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.

In The Candy House, Jennifer Egan revisits some of the characters from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit From the Good Squad. But The Candy House is less a sequel than a continuation of themes, offering a bold imagining of the lures and drawbacks of technology through a lively assortment of narrative styles.  

Bix Bouton, a minor character in Goon Squad, emerges in The Candy House as a staggeringly brilliant tech guru whose casual interest in animal consciousness leads to the creation of his social media company, Mandala. Bix’s groundbreaking product, Own Your Unconscious, allows users to externalize their consciousness to a cubelike device. Taking the concept a step further, his invention Collective Consciousness offers the option of uploading memories to an online database, where they can be shared. This hugely seductive innovation inspires a backlash movement, in which “eluders” wipe their digital footprints or even hide behind false avatars. 

From Bix’s life-altering inventions, the novel spirals outward in subsequent chapters, tracking families and friends over decades, digging deeply into the emotional and psychological effects of their private memories being made public. The novel even takes a dystopian turn through the story of Lily, a former spy whose brain has been infiltrated by a government-implanted “weevil.” But for the most part, Egan keeps the novel moving through relatable territory, as universal access to personal memories proves, unsurprisingly, to be as disruptive as it is tantalizing.  

Egan’s bold appropriation of narrative styles, like the use of first-person plural and chapters written in tweets and text messages, gives the novel a glittering, kaleidoscopic quality. But Egan’s empathetic interest in human behavior is what drives The Candy House, making it more than just a literary experiment. As Bix’s son Greg points out, you don’t need access to Collective Consciousness to fully experience another person’s memories, thoughts and perceptions; fiction can do the same thing.

A startling novel written by an author at the top of her game, The Candy House never loses sight of fiction’s superpowers.

Read our interview with Jennifer Egan on ‘The Candy House.’

Sara Nović’s second novel is a vibrant celebration of Deaf culture and Deaf communities. Set at the fictional River Valley School for the Deaf in the struggling industrial town of Colson, Ohio, True Biz follows the interconnected lives of several students and teachers over the course of one tumultuous year. It’s a remarkable book that is many things at once: a primer on Deaf history, a love story, a coming-of-age tale, a riotous political awakening, a family saga and a richly layered character study.

February, the headmistress of River Valley, is a hearing child of deaf adults. She’s trying desperately to keep the school afloat in the face of ongoing budget cuts, while also taking care of her aging mother and trying to keep her marriage intact. Austin is the golden boy of River Valley. He grew up immersed in Deaf culture, but his blissful life is shaken when his baby sister is born hearing, causing hidden tensions between him and his hearing father to rise to the surface. Charlie is a deaf teen with a cochlear implant, whose hearing parents, at the urging of doctors, didn’t allow her to learn American Sign Language as a child. Arriving at River Valley in the wake of her parents’ divorce, she meets other deaf people for the first time, begins learning ASL and discovers the joys and challenges of being part of a community that speaks a language she can understand.

Though written in English, the book is bursting with ASL, offering an exploration into the power of language and the violence of language deprivation, the beauty of free and open communication, and the possibilities (and limitations) of translation. Throughout the novel, signed conversations are translated into English, each chapter heading is an illustration of a character’s name sign, the first signed letter of their name. Interspersed among the chapters are school assignments and other ephemera that detail ASL lessons and exercises.

The narrative moves in and out of the three main characters’ points of view, offering intimate glimpses into their inner lives. The novel’s sense of emotion builds slowly, from Austin’s intensifying anger and February’s growing desperation to Charlie’s burgeoning confidence. By the end of the book, each character is changed, and their transformations are explored with a beautifully subtle touch.

Deaf rights activist Nović incorporates so many issues that affect the Deaf community, including education inequality and the rise of cochlear implants. Though it focuses on three central characters, the story feels symphonic as the entire River Valley community comes to life. At times somber, often bitingly funny, awash in playfulness and fiercely proud, True Biz is a masterfully crafted love letter to Deaf culture.

Have you ever read a book that was so off-the-wall bizarre that you thought, I can’t read this anymore, it’s too ridiculous, but it was also so compelling that you had to keep reading just to see what happens? John Elizabeth Stintzi’s harrowing novel My Volcano is one of those books.

The story, if it can be called that, begins in 2016, when a volcano sprouts from New York’s Central Park reservoir. This is weird, but it’s not unheard of.

After all, a volcano really did pop up in a Mexican cornfield in 1943. But the volcano in My Volcano brings not fountains of ash but instead much stranger complications. For one thing, it appears to be Mount Fuji, even though researchers confirm that the original Mount Fuji is where it should be and hasn’t tunneled through the Earth to reappear in midtown Manhattan.

Against the backdrop of this volcano’s appearance, the novel’s narrative scope is tremendously broad: A girl in Russia wakes up in the body of a huge insect, but unlike with poor Gregor Samsa, nobody seems to notice this but her. A golem made of rocks from the Libyan desert wreaks destruction on entities that pollute and despoil the environment. A nomadic herder leading his flock through Mongolia transforms into a spiky plant, and everything he passes also turns into the same spiky plant until there are millions of them. A woman dreams that she inhabits the bodies of other people, including the boyfriend of the insect-girl. And five centuries ago, a boy possessed by an angry spirit fails to save the Mexican people from the Spanish conquistadors.

