In Act 1 of Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth questions his plan to commit regicide against King Duncan, saying, “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on th’other.” Vaulting ambition and the willful blindness that can accompany it form the tragedy of Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s third novel and the follow-up to her 2013 Booker Prize winner, The Luminaries.

The Birnam Wood of the title refers not to the Scottish town of the play but to an activist collective in New Zealand whose members harvest crops planted “without permission on public or unattended lands.” The group’s founder, Mira Bunting, has an idealistic goal: “radical, widespread, and lasting social change” that shows “how arbitrary and absurdly prejudicial the entire concept of land ownership” is. But there’s a problem: The collective has trouble breaking even.

A possible solution arrives in the form of a natural disaster, when earthquakes lead to a landslide, causing the closure of the Korowai Pass and cutting off the small fictional town of Thorndike. Not far from the site of the landslide is a farm owned by the soon-to-be-knighted Owen Darvish. Paradoxically, Owen’s pest control service has partnered with American tech corporation Autonomo on a conservation project to rescue endemic species from extinction. Mira’s plan: buy the farm for Birnam Wood.

In both of her novels, Catton has shown that she’s an expert at building tension from an intricate plot. One of the complicating factors in Birnam Wood is Autonomo co-founder Robert Lemoine, “a serial entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, and, apparently, a billionaire.” He wants to build a bunker on the farm and store precious cargo that would make him, “by several orders of magnitude, the richest person who had ever lived.” When he catches Mira on the property, he suggests they join forces, but in true Shakespearean fashion, Robert’s intent may not be what he claims.

Catton brilliantly weaves other characters and plot elements into the mix, among them Tony Gallo, a former collective member and would-be journalist who rails against capitalism, wants to write “a searing indictment of the super-rich” and is keen to expose Robert for who he is. Tony is too broadly drawn, and Catton sometimes over-explains the plot, but Birnam Wood is still a powerful portrait of the uncomfortable relationship between capitalism and idealism, and the compromises and trade-offs one might accept in pursuit of a goal. As some of Catton’s characters learn, vaulting ambition can be admirable, but if one o’erleaps and falls, the landing is anything but smooth.

Correction, March 7, 2023: This article has been updated to reflect that Birnam Wood is Catton’s third novel and The Luminaries is her second.

In Rebecca Makkai’s engrossing novel I Have Some Questions for You, a successful podcaster and film critic takes a job at a New Hampshire boarding school where, 23 years ago, a white female student named Thalia Keith was murdered. The school’s athletic trainer, a Black man named Omar Evans, was convicted of the crime and has been imprisoned for decades.

Bodie Kane sees the invitation to teach a course on podcasting at the Granby School as an opportunity to give back to her alma mater. It’s also a chance to investigate the murder of Thalia, who was Bodie’s classmate; with her interest in true crime, Bodie has had lots of time to think about how poorly the case was initially handled. Bodie suggests to her class that revisiting the case would make a good podcast, and two of the students begin what evolves into a groundbreaking inquiry. Meanwhile, a major #MeToo scandal involving Bodie’s ex-husband, a well-known visual artist, threatens her reputation, veracity and livelihood. 

Back at Granby and surrounded by the familiar landscape, classrooms and even some of the old faculty, Bodie is overwhelmed by memories of her trauma-filled childhood and wonders how those experiences might have shaped her high school years. She also starts to question her impressions of the school’s music teacher, Denny Bloch, whom she thinks may have been involved in a sexual relationship with Thalia. Bodie cannot help but subtly shape the students’ investigation, and the more time she spends at the school, the more she questions the motives of her classmates, her professors and even herself.    

Makkai places the fictional murder of Thalia Keith and imprisonment of Omar Evans in the wider context of violence against women and institutional racism. If the book has any faults, it’s that we never hear from Omar himself, and his experiences only come to Bodie second-hand. But I Have Some Questions for You is Bodie’s story, a well-plotted indictment of systemic racism and misogyny craftily disguised as a thriller and beautifully constructed to make its points.

There is no word in the English language for someone who has lost their child. We have orphan for children who have lost their parents and widow or widower for a person who has lost a spouse, but we dare not give a name to the tragedy of losing a child. However, in his debut novel, Monstrilio, Gerardo Sámano Cordova attempts to describe this nameless grief, not by giving it a name but by showing how resisting it can destroy us.

The novel begins with Magos, a grieving mother who cuts out a piece of lung from the body of her deceased 11-year-old son, Santiago. When Magos returns to her childhood home in Mexico City, she discovers that the piece of lung can be fed, and she slowly nurtures it into something new. When this creature becomes the titular Monstrilio and begins to resemble her dead son, Magos and her husband, Joseph, try their best to care for it. However, Monstrilio’s innate, destructive impulses jeopardize their son’s second chance at life, and the characters are forced further down the path of grief toward something like acceptance.

Sámano Cordova’s writing is piercing and intimate. Whether describing Monstrilio’s first, vicious moments of life or the subtle, strained romance between Magos and her childhood friend Lena, Sámano Cordova keeps readers breathless. By splitting the book into four parts, narrated by Magos, Lena, Joseph, and Monstrilio himself, Cordova allows us to see the different sides of this tragic story; combined, they are more than the sum of their parts. 

Some of the novel’s best moments are the flashbacks, when Magos, Joseph and Santiago share loving moments together, seek a method of healing for the boy and reckon with the fragility of life. When we see the monster that Santiago’s lung becomes, complex and grotesque and pitiful as it is, it troubles these tender moments, showing how grief often fixates on pain, trapping us in an interminable cycle. Sámano Cordova doesn’t attempt to break the cycle; rather, his novel seeks to embody it, making this nameless, eternal pain something we can speak to and hold.

