Kit, the protagonist of Kimberly King Parsons’ We Were the Universe, is in trouble. Her 3-year-old daughter, Gilda, is horribly spoiled. Kit’s mother, Tammy, is a hoarder. Her husband, Jad, seems saintly but is simply passive in the face of Gilda’s commandeering of their lives. Worst of all, Kit’s sister, Julie, is dead. 

Kit is the last person you’d think would break herself on the wheel of domesticity. Still quite young when the book begins, she was once a smart, snarky, adventurous girl from Wink, Texas, who lusted after men and women (and still does). She enjoyed her booze and drugs: She credits LSD trips for getting her through unmedicated childbirth. She played bass guitar in a band with Julie and their friend Yesenia. All of the girls liked altered states of consciousness, but unlike the other two, Julie became hooked. The band collapsed. Julie lived with their mother in squalor. Then, she died.

What’s puzzling for the reader and alarming for Kit’s friends and family is that, though Julie’s death occurred in the last days of Kit’s pregnancy, it’s only now that Kit’s grief is starting to drive her crazy. Parsons, author of the short story collection Black Light, gives us some clues as to why. Mothering Gilda has ground Kit down to a nub. Does she long for or dread the day when this tantrum-throwing, co-sleeping, still-nursing gremlin will stop needing her, when Gilda, like Julie, will leave? A brief scene near the end of the book throws a klieg light on the last days of the sisters’ relationship. Without revealing what happens, it becomes clear that Kit has been living life as penance: performing motherhood as an endless martyrdom, abjuring the things that gave her joy (even if they weren’t exactly good for her), eclipsing her once-vibrant self. If you’re in the market for a sad yet funny yet hopeful book, We Were the Universe might be it.

Some writers have a gift for making ordinary lives as compelling as anything you’d find in an epic adventure. This ability to chart the human condition goes beyond technical proficiency or what we’d generally consider literary merit. Sunjeev Sahota has this gift, and his latest novel, The Spoiled Heart, wrings maximum emotional impact out of a seemingly unremarkable life. 

The Spoiled Heart centers on Nayan, a working-class man living in England who was devastated by a tragic loss two decades earlier. Ever since, Nayan has thrown himself into his union, and into caring for his aging father. He’s never wanted much of a romantic life, until the standoffish and oddly beguiling Helen Fletcher returns to town. Nayan finds himself drawn to Helen, even as she seems determined to push him away, and as a union election threatens to consume his world. What draws Nayan to Helen? What drives him to keep pushing, both for her and for success as a union leader? What makes a man like Nayan tick? 

These are the questions that Sahota’s narrator, an acquaintance and eventual friend of Nayan’s, sets out to answer, and it’s through this narrator’s eyes that the particular brilliance of The Spoiled Heart becomes clear. By framing Nayan’s story through the eyes of another storyteller, Sahota digs deep into the psyche of his protagonist, while asking provocative questions about whose story this really is and how much of it is true. There’s an element of voyeurism that lends something thrilling and incisive to the whole story.

Sahota’s prose is as precise, confident and startlingly wise when describing the depths of tragedy as the banalities of a transaction in a local shop. Nayan’s internal life, as a broken man who’d rather fix others than himself, is rendered in powerful, stealthily profound sentences, and all the while it’s accompanied by the sense that the author is building to something bigger, darker and more revelatory. When Sahota finally reaches that moment in The Spoiled Heart‘s final pages, it feels both shattering and strangely inevitable.

The Spoiled Heart is one of those books that will take root quickly and grow in your soul. It’s another powerful achievement for Sahota, and a novel that even readers who are leery of contemporary realism will enjoy.

Cliche tells us that reading a work in translation is like taking a shower in a raincoat. Some stories, however, are powerful enough to permeate that language barrier, to bypass the cliche and completely pierce us. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Silence of the Choir, translated by Alison Anderson, is one such powerful book. Taking place in a small town in Sicily, this story lives up to its title, bringing together a rich and varied group of voices. This polyvocality allows Sarr to explore the main issue of the book, immigration, without becoming either heavy-handed or diminishing: In an increasingly metropolitan world, immigration is an issue that impacts everyone, and all voices have something to say about it, whether we want to hear them or not.

The story centers around the ragazzi (Italian for “guys”), a group of 72 immigrant men who have arrived in a small town in the Sicilian countryside called Altino. A group of workers from the Santa Marta Association has taken them in, though each worker has different feelings about the ragazzi and their fate. For one, Dr. Salvatore Pessoto is a cynic who finds it hard to have empathy for the ragazzi, especially considering how unlikely it is that any of them will be allowed to stay in the country. The doctor is chastised by his coworkers: a nun, Sister Maria, and her childhood friend, a lawyer named Sabrina, both of whom have devoted their lives to helping people, though in different and sometimes conflicting ways. Meanwhile, we also hear from the ragazzi themselves, like Fousseyni Traoré, who, upon first awakening in Altino, is unsure whether he is actually alive. Once the ragazzi realize they have reached safety, they rejoice, having completed the arduous, deadly journey across the Mediterranean.