My Volcano is perhaps most likely to remind readers of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, in which everything becomes a mashup of everything else’s DNA. Why is all this happening? Each of the book’s sections begins with a description of a real human atrocity, from homicides and drug overdoses to shootings by police officers. Maybe the Earth has decided it’s not going to wait for climate change to put an end to human malfeasance. On the other hand, maybe it’s not so much about bringing about the end of humanity as encouraging us to clean up our act.

We are less than a dust mote in the universe, and no one will miss us when we’re gone, Stintzi’s deranged Mobius-strip of a book suggests. Should we still be saved? Can we?

In an introductory note to her mischievous new work of fiction, Helping Howard, Sally Schloss writes, “This is a novel in which the main character, Howard, helps The Author write a book, and The Author in turn helps Howard understand his marriage.”

That’s the distilled storyline of Schloss’ multilayered work, a book that’s at once a funny, fizzy rom-com; a tense, discomfiting family drama; and an act of full-on narrative experimentation. Helping Howard is a novel about novel-writing that explores the strange partnership that can arise between author and character over the course of composition.

Throughout the book, Schloss’ avatar, the Author, banters with her lead creation, Howard, about plot options, the introduction of new characters and other decisions that go into the building of a book, and their often comic, surprisingly poignant exchanges (italicized in the narrative) lay bare the creative process. A 53-year-old drummer from Brooklyn, Howard is, for the most part, handsome and appealing: “Women liked him. For awhile.” (“Why for awhile? What’s wrong with me?” Howard asks The Author. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she replies.) Howard’s younger wife, T.J.—a lesbian who, in the midst of their marriage, seeks out other lovers—works as a professional photographer. Caught in the middle of this uncomfortable arrangement is the couple’s distant teenage daughter, Sinclair.

As she chronicles the stages of Howard’s marriage, Schloss skillfully shifts points of view, writing from the perspectives of T.J. and Sinclair. She supplies well-developed backstories for the main protagonists and in richly realized domestic episodes captures the intimacies and estrangements, ruptures and reconciliations that can make or break a marriage.

The dialogue between Howard and the Author complements the book’s larger storyline without feeling heavy-handed or precious. The result is a deeply human exploration of how decisions and desires can impact a life. With Helping Howard, Schloss has crafted a novel of narrative daring and creative risk. Thanks to her many gifts as a writer, the risk pays off.

Our connections to people have never been stranger. Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the internet, people from all walks of life are increasingly isolated in person but willing to reveal more of themselves online. Nigerian author Eloghosa Osunde understands the tension of these tenuous connections, and in her first novel, Vagabonds!, she shows how each person’s life bears the effects of unstoppable forces. From the intimacy of sexuality to the vastness of cityscapes, Osunde gives the reader a clear picture of the messy collision courses that are our lives.

Vagabonds! begins with several dictionary definitions of its own title, prompting the reader to draw some preliminary conclusions about the story before they even read it. Then, over the course of the novel, Osunde allows the reader to become painfully intimate with economically, sexually and culturally marginalized life in Nigeria. She shows people at their best and at their worst, sometimes in conjunction, creating a universal sense of belonging that will resonate with many.

The defining characteristic of Vagabonds! is its large cast. There are tons of characters, but each manages to limn a certain aspect of Osunde’s world. Within this Lagos-set milieu, skeevy politicians and street hawkers selling pirated copies of “How to Get Away With Murder” exist alongside complicated people trying to find love and joy. Some chapters are written as letters, others as numbered or bulleted lists, experiments that call to mind Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad and lead to similarly reality-bending results. Characters appear and reappear, such as fashion designer Wura, who tells of her precocious daughter in one chapter, then later in the book turns up in letters from a lost lover. The dramatic effect of these touches is realized at the book’s end, in a time-stamped sequence of events.

Osunde’s devotion to exploring individual human lives is balanced by a notably divine focus in sections about Èkó, a mythical figure and synecdoche for the masses. Through Èkó, the reader is led to understand the relationship between the public and the godly: When people come together, even unconsciously, they create a divine power. In humanizing this power, Osunde shows how each of her characters is part of something much larger than themselves—which is, in both the biblical and laical senses, awesome.

There are several epigraphs at the novel’s opening, a preview of its ambition, but this line from Toni Morrison is the most salient: “All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.” Osunde reveals people loving and fighting in their bid to design the world together.

The sixth novel from Emily St. John Mandel, author of the award-winning, bestselling Station Eleven, is a time-travel puzzle that connects a disparate band of characters.

Sea of Tranquility opens in 1912, as Edwin St. John St. Andrew, the aimless youngest son of an English earl, makes his way across Canada. Edwin lands in Caiette, a remote settlement in British Columbia, where he experiences something that cannot be easily explained, and encounters a strange man named Roberts who claims to be a priest.

