Writers will tell you that their books are like their children: They nurture them, struggle with them and orient their whole lives around them. Elisa Albert plays with this trite analogy between artistic creation and parenthood in her third novel, Human Blues, the energetic tale of a singer-songwriter who wants to get pregnant but can’t. 

Aviva’s infertility leads her and her husband, Sam, to consider the option of assisted reproductive technology. However, even though Aviva wants a child, she is terrified of these alternative methods. Her ambivalence fuels her music, giving her the perfect material for a breakthrough album. As she steps into her new position in the spotlight, she begins to wonder: Does she really want all that she says she wants? And who gets a say in what she really wants?

Spanning nine of Aviva’s menstrual cycles, Human Blues is filled with personality as Albert merges questions of fame and fertility into a thought-provoking exploration of agency and expression. Aviva’s musicianship gives Albert’s prose a distinct rhythm: It’s fast and sweet, with enough attitude to put Sleater-Kinney or even Lizzo to shame. Aviva’s characterization as a young bohemian fosters pop culture references aplenty, and this becomes a central aspect in the plot as her obsession with Amy Winehouse transforms from innocent worship to a near loss of self. As Aviva’s fame grows, she turns to her idol but is confronted with a grisly picture of stardom and womanhood gone sour. Whether she’s watching blockbuster movies or taking a yoga class, Aviva is confronted with the implications of her gender at every turn.

Aviva and Sam are unprepared for their biological processes to become subject to scrutiny, and they’re overwhelmed by philosophical questions about nature and nurture. In this way, the invasiveness of social media mirrors the invasiveness of the fertility industrial complex, and excerpts of Aviva’s online presence provide an all-too-relatable dimension to her physical and mental bombardment. But solace does come, and as the title implies, the result is an emotional, life-affirming howl into a wild world.

At one point in Alice Elliott Dark’s marvelous second novel, a character says, “Howards End reminds me of Leeward Cottage.” Another character quickly responds: “I can see that. Except for the conflict about who will inherit it.” This short exchange wonderfully encapsulates the drama in Fellowship Point, whose intricate plot and precise prose sparkle like the waters off the Maine coast where the book is set. 

The Fellowship Point peninsula hosts a handful of old-money summer cottages, including those owned by two wealthy matriarchs, lifelong friends Agnes Lee of Leeward Cottage and Polly Wister, who lives next door at Meadowlea. The tip of Fellowship Point contains 35 acres of undeveloped land known as the Sank (short for “sanctuary”), where an eager developer intends to build a resort. Therein lies the novel’s central conflict. 

The cottage homeowners are part of a small association that manages the Sank, and Agnes has one goal before she dies: to dissolve the association and preserve the land forever. Polly would also like to see the land protected, but her eldest son is friends with the developer, so things get complicated.

Agnes and Polly could hardly be more different. Agnes, who never married, is the author of a successful series of children’s books and (anonymously) a series of popular adult novels. Polly has devoted her life to the happiness of her professor husband and now-grown children. Despite their differences, Polly and Agnes are united by their long lives together and the tragic losses they’ve experienced, which Dark gradually reveals.

As with old cottages, there is plenty of history to relate, and the story unfolds via alternating viewpoints from 2000 through 2008, with lengthy letters flashing back to the early 1960s. There’s also a host of well-drawn characters, including Maud, a young editor who’s urging the reluctant Agnes to write a memoir. 

The contemporary conflict occurs during a time of millennial sea change, and Dark trains a sharp eye on the shifting tides of money, class, marriage and land ownership. She has created a phenomenal portrait of aging and the consequences of choices we’re forced to make. Along with these concrete, realistic details, Fellowship Point also has a sort of fairy-tale quality when ruminating on literature and the struggle to create it. 

Dark (Think of England) intended for this epic saga to resemble a classic 19th-century novel featuring female landowners instead of men, and it took her nearly 20 years to write. Such a long rollout seems appropriate for a story of this nature, and her exquisite craftsmanship shines throughout. (Dark is also the author of two story collections, and her tale “In the Gloaming” is included in the Best American Stories of the Century and was adapted into an HBO film.) 

Reading this novel is a transportive experience, similar to spending a long, luxurious summer on the shores of a picturesque Maine peninsula. It’s full of memorable adventures, tense moments of family drama and opportunities for restorative contemplation. Through it all, Fellowship Point harkens back to one of Howards End‘s big messages: “Only connect.”

