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.

As Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Fencing With the King opens, it’s late 1995 and Amani Hamdan is adrift. At 31, she’s separated from her husband and drinking too much, her poetry and teaching careers on pause. She’s moved back in with her parents, Gabe and Francesca, in Syracuse, New York. Then her Uncle Hafez (Gabe’s brother and an adviser to the king of Jordan) calls from Amman with a surprising invitation: The king wants Gabe to partake in his 60th birthday celebrations, specifically a fencing exhibit. As teenagers in Jordan, Gabe and the king fenced together. In the interim years, Gabe immigrated to the U.S., married Francesca and raised Amani, their American daughter.

While considering this invitation, Gabe pulls out a family heirloom, an ancient knife known as Il Saif, passed to him by his dying father. Amani returns the knife to its satchel, where she finds a note written by her grandmother Natalia, a sad fragment that speaks of loss, perhaps that of a child. Amani, wondering about this grandmother she never knew, persuades Gabe to accept the king’s invitation, and soon father and daughter are in Jordan, greeting extended family and attending the first of the king’s celebrations.

This is only the beginning of a story that focuses on multiple searches. Although the novel belongs to Amani, it includes the perspectives of her uncle and father, Hafez and Gabe, who are brothers but opposites. Hafez is a self-centered mover and shaker in modernizing but autocratic Jordan, and Gabe is a quiet contractor living a suburban American life. Amani is seeking clarity about herself and her failed marriage, but she also wants to understand her family’s past, in particular the sadness of grandmother Natalia, who was forced to flee her village in Nazareth as a child in 1918 and resettle as a Palestinian refugee in Jordan. With the help of her 19-year-old cousin Omar, Amani begins to decode the mystery embedded in her grandmother’s note, a possible secret at the heart of her family history.

Abu-Jaber, whose family’s story is reflected here, writes with a poet’s attention to language, and the novel beautifully evokes Jordan, from its modern cities and society parties to its ancient desert sites and Bedouin goatherds, all existing together under the whims of an autocratic kingdom and at a time (the mid-1990s) when peace in the Middle East seemed almost within reach. Fencing With the King is a complicated, character-driven and slow-burning mystery with a satisfying yet open-ended finale.

When one looks back upon a life, one remembers it as a series of noncontiguous fragments, with each discrete moment forming a picture of a person. Italian writer Sandro Veronesi knows this instinctively. In The Hummingbird, he presents just such a puzzle to create a unique portrait of an enigma of a man.

In a narrative that moves through seven decades, from 1959 to 2030, Veronesi chronicles the life of Marco Carrera, an ophthalmologist in the Italian village of Bolgheri. His mother nicknamed him “the hummingbird” because, until age 14, he was worryingly shorter than his peers. But Marco resembles a hummingbird not just in his childhood stature but also, as one character puts it, “because all [his] energy is spent keeping still.”

Nevertheless, much happens to this supposedly fixed entity. The book starts in 1999, when a therapist who has been treating Marco’s wife, Marina, risks his career to tell Marco, “I have reason to believe you may be in grave danger.”

In chapters that incorporate text messages, emails, phone conversations, love letters and even poetry, Veronesi describes the events that shape Marco’s life, including his and his wife’s infidelities; his five-decade correspondence with a woman he loved since he was 20; the death of Marco’s sister and his estrangement from his brother; the difficulties facing his daughter, Adele, who met with a child psychologist when she was little because she felt she had a restrictive thread attached to her back; and Marco’s later guardianship of Adele’s daughter, Miraijin.

The Hummingbird is a moving, black-humored work about family and the tragedies born of time and poor decisions. Veronesi has created complicated characters that don’t always behave nobly, are products of their time and are, from a literary standpoint, the richer for it. As the omniscient narrator observes, “There are those who—not moving at all—still manage to cover great distances.” That’s the message of this wise book: A hummingbird may seem stationary, but in its way, it can cover a lot of ground.

Transformation is the hallmark of any well-drawn character, but in her heart-rending first novel, Shadows of Pecan Hollow, author Caroline Frost asks whether real transformation is attainable for everyone. Can a very bad man ever be redeemed? Can a lost girl find herself when she’s grown? Can people who are ridiculed or ignored by society learn to believe in their worth without relying on validation from others?

