Every so often, a book flows so seamlessly that you hardly notice you’re reading it; it feels more like you’re simply existing with the characters. Neel Patel’s gorgeous debut novel, Tell Me How to Be, is a book like that. An emotionally layered family saga about cultural identity, first love, grief and the power of second chances, it’s a painful, funny and ultimately redemptive story.

The novel unfolds through two perspectives. Akash is a gay Indian American man whose life is spiraling. His relationship with his white boyfriend is falling apart, his drinking is out of control, his career as a songwriter in Los Angeles isn’t going anywhere, and he’s not out to his family. Renu, his mother, is in the midst of a different kind of crisis. A year after her husband’s death, she decides to sell the family house and move back to London. She wants to regain the freedom she gave up when she married and came to America 30 years before. When Akash and his older brother, Bijal, return home to help Renu pack up the house, the secrets they’ve all been hiding from each other come to light.

Both Akash and Renu narrate in the second person. Akash speaks to his childhood friend Parth, while Renu directs her sections to Kareem, the Muslim man she fell in love with before getting married. As the book progresses, the profound impact that Parth and Kareem have had on Akash’s and Renu’s lives slowly becomes clear. It’s an elegant narrative device that never feels cliched or contrived. Instead, the parallels between Renu’s and Akash’s stories highlight the rift between mother and son and its origins. So much of this novel is about what parents and children don’t say to each other and the trauma that silence can cause. Akash and Renu are both lonely and unhappy; they wrestle separately with their ghosts, and then slowly find their way back to each other.

This is a rich story that’s as vivid and surprising as its characters. In addition to all the nuances of Renu and Akash’s complicated mother-son relationship, Patel explores sibling relationships, racism in small-town Illinois, first- and second-generation immigrant experiences, alcoholism and more. Renu is observant, bitingly funny and deeply caring. Akash is morose and impulsive; his pain often feels claustrophobic, while his love of music comes across as buoyant and joyful.

Tell Me How to Be is a contemporary family story that captures all the contradictions and challenges of 21st-century life. It’s a rare treat to watch Renu and Akash navigate such tumultuous change—and come out stronger on the other side.

“Life, this up and down life” is on full, multifaceted display in Ethan Joella’s debut novel. A Little Hope begins with a family facing one of life’s greatest tests: a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a cancer within white blood cells. Greg Tyler and his wife, Freddie, are caught up in worry and fear. How do they tell their daughter, Addie, that Greg is sick? What will the next looming doctor’s appointment reveal? The calendar year may be sliding into fall and then winter, but it is just the beginning of a long, unknown road that neither of them wants to take. And they are not the only ones questioning and wrestling. They are so very far from alone.

The small, fictional town of Wharton, Connecticut, is a well-connected community of characters who feel like people you know or people you could be: mothers and sons, wives and husbands, lovers and friends, parents and those soon to be. The cast of characters—Freddie and Greg, Ginger, Luke, Iris, Alex and Kay, Suzette, Damon, Ahmed, Darcy—are honest as they move through the vagaries of love, illness, infidelity, death or disappointment as best they can, searching for a foothold in the midst of all that is happening. Their unceasing thoughts and fickle feelings all strike a familiar and fully human chord.

Joella’s poetic side shines in his moving but never maudlin novel. He captures loneliness, sadness, happiness and anger in all their fleeting hues. He has created a truly intertwined world around the Tylers, portraying their neighbors truthfully yet kindly. From beginning to end, A Little Hope finds the grace of the everyday and homes in on the surprises (both heavy and light) that each day can hold.

Life is both painful and hopeful, but in Joella’s world, it is blessedly more of the latter.

Listen to a 9-year-old, and you could learn a lot about the world. That’s the benefit that Swiv’s absent father would derive if he were to read the letter that constitutes Fight Night, Miriam Toews’ brilliant new book, in which she triumphs over a tough assignment: to write an entire novel in the voice of a child.

Assignments are nothing new to Swiv. As she relays to her father in this letter, she’s been kicked out of her school near Toronto because of her “lashing out tone” after an incident during Choice Time. Now she’s at home with her actor mother and grandmother, and Swiv and Grandma swap homework assignments. For example, Swiv instructs Grandma to compose a letter to Gord, the baby that Mom is carrying.

Toews gives Swiv a voice that is sophisticated, childlike and utterly believable. Readers can see where Swiv gets her pugnaciousness: Mom has been known to rail against capitalism and get into arguments with clerks at tasteful card shops. Mom has reasons to be on edge, however. She’s dealing not only with a pregnancy and an absent husband but also with backstage experiences that have instilled distrust in her profession.

Then there’s Grandma, a free spirit who speaks in what Swiv calls a secret language and is passionate about Toronto Raptors basketball. Her joie de vivre, however, belies a dark history that Toews slowly reveals as the story progresses. 

The novel features a supporting cast of men that allows Toews to comment on examples of the patriarchy at work, from Grandma’s religious older brothers, who packed her off to Nebraska to get a husband and study the Bible after their father died, to directors who subject Mom to callous treatment. This material could have been strident, but the wonder of Fight Night is that it’s a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who have learned to fight against adversity. “You play hard to the end, Swiv,” Grandma tells her as they watch the Raptors on TV. “To the buzzer. There is no alternative.” You could learn a lot from grandmothers, too.