Call it prayer, call it intention or manifestation, call it “throwing it out into the universe to see what we get back.” At some point, we all have had a fundamentally unanswerable question whose solution we hoped to find somewhere in the great “out there.” In Cult Classic, the second novel from bestselling author and two-time Thurber Prize finalist Sloane Crosley, former psychology magazine editor Clive Glenn has reinvented himself as a New Age guru with a side of tech entrepreneur. He’s like L. Ron Hubbard by way of Gwyneth Paltrow, with a dash of Elon Musk.

Clive’s project, the Golconda, promises to “put your past into a cohesive whole in an abbreviated time frame, thereby setting an actual course correction for closure.” The Golconda’s Classic package arranges meet cutes with a user’s former paramours, followed by a debrief on a device that’s like a cross between a polygraph and the Scientology E-meter.

Clive’s former staffer Lola wants to confront her ex-lovers to discover why things blew up and maybe get a handle on where to go—if anywhere—with her fiancé, a laid-back glass artist called Boots. The source of Lola’s agita is not uncommon with folks tying the knot for the first time; fans of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity will recognize it straightaway. Is settling down the same thing as settling for less? And might we be more compatible with one of our exes than with the bird in the hand, if we’d known then what we know now? As Lola begins to uncover answers through the Classic package, she is also confronted with some troubling questions, both about her current relationship and about the Golconda project itself.

Through Lola, Crosley wields language like a rapier, slicing off layers of self-delusion and self-doubt to find even more layers underneath. Lola needs to make some hard decisions about her spouse-to-be-or-not-to-be, but in order to do that, she must uncover the secret at the heart of her guru’s creation. Does Golconda, like Lola’s checkered past with men, carry within it the seeds of its own destruction? If it implodes, can she withstand the fallout? And will the universe call her back before it’s too late?

Longtime fans of Nina LaCour’s teen novels will be enchanted by the quietly powerful Yerba Buena, her first book for adult readers. It unfolds without any fanfare through a series of intimate and brilliantly observed details about growing up and into yourself. From one seemingly ordinary scene to the next, the relentless momentum of our imperfect, chaotic lives pulses through LaCour’s prose.

At 16, Sara is desperate to flee her small hometown on Northern California’s Russian River and get far away from her difficult childhood, her drug-dealing father and memories of her dead mother. When her girlfriend dies suddenly, Sara seizes the first opportunity to run. Pushing aside the traumas of her past, she begins to make a life for herself in Los Angeles.

Emilie is an LA native struggling with more nebulous challenges. She’s not sure what she wants, so she flits from major to major in college, and then from job to job. She doesn’t feel at ease in her family, as she’s still grieving the loss of the closeness she used to share with her sister.

Emilie and Sara meet at a restaurant where Sara tends bar and Emilie arranges flowers. They spend one meaningful night together, but it’s a long time before they connect again.

Yerba Buena is not a simple romance. It’s a layered story about the process of learning to love yourself, of holding onto and letting go of painful history, and of building your own home. Along the way, LaCour captures all the aches and hurts and betrayals and sensual delights of being in your 20s. Emilie and Sara get tangled in messy relationships—romantic, platonic and familial. They make impulsive choices as well as smart ones. They yearn for each other, but they aren’t ready for each other, and so they return, again and again, to their own lives, tumbling forward, muddling through, making mistakes and starting again.

LaCour’s prose has a soft, flowing quality and a lushness that readers of her previous books will recognize. She’s adept at describing the things that matter most to her protagonists: the colors of a flower arrangement, the quality of light on a wooden floor, a facial expression, the taste of a beloved gumbo recipe. She’s even better at describing tumultuous emotional landscapes. Sara and Emilie are such fully realized characters that by the end of the novel, you will feel as though you’ve spent time with cherished friends.

Bursting with emotionally resonant moments and vivid details of LA neighborhoods, Yerba Buena is a remarkable story of queer love and childhood trauma, addiction and forgiveness, family legacies and new beginnings.

There are many pieces of fiction that attempt to capture and explore our collective fascination with true crime, but while those stories manage to convey at least some of the truths surrounding that obsession, few ever reach its emotional core. Katie Gutierrez’s debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, joins those select ranks, as this elegant, evocative tale of suspense burrows straight to the heart of our cultural true crime fixation through an intense emotional dance between two seemingly different women.

