Kids are unpredictable. They suddenly love food they once thought disgusting. And sometimes they just might spontaneously combust.

In Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson doesn’t dwell on the science of human combustion. Instead, he uses the phenomenon as a clever metaphor for human behavior, especially as it relates to a seemingly privileged family.

Lillian Breaker, the novel’s 28-year-old narrator, is anything but privileged. She grows up poor in Tennessee but is determined to seek a better life, so she earns a scholarship to the prestigious Iron Mountain Girls Preparatory School. She develops a fast friendship with Madison Billings, a rich girl whose family owns a chain of department stores. They’re classmates for a year, until another student rats on Madison for having cocaine in her room. The Billings family’s solution? Bribe Lillian’s mother and get Lillian to take the rap.

The young women go their separate ways until years later, when Madison is the wife of a senator who had twins with a previous spouse. The senator is eager to assume higher political office, but the 10-year-old twins are a liability. Whenever something upsets them, they burst into flames, damaging everything around them but leaving their own bodies unharmed. Madison hires Lillian to live on the family estate and act as governess to the two children. What follows is a series of revelations for all parties, as Lillian discovers untapped maternal instincts and Madison and her husband learn more about their family dynamics.

Parts of the novel go on too long, but Nothing to See Here poignantly uses its high concept to make a larger point: Embarrassing behavior often stems from a person’s emotions and anxieties. The key is to address them before an easily resolved problem becomes a major conflagration.

When we meet Victor Tuchman, the patriarch of New Orleans-based novelist Jami Attenberg’s All This Could Be Yours, he’s as good as dead. Which is just as well, since everyone agrees Victor is a monster. Now he languishes in comatose purgatory while the whole family is called home. Well, not home exactly, but to Victor and his wife Barbra’s condo in New Orleans, where they’ve lived for about a year. Nobody is sure why they left Connecticut, but it probably had something to do with Victor’s criminal activity. Not that anyone knows what that activity is—except maybe Barbra.

One family member has questions. Alex, their daughter who lives in Chicago, is a tough-minded, recently divorced attorney who gave up on a relationship with her parents years ago. But news that Victor is near death stirs in Alex a primal excitement. In a rare show of optimism, Alex has convinced herself that once her father is dead, her mother will spill the tea on the Tuchmans’ secret history.

Gary, Alex’s younger brother, has been living in New Orleans for several years and has no idea why his parents stopped honoring the decades-long unspoken agreement to stick to their own corners of the country. Gary, who is going through a marital crisis, just happens to be in Los Angeles on business when he gets the call. He promises his mother he’ll find a flight home soon but can’t manage to force himself onto a plane.

Weaving together a riotous assortment of threads—the stories of three generations of Tuchmans as well as a smattering of other characters pulled into their orbit—Attenberg tenderly mines their family history and massive dysfunction not for clues as to what created the monstrous Victor but for what a monster can create in spite of himself. Her characters—flawed, defensive, overwhelmed and frequently endearing—fizz off the page. Their inner lives coalesce beautifully into a funny and heart-stirring tribute to the nutty inscrutability of belonging to a family.

The Dutch House confirms what we’ve always known: Ann Patchett doesn’t write a bad book. Though the settings may differ (Bel Canto took place in South America, Commonwealth in Southern California and elsewhere), each of Patchett’s books tells a compelling, vivid and imaginative story while offering a deep meditation on human nature.

The titular mansion is located in the Elkins Park section of Philadelphia. It was once owned by the VanHoebeeks, whose imposing portraits are still hanging on the walls when an aspiring real estate developer buys it after World War II. He brings with him his two children—Danny, 3, and Maeve, 7—and his wife, Elna. The house, which has fallen into disrepair, comes complete with furniture and a servant, Fluffy. Elna is horrified by the extravagance of the property and her husband’s wealth, which he’d been keeping a secret. She starts to disappear, first sporadically, then permanently.

Left with their emotionally detached father, the children find that things can only get worse. In true fairy-tale fashion, a wicked stepmother and her own kids move in. Danny (the narrator) and Maeve are displaced from their home when their father suddenly dies and leaves them both almost penniless. An unshakable bond forms between the brother and sister as they survive and strive, pining for their lost home and enraged by the woman who took it from them.

