Author Jane Johnson’s portfolio is extensive to say the least. An editor, novelist and historian, she has edited for Dean Koontz and other big names, and written several novels for children and adults, including the film tie-in books to The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. Her latest novel, The Sea Gate, is a beautiful story of love, loss and pain, bouncing between wartime memories of the 1940s and present day.

Set in the gorgeous seascape of Cornwall, England, the novel explores the trials and tribulations of two women: bold and eccentric Olivia Kitto, now in her 90s; and Becky, her 30-something cousin who has learned about Olivia through letters she discovered after her mother’s very recent passing.

After an unexpected fall that led to a stint in the hospital, Olivia desperately needs help restoring her beloved home in Cornwall. Becky, needing an escape from a despondent life in London, decides she’ll take on the responsibility that would have otherwise belonged to her late mother. Olivia’s memory is not quite what it used to be, but she remembers enough to know that the renovation of her home will need to include a few repairs that could quite literally unearth some troublesome secrets that she has managed to hide for so long. Becky, being naturally inquisitive, uncovers them anyway and eventually connects the dots that tell a scary tale of murders, Nazis and the courage it takes to protect the ones you truly love at any cost.

All of that—plus dives into history, a mind-blowing landscape and even a love story—make The Sea Gate a pleasant read.

In Gail Tsukiyama’s eighth novel, a small Japanese community on Hawaii’s Big Island is thrown into chaos in 1935 when the town’s golden boy, Daniel Abe, returns home after several years away on the mainland. His homecoming coincides with the eruption of Mauna Loa, a portentous omen, as the locals have long viewed its seismic activity as the manifestation of the mercurial moods of Pele, the goddess of volcanoes and fire and the creator of the Hawaiian Islands.

As Daniel works to resettle into his former home and make peace with a tragedy that occurred while working as a doctor in Chicago, dormant secrets and sins of the past come bubbling up. Tensions rise further when he and the villagers learn that the lava flow from Mauna Loa is headed directly for them.

With The Color of Air, Tsukiyama revisits themes that have been constant over the course of her 20-year career, tenderly exploring the complicated web of family and the resilient nature of the human spirit, while also shedding light on an important period of Asian history, this time the indentured servitude of Asian people on the sugar plantations that were once Hawaii’s lifeblood. As always, Tsukiyama’s storytelling is deeply compassionate, undoubtedly buoyed by her personal ties to the material (her father was Japanese American by way of Hawaii), which lends a quiet and sincere intimacy to the proceedings.

There is plenty of interpersonal drama in this twisting tale of love and loss, but the novel’s true joy and beauty come from the intensely atmospheric writing. Tsukiyama’s prose is lush and sensual, fully immersing the reader in this pocket of paradise and bringing the island’s spirits to life. She elevates Hawaii from a simple setting to a character as dynamic and vital as its human inhabitants.

An intoxicating blend of historical events and fiction, The Color of Air is a richly rewarding reading experience perfect for fans of Lisa See or Isabel Allende, or anyone looking for a magical love story that transcends time.

When Desiree Vignes returns to Mallard, Louisiana, in 1968 after running away 14 years earlier, people take note—especially because she’s accompanied by her dark-skinned 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The black citizens of Mallard believe that lighter skin is better, an idea that’s been championed since the town’s founding back in 1848. All these years later, the townspeople “weren’t used to having a dark child amongst them and were surprised by how much it upset them.”

That’s just part of the masterful plot of The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett’s exquisite second novel, which weaves together scenes from the 1950s through the ’90s, tackling such issues as racism, identity, gender and inherited trauma. Family ties and secrets were at the heart of Bennett’s bestselling debut, and she continues to explore these themes here, this time concentrating on sisterhood. The title refers to Desiree’s identical twin, Stella, who has turned her back on her family, married her white boss and is living in California as a white woman, a secret unbeknownst to her husband and daughter, Kennedy.

This is a novel to be devoured slowly, not only for its intriguing plot and exploration of vital issues but also for its gorgeous writing. Bennett digs deep into the history of colorism and racism in America and explores how far their poisons can reach. As young girls, Stella and Desiree witness the lynching of their father by angry white men. This tragedy haunts his surviving family, its effects reverberating for generations to come.

At the novel’s core is not only family but also community, from Mallard to the privileged, seemingly progressive Los Angeles neighborhood where Stella lives with her family. When a black television star and his family move in across the street from Stella, it poses a unique dilemma that unfolds in a multitude of rewarding scenes. Soon the lives of cousins Jude and Kennedy intersect with plot twists reminiscent of Twelfth Night, which the novel references.