Cassie Bowman is a true crime blogger who dreams of more. After years of trafficking in the seediest corners of the genre, she wants to take her journalism prowess to new heights and prove that she has something to say about the ways people hurt each other. When she stumbles upon the story of Dolores “Lore” Rivera—a banker whose double life led to one of her husbands murdering the other in 1985—Cassie thinks she might have finally found a tale worth telling. When the two women finally meet, though, the tension between their personalities kicks off a series of conversations that reveals the truth about both of their pasts.

Told across two time periods set decades apart and narrated through both Cassie’s and Lore’s perspectives, More Than You’ll Ever Know has all the ingredients necessary for a good thriller. Gutierrez writes with an instinctive understanding of the scaffolding necessary to keep readers turning the pages, and the narrative flies by as the dramatic and emotional tensions in both women’s lives ratchet up.

Beyond the novel’s well-executed, suspenseful structure, Gutierrez also clearly understands her characters, where they’ve come from and what they want and need. Both women are searching for something, longing for understanding in a world full of mysteries that are never solved. Whether it’s Lore’s emotional journey or Cassie’s deep dive into her chosen journalistic genre, Gutierrez has crafted detailed, vulnerable portraits of women searching for clues to their own survival. In the process, she unearths some truly compelling insights about our cultural obsession with true crime.

Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is a delightful invitation to reunite with Selin by picking up her adventures where we left off in The Idiot. Now a sophomore at Harvard University, Selin continues to explore, meander and wonder throughout the autumn of 1996, the spring of ’97 and the summer that follows.

Selin’s voice is notably more mature, more reflective and perhaps more droll, and yet she’s still true to herself as she tries to figure out who, exactly, that self is and can be. She attempts to make sense of the previous summer—her travels in Hungary, her time with her crush, Ivan, and his strangeness and distance, and all the many experiences she’s lived but doesn’t yet understand—and searches for guidance through the works assigned for her literature class, including The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard and more.

As Either/Or moves through the year, Selin begins to live actively rather than reflexively; she develops agency, and her choices have power. As she shows an increasing awareness of and engagement with the world, she starts to move out of her novels and into her own self.

Readers will find the tensions of history and present-day politics difficult to miss while reading Either/Or: Russian literature is a strong influence in Selin’s life, and her on-campus job is at the Ukrainian Research Institute. The 1990s technology is a throwback and a joy, and it’s fascinating to consider the ways that email and the internet have changed and shaped everything in our world, from relationships to travel. There’s humor in the lived experiences of parties, classes, alcohol and sex, and Batuman’s balancing of all these elements is remarkable.

Our present moment will change, and technology will continue to evolve, but undoubtedly Selin’s voice will remain a gem.

G.K. Chesterton once said that he had “searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.” In Michelle Huneven’s fifth novel, Search, we can begin to see why Chesterton’s hunt proved so fruitless.

Pastor Tom Fox has been dialing it in lately, and his Southern Californian congregation is becoming restless. Some of the church’s executive committee members approach a fellow congregant, restaurant critic and food writer Dana Potowski, with the suggestion that she take him to lunch and have a come-to-Jesus chat about the situation. Well, not exactly come-to-Jesus; the Unitarian Universalists don’t work that way.

For readers unfamiliar with it, the Unitarian Universalist Association is a spiritual organization that’s open to theists, atheists, agnostics and believers of all stripes, formed from the union of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. “I could go into some detail about the theological and class differences between the two groups,” says narrator Dana, “but suffice it to say that Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian and P. T. Barnum a Universalist.”

When Pastor Fox cops to his critics’ appraisal and lets it slip that he’s planning to retire from ministry, this sets into motion a replacement search committee, which Dana semireluctantly joins. Previous committee meetings had taken place over potluck dinners, so Dana persuades herself to take the plunge by planning to get her next project—The Search Committee Cookbook—out of it.

Whiting Award winner Huneven is uniquely suited to undertake a novel like this; not only did she study at the Methodist Claremont School of Theology and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but she’s also a James Beard Award-winning food journalist. She gleefully digs into the sausagemaking of a New-Agey church committee trying to reach consensus. They go on retreat. They hold meetings. They undergo anti-oppression training “to promote inclusivity and discourage undue discrimination in the search process.” And they talk—with one another, over one another, behind one another’s backs, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes lovingly, sometimes angrily. By the time the process winds down, all eight committee members have vetted not only the replacement candidates but also each other.