Along the way, Patchett’s knack for aging her characters over many decades serves the story well. The Dutch House is a vast, almost preternatural property, and the characters who have, at one point or another, inhabited it are at the heart of this absorbing tale. It’s fitting and inevitable that the home eventually beckons them back.

Bryn Greenwood’s quirky, page-turning love story, The Reckless Oath We Made, is mesmerizing from its opening pages to resonant end.

Zhorzha Trego, called Zee, lives with her sister, LaReigne, and nephew, Marcus. She works as a waitress and makes weed runs for extra cash to pay their never-ending bills. Zee suffers from chronic pain from a motorcycle crash, and at physical therapy she meets an oddly chivalrous young man named Gentry. She doesn’t think much of him, even though LaReigne calls him Zee’s stalker.

Gentry is an aircraft builder with autism spectrum disorder who speaks in Middle English and hears voices. One of the voices, the Witch, tells him that one day Lady Zhorzha will need a Champion. Ever since, Gentry has been checking in on Zee, waiting to serve his lady.

While volunteering at the local prison, La-Reigne is kidnapped by two white supremacists, and Zee’s life is flipped upside down. When Zee and Marcus are swarmed by journalists in front of Zee’s mother’s house, Sir Gentry steps in, thrilled to finally be of service. Zee accepts his help reluctantly, embarrassed by the state of her mother’s home even in the midst of chaos. Zee’s mother is a reclusive hoarder; Sir Gentry calls her a dragon.

When the police come up short in their search for LaReigne, Zee is still determined to find her missing sister, and Gentry’s deep code of honor mandates that he follow her to whatever end. 

Chapters told in Gentry’s melodic, medieval voice are hypnotic and haunting, and Zee’s chapters provide an exciting contrast. The Reckless Oath We Made illuminates a life of struggle in middle America and examines how incarceration, poverty and mental illness affect families for generations.

Identical twins Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, both named for the same minor Greek goddess, shared everything: a womb, a language known only to themselves, the red hair that set them even further apart from their peers (only 2% of the world’s population are gingers, less than the 3.3% that are twins). They also share a love of English that (and they would adore the irony) cleaved them together as much as it cleaved them apart. 

Long before their first adolescent stirrings, the pair fell head-over-heels for words. Daphne amassed rare ones (rebarbative, hendiadys, aposiopesis) in her notebook, the same way other kids collect sea glass or baseball cards. Laurel looked them up in their father’s massive Merriam Webster’s Second Edition. They played with words, quarreled over words, used words as both rapier and armor.

Author Cathleen Schine is a keen student of both language and families, and The Grammarians calls to mind the likes of Nora Ephron or Joan Didion. It’s not every verbal stunt pilot that can bring a mid-novel excursus about the differences between Webster’s Second and Third editions to a safe landing.

As for the sisters, Schine renders a note-perfect portrait of how shared DNA can foster a ferocious internal rivalry, while it renders the pair nearly impervious to attack from the outside world. When the big rift does descend, it’s a proxy war but devastating nonetheless: prescriptive grammar versus descriptive, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage versus The Chicago Manual of Style. Daphne’s somewhat hectoring grammar column, “The People’s Pedant,” has found a modest but passionate audience, and it puts her on the obverse side of a coin with sister Laurel, whose poetry celebrates the authenticity of those for whom grammar doesn’t really exist. Words are exchanged, but fewer and more rarely. As they say, the reason that our families can push our buttons is because they’re the ones who installed them.

The big question becomes whether there is a dictionary sufficiently large and complex to contain the words that Laurel and Daphne need to build a bridge back to one another, or whether they will remain like their identical DNA, a double helix whose twin coils never really meet. 

Stories about the mysteries of childhood have often been at the heart of Emma Donoghue’s fiction, from the boy who spent his first five years imprisoned in Room to the 11-year-old girl who refused all food in The Wonder. The two characters at the heart of Akin grapple with the effects of difficult upbringings, and inner demons and the desire to understand them drive the present-day narrative.

