In Akwaeke Emezi’s brief, remarkable second novel for adults, the reader knows from the start that the central character, Vivek Oji, is dead. After riots in the marketplace of their Nigerian town, Vivek’s mother discovers his naked body placed “like a parcel, like a gift” at the family’s doorstep. Why was he killed? Who killed him? Who was he? Answers emerge incompletely, surprisingly and in fragments as the novel progresses and casts its spell.

“I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was,” Vivek says from somewhere outside life. “Every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them.”

One of the brilliant aspects of this novel is how Emezi makes a person’s invisibility visible. As a child, Vivek is bright, beautiful and by turns violently angry and girlishly shy. He is often beset by fugue states during which his body is present and his consciousness vanishes. Vivek’s family is loving but unable to comprehend him. His extended family is populated by “Nigerwives,” women from India, the Philippines or Sweden who are married to Nigerian men. Outdated sexual traditions and identities—multiple wives for Nigerian men and a sanctified horror of gay people, for example—still prevail in these families. After being forced to leave university, Vivek spends more and more time with the daughters of his extended family. These daughters are of a new generation and seem to understand and protect him.

Yes, it takes a village to raise a child. But, Emezi implies, it takes a culture and its mythologies to erase a child. The Death of Vivek Oji is a profound exploration of the boundaries of personal, sexual and cultural transition.

Leah Franqui knows a thing or two about straddling different cultures and identities. She is a Puerto Rican Jewish American who lives in Mumbai with her Kolkata-born husband, and her perspective informs her latest novel. Set in the busy, noisy and chaotic world of modern Mumbai, Mother Land is the story of an expat, Rachel Meyer, who knows she’s living the dream—but whose dream exactly, she isn’t sure.

Upon meeting her now-husband Dhruv in a Manhattan bar, Rachel instantly fell in love with his boyish charm and assertiveness. His sense of purpose was a welcome change in her listless life, so she married him and followed him to India to make a home together.

To Rachel, Mumbai is mesmerizing—at first. Then cultural expectations, language barriers and mounting loneliness start revealing all the voids that can’t easily be filled. Things get even more confusing when Swati, Rachel’s mother-in-law, arrives unannounced one day from Kolkata with the intention of leaving her husband and moving in permanently with the newlyweds. The shock of it all, coinciding with Dhruv’s departure for a monthlong business trip, leaves Rachel paralyzed with fear. Thus, Franqui resurrects the age-old struggle between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law—and topples it with a spot-on exploration of what it means to stand up against other people’s expectations.

Mother Land is unexpected. It’s funny and relatable even if your mother-in-law isn’t anything like Swati. It’s a tender tale of two women who are lost and alone, but who eventually become allies and each other’s biggest champions.

Rachel Beanland’s debut novel opens in 1934 Atlantic City. It’s a blue-sky June day, and most of the Adler family is enjoying the beach: 7-year-old Gussie; Gussie’s grandparents Esther and Joseph; Anna, the young German Jewish woman the family has taken in; and Florence, Esther and Joseph’s younger daughter, a Wellesley College student and star swimmer. Florence is such a competitive swimmer that she’s training to swim the English Channel later that summer. One family member who is not on the beach is Fannie, Florence’s older sister and Gussie’s mom, who is pregnant and in the hospital on bed rest, determined not to lose this baby as she lost the last one.

By the end of the day, the Adler family’s world has changed forever. Florence inexplicably drowns, and Esther decides that the family must keep this secret from Fannie, for fear that Fannie will go into early labor. There will be no funeral, no sitting shiva, no outer mourning for Florence.

But that’s not the only secret in this family novel. Each character has reasons to hide something important, which in turn affects their own happiness and relationships. The novel rotates through the perspectives of Gussie, Esther, Joseph, Anna, Fannie, Fannie’s husband and Florence’s devoted young swim coach, Stuart. It’s an ambitious balancing act that occasionally requires a little double-checking as to whose point of view we’re following. As the novel moves forward through the summer, the stress of secrets increases the pressure on each of the characters.

Florence Adler Swims Forever beautifully brings to life Atlantic City in the 1930s, offering the sights, sounds and smells of the beach and the boardwalk, as well as the daily life of Atlantic City’s Jewish community. It also foreshadows, through refugee Anna’s plight, the coming catastrophe of the Holocaust.