The Vanishing Half calls to mind the work of Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout. Bennett writes like a master, creating rich worlds filled with a broad cast of characters, all shining brightly in memorable moments both big and small. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read about how Brit Bennett’s mother inspired The Vanishing Half.

Journalist Connie Schultz won a Pulitzer Prize for her columns in Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer, stories that “provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged.” So it should come as no surprise that her debut novel, The Daughters of Erietown, is a plain-spoken elegy to small-town, working-class women with big stories to tell.

The novel opens with a prologue set in 1975, as college-bound Samantha “Sam” McGinty is leaving behind her hometown, Erietown, but carrying plenty of emotional baggage along with her vintage suitcase. On the road trip to Kent State, she’s accompanied by her parents, Brick and Ellie, and younger brother, Reilly. It’s a trip that hints at Sam’s childhood scars even before the story begins to unfold through a series of flashbacks, starting in 1944.

After being abandoned by her ne’er-do-well parents, Ellie is raised by her grandparents, kind and decent folks whose old age has been interrupted by the demands of another round of child rearing. The youngest of 12 children, Brick grows up with a violent, alcoholic father, who is mourning the death of his favorite son, killed in the war, and a loving mother, who is also a victim of the patriarch’s wrath. By the time Ellie and Brick are teenagers—she’s a cheerleader, he’s the captain of the basketball team—the young lovers are inseparable and looking forward to college, careers and eventually marriage and a family.

But those dreams are dashed by an unplanned pregnancy, a quickie marriage and a move to a dilapidated rental house near the electric plant where Brick finds employment. Before long, the young couple and their baby, Sam, have settled into a routine, with Ellie raising their child and visiting with friends, and Brick turning to a corner tavern and womanizing—with catastrophic consequences.

While Schultz’s compelling narrative and realistic characters will keep readers turning pages into the night, her eye and ear for real-life details set this novel apart from other domestic sagas. Part tragic love story, part powerful testament to shifting cultural norms and the evolution of the women’s movement, The Daughters of Erietown is an impressive first novel with a big heart.

Ava Homa, a writer and activist born and raised in Iran’s Kurdistan province, has embraced the adage to “write what you know” in her stark and elucidating debut novel, Daughters of Smoke and Fire. The broad scope of her story encompasses 50 years of Kurdish history—and the ways Iran has attempted to eradicate that history. In much the same way Native American children were treated by the U.S. government beginning in the late 19th century, Kurdish children are alienated from their roots as early as first grade, when “overnight,” Homa writes, “we were robbed of our language, our heritage.”

Homa centers her novel on a young Kurdish woman named Leila Saman and her family. As a boy, Leila’s father saw his six uncles massacred by Iraqi soldiers, and in the years that followed he was imprisoned and tortured for his leftist activities. Leila and her brother, Chia, grow up vaguely aware of their father’s horrific past, though he never opens up about it. In their 20s, the siblings move to Tehran, where Chia attends the university and Leila works in a bookstore, saving her meager earnings so she can eventually follow her long-held dream of making films “to tell our stories.”

Through the courageous character of Leila, Homa paints a picture of many Kurdish women who have struggled against persecution and the misogyny embedded in religious extremism. When Chia is drawn more and more into the political scene, his activism attracts the attention of the Iranian authorities. He is jailed, and Leila is not allowed to visit her beloved brother for over a year. Frustrated by her inability to help Chia, Leila begins publishing his activist writings online, putting herself in danger as well. Her exodus from her birthplace mirrors that of the author, who now splits her time between Toronto and the Bay Area.

Homa’s remarkable novel serves as a potent and illuminating window into the persecution of the Kurds, which has existed for decades and continues unabated today.

Following The Lighthouse Road and Wintering, Peter Geye’s latest novel about the Eide family, Northernmost, combines a contemporary love story with a historical tale of Arctic travail. 

Minnesota, 2017: Greta no longer loves her husband. On her way to confront him in Oslo, where he has a work event, she spontaneously detours to Hammerfest, a town in northern Norway. There, she visits her family’s graves and discovers a link to her past she’d never known: Her ancestor Odd Eide survived two weeks alone in the Arctic in 1897. His story inspires Greta to tell her own. 