They also consume a great deal of food. If it’s true (as Napoleon may have said) that an army marches on its stomach, then a church committee bears some resemblance to a platoon. Here Huneven sparkles, with chop-licking descriptions of their potluck delectables, and as a bonus, she includes a baker’s dozen recipes as appendices.

But there’s also a profoundly spiritual dimension to Search. It raises difficult questions about living one’s beliefs in a faith-based community and doesn’t flinch when principles and practice come into conflict. Like a challenging sermon or a great restaurant’s tasting menu, Search leaves the reader hungry for more.

Read more: Michelle Huneven discusses the spirituality of food and her love for ‘burly cookies’

The transgender experience in Latin America is a unique, vital part of Latinidad, and in the English translation of her debut novel, Camila Sosa Villada shows us why. Bad Girls—Las malas, as it was originally titled in Spanish—captures the beauty, wonder and danger in the lives of travestis, a Spanish term that has been re-appropriated to empower trans women.

Villada brings us into the found family of a group of travesti sex workers living in Córdoba, Argentina. When Auntie Encarna, the 178-year-old godmother of the group, finds an abandoned child in the bramble of Sarmiento Park, the group is suddenly transformed into a “real” family who will raise the boy together. They name him Twinkle in Her Eye, and as the novel unfolds, each member of the family learns to find their own twinkle in the cruel and magical world Villada so masterfully crafts.

Bad Girls reads like a fairy tale but still connects strongly with corporeal aspects of trans experiences. Villada writes in an arrestingly poetic voice, often leaning on ancient Greek allusions to give her prose a mythic feeling. She introduces each character and their backstory like picking petals from a flower—lovingly and painfully, with dreamy care.

Early in the novel we meet Laura, the only person in the group who was assigned female at birth, and whose pregnancy and poverty lead her to the travestis. When Laura gives birth, Villada writes a scene so visceral that readers are sure to be astounded by the combination of beauty and grossness. Moments like these, in which Villada makes art out of bodies, bolster the novel’s keen and critical gender lens. From headless men to virgin births to immortal souls, Villada wants us to imagine what our bodies and lives could be.

Latin America has a rich trans tradition, in both the art and activism realms, and with Bad Girls, Villada joins the ranks of the greats. With nods to Argentine trans icons such as actor Cris Miró and activist Claudia Pía Baudracco, Villada weaves Bad Girls into the world of Latin American trans life. Just as artists like Venezuelan musician Arca have shown what the Latin American trans community can offer music, Villada shows how much a travesti can offer the field of literature. The promise is great, and on every page, Villada delivers.

Imagine an octopus, trapped in an aquarium: What might he notice, share, taunt and attempt? In Remarkably Bright Creatures, first-time author Shelby Van Pelt asks such questions about life in a tank—and outside of it.

Each evening, recently widowed Tova Sullivan methodically and meticulously works as a cleaner at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Staying active sustains her, as she is still reeling from her son’s mysterious disappearance many years ago, when he was 18. Tova begins to form a cautious bond with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus who lives in the aquarium and sneaks out to explore the other tanks and corners of the building. As Marcellus and Tova become increasingly attuned to and curious about each other, he notices details and secrets that help her find a new direction and purpose.

Remarkably Bright Creatures introduces other narrators and perspectives that are seemingly disconnected from Tova and Marcellus, albeit still engaging enough to propel the story forward. The chapters are short, making it easy for readers to dive into each subsequent voice, wondering what secrets will be uncovered. It’s a delight to piece the many stories together.

While the individual characters—human and cephalopod alike—are charming and complex, Remarkably Bright Creatures also emphasizes the importance of community. Locations such as the aquarium, a grocery store, a camper and the Sowell Bay area bring people together, providing spaces to foster conversation, gossip and curiosity. As everyday lives overlap, the reader wonders if crushes will be requited, if families will find each other and if estrangements will end. Will Tova learn more about what happened to her son? And what does Marcellus know?

As Van Pelt’s zippy, fun-to-follow prose engages at every turn, readers will find themselves rooting for the many characters, hoping that they’ll find whatever it is they seek: answers to mysteries, family, joy. Each character is profoundly human, with flaws and eccentricities crafted with care. But what makes Van Pelt’s novel most charming and joyful is the tender friendship between species, and the ways Tova and Marcellus make each other ever more remarkable and bright.