private suffering brought on by the knowledge that her life will be truncated by disease, while Aleksander fights against what seems an equally inevitable public destiny.

Though at times she overreaches for an arresting metaphor, duBois does an admirable job of portraying the death rattle of Communism and the birth of a nominally democratic but persistently corrupt society. She vividly captures the spirit of St. Petersburg and Moscow, not least the cloud of paranoia that hovers over both the old and new Russian worlds. A Partial History of Lost Causes is a deeply thoughtful novel, a pensive, multilayered look at a culture in transition and the lives of the two complex, memorable characters at its core.

To be a good busybody, you need people skills and the best of intentions. (Bad busybodies are something else again.) The middle-aged British heroine of A Surrey State of Affairs, Constance Harding, is perfect for the role, strewing both intended and unintended results of her meddling all around her circle of family, friends and virtual universe with innocent ignorance and a blithe disregard for reality. Not to mention a bewildered disbelief at the occasional unexpected results of her activity.

Trying to live up to the outmoded values of her upper-middle-class upbringing, Constance ricochets from ignoring the obvious evidence of her own husband’s adultery to missing entirely the crush another woman’s spurned husband has on her. (That would be a man from her beloved Tuesday evening bell-ringing club.) She also totally misreads her son’s sexual leanings, resulting in misguided attempts to find him a wife, even as she despairs at her daughter’s truly appalling computer-assisted illiteracy.

But that’s only the first half of this giggle-out-loud, go-with-the-flow novel of old-fashioned human impulses filtered through the first-person narration of Constance’s blog. It’s whimsical and droll, a good enough premise to provide the setting for the whole novel, but Ceri Radford (called the “new Helen Fielding”) has other plans for her debut. Reader be warned, the story abruptly abandons its old-fashioned character-probe for a startling new tack: Constance suddenly tires of her Wodehousian existence and sets off to bring her outmoded education up to date.

She impulsively follows her husband Jeffrey (“a man of few words and many possible meanings”) to Buenos Aires and Patagonia, being careful, of course, to pack a compass, sturdy boots and Bach’s Rescue Remedy. Readers will be charmed by Constance’s all-out approach to life and swept away by this comical, sparkling adventure.

The night her sister was born, Janie was warned by her grandmother to take good care of the new baby, since in their family, a sister disappears in every generation. So begins the beautiful debut novel Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung, a masterful exploration of generational tensions within a Korean family on two continents.

Janie is a graduate student in mathematics when her sister Hannah disappears from college, cutting off all communication with the family. Their father demands that Janie find her, which is difficult since Hannah’s disappearance is clearly intentional. Haunted by her grandmother’s words, Janie resentfully searches; this is just the latest instance of her sister’s manipulations. However, when a second crisis forces her parents to move back to Korea after 20 years in Michigan, the urgency of contacting Hannah increases.

At the center of the novel is the legacy of the Japanese occupation’s violence, the Korean War and the subsequent division of the country. After the gruesome slaughter of his parents, Janie’s father was raised by an older sister. Janie’s mother lost an older sister under mysterious circumstances that are never discussed. The reactions of Janie and Hannah to their tradition-bound parents—one dutiful, the other rebellious—also follows familiar tropes. It is in the family’s return to Korea that the novel really breaks new ground, as Janie is forced to confront the effects of family history on her own life, and come to terms with her role in Hannah’s filial ambivalence.

Recently named one of Granta’s New Voices, Chung is a remarkable writer, willing to dig fearlessly under her characters’ surface motivations. Her style is elegant but never clinical, and her judicious use of Korean folktales amplifies the themes of sacrifice, duty and expectation. Chung is especially successful in the depiction of the intense cauldron of emotion between siblings. The novel ends with a resolution that is satisfying but in no way pat or formulaic, an indication of her extraordinary talent.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Catherine Chung for Forgotten Country.

Screenwriter Amanda Coe’s fiction debut, What They Do in the Dark, is distressing. It is also technically impressive, and while its subject matter—the wreckage resulting when adults fail children—is somber, its character portrayals are soaked in the warmth of honesty. Set in a working-class northern town in 1975 England, the book chronicles a gloomily pivotal spring/summer in the lives of 10-year-old schoolmates Gemma Barlow and Pauline Bright. The girls are not exactly friends, but are drawn together by their fractured souls. Their fates become hauntingly entwined.

Gemma is a good student from a middle-class home, whose perfect Saturdays are brought to a perfect close by watching “It’s Lallie,” the wholesome television vehicle of child star Lallie Paluza, with whom she is obsessed. By contrast, the ironically named Bright household is marked by hopelessness and decay, and abuse and neglect have turned Pauline, already a fearsome bully, into a time bomb of aggression. Their lives intersect when Lallie comes to town, starring in her first feature film as the victim of a pedophile. As the filming progresses, partially at Gemma and Pauline’s school, the girls’ lives change: Gemma’s mother leaves her father, moving her in with a new boyfriend, and Pauline’s wretched home life reaches terrible new lows.