Toggling between Odd’s and Greta’s stories, Northernmost has something for everyone: history, adventure, romance and spiritual awakening. Inspired by Fridtjof Nansen’s true expedition to the farthest point yet reached in the Arctic Circle, Odd’s journey across a sea of white and cold, complete with riveting bear encounters and near starvation, is as harrowing as his return home, where his wife and fellow villagers think he’s dead. Intertwined with the story of the slow rejuvenation of his marriage is the story of Greta’s renewed passion. Both Greta and Odd experience longing and loneliness, stark emotions depicted as clearly as the breathtaking wintry settings. And then, out of the darkness come peace and love as warm as the tropics. 

Strong characters steer the narrative with conviction. Stoic Greta is an independent woman, navigating divorce with both relatable mistakes and self-aware intention. Although not a believer in God, Odd is faithful, living each day for his family. His pithy and personal manner of describing what happens to him, and his feelings about these events, dignify the text. As Greta learns about Odd’s admirable bearing and spirit, she gains resolve, as well as a newfound buoyancy. 

Geye rounds out his Eide family trilogy with a beautiful ode to the enduring human spirit.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing recounts a fascinating narrative of Vietnam through the alternating voices of Hương—a woman born in Vietnam in 1960—and her grandmother, Diệu Lan. Quế Mai is an acclaimed Vietnamese poet, and her vivid images, along with the simplicity of her prose, make the novel propulsive and haunting in its depiction of a deep, nuanced landscape.

Early on, Quế Mai writes, “Only through honesty can we learn about the truth.” That truth is, at times, hard to confront. The Vietnam War-set opening scene—as Hương and her grandmother seek shelter from bombs, only to find that the available hiding places are full of people or cold water or both—is difficult to process, but the novel begs us to keep reading, to see how the two women’s narratives converge, to understand the legacy and complexity of family and place.

In alternating chapters, Quế Mai moves between Hương’s visit to Hanoi in 2012, her survival of the Vietnam War with her late grandmother and Diệu Lan’s harrowing stories of how war, poverty and North Vietnam’s land reform movement ripped their family apart. Diệu Lan’s community turns on her as a result of the politics of the land reform movement, and she is chased off her land, forced to abandon her family and remake her entire life. These historical chapters reveal the complexities of this family and how it has been ruptured by generations of conflict, bolstering our comprehension of how colonialism, violence and the landscape impact a family’s past and present. 

While many recent novels from authors like Ocean Vuong and Viet Thanh Nguyen give glimpses of the Vietnamese American experience, The Mountains Sing offers a tale of Vietnamese history through a Vietnamese lens: neighbors caring for and turning against each other, families split apart by war and attempts at reunification on various scales. We also see the ways that food (foraging for it, cooking it, sharing it, eating it) can bring communities together and rip them apart.

Above all, we see how war impacts the individual. Hương and Diệu Lan are remarkably drawn characters. They’re complex, likable, flawed women, and each is searching to connect with family and understand her community and history. Their pain and joy make the novel and landscape sing.

Charting the story of a family across generations brings with it many pitfalls that could inevitably lead to a weak link in a story’s chain. Walking a path that takes you through many voices, many times and many feelings is enough to get a great many storytellers lost. The same is true of stories with a very particular, even metaphorical sense of structure, as the scaffolding has a tendency to obscure the heart of the piece. So there’s a lot that could have fallen short with a novel like Greenwood, which does all of the above. But with the expert, deft hands of a seasoned carpenter, author Michael Christie carefully and methodically pieces together a story as intricate as the rings within a tree. The result is a deeply compelling novel of family and memory.

In the year 2038, Jacinda “Jake” Greenwood is working off her crippling student debt by working as a guide in the “cathedral” that is one of the world’s last forests. The planet surrounding the cathedral has undergone a “Great Withering,” which left the island as one of the last refuges of old-growth trees. The trees have always felt like home to Jake, but as we meet her, two things happen that make her question everything: a strange development in the trees themselves, and news about her family heritage that shakes her to her core.

From there, Christie works backward and then forward again in time, charting the history of the Greenwood family by moving toward the center of his drama and then back out again, like following the rings of a tree. This sense of formalism could prove stuffy, but Christie creates a sense of poetic, organic symmetry through rich characters and evocative, almost tactile descriptions. Even if readers are sad to leave Jake’s storyline in order to get to know her family, they may become just as captivated by her grandmother, Willow, and the ancestors that come before her.