The narrative then leaps to 2020 in New York City, where Mirella Kessler is trying to discern her friend Vincent’s whereabouts. (Readers of Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, will recognize Mirella and Vincent.) Mirella finds herself talking to a stranger, Gaspery Roberts, who seems familiar. Gaspery wants to know about a glitchy moment that Vincent captured on video years ago.

The narrative skips ahead again, to the year 2203, when writer Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour, talking to audiences on Earth about her bestselling pandemic novel. Olive lives with her husband and daughter in Colony Two on the moon. Olive, like Mirella, finds herself talking to a man who calls himself Gaspery Roberts. Gaspery, a magazine reporter, asks about a brief scene in her novel, an odd moment in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal.

And then once more, the narrative jumps forward in time, and now Gaspery Roberts begins to tell his own story.

How these four (and a few other) characters are linked, and how one strange moment reverberates through time, are the subjects of this novel. There’s a mournfulness to Sea of Tranquility. Its main characters feel themselves to be exiles, trying to sort out where and how they belong. But the novel is playful, too, taking a metafictional turn: Olive, like her creator, Mandel, has written a bestselling novel about a pandemic, and she’s stuck on an endless book tour, far from her family, as an actual pandemic approaches. And Gaspery is a dryly funny, self-deprecating guide to his era and his unlikely travels through time.

Although readers may question the particulars of the novel’s depiction of the future (wouldn’t the concept of a book tour be impossibly quaint, or even unknown, by 2203?), Mandel’s character development will sweep them along. Turn-of-the-century character Edwin’s sections are particularly well rendered.

Mandel’s prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly, the suspense building not only from the questions about that one strange moment but also from the actions of those investigating it. In the end, the novel’s interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love.

Read more: Through multiple audiobook narrators, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel transforms into a stage play in an interdimensional theater.

Julie Otsuka’s first novel in 10 years is a quiet and startling masterpiece about memory, aging and the indelible experiences that define a life. The slim novel reads like a much longer one, its mere 192 pages giving rise to the possibility of infinite stories. The effortlessly musical prose will be familiar to readers of Otsuka’s previous novels, especially her 2011 bestseller, The Buddha in the Attic. But The Swimmers is even more structurally bold.

The novel begins with two chapters told in the collective second person. A group of amateur swimmers, all of whom belong to the same community pool, speaks about their obsessions, grievances and small triumphs. When a mysterious crack appears in the bottom of the pool, some are curious, but some begin to panic. Soon they all wonder if this means that their swimming days are numbered.

The third chapter, told in the second person, narrows in on one particular swimmer: an elderly Japanese American woman named Alice, who is in the early stages of dementia. As her memory slips away and the past and present lose their distinct boundaries, Alice struggles to hold onto her sense of self. She still exists in the world, still has opinions and fears and desires, but everyone around her—her fellow swimmers, her husband, her daughter—views her as someone fading, incapable, a danger to herself.

The Swimmers seems to continually reinvent itself as each section reframes everything that came before it. Reading something so inventive and playful is a bit like being inside an architectural blueprint as it’s being drawn, or watching an acorn grow into a massive oak in only a few minutes. This is not a simple, orderly, linear novel. It unfolds in a messy chorus of contradictory, unpredictable voices that each bring something different to the whole.

With nuance, grace and deep tenderness, Otsuka ponders the questions that define our lives: Who are we without our memories? What does it mean to truly see someone else, to see ourselves? What is knowable about the world, and what do we do with the mysteries no one can solve? Funny, moving and composed of sentences that read like small poems, The Swimmers is a remarkable novel from a writer with an unparalleled talent for capturing the stuff of the world, whether mundane, harrowing or bizarre.

There’s a magic to Isaac Fellman’s fiction, born of his depth of perception, precise prose and straightforward sense of expression. In his second novel, Dead Collections, his characters’ earnestness and warmth make even the darkest moments beautiful, in a way that will remind the reader of the work of Anne Rice and Stephen Graham Jones. Fellman tells the tale of two souls searching the depths of their experiences for something—and seemingly finding it in each other.

Sol is a trans archivist who manages his vampirism by living among the collections in the basement of his workplace. His carefully cultivated isolation begins to shift when he meets Elsie, an alluring widow who brings in her late wife’s papers for archiving. As Sol digs into the writer’s work, he also begins to discover Elsie’s curious spirit. Elsie reciprocates, and as their spark kindles into something more, Sol must contend not just with the possibility of venturing out into the world but also with a newfound blight that seems to be seeping into his professional life.

Through a combination of Sol’s incisive narration, message board entries, script books and other formalist flights of experimentation, Fellman lays out Sol’s and Elsie’s parallel journeys with propulsive, intense focus. The prose unfolds with notable determination, and there’s not a single wasted word, even when Fellman plays with format and frame of reference.

Whether he’s conjuring the image of Sol soaking his hands in warm water to give the illusion of body heat or the way Elsie uses light to mimic the experience of daylight for her vampire friend, Fellman’s style is vivid, specific and deeply evocative. On a sentence level, Dead Collections is a sensual, tactile work, and when combined with Fellman’s confident grasp of his characters, it becomes a wonderful, bittersweet journey in which you may get happily lost.