There are many other characters in Altino whom Sarr introduces us to, each adding to The Silence of the Choir’s complex diorama of immigration. One of the most enjoyable is old Giuseppe Fantini, a retired, reclusive poet who hasn’t written in over a decade. From Giuseppe, we get a beautiful, delicate view of Altino and its people, reminding us that no matter who currently calls a certain place home, no one and nothing is ever fixed. Sarr delivers a moving, dynamic story, shedding light on the joys and consequences of contemporary immigration.

Celebrated children’s and young adult author Renée Watson’s first novel for adults is set in Portland, Oregon. skin & bones follows 40-year-old protagonist Lena Baker, who wears many hats as the daughter of a pastor; a priceless friend to Aspen and Kendra; the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the county library system and the loving mother of 8-year-old Aaliyah.

We first meet Lena at a doctor’s appointment. Ignoring the symptoms she came to them about, the medical staff insist on taking her blood sugar and blood pressure. Even after the tests come back normal, they keep returning to her weight instead of the issue she needs help with. As a Black woman with a large body, Lena has been through similar situations countless times before, where peoples’ assumptions about her overshadow everything else.

Lena knows she is brilliant and radiant. However, her power to push through the noise of others’ biases finally falters when heartbreak from a serious romance makes her second-guess her beauty and self-worth. When these negative feelings start affecting her daughter too, Lena gets a wake-up call. But how do you mend a broken heart? And more importantly, how do you mend a broken system in which standards for beauty and success are so narrowly defined?

Narrated in the first person, Lena’s journey unfolds in short chapters that are lyrical and poetic. The intertwining of Portland’s Black history, thanks to Lena’s job as the Director of DEI, adds tremendous depth to the story. Watson’s supporting characters build a strong sense of family and community, collectively showcasing the importance of passing down knowledge from one generation to the next. For anyone intrigued by stories that highlight experiences with race, gender, self-love, family and friendship, skin & bones will resonate in more ways than one.

A violent crime threatens the stability of the middle-class wife and mother at the center of Ethel Rohan’s Sing, I, a thoughtful novel about self-discovery and new beginnings.

Ester Prynn’s mother chose her name in the hopes of making her unforgettable. Ester lives with her husband, Simon, and their two teenage boys in coastal Northern California. Though amicable, the marriage has lost whatever spark it once had, and their younger son is so obsessed with video games he barely comes out of his room. On top of that, Ester’s father has advanced dementia, and she is estranged from her brothers, who remained in Montana after their mother’s death.

When a masked gunman robs the convenience store where Ester works, assaulting both her and her coworker, Crystal, Ester is badly shaken. She quits the store and gets another job as a hostess in an upscale hotel restaurant. Friends encourage her to pursue forgotten interests like singing, but she is haunted by her frustration that the gunman is still free and continuing to commit acts of violence. She’s also troubled by her unexpected attraction to Allie, a manager at the restaurant. Though Ester has long fantasized about an escape, are these feelings worth imploding her life over?

The strength of Sing, I is its focus on the ordinary and the relatable. Ester is a middle-class woman with close friends, but also beholden to her family and trapped in a low wage job. The robbery jumpstarts her out of her stupor and into the role of an active participant in her life. Other characters also struggle with the hardships of starting over, addiction and life’s disappointments.

Though it treads a predictable path, Sing, I nonetheless offers a gentle reminder of the hard-earned growth that can emerge from disruption and change.

A well-stocked bookstore would have no trouble filling an entire section with novels about art and artists, from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. Even connoisseurs of art-themed fiction, however, are unlikely to have encountered a protagonist like Jay Gates, the down-on-his-luck artist at the center of Hari Kunzru’s brilliant new novel, Blue Ruin. For anyone who has tried their hand at creating art, Blue Ruin offers satisfying criticisms of the capricious industry’s spotty record of anointing winners and losers.

Jay is a British man of Jamaican ancestry in his 40s, who was once a promising art student. At the start of the novel, he’s a COVID-19 survivor and undocumented immigrant in upstate New York, sleeping in his beat-up car and eking out a living by delivering groceries.

On one delivery to a craftsman cottage overlooking a lake at the end of a mile-long driveway, the masked person awaiting his arrival turns out to be Alice, a woman who was briefly Jay’s girlfriend in art school. Alice left Jay for his best friend, Rob, and Alice and Rob have now been married for 15 years. After Jay collapses from fatigue, Alice invites him to stay in a barn on the property until he recovers. Also isolating there are Marshal, Rob’s gallerist, who espouses conspiracy theories and calls COVID-19 “a Chinese bioweapon”; and Nicole, Marshal’s 20-something “trophy girlfriend.”

Coincidence is a dangerous narrative tool to mess around with, but Kunzru pulls it off in Blue Ruin thanks to the subtle characterizations and intricate layers with which he expands his premise. Buried resentments and jettisoned ambitions come to the fore as Kunzru explores themes of racism, opportunism and the inequities of privilege and hardship. The result is an exceptional work that finds new variations on the familiar chestnut that people aren’t always what they seem.