The structure provides a captivating spine for Greenwood, but what stands out most by the end is the way in which Christie has been able to evoke and give voice to the way the cumulative effect of time and memory weighs on us all in ways both uplifting and terrifying. Greenwood is a towering, profound novel about the things that endure even as the world seems to be moving on.

As the title of Maisy Card’s radiant debut suggests, this is a story of a family shaped and haunted by the past. The Paisley family’s origin story, revealed as the narrative circles down and swims up through eight generations of family life, begins with the particularly cruel form of slavery practiced on Jamaican sugar plantations. 

The novel opens in 2005, when 69-year-old Jamaican-born Stanford Solomon summons his female descendants to his home in Harlem to tell them who he—and they—really are. The women include Stanford’s home healthcare worker, who has no idea that he is the father she thought was long dead. 

Stanford, we learn, began life as Abel Paisley. In a miserable marriage and scarred by his experience as a rookie policeman, Abel leaves Jamaica in 1970 to find work in England along with his friend, the real Stanford. In London, they find work on the docks. When Stanford is crushed by a shipping container, the other dockworkers think the dead man is Abel. All black men look alike, right? Abel, now Stanford, seizes the moment. He abandons his family, still in Jamaica, and goes to New York to start a new life. 

But on this day in 2005, it’s time for a reckoning. This all happens within the first three pages of the novel. There are many other reckonings ahead.

Card is a beguiling storyteller, and These Ghosts Are Family is layered with fraught family relationships arising from the complicated legacies of the racial divide in Jamaica and in the United States. Card’s characters—even the ghosts—are vividly drawn and compelling. The story, told in a satisfying blend of dialect and standard English, will make the reader consider both the emotional lives of the characters and the worldly circumstances that shaped them and their choices.

Card was born in Jamaica and grew up in Queens, New York. She is a public librarian and now one of our brightest new writers. There is magic in these pages.

In 1929 New Orleans, a young Dominican woman named Adana Moreau writes Lost City, a universe-bending work of science fiction. She writes a sequel, A Model Earth, but just before the new book is ready to be published, Adana falls ill. Knowing she is about to die and will never see the publication of her newest work, she burns the manuscript. In 2004 Chicago, a man discovers a manuscript in his recently deceased grandfather’s apartment. The ensuing journey to deliver the manuscript to the author’s son is enriched by generations of remarkable characters and the complex network of their memories. 

A quick summary does The Lost Book of Adana Moreau no justice. As intriguing as the plot may sound upfront, it can’t speak to the otherworldly beauty of Michael Zapata’s writing. Don’t even bother trying to mark all the gorgeous passages that give you goosebumps, because there wouldn’t be much left unmarked. Zapata’s lyrical style has firm roots in Gabriel García Márquez’s work, with a boldness of delivery to the tune of Jorge Luis Borges. Much of this book is a story-within-a-story, a mise en abyme; it is a labyrinthine ode to storytellers. The theme of storytelling works as a suture, weaving through generations and throughout multiple, infinite and parallel universes. 

Something to note is the novel’s treatment of women. While most of the protagonists are male, Zapata crafts female characters who are authors, physicists and master storytellers, who are loved for their intellect and contributions to the universe rather than for their beauty or contributions to the lives of men. Zapata pulls this off in a natural way that doesn’t feel showy or even particularly outright, which is all the more admirable.

As if his captivating writing style weren’t enough, Zapata has treated us to a thrillingly mysterious storyline with a beautiful payoff. The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is his debut novel, and we can only hope it is the first of many.

The Trelawney estate in Cornwall is much like the Trelawney family itself: sprawling, ancient and crumbling. Once among the most breathtaking estates in Britain, it has fallen into disrepair as the Trelawney fortune disappears. Ivy and moss grow through the walls of what were once grand ballrooms. Greenhouses around the property lie in collapsed heaps. Most of the formerly extensive art collection has been sold off, leaving shameful empty patches on the castle walls. As author Hannah Rothschild writes, “As the centuries tripped by, the Earls of Trelawney, their senses and ambition dulled by years of pampered living, failed to develop other skills. Of the twenty-four earls, the last eight had been dissolute and bereft of any business acumen. Their financial ineptitude, along with two world wars, the Wall Street crash, three divorces and inheritance taxes, had dissipated the family’s fortune.” 

As has been the tradition for centuries, Kitto promptly kicks his sister, Blaze, out of the castle when he is named the 24th Earl of Trelawney. The hapless Kitto, who is virtually devoid of employable skills or interests, lives in the castle with his wife, Jane, whose own sizable inheritance has been sunk into the lost cause of maintaining Trelawney. 