It’s February in New York, and Noah Selvaggio is packing for an 80th birthday trip to Nice, France, where he was born. He hasn’t been to Nice since age 4, when his mother, Margot, sent him to live with his father in America. She stayed behind to care for her own father, a famous photographer, in the later years of World War II.

Noah married Joan, a fellow chemist, and they remained together for almost 40 years until her recent death from cancer. When Noah went through the belongings of his recently deceased younger sister, he found nine black-and-white photos from the 1930s and ’40s. Noah suspects that Margot had printed them herself. Part of the reason for his trip to Nice is to learn more about his mother and the places depicted in her pictures.

But before he leaves, he gets a call from Children’s Services asking him to be temporary guardian for Michael, his 11-year-old great-nephew. Michael’s father, Victor, is dead from an apparent overdose, and his mother is in jail. Noah is the closest available kin. Reluctantly, Noah agrees to take Michael, an ill-mannered potty-mouth fond of violent video games, on his journey.

What follows is an emotionally trying trip to France, with Noah struggling to keep Michael out of mischief as he pieces together the puzzle of the photographs, which suggest that Margot may have had greater involvement in the war than anyone in the family ever knew.

Akin isn’t as tightly plotted as Donoghue’s previous works, and many scenes play out like a Nice travelogue more than a novel. But Donoghue does an admirable job dramatizing the sacrifices people are often forced to make for younger generations, sometimes in unimaginably dangerous situations.

A Pure Heart grapples with the question of how to be many things at once—a condition that afflicts everyone but requires only some to justify their complexities.

Rajia Hassib’s novel follows the divergent lives of two Egyptian sisters, Rose and Gameela Gubran. Rose, an Egyptologist, falls for an American journalist and moves with him to New York. Gameela remains in Egypt, embraces Islam and marries a much older man. The story begins in the aftermath of Gameela’s death due to a suicide bombing during the chaotic years following Egypt’s failed revolution. Slowly, Hassib charts the events leading up to this conclusion, working her way backward through a series of intertwined lives in both Egypt and America. 

Hassib is especially talented at rendering the small details of daily Egyptian life—not in some exoticized fashion but rather as a foundation on which to lay the wide variety of experiences, ideologies and aspirations of the country’s citizenry. These details, found throughout the book, shine. A description of habitual lateness, for example: “What are a few minutes here or there in a country that’s been around for seven thousand years?” There is some hand-holding—not a single Arabic phrase or idiom goes unexplained for the benefit of the Western reader—but for the most part, it works.

What’s most impressive about A Pure Heart isn’t the central tension—how Gameela’s death comes about—but rather the novel’s meditation on the nature of multiple identities. Both sisters struggle to find their places in the world amid their sometimes-warring allegiances to different nations, different professional and personal aspirations and different views of religion. There is a tenderness and honesty in the way Hassib describes the relationship between the two women, and it is in this relationship that the novel is most nuanced.

Some people work to live, but Cassie Hanwell lives to work. Her job as a firefighter—and an extremely good one at that—gives her a sense of purpose that nothing else ever has. With grit and unwavering determination, Cassie has worked her way up the ranks of the Austin, Texas, fire department, earning the respect and admiration of her male colleagues. She’s even the first woman to win the department’s prestigious Valor Award. But on the evening of the award ceremony, an impulsive decision, triggered by an encounter with a blast from her past, may jeopardize everything for which Cassie has worked so hard. With her career on the line, Cassie agrees to transfer to an old-school fire department on the outskirts of Boston, where she’ll have to prove herself to her new squad, who have made it clear that there’s no room for a “lady” in their fire station. 

The only person who doesn’t ignore her or treat her with outright hostility is a fellow newcomer, known as the Rookie, who proves to be a different kind of problem—because Cassie decided a long time ago that she would never fall in love, no matter how considerate or attractive or good a cook he might be. There’s no way her career can survive another scandal, but as she spends more time with the Rookie—and begins reconnecting with her estranged mother—Cassie can’t help but wonder if she should let her past go up in flames and make room for something new.