Beanland loosely based the novel on the story of her great-great-aunt Florence, who, like Florence Adler, was a competitive swimmer who drowned off the coast of Atlantic City. It’s a worthy tribute and a satisfying historical family drama.

There’s nothing like a great New York City novel, and praise be to the novelists who take us there: Think Cathleen Schine, Elinor Lipman, Emma Straub, Jennifer Egan and now Lee Conell, whose exquisite debut gets to the heart of the city via the super of an Upper West Side co-op and his frustratingly underemployed daughter.

Martin lives in the building’s basement apartment with his wife, Debra, and 24-year-old daughter, Ruby, who has just moved home with an art history degree but no way to pay her student loans. Ruby’s friend Caroline, whose affluent family lives in the co-op penthouse, is also back home, but her wealth has cushioned the transition from college to what-comes-next. Though the girls have been friends since childhood, Ruby has grown increasingly discomfited by Caroline’s obliviousness to how her wealth brings her certain advantages.

The Party Upstairs is told over the course of a single day, beginning with an argument between father and daughter when Martin tries to get Ruby to meditate with him before work. Ruby readies herself for a job interview at the Museum of Natural History and plans to attend Caroline’s fancy penthouse party that night. Meanwhile, Martin’s anxiety is through the roof after dealing with needy tenants and his grumpy daughter, and now vivid memories of a recently deceased tenant are starting to trouble him. 

After a disheartening job interview, Ruby is further provoked by flashbacks of the decades of inequities between herself and Caroline and by an unfortunate run-in with a neighborhood photographer. By the time of the party, Ruby is moved to act out in a way that dramatically disrupts the course of her life and the lives of her parents.

Like Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, The Party Upstairs will make you laugh even as you grapple with how money defines many of its characters’ most significant choices. As chapters alternate between Ruby’s and Martin’s perspectives, Conell’s realistic dialogue and thoughtful plotting take us deep into the often unexpressed shame linked to financial uncertainty. The Party Upstairs is an on-the-nose, of-the-moment dark comedy that delves deep into issues of wealth, gender and privilege in the most iconic of American cities.

As problems go, a surfeit of money is a nice one to have. Some might argue, however, that wealth is like a set of weights: Those who have it will likely be stronger than those who don’t. But mishandle it, and the self-imposed strains can be painful.

The clash between rich and poor animates Friends and Strangers, J. Courtney Sullivan’s quietly perceptive new novel about two women on different sides of America’s economic divide: a new mother and the college-age nanny she hires for her son.

Elisabeth Ronson, a former New York Times journalist and author of two bestselling books, has moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York with her husband, Andrew, and Gil, their baby conceived through in vitro fertilization. The move was precipitated by the fellowship Andrew received from a nearby college to develop a solar-powered grill. Elisabeth won’t accept money from her rich, philandering father and insists that her needy sister, Charlotte, eager to build a lifestyle brand on Instagram, do the same.

As Sullivan skillfully shows, family is not Elisabeth’s only problem. Another is loneliness in her suburban neighborhood of stay-at-home mothers. Elisabeth also needs help caring for Gil as she struggles to write a third book, so she hires Sam, a senior at the town’s women’s college, to watch him.

Sullivan does a fine job depicting Elisabeth’s and Sam’s respective dilemmas, as Elisabeth learns to live on less money and Sam deals with her family’s meager finances. Among the well-drawn supporting characters are Clive, Sam’s English boyfriend who’s a decade her senior, and whom Elisabeth suspects may be taking advantage of her; George, Elisabeth’s father-in-law, who rails against the inequities of society; and the poorly paid staff at the college kitchen where Sam also works.

The tension sometimes wanes, but Friends and Strangers is at its best when Sullivan emphasizes the widening class difference in America between people who can afford $46 peony-scented hand soaps and those worried about meeting basic needs. Sullivan dares to further complicate her narrative by showing that financial security doesn’t guarantee happiness. The result is a poignant look at the biases of modern society.

Sky is only 10 years old, but she’s experienced as much pain and confusion as someone three times her age. Although she was abandoned at a fire station as a newborn, she found a home with her adoptive parents. Now she’s starting over again, and this time she’s old enough to be aware of the pain. Sky’s adoptive parents have died in a car crash, and their will designates that Leo, Sky’s father’s best friend from childhood, would become her guardian.