How does one sum up the arc of a long life? That’s the intriguing question Joshua Ferris poses in A Calling for Charlie Barnes, a poignant, bitingly funny exploration of how a life that’s riddled with defeat may turn out, after all, to be profoundly meaningful.

Inspired by the death of Ferris’ own father in 2014, the novel tells the story of Charlie Barnes, nicknamed “Steady Boy,” an investment adviser struggling in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse whose ambition is matched only by the number and magnitude of his professional and personal debacles. Charlie is a bundle of contradictions—an ethical money manager in a world of charlatans, and someone whose endlessly inventive mind conjures up bizarre moneymaking schemes that are distinctive only for their consistent failures, like a flying toupee called the Original Doolander or the Clown in Your Town, a franchised fleet of party clowns.

But when, at age 68, Charlie is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he’s forced to confront his mortality and come to terms with a chaotic family life that has included five marriages—four of which ended badly—and has caused the bitter estrangement of his two eldest children. His youngest son, Jake, the only Barnes sibling who remains close to his father, is a novelist who takes on the project of chronicling Charlie’s “perfectly failed life.” From moments of rollicking humor to episodes of deep pathos, Jake strives to capture his father’s utterly ordinary, strikingly tumultuous biography with as much fidelity to the facts as he’s able to muster while keeping it “honest, but respectable.”

In addition to its autofictional component, A Calling for Charlie Barnes contains a strong metafictional element, as Jake comments frequently and incisively on the challenges of storytelling, even assuming the mantle of unreliable narrator almost with a sense of pride: “Like reliability exists anywhere anymore,” he writes, “like that’s still a thing,” reminding the reader of “the power you have when you control the narrative.”

Ferris’ control of his own narrative is impeccable, but that doesn’t mean readers shouldn’t be prepared for the frequent wicked curveballs he delivers with evident zest. A Calling for Charlie Barnes has plot twists as manifold as its protagonist’s cruelly dashed dreams, but when Steady Boy’s story reaches its end, it’s a reminder of how little we know about the ones we love and the fact that even the humblest life story encompasses unfathomable depths.

For the audiobook, Nick Offerman delivers a powerful performance as Jake Barnes.

A flailing commune. A lead singer of a touring rock band. Sex, drugs and then even more sex and drugs. Zoe Whittall’s taut novel The Spectacular has all the trappings to become the season’s dishiest read. It’s also a gem of literary fiction. 

Whittall, a poet and novelist who has also been a writer on the sitcom “Schitt’s Creek,” introduces three women with very different plans for their lives. Missy is a 20-something rock star with a penchant for drugs and a love’em-and-leave’em attitude toward men. Early in The Spectacular, she is upset to learn that she is pregnant. Carola, Missy’s mother, has provided maternal succor to many, first at a hippie commune and later at a yoga ashram. But she struggles to show up for her own daughter and, in many ways, to show up for herself. Finally there’s Ruth, Carola’s mother-in-law, whose sacrifices as a young immigrant in Canada set the stage for her family’s life. 

The plot of The Spectacular isn’t clearly defined; all three women’s stories connect at certain points, and the narrative jumps forward and backward in time. But this is not a typical sprawling family drama, and in Whittall’s smart and capable hands, these unconventional women are given the space to experience their full, complicated lives. Whittall takes the long view with this multigenerational arc to explore the responsibilities of motherhood, the boundaries of biology and the price for women’s freedom to live fully actualized lives.

Award-winning Israeli writer David Grossman’s More Than I Love My Life is a complex novel about the secrets that scar three generations of women for a lifetime.

Upon her 90th birthday, family matriarch Vera Novak reunites with her daughter, Nina, after five years of separation. Both Vera and Nina have committed the almost unpardonable act of abandoning young daughters—Vera when Nina was 6, and Nina when her own daughter, Gili, was even younger. The circumstances surrounding Vera’s and Nina’s departures are complex, slowly revealed and come to dominate all three women’s emotional lives.

When Nina, who has spent several years on a tiny island between Lapland and the North Pole, announces that she’s in the early stages of dementia, she asks Gili, a writer and filmmaker now approaching her 40s, and Gili’s father, Rafael, formerly a film director himself, to record Vera’s story. The novel reaches its climax when the foursome journeys to the island of Goli Otok, off the coast of Croatia, once home to a notorious labor camp and reeducation center for opponents of the Tito regime in the former Yugoslavia. Vera was sent there after the death of her husband under circumstances she’s withheld from Nina all her life. 

In harrowing passages that alternate with the present action, Vera recalls two months of her nearly three-year imprisonment when she was marched daily to a cliff top and forced to stand in the blazing sun, her only companion a sapling she shaded with her body.

Vera, Nina and Gili are memorable characters, each suffering in different but equally profound ways. Grossman effectively inhabits the consciousnesses of these women and doesn’t spare the reader any of their considerable emotional pain. He’s a sympathetic if unfailingly honest chronicler of their anguish. A reader doesn’t have to identify with the particulars of the women’s stories to appreciate how the consequences of fateful choices can reverberate down through the generations.