Katherine Center’s latest novel is an emotionally resonant and deeply satisfying love story that features a resilient and courageous heroine with legitimate traumas and obstacles to overcome. Center is a pro at creating characters that readers will root for every step of the way. While Cassie’s happy ending is never truly in doubt, she puts in the work to get there, and it feels well-earned and richly rewarding. 

Hopeful and heartwarming, Things You Save in a Fire is a moving testament to the power of forgiveness and love’s ability to heal, even in the face of life’s worst tragedies.

While the condition generally known as “Minnesota Nice” might seem to imply an unmitigated kindliness, it is more aptly described as passive aggressiveness made palatable by a virtually transparent veneer of civility. This is not to say that hearts of gold fail to beat beneath that veneer, but it might take an ice drill—or a clever wordsmith—to bust through the permafrost.

In The Lager Queen of Minnesota, J. Ryan Stradal ventures back into the kind of kitchen that made his debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, a success—and from there into the ever-evolving world of beer culture. Early on, the reader gets the sense that sisters Edith and Helen Magnusson were not particularly close during their youth, and that condition is dramatically exacerbated when their inheritance favors one over the other. Hopscotching back and forth between the sisters’ stories over the years, Stradal lays out the triumphs and tragedies that have kept the siblings apart, as well as the story of the granddaughter/great-niece who might be their bridge to reconciliation. 

Elder sister Edith comes across as an archetype of Midwestern sense and sensibility: modest, hard-working, self-deprecating, stoic and just a bit too straight-laced to enjoy life to the fullest. When her pies are touted in the press as the best in the state, she regards the ensuing notoriety as a distraction, if not an impediment. Helen, on the other hand, plays grasshopper to her sister’s ant and revels in her ability to transform her parents’ estate into a brewery that markets “the second-bestselling Minnesota-brewed beer in Minnesota.” Her husband, in a moment of inspiration, crafts the tag line that propels the brand to stardom: “Drink lots, it’s Blotz.” But as fans of Falstaff, Rheingold, Schmidt, Esslinger’s, Jax and others have ruefully noted, chilled and frothy heads oft turn warm and flat, and the fictional Blotz goes plotz. 

With decades of silence and unspoken resentment separating Edith and Helen, it may take something stronger than a stein of stout to reunite them, and Stradal artfully keeps the suspense brewing for over 300 pages.

With apologies to McCann-Erickson’s wildly successful campaign for Miller Lite (you know the one: “Tastes great, less filling”), this book tastes great, is quite filling and never bitter. 

Some fictional worlds have a high threshold for entry, but once entered are sharply and mysteriously illuminating. That’s the truth about CJ Hauser’s second novel, Family of Origin.

In this novel, two estranged half siblings, children of a brilliant but erratic scientist named Ian Grey, meet at a privately owned Gulf Coast island—a former 1960s commune named Leap’s Island. They are there to retrieve Ian’s personal belongings and his secretive scientific research after he drowned swimming in the Gulf. Elsa, a mid-30s grade-school teacher who lives with her mother in Minnesota, and Nolan, her younger half sibling who works in online PR for the San Francisco Giants, enter a disorienting world where Baby Boomer-era scientists and a cultish science-fiction writer have come to investigate “Reversalism,” a theory about the undowny bufflehead, a duck that seems to be devolving, surrendering its evolutionary advantage. They hope to prove that evolution has started running backward.

Elsa and Nolan have a difficult, charged—even sexually charged—relationship that resolves into clearer focus as the narrative moves alternatively from the present into memories of the past and back again to the present. Her father divorced her mother when Elsa was 8, and she has always felt abandoned and resentful of her younger sibling because of how she was displaced. In a scene from their early history, she crawls behind 4-year-old Nolan into a brushy wilderness and then abandons him in a dry, shallow well he is too small to climb out of. As an unhappy adult, she plans to escape the misery of her current confusion and join a program to colonize Mars. Nolan, whose history we learn less about, arrives on the island with a kind of rational passivity, feeling dismissed and dominated by his older sister. Both feel alienated from each other and the adult world, less capable than their parents and trapped by their histories. In the week they spend on the island, they do come to at least a partial resolution—maybe even a sense of being freed from the past.