Leo is torn up at the loss of his friend, and now he must create a loving home for Sky. Her presence sends Leo and his husband, Xavier, into a tailspin. The couple never wanted children, and Xavier is committed to their life in Boston. Leo doesn’t understand why he was named Sky’s guardian, but he loves the girl and the Massachusetts island where he was raised. He relates to her; they are some of the only dark-skinned people on the island, and they’ve both worked to find the people whom they can call home.

In My Kind of People, novelist Lisa Duffy paints a portrait of a community of people trying to find out who they are—and with whom they can be themselves. As neighbors jump in to help raise Sky, or to weigh in on what Leo could do better, Sky and Leo wrestle with their understanding of their changing circumstances. What caused the crash that killed some of the most important people in their lives? And can they form a new family with each other?

Duffy’s story is sweet but never cloying, and she’s unafraid to depict uncomfortable circumstances as the tale unfolds. My Kind of People is an emotionally complex tale that leaves some threads dangling—much like life—but still comes to a satisfying and hopeful conclusion.

KJ Dell’Antonia’s The Chicken Sisters opens when Amanda Pogociello applies to “Food Wars,” a show that features culinary rivalries. As a practical woman, she has little hope that she’ll be chosen, but her story is compelling: In the late 19th century, two sisters founded two fried chicken joints, Chicken Mimi’s and Chicken Frannie’s, in nowheresville outside of Merinac, Kansas. The rivalry continues to the present day.

Amanda works for the more upscale Chicken Frannie’s. Her mother, Barbara, operates Chicken Mimi’s, and Amanda is persona non grata there. Barbara wouldn’t even let Amanda use Mimi’s restroom when she was pregnant and desperate. To Amanda’s shock, the producers at “Food Wars” are intrigued. The first prize is $100,000, which both eateries need badly.

Amanda contacts her sister, Mae, a semi-celebrity who fled Merinac at the first chance she got and is now a snooty lifestyle guru. Mae dismisses the idea of appearing on “Food Wars” because it’s beneath her and a rival to her own show, which is (of course) named “Sparkling.” But when Mae gets fired, she’s quick to change her mind.

What follows upends the expectations of Amanda, Mae, their kids, Barbara, just about everyone who lives in this little Kansas hamlet and even the show’s producer, a sweetly cutthroat woman named Sabrina. The tale itself upends any expectations of rural, Green Acres-esque silliness. Yet Dell’Antonia, the author of How to Be a Happier Parent, takes her characters seriously, albeit always with gentle humor.

In the end, “Food Wars” proves to be a catastrophe for Barbara and her daughters, as old wounds, resentments, postponed dreams and layers of grief are peeled back and allowed to heal. And the mean girls of “Food Wars” and “Sparkling” get what’s coming to them. It all works to make The Chicken Sisters a delight.

I only had to read the title of Ilana Masad’s debut novel to be hooked. It doesn’t spoil the plot to learn that within the first few pages of All My Mother’s Lovers, the mother in question, Iris, dies, leaving behind her daughter, Maggie; her husband, Peter; her son, Ariel; and at least some of the titular lovers. 

Iris left each of these men a letter to be read in the event of her death. Maggie, appalled at the revelation of her mother’s secret life, takes it upon herself to hand-deliver them. Lucky for her, all these chaps live within driving distance. Like Maggie, the reader spends much of the novel wondering why Iris, whose marriage and family have been a source of endless joy, would want to step out on her husband—and not once, but multiple times until the day of her death. Was she trying to work out the trauma of her ghastly first marriage? Sort of, but not really. The reasons don’t add up, reminding the reader of life’s untidiness. Maggie, after all, knew her mother for 27 years and had no idea who she really was. Indeed, the two women were pretty opaque to each other. Iris could never quite approve of her daughter’s sexuality, and Maggie actually believed, for a long time, that her mother disliked her.

Masad’s writing style is easy and straightforward, even if her characters aren’t. Maggie was a bit of a mess even before her mother’s death. She’s prickly, rude and histrionic but craves love even as she’s wary of it. She and Ariel have made a lifelong game out of being mean to each other, and both children are polar opposites of their gentle, wise, accepting dad. Masad gives Peter a counterpart in Maggie’s meltingly sweet girlfriend, Lucia. It’s not a coincidence that the beginning and end of the novel find Lucia and Maggie in an intimate situation.

A story of good but difficult characters and the openhearted people who love them, All My Mother’s Lovers is a compassionate and insightful work.

No one engages a reader quite like Emma Straub. I was 30 pages into her warmhearted new novel, All Adults Here, before I even realized it. Her writing is witty, informal and deceptively simple, drawing readers in as if they’re having a conversation with a close friend.

Events take place in a small, fictitious town in New York’s Hudson Valley and center on the Strick family. The matriarch is 68-year-old widower Astrid, who witnesses an acquaintance being struck and killed by a school bus. This brings to light Astrid’s long-standing animus toward the victim, who, years ago, informed Astrid that her eldest son, Elliot—now a successful builder, married with kids—had been spotted kissing another boy. The fact that Astrid admonished Elliot, albeit subtly, has plagued her ever since, particularly now that she is in a same-sex relationship with her hairdresser, Birdie.

Indeed, gender and sexuality are some of the central themes of the novel. Astrid’s daughter, 37-year-old Porter, pregnant via a sperm bank, embarks on an affair with her former high school boyfriend, who is married with kids. Astrid’s youngest son, Nicky, and his wife have sent their daughter, Cecelia, to live with Astrid after a scandal involving online pedophilia in her former Brooklyn school. At Cecelia’s new school, she befriends August, who is transitioning into Robin.

Along the way, Straub imbues the novel with her trademark humor and comic turns of phrase, particularly Porter’s one-liners. Straub has taken on a lot of issues—gender politics, abortion, bullying, sexual predators—and it’s to her credit that the subject matter never seems heavy-handed or detracts from the momentum. The characters are believable, and events unfold naturally.

I found myself stepping onto a few trapdoors while trying to predict the plot. Having read Straub’s other novels, I should have known better; she’s always one step ahead.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Emma Straub shares a glimpse into her life as a bookstore owner and library lover.

Carter Sickels’ The Prettiest Star imagines a difficult prodigal son homecoming. It’s 1986, and Brian Jackson has returned to his small southern Ohio hometown. Six years before, Brian left home for New York City, where he found friends, a measure of acceptance and love with his partner, Shawn. Now Brian is 24 and ill with late-stage AIDS. He’s also alone; Shawn has already died, isolated in a hospital ward. 

Brian’s family doesn’t know—or rather, they’ve chosen not to accept—that he is gay. The novel rotates through the first-person perspectives of Brian; his mom, Sharon; and his 14-year-old sister, Jess. Sharon is paralyzed, unable to figure out how to be a parent to Brian and remain a wife to Travis, who pretends that his son isn’t gay and isn’t sick. Observant Jess, who shares with her brother a love of whales and David Bowie songs, struggles to find her place in this changed world. And Brian narrates through a series of video recordings from the camera he carries with him, as Shawn asked, so those who die of AIDS won’t be forgotten. 

Soon, word of Brian’s return, along with the suspicion that he has AIDS, gets around town. Friends, strangers and their own extended family begin to shun Brian, Sharon, Travis and Jess, often in overtly hateful ways. 

Sickels does an excellent job showing the mix of panic, homophobia and bullying that AIDS once engendered. He also evokes the mid-1980s and rural small-town life with the right amount of period and place detail. Brian’s narration occasionally feels too composed and lyrical for a 24-year-old man talking into a camera, but that’s a small quibble.

While the story is bleak, it moves along at a clip, offering some surprises and a couple of unlikely, brave heroes. The Prettiest Star is a sensitive portrayal of a difficult time in our recent history.

Lee Matalone’s promising, poetic first novel traces the story of Cybil—a Japanese orphan of World War II, adopted by an American family—and her daughter, Chloe, who lives in Virginia and moves into a new home when she separates from her husband.

The author’s conceit is to construct the drama by inspecting Chloe’s new house room by room. Chloe’s friend Beau, a Louisiana-born gay sculptor and college professor, helps her in this task as she slowly paints and decorates her nondescript home. Her mother watches from afar. Both Cybil and Beau warn that creating a living environment is temporary; “the decay,” says Beau, is “impatiently waiting to begin.” Matalone observes that “part of building a house necessitates living in denial that it would ever fall apart.”

That’s true, of course, for relationships and for lives. Chloe’s estranged husband seems to be falling apart. When he is diagnosed with cancer, he insists she move out, because “we must remember this house in its complete happiness.” It is unclear how much this directive is influenced by an affair Chloe enters into.