Points-of-view alternate from Gemma and Pauline to Vera, an aging actress with a small part in the film; Frank, Lallie’s put-upon agent; and Quentin, a neurotic young American woman whose new job as a producer brings back childhood demons. Quentin wants to save Lallie from her apparently toxic stage mother and a future as a Hollywood casualty, but Quentin’s addictions (to chemicals and men) leave her ineffective. At the center of it all is the mystery of Lallie, whose life is surely troubled—the question is how darkly so.

A shocking ending breaks the book’s brewing storm but does not bring relief. In Coe’s vivid, well-crafted character details and expert plotting, the seemingly unimportant—but always enjoyable—proves crucial. The book is shot through with ambiguity and character ambivalence, but despite its lack of answers, it reads even better the second time around. A provocative achievement, What They Do in the Dark stays with you after the last page.

The privileged and insular society of an Eastern prep school in the 1980s is unveiled and brought vividly to life in Amber Dermont’s emotionally rich debut novel.

Jason Prosper has been banned from Kensington, his parents’ prep school of choice, and is now beginning his senior year at Bellingham Academy—where students who have been “kicked out of better schools for stealing, or having sex, or smoking weed” end up. As Jason walks out of his Manhattan penthouse in September, he realizes the only person he will miss is his doorman. Jason’s father, who looks “more like a member of the British House of Lords” than a dad, drops him off. It’s clear that he cares less about Jason’s happiness than he does about his possible acceptance to Princeton at year’s end.

Enter the privileged, insular world of an East Coast prep school in this sensitively wrought debut.

Dermont gradually reveals Jason’s devastation and guilt over the suicide junior year of Cal, his best friend and sailing partner at Kensington. At Bellingham he reconnects with sons of his parents’ friends from the past—New England boarding schools being a “small, incestuous world” where everyone knows whose money is oldest, and who vacations in St. Moritz or Tuscany. Though Jason bonds with this predictable mélange of jocks and the sons of investment bankers and fund managers (it’s 1987, and Black Monday looms), he remains as aloof as possible, comparing them to Cal, and hesitant to get close to someone he might lose. He meets Aidan, a girl who’s also carrying troubling baggage to Bellingham, and they forge a special relationship—tentative at first, but gradually deepening as they learn to trust one another with painful secrets from their pasts.

At this point, Dermont injects a third element into her tale of coming-of-age in the land of the wealthy—a mystery surrounding the discovery of a body on the beach after a violent storm. It’s first ruled an accident, then announced by the dean as suicide, but Jason begins putting together the pieces from that night which lead to a far different verdict—one that involves his so-called friends.

Dermont writes beautifully—about the sea and sailing, about her diverse characters and about the youthful pain of love lost.

It isn’t surprising that Ella Beene’s husband, Joe Capozzi, dies within the first 10 pages of The Underside of Joy. After all, the jacket copy reveals that this story is about the personal struggles and family challenges Ella faces after her husband’s death. But the juxtaposition of Seré Prince Halverson’s descriptions of pure, unadulterated joy, and the reader’s knowledge that Ella’s joy has an expiration date, is breathtaking.

In the opening pages, Ella says, “For three years, I did backflips in the deep end of happiness. The joy was palpable and often loud. Other times it softened—Zach’s milky breath on my neck, or Annie’s hair entwined in my fingers as I braided it, or Joe’s humming some old Crowded House song in the shower while I brushed my teeth.”

Debut novelist Halverson paints a picture of Ella’s everyday life, married to Joe and raising her stepchildren, Annie and Zach, in a coastal Northern California town. Ella was still fresh out of her first marriage when she met Joe. The couple fell for each other hard and fast, and were married within a year. He, too, was divorced; Joe’s first wife, Paige, had left him and the kids months earlier, with hardly a word since. Ella is the only mother they have ever known. Until, of course, Paige shows up at Joe’s funeral and begins the fight to regain custody of her children.

The first third of The Underside of Joy is rich with detail, recounting Ella’s move from joy to mourning to struggles with Paige and the faltering family business Joe left behind. Though the plot at first moves slowly, Halverson’s prose is captivating. In fact, it’s once the plot quickens that the book hits occasional weak points, where plot takes precedence over previously enchanting descriptions. But as she mines the family secrets her characters hold close and how those affect their relationships with one another, Halverson proves she’s a wordsmith and a storyteller to keep an eye on.

Never mind that you should not judge a book by its cover: I must confess to panicking when I glimpsed the shiny black Louboutin stiletto embellishing Erin Duffy’s debut novel Bond Girl. Call me a snob, but I have no interest in reading anything remotely resembling an homage to Sex and the City. Thus I was delighted to discover that Duffy’s maiden literary voyage has steered clear of the silly and sordid clichés of so-called “chick lit,” and instead delivers a delectable tale of a plucky female bond trader whose Wall Street escapades just happen to coincide with the economic Armageddon of 2008.

When it comes to writing fiction about “the Street,” Duffy—who spent 10 years in the world of fixed income sales—certainly knows her stuff, and is a heck of a storyteller, too. While Bond Girl is not autobiographical, its heroine, Alex Garrett, clearly has much in common with the author. Smart, sassy and smitten with dreams of breaking the gender barriers imposed by the Manhattan men’s club of investment bankers, Alex is hired fresh out of college at the elite firm Cromwell Pierce.