At 13, Kit has no reason to trust adults. She’s been shuffled around among a number of foster families, starved and even beaten. When an older man named Manny shows Kit simple yet unfamiliar kindness, she becomes his loyal companion. Though he gains her trust, he’s a con artist and a thief, and he’s only able to care for Kit through his ill-gotten gains.

Manny recruits Kit for small thefts and then gun-toting robberies, and over time they become notorious partners in crime, wanted by the police. Their life is not just itinerant but also dangerous, and when Kit becomes pregnant with their child, a shift in her perspective allows her to look at Manny and their violent delights with fresh eyes. Yet years later, when Manny is released from prison and comes for their daughter, Kit learns that the hard life isn’t so easy to leave behind.

Frost puts her background as a marriage and family therapist to good use in crafting Kit. Less perceptive writers may have written Kit as a cliché, but Frost guides the reader to understand Kit’s story and the reasons behind her susceptibility to a charismatic egotist. Shadows of Pecan Hollow will be heartbreaking for readers wiser and more experienced than young Kit, as they’ll be able to see Manny’s manipulation and violence for what it really is: abuse. Frost’s relationship expertise also shines in crafting the dynamic between adult Kit and her untameable daughter, Charlie.

At over 400 pages, Shadows of Pecan Hollow takes readers on a long journey—not unlike Kit’s journey to find a home. It will especially resonate with readers who have their own hard-won stories of survival.

Poet Destiny O. Birdsong’s (Negotiations) debut novel is as much about what isn’t said—what can’t be said—as it is about what’s actually on the page. Nobody’s Magic is a masterfully crafted and sometimes painfully honest story told in triptych, centering on three Black women with albinism living in Shreveport, Louisiana.

This unusual novel is built on spaciousness and silence, with each section reading almost like a novella. Suzette lives with her wealthy parents, who shower her with gifts while keeping her sheltered from the world. After falling for a tenderhearted mechanic who works at her father’s shop, she begins to express her own desires for the first time. Maple is grieving the sudden death of her mother, a straight-talking, fun-loving and beloved sex worker. And Agnes has spent most of her adult life trying to set herself apart from her sister. When she meets a man while on a temporary job in Utah, a string of impulsive choices leads her to a confrontation with her family.

These are dynamic characters, each with her own distinct narrative voice and particular way of looking at the world. Suzette’s first-person narration is informal, conversational and intimate. Maple’s section is raw with grief. Agnes’ story, told in the third person, is slightly distant, as if she can’t quite bear to face herself. But each woman experiences a major shift: Suzette makes a momentous decision, Maple experiences a catastrophic loss, and Agnes faces her conflicted relationships with her mother and sister.

Each section is bound to the others through themes of Black womanhood, familial expectations, grief and the power of self-determination, but instead of drawing straightforward conclusions about these connections, Birdsong leaves the reader to meditate on the questions and ideas she raises. What do these very different experiences of Black womanhood have to say about one another? How does Suzette’s story inform our understanding of Maple’s? How does Maple’s relationship with her mother influence how we read Agnes’ section? Buried in these pages are infinite conversations—about what it means to be labeled “other,” to be a part of a community, to choose something for yourself.

Nobody’s Magic is worth reading simply to spend time with these women, but the thoughtful and unexpected way that Birdsong combines their three unique stories into one is what makes the book unforgettable.

From the first paragraphs of Vladimir, it’s clear we’re plunging into a campus novel with some darkness to it but also some comedy. At 58, the unnamed narrator is a long-tenured English professor at a small upstate New York college. She should be writing another novel and coasting to retirement. Instead, her husband, John, also an English professor and chair of their department, is being investigated for his past affairs with students, and he’s on leave while he awaits the outcome.

John’s affairs are no secret; long ago, he and the narrator agreed on an open marriage of sorts. Still, she’s angry—at John and pretty much everyone else. “Lightning bolts of anger shot from my vagina to my extremities,” she says, explaining why she’s been avoiding faculty events.

At this moment in the narrator’s life, a new colleague appears: Vladimir Vladinksi, a younger writer with a well-regarded first novel and abs to die for. The narrator is suddenly and completely obsessed, and she concocts a plan to charm and seduce Vlad. Complicating this setup is the narrator’s grown daughter, Sidney, who returns home after a fight with her longtime girlfriend.

Vladimir sweeps us along on a sometimes claustrophobic ride, as the narