Cyrus Shams is, in his own words, “another death-obsessed Iranian man,” fixated on death—but more than that, on martyrdom. He needs his death to matter, for the act of his dying to have a purpose.

Cyrus’ family inheritance is one of pointless death. His mother died when her plane was shot down by American forces over the Persian Gulf; she was traveling to visit her brother, a man decimated by his experiences fighting in the Iran-Iraq War. Cyrus’ father died soon after Cyrus left for college. Uneasily sober after years of chasing addiction, Cyrus decides to write a book on martyrs. To help himself get started, he seeks out an artist in New York City, an older Iranian woman named Orkideh, who, in a Marina Abramovic-style performance, has made herself publicly accessible while she dies of cancer by spending the end of her life in the Brooklyn Museum.

Over several days, Cyrus and Orkideh speak on death, art, nation, victimhood, gratitude and family. In between scenes of their easy connection, we read poems from Cyrus’ book and witness flashbacks to Cyrus’ mother’s, father’s and uncle’s stories. There are also chapters recounting supernatural conversations from Cyrus’ dreams, between his mother and Lisa Simpson, Orkideh and the American president of 2017, his father and the poet Rumi, and an imaginary brother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Martyr! has a certain loudness, between the echo of a weighted Iranian history, the roar of Cyrus’ broken family legacy and his intense internal warfare. Even the book’s title can be taken as a shout, its exclamation point signifying an accusation or revelation. That which quiets the noise is simple enough, delivered in sublime prose from Iranian American poet and debut novelist Kaveh Akbar: “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it,” he writes late in the novel. Akbar has previously published two collections of poetry (Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Pilgrim Bell), and his writing makes just enough time for beauty while never languishing.

Throughout Martyr!, language is a saving grace, if imperfectly so. “I get frustrated this way so often,” Cyrus’ mother says in a flashback. “A photograph can say ‘This is what it was.’ Language can only say ‘This is what it was like.'” Similarly, although a novel cannot capture what life is, its truths and inventions can powerfully gesture toward what life is like: full of both pain and pleasure, with death inevitable, and love a choice.

Kiley Reid’s sophomore effort Come and Get It is a compelling, dialogue-driven novel about consumption, desire and class set at a state university in 2017. Readers who enjoyed Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, will find themselves in welcome territory.

Millie, a woman whose college years were interrupted by helping an ill parent, has returned to the University of Arkansas as a 24-year-old senior, working as a resident assistant in her dorm. Mature and responsible, she fantasizes about Josh, her hunky supervisor, and is diligently saving to purchase a house. Agatha is a visiting faculty member in her late 30s, recently separated from a younger professional dancer who married her for health insurance. At the beginning of the semester, Agatha asks Millie to organize a small group of students for Agatha to interview as part of her research for a potential book on wedding traditions. What starts as an innocent gathering of information becomes a more complicated entanglement when Agatha begins paying Millie for access to the dorm to spy on the students’ personal conversations, which she then writes up as a series of demi-comic pieces for Teen Vogue. Meanwhile, a prank dreamed up by Tyler, the mean girl of the dorm, sparks a vengeful retaliation which threatens both Agatha and Millie’s livelihoods.

This reader’s advice is to follow the money, as much of Come and Get It is embedded in the details of ostensibly insignificant transactions. Reid prefers to serve her themes amid a frothy concoction of witty dialogue, campus capers and unrequited crushes, but underneath it all, her eye is firmly fixed on obsessive consumerism and intersecting issues of race and class. Though no crimes are committed, there are enough errors of judgment, blurred ethical lines and microaggressions to permanently alter the life trajectories of her characters. Yet Reid writes with enormous compassion, showing us flawed humans caught in systems outside of their control who are, mostly, doing the best they can.

For author Leo Vardiashvili, home was Tbilisi, Georgia, until post-Soviet civil unrest forced him and his family to flee to England in the 1990s. Almost two decades would pass before Vardiashvili returned to Tbilisi, finding a pulsing city filled with mere remnants of his childhood memories, places and faces.

Born of this loss and transformation, Vardiashvili’s debut novel Hard by a Great Forest tells the story of Saba Sulidze-Donauri, who has returned to his native city from London under difficult circumstances. Months ago, first his father, Irakli, and then his older brother, Sandro, had been drawn to Tbilisi by the pull of the past, then suddenly dropped out of contact and disappeared. It is now up to Saba to decipher the cryptic clues they left behind and locate his father and brother without arousing suspicion from the Georgian authorities.

Along with the shock of this awful situation, Saba faces the anxiety of returning “home” to find everything unfamiliar and overwhelming. Helping him navigate the streets as well as his emotions is a gregarious taxi driver named Nodar who drives an ancient Volga. Nodar has his own stories of loss camouflaged within this city that has moved on without him. Like young children possessed by an adventurous spirit, Nodar and Saba soldier on, determined to unravel the mystery of the disappearances. Although some brutal moments are hard to bear, Vardiashvili keeps readers invested with the grit and generous spirit of his characters, including Nodar, his resourceful wife Keti, and many long-dead relatives that live on as voices in Saba’s head.

At its simplest, Hard by a Great Forest appeals as a thrilling story of good guys trying to beat the bad ones. It is a great read full of history, mystery and chance reunions that asks the reader to examine how we can move forward when we’re followed by the ghosts of the past.

In Karen Outen’s adroit first novel, Dixon, Descending, Dixon Bryant carries a lot of baggage up Mount Everest. And even more coming down.

Part of that baggage involves his relationship with his brother, Nate. Sixteen months older than Dixon and now approaching 50, Nate, the long-awaited first son, has always been the “gift” to their parents. Charismatic, irrepressible and sometimes irresponsible, Nate is a bright balloon floating high in the air. Dixon, the wise, soulful, solid brother, holds the string. It is Nate who proposes that the brothers become the first Black American men to summit Everest.

Everest and the people who climb it form a world all their own. Outen, whose endnotes describe her passion for the mountain, writes breathtaking passages about the brothers’ experiences there: the competitive companionability of other climbers; the smell and sounds of the ever-shifting mountain; and, of course, the gut-wrenching dangers of the ascent. Nate and Dixon and their climbing team have lighter moments in camp, but as the brothers climb higher, things get deadly serious. In the rarefied air near the summit, slowed by the long line of climbers and barely able to breathe, the brothers have to make impossible choices about their ambitions, responsibilities and love for one another.

Back near sea level in Maryland, Dixon has more to contend with. Family and friends, for one. But more pressing is a matter at the middle school where he works as a beloved school psychologist. He has taken a bullied boy, Marcus, under his wing. When Marcus is viciously beaten, in an uncharacteristic moment, Dixon violently confronts the tormentor, an irreparably damaged soul named Shiloh. As a result, Dixon goes on leave and follows an unexpected path to self-discovery and expatiation.

That Outen can rather seamlessly meld these two fraught strands of story is a marker of her flowering skill as a writer. An additional gift of the novel is how much it has to reveal about love and friendship among Black men. That alone makes Dixon, Descending a worthy read.

The concept of reparations has been a component of conflict resolutions since the days of ancient Carthage. In America today, the issue most often comes up in reference to offering restitution to Black citizens for the ills of slavery. That topic, and the backlash from those against monetary redress, is the animating force in Acts of Forgiveness, Maura Cheeks’ debut novel.

When Senator Elizabeth Johnson ran for president, a pillar of her campaign was her championing of the Forgiveness Act, which would provide $175,000 to every Black citizen over 18 who could prove they had an enslaved ancestor. Now, as America’s first female president, she announces her intention to carry out that promise. This is hopeful news for Black Philadelphia native Willie Revel, the 33-year-old single mother of a gifted daughter. Willie once dreamed of becoming a journalist. But after her father, who owns a construction company, had a heart attack, Willie abandoned her dreams and returned to Philly to take over the business.

Cheeks does a nice job of dramatizing Willie’s conflict and is equally adept at demonstrating not only the need for financial restitution but also its specific importance to Willie’s family. Willie could use the money for the family business, which struggles to stay afloat. One lifeline her father insists upon is a contract with Soteria, a company that hired their firm to build a recycling complex. Willie is revolted by working with Soteria because the owner, like a lot of conservatives, vehemently opposes the Forgiveness Act.

That’s just one of many issues Willie contends with as she researches her family history to prove their eligibility for reparations. Others include her lack of career fulfillment and her daughter’s difficulties at school and attempts to write a play—an ambition that resembles the one Willie had to give up.

Cheeks doesn’t fully demonstrate the skill of distinguishing necessary information from superfluous detail, but Acts of Forgiveness movingly highlights a litany of injustices, from casual racism to the pressure on women to sacrifice their ambitions. Willie’s mother tells her that “sometimes you have to go where you’re not wanted in order to change people’s minds.” This novel highlights the soundness of that advice, as well as the perils of being brave enough to follow it.

Written before her death in 2019, and published with the help of her daughter, Katherine Min’s The Fetishist allows Min to pour out something of herself that we might otherwise have sadly missed. Darkly funny, strangely poignant and sometimes startlingly vicious, The Fetishist is a wonderful novel from an author we lost too soon, and a sweeping yet intimate statement on the impacts of racism and sexism on Asian American women.

Kyoko is a Japanese American rock musician, while Alma is a Korean American cellist whose career was sidelined by illness. Both are tied irrevocably to Daniel, a white man and fellow musician whose pursuit of Asian women seems to have ruined both Alma’s life and the life of Kyoko’s late mother. Shifting between these three characters’ perspectives, Min tells us the captivating, hilariously twisted story of their intertwined lives, from a potential hit song and an infamous affair, to a kidnapping gone wrong.

Min’s prose is simultaneously playful and powerful. She crafts sentences that are somehow able to contain both breathless puns and elegant intonations on the meaning of life. The Fetishist flies on the strength of her words, and that strength transfers into her characters. There’s not a simple narrative here, no firm sense of right and wrong that we can apply to every page. Instead, these complicated, messy characters are lent warmth and gravity in each word, each moment. Kyoko, Alma and Daniel are all searching for meaning, all trying to sort through the regrets they carry and the sins they bear. They feel whole, feel human, and therefore are free to surprise us.

While The Fetishist is many things, surprising is probably the most apt word to describe Min’s posthumous work. This remarkably clever, wickedly incisive little book will keep you hanging on every word and leave you with questions you’ll ponder for days.

Being an émigré isn’t that unthinkable: Just imagine that you have to leave home forever, potentially never to return. Or imagine that you never had a home in the first place; that the very word “home” taunts and perpetually eludes you; that everywhere you go, you try to find or create it to no avail. Still can’t imagine it? Hisham Matar’s new novel My Friends will help. Following Khaled Abd al Hady, a young Libyan man, as he moves from Benghazi to London, this scintillating novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author is filled with equal parts history and fiction.

Khaled is the son of a school headmaster and a headstrong mother. Innately curious, he spends days reading books from his father’s vast library. When Khaled and his family hear a short story read over the radio about a man being eaten by a cat, broadcast by Libyan BBC reporter Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan (a real journalist who was assassinated in broad daylight in 1980), they are fascinated and discover that the author, Hosam Zowa, is a Benghazian living abroad to pursue university in the U.K. Khaled is inspired to apply to university in Edinburgh and is miraculously accepted. Although he is thrilled to embark on this adventure, his family seems hesitant: They know, though he doesn’t, that once Khaled leaves, he will never come back.

In Edinburgh, Khaled meets other Libyan students, though they all live under the shadow of the Qaddafi regime, unable to trust even one another. At a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy in London, an actual event that took place on April 17, 1984, Khaled is shot by a gunman in the embassy and, in the aftermath, is outed as a radical. Eventually, he meets Hosam, the author of that strange short story, and his life is forever changed.

From its opening when Khaled and Hosam part ways for what is likely the last time, My Friends flows quickly and vividly. The story is structured around Khaled’s reminiscing as he walks around London, visiting the spots where the events he is retelling took place. This foundation of memory allows Matar to imbue each scene with rich, nostalgic emotion, especially as much of the book is based on reality. As Khaled reflects on the heartbreaking and life-affirming relationships he has had over the course of his life, readers are sure to be touched, coming to a deeper understanding of friendship, nation and home.