Of course, Alex’s illusions about working on “the Street” are shattered on day one at the firm, after she is handed a child-size folding chair with “Girlie” scribbled on the back and subjected to a fraternity-house work environment.

Surprisingly, Chick—Alex’s profanity-spewing, hard-driving boss—is one of the most sympathetic characters in Bond Girl, which is littered with a cast of offensive characters whose peccadilloes include wagering over a co-worker’s disgusting act of eating everything in the vending machine; talking trash about the firm’s resident silicone-enhanced tart, aka “Baby Gap”; and raising money for charity by auctioning off lunch with the poor guy who mans the building’s coffee cart. Readers will find themselves rooting for Alex from page one—and hoping that the very talented Duffy might have a sequel in the works.

Recently divorced, middle-aged and generally down on his luck, Ezekiel Cooper doesn’t know where he’s going when he packs up his loyal dog, Tucker, and leaves his hometown of Clayton, Tennessee. Zeke just knows he’s running—running from memories of his broken marriage, from his twin brother’s tragic death and from the many secrets that have shattered his family. Through the alternating, pitch-perfect voices of Zeke and his complicated mother Lillian, Alabama writer Amy Franklin-Willis tells the story of the Cooper family from the 1940s to the 1980s in The Lost Saints of Tennessee.

Lillian is a difficult woman—a mother who loves her five children, but can’t help but feel that they have derailed her dreams. Zeke is her golden child, the one she’s sure will get out of their small town and make something of himself. But things don’t exactly turn out as planned, and his time at the University of Virginia is cut short. Then his brother’s mysterious death changes everything. Eventually, Zeke finds himself back in Virginia, with his mother’s cousins Georgia and Osborne, trying to reclaim his life, his sanity and his family.

In her powerful debut, Franklin-Willis expertly crafts a Southern novel that stands with genre classics like The Prince of Tides and Bastard out of Carolina. The Lost Saints of Tennessee is a measured, slow-burning book, with complex, compelling characters and secrets that reveal themselves slowly. A beautiful novel from a talented new author, The Lost Saints of Tennessee proves that in great literature, as in life, we must always expect the unexpected.

“Is she real?” is the question the reader asks about the strange, wild little girl at the center of Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child. Faina shows up in the dead of winter at the home of Mabel and Jack, a married couple who are trying, without too much success, to make a go of it as homesteaders in post-World War I Alaska.

Faina lives all by herself in the woods. Her skin is ice pale, her hair so blonde that it’s white. She seems to thrive in cold and snow and can’t tolerate heat; Mabel actually fears she’ll melt if she gets too close to a fire. She appears after Mabel and Jack build a snow child in their yard one whimsical night, and Mabel thinks she’s both a manifestation of her and Jack’s deep longing for a child and a sprite out of a Russian fairy tale. Unwinding alongside the mystery of Faina is the very palpable reality of Alaska. Ivey’s depictions of the state she was born in are literally breathtaking. You feel the snow and cold in your lungs, as if you’ve inhaled the place’s icy air, or spent time crunching through pure white blinding snow that comes up to the knees. Very rarely has the beauty and unyieldingness of nature been described so sensuously.

The reader also cares about Ivey’s characters. Mabel and Jack deserve a measure of happiness, and it would take a hard heart not to adore their salt-of-the-earth neighbors. But wrapped around everything is the enigma of Faina. Who or what is she, really? The answer is just one of the elements that make The Snow Child such a splendid, magical book.

Composer Alan Lazar’s debut novel traces the life of Nelson, a half-beagle, half-poodle mutt who is put up for adoption at a Boston pet store—a disappointment to the shop owner, who prefers dogs with a pedigree. Two weeks later, Nelson is in danger of being sent to the pound when newlyweds Katey, a concert pianist, and her husband Don decide Nelson is the dog for them. All goes well for two years, but when Katey and Don’s marriage starts to fall apart due to Don’s infidelity, Nelson escapes from their yard and quickly becomes lost. Katey searches for him for weeks, but eventually gives up.

Over the next eight years, Nelson has many adventures. He sees the world from the passenger seat of the truck; scavenges from dumpsters; finds a female friend who helps stave off his loneliness; escapes from two shelters, losing a hind leg in the process; and even lives with a pack of wolves for several months. Through it all, he never loses sight of his goal to reunite with Katey, his “Great Love.”

Carrying through Nelson’s lengthy odyssey is his fine-tuned sense of smell—the incredibly reliable survival mechanism that never fails to keep him from starvation, leads him to friendly humans and steers him away from danger. Lazar’s portrayal of its power will ring true for dog owners. Roam will appeal most strongly to pet lovers—a not-insignificant proportion of the reading public—and will likely be added to bookshelves that include titles like Dewey the Library Cat, The Art of Racing in the Rain and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Lazar has crafted an adventure guaranteed to capture the interest of the reader—who hopes, like Nelson, that the dog will somehow make it home to Katey.