At times the storyline of Family of Origin creaks and groans and seems overly intricate. But sentence by sentence, Hauser is a sharp and often witty observer of human behavior. She brilliantly portrays some of the central issues of contemporary life, particularly issues for the lives of millennials. And she raises provocative questions about how contemporary human beings will survive and make full lives for themselves in the future.

In the end, Family of Origin is worth a serious read and some serious thought.

Bruce Holsinger is an English professor at the University of Virginia, a medievalist whose first two novels were set in 14th-century London. With his new novel, Holsinger has moved forward seven centuries and across an ocean. The Gifted School is a contemporary story about high-stakes parenting, set in an affluent Colorado suburb.

The novel’s four moms—Rose, Azra, Samantha and Lauren—have been best friends for a decade. Together, they’ve weathered death, divorce, addiction and travel-team sports. When they learn that a charter school for gifted middle and high schoolers will open in Crystal (a fictionalized Boulder), they respond with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But before long, they’re caught up in the school’s competitive admissions process, each trying to find a hook for her kid.

Although the novel’s point of view shifts with each chapter, Holsinger has made an interesting and smart decision to offer the perspective of only one of the four moms. That’s Rose, an ambitious neurologist who’s exasperated with her husband, Gareth, an underachieving novelist. Other point-of-view characters include Beck, the soccer dad ex-husband of Azra, and Ch’ayña, an immigrant grandmother who cleans houses. We also get the perspectives of three kids: Emma Z., daughter of Samantha, the most affluent mom; Xander, an 11-year-old chess whiz on the autism spectrum; and Tessa, Xander’s troubled 16-year-old sister.

Yes, it’s a lot of characters to keep track of. But the novel’s frequent perspective shifting, interspersed with faux newspaper articles, texts, Facebook posts and video narration, keeps the story moving through the months leading up to the gifted school’s opening. As the story unfolds, we learn that most of the characters harbor secrets, not all of them having to do with parental ambition. These secrets, compounded by a devastating project undertaken by one of the kids, are revealed in the novel’s climactic final act at the school’s open house. An astute reader may predict part of the outcome, but the story still offers satisfying surprises.

Reminiscent of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, The Gifted School is a story of trouble in paradise with timely commentary on hyperparenting and the lengths to which parents will go to ensure that their kids remain “exceptional.”

Meet the Sorenson sisters.

Wendy, the eldest sister, has always been headstrong. Even as a baby, her powerful will sometimes overwhelmed her mother. Now she’s a young widow, adrift years after her husband’s death and quick to turn to alcohol in an attempt to hide from discomfort.

That discomfort often arises when her sister Violet arrives. Violet is Wendy’s Irish twin. Her picture-perfect family provides glaring contrast to Wendy’s aloneness.

Liza is a tenured professor whose accomplishments are overshadowed by her boyfriend’s depression. She isn’t sure she can help him—but shortly after attaining tenure, Liza learns she’s having his child.

Grace is the baby of the family—a fact she’s acutely aware of even as she faces postgraduate life. She has always felt coddled, as though she isn’t capable of facing the world alone. Grace is trying to find her way in Oregon, hundreds of miles from her family’s Chicago home. But the distance leaves her just as isolated as her youth always has.

The sisters inevitably compare themselves not only to each other but also to their parents, Marilyn and David. The couple met in college in the 1970s, and their ongoing love story is so vibrant that many assume it’s easy. It isn’t. But they continue to turn to one another for love and support, even as they worry about their adult daughters—and the grandson one of the girls gave up for adoption 15 years earlier. Jonah Bendt’s arrival upends what Marilyn and David knew about their daughters, one of whom helped hide another’s pregnancy.

Throughout The Most Fun We Ever Had, debut novelist Claire Lombardo’s characters challenge their self-defined roles and the assumptions they’ve made about their family. This family drama tracks the Sorensens through 40 years, examining the way family ties affect each person’s identity. Lombardo’s tale is an immersive account of family, identity and the tensions that can arise from both.