Blaze, sent packing with little cash and no plan, has remade herself as an uber-successful financial investor in London. Beautiful, ruthless and utterly lonely, Blaze hasn’t spoken to the family in years. But when an unexpected heir turns up, the family is forced to reengage and find a way to save the house of Trelawney.

Rothschild, author of The Improbability of Love and The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild, is also an accomplished film director and a member of that Rothschild clan (the banking one). Her understanding of the eccentric world of English aristocrats shines throughout this remarkably entertaining novel. Her writing is whimsical yet poignant as she examines how privilege can become a burden, and how an inheritance system so focused on men impacts the women drawn into it. Consider an elderly male relative who marvels at the survival instincts of a young Trelawney woman who is single-mindedly focused on marrying someone wealthy: “He’d never understood women; men were so simple by comparison. Centuries of absolute power had dulled the male brain, whereas women, forced for so long to cajole and manipulate, had evolved into far more complex and capable beings.”

Part comedy of manners, part serious meditation on money and gender roles, House of Trelawney is both deeply thought-provoking and thoroughly fun. 

Amid the chaos of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a woman named Su Lan gives birth. Her husband is nowhere to be found; perhaps he has been rounded up or killed. She and her newborn daughter are alone. This aloneness, as well as its mutations and consequences, will stalk both mother and daughter for the rest of their lives—a gaping negative space of family, country and history. 

So begins Meng Jin’s spectacular and emotionally polyphonic first novel, Little Gods, which in the first few pages may feel like a story centered on Tiananmen but quickly and in the most satisfying way transforms into a meditation on ambition, love and time. In a particularly brilliant act of alchemy, the novel finds new ways to dissect the geopolitical significance of China’s explosive 1980s through the complicated nature of the story’s relationships.

In alternating points of view, Little Gods’ five central narrators slowly piece together what happened to Su Lan, her husband and the life she left behind when she moved to the United States from China to study physics. For the most part, the story is told by or to Liya, Su Lan’s daughter, who returns to China after her mother’s death to try and unearth the past that Su Lan so successfully kept hidden. The narrative is complex without ever being convoluted, and Jin, a Kundiman Fellow who was born in Shanghai and now lives in San Francisco, holds the various strands together flawlessly.

Su Lan is a difficult and singular character of immense depth. What makes Little Gods extraordinary is the way it examines not only the trajectory of its characters’ lives but also their emotional motivations, the reasons why people do what they do and long for what they long for.

 In mining these motivations, Jin produces many of the book’s most beautiful and resonant passages—such as when Liya, nearing the end of her search for her father, thinks, “So badly I wanted to be untethered, because to be untethered meant to be undefined, to have a body rinsed of meaning. I didn’t want my feet tied up in history.”

That Jin has managed to craft such an intimate, emotionally complex story is an awesome achievement. That she managed to do it in her debut novel, doubly so.

Jokha Alharthi makes her American debut with Celestial Bodies, the first book by an Omani woman to be translated into English and the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the coveted Man Booker International Prize.

Although it’s framed as a novel that tracks the lives of three sisters, each navigating love and marriage within Oman’s rapidly evolving society, Celestial Bodies is far from a Middle Eastern Pride & Prejudice. Complex and challenging, Alharthi’s novel is less interested in chasing happily ever afters than in exploring Oman’s history of slavery, its cultural and class dynamics and the power of its women within a shifting but resolute patriarchy.

Celestial Bodies is comprised of nonlinear vignettes that highlight a dizzying number of members from a sprawling Omani family over the course of multiple generations. (The family tree at the book’s beginning is critical.) Each character is often given only a few pages—just enough to reveal some tantalizing or illuminating tidbit—before we are whisked on to someone else. Readers will have to work to assemble a cohesive portrait from the beautifully rendered puzzle pieces that Alharthi has scattered before them, but their efforts will be rewarded with a deeply immersive and enlightening reading experience.

The fragmented narrative and lack of obvious plot will not be for everyone, but the novel’s structure emphasizes the immutable passage of time and the changes that have transformed Oman over the last century. These changes are as unsettling for some of the characters as they are for the reader.

We read some books in order to peek into cultures and lives other than our own; others we read to better understand ourselves. Fascinating in its depiction of Oman and its intricacies, yet generous and sweeping in its humanity, Celestial Bodies offers its readers the rare opportunity to do both.