If the title of Elizabeth McKenzie’s third novel (after The Portable Veblen) were the strangest thing about it, it would still be remarkable. Luckily for readers who like their books odd, haunting, strange and surprising, it isn’t. 

As The Dog of the North begins, narrator Penny Rush is recently separated from her husband and heading from Salinas to Santa Barbara, California, where she knows she has problems waiting for her. Penny’s story intertwines with that of her grandmother, Dr. Pincer, a quirky, cantankerous hoarder who values privacy above all; and Burt, a lonely man who shares his toupee with his brother and loves his Pomeranian. Burt’s van is the titular Dog of the North, and it becomes Penny’s home and the place from which her adventures spring. 

Penny is searching for connection, for meaning in her life after quitting her marriage and job. Throughout her episodic travels, there are missing parents, a grandfather ready for an adventure, strange objects that perform mysterious and surprising functions, Dr. Pincer’s science experiments, shared meals, injuries, ailments and bits of hope.

Penny’s voice is curious and kind; she’s empathetic and reserves judgment from both herself and others. Her route—through places and among people, through landscapes both internal and exterior—surprises her. She doesn’t know what she’ll find or who she’ll meet, and her openness allows experiences to take shape that otherwise simply could not. Her presence unsettles some characters, forcing them to share more than they might have intended, and this enables a deeper connection between McKenzie’s characters and the reader, illuminating challenges we could’ve missed. 

Through Penny’s eyes, we see the beauty in the seemingly broken, in the flawed stories we tell ourselves—and what happens when those stories delightfully shatter.

It’s time for the literary world to take fanfiction seriously. Well into the internet age, contemporary literature is profoundly shaped by online aesthetics and sensibilities, but for some reason fanfiction remains outcast. Esther Yi’s debut novel gives fanfiction, and stan culture more broadly, the piercing, unhinged analytic treatment it deserves. Beginning with an unnamed Korean narrator living in Berlin who is lured into an intense K-pop fandom, Y/N takes readers on a surreal, self-reflexive adventure that blurs and ultimately dissolves the borders between reality and fiction, self and other, and admiration and fetishization.

Though the unnamed narrator is the catalyst for the novel, both she and Yi make it clear from the start that this book is not really about her; it is about the limits of fandom. The novel opens with her first exposure to Moon, the youngest member of a Korean boy band that captivates international audiences in sold-out arenas. From her nosebleed seat, the narrator falls instantly for Moon, except it is not love she falls into but rather something like delusion. Soon after, our narrator starts writing fanfiction in which the protagonist is called Y/N (fanfic lingo for “your name,” which allows readers to insert themselves into the story). But soon Y/N takes over the narrative, traveling to Korea to meet Moon and destroying any semblance of selfhood that the narrator had. 

Yi speaks to some of the most pressing ideas in today’s culture with wit and grace. Y/N illustrates how serious fandoms can be, how their influence reaches beyond bedroom wall posters to shape politics and identity. When Moon livestreams and calls his fans “liver,” insinuating both “lover” and the idea that his fans are somehow a part of his body, we see how a fandom forms a collective, though with a strict hierarchy. Parasocial relationship is an apt term, but in this case, it’s not necessarily the other that is the object of one-sided connection, but rather a fictionalized version of the self. With this in mind, Yi explores how gender discrimination and racism (particularly fetishization) can be the outcome of such constructed realities, as characters repeat Korean stereotypes and parrot a culture they have no real link to. 

Considering all of this, it is clear that Y/N is one of the most daring novels of the year. Yi has set a new standard for internet-influenced literature by showing that online and literary narratives exist hand in hand, creating the world with every word.

Nothing much happens in Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons, but the author’s artistry is such that you keep on reading, whether for the beautiful writing or for the beautiful pain of the strange couple at the story’s core.

First published in South Korea in 2011 and set mostly in Seoul, Greek Lessons is the story of two damaged people. One is a man, a professor of ancient Greek who is slowly losing his vision. The other is a woman taking his class. She’s a writer and former teacher who has either abandoned her power of speech or whose speech has left her; she recalls Liv Ullmann’s character in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, Persona, an actor who suddenly goes mute in the middle of a performance and decides to stay that way.

Near-blindness and muteness seem to be physical manifestations of Kang’s characters’ excruciating loneliness. At the end of the day, each goes home to nearly empty apartments on nearly empty streets. The relationships they do have with other people are fraught. The woman is divorced. Her ex-husband thinks she’s “too highly strung and that this was a bad influence” on their son, so she lost custody of the boy. The Greek professor lived much of his earlier life in Germany, where he and his family stood out and were sometimes discriminated against for being East Asian.

“Why ancient Greek?” a reader might ask. The woman tells herself she’s studying it because it’s so different from Korean that it might help her reclaim language itself; ancient Greek lacks the traumatic baggage that caused her to go silent in the first place. Still, her speech does not return. She is so speechless that her teacher starts to believe she is deaf as well as mute.

Then, one night the man breaks his glasses. Helpless without them, he needs an emergency optician. The woman can help.

Beautifully translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, Greek Lessons conjures a mood that calls to mind the Korean word ho, which is that time just after the sun sets and just before it rises. To go Bergmanesque again, it’s the hour of the wolf, when people experience the most anguish. Though the woman and her teacher are full of sorrow, their sadness doesn’t stop them from appreciating and even seeking small moments of beauty. This gives Kang’s slender book much of its power.