Some of the best scenes occur in the bathroom, where Chloe and Beau gather with no self-consciousness to chat. They have a strange intimacy. They do not have sex, but they conceive a child together. The result is a boy named Ru. It is not stated, but the name could be short for Ruelle, which is the space between a bed and a wall, a space where Chloe liked to sleep as a child.

Home Making is short on action, long on furniture and color schemes, and Matalone misses the opportunity to delve into Chloe’s mixed ancestry. When the house is complete, it is time for Chloe to move on. It will be interesting to see where Matalone herself moves from here.

You’ve probably seen a similar story in the news: A pretty American teenager meets a tragic end while on vacation in a tropical paradise. The 24-hour news cycle is fueled by every salacious detail of the girl’s private life, and with every new revelation, hasty conclusions are drawn. The lurid media frenzy cruelly obscures what should be obvious—that the dead girl was a real person, someone’s daughter or perhaps someone’s sister.

Alexis Schaitkin’s magnetic debut, Saint X, begins on the first day of 7-year-old Claire Thomas’ family vacation on a fictional Caribbean island. Claire’s 18-year-old sister, Alison—gorgeous, brilliant and on the sullen cusp of adulthood—disappears on the last day. When her body is found, local police make some arrests but can’t make murder charges stick, which drives her grieving parents even further around the bend. Claire, already a “reticent, prickly” child with an obsessive streak, struggles to fit into her new identity as the surviving sister: “I was an only child now, hopelessly insufficient.” 

But time does its good work. The Thomases transplant themselves from the East Coast to Pasadena, California, where Claire decides to go by Emily, her middle name. A fresh start in a sunny setting is what she and her family need to forge a manageable path through the rest of their lives. If Alison haunts her little sister throughout childhood, into college and beyond, it is more or less as a friendly ghost. 

This relative peace is upended in a moment. Emily, now an editorial assistant living in Brooklyn, has a chance encounter with an employee of the Saint X resort where her family vacationed—a man with whom Alison was seen on the night she died. Emily is yanked instantly into an obsessive web of her own making, a cold case unceremoniously reopened: Who was her sister, really? And what really happened to her?

Saint X is a nuanced examination of class, privilege and the terrible ways that tragedy can echo forward in time. Schaitkin embellishes a strong plot with psychologically complex main characters and a chorus of devastatingly incomplete narratives from peripheral characters about what really took place on Saint X. This is a must-read for fans of literary suspense.

A contemporary North Carolina suburb might seem an unlikely setting for Shakespearean tragedy. But that’s exactly what unfolds in Therese Anne Fowler’s A Good Neighborhood, whose first paragraph hints at what’s coming: “Later this summer when the funeral takes place, the media will speculate boldly on who’s to blame.”

A loose reworking of Romeo and Juliet, A Good Neighborhood opens on the day the Whitmans, a white family, move into the overly fancy house they’ve built in Oak Knoll, the “good neighborhood” of the title. Oak Knoll’s residents are proud of their trees, their progressive outlook and the neighborhood’s multiracial makeup.

Most dismayed by the Whitmans’ presence is next-door neighbor Valerie Alston-Holt, an ecology and forestry professor and mom to high school senior Xavier. Valerie is black; her husband and Xavier’s dad, who died when Xavier was a toddler, was white. Valerie is pretty sure that Brad and Julia Whitman are racist, but she’s also fixated on her magnificent prize oak tree, because the Whitmans, in building their trophy house, have disturbed the tree’s roots, and the tree is starting to die.

Meanwhile Xavier and Juniper, the Whitmans’ sheltered older daughter, fall for one another. They keep their romance secret, as Xavier knows how upset his mom would be, and Juniper took a purity pledge at 13—no dating, no boyfriends, no sex before marriage.

The story ticks forward through the summer, rotating through the viewpoints of Valerie, Brad and Julia, Xavier and Juniper. Throughout, a chorus of neighbors intrudes to speculate and offer background information, an intriguing mix of omniscient narration and gossipy lamentation. Although the transitions between the chorus and the other perspectives aren’t always seamless, this structure adds depth to the sense of Shakespearean tragedy.

A Good Neighborhood is fast-paced and thoughtful, and like Bruce Holsinger’s The Gifted School, it finds trouble in paradise, mapping the divisions among people who think of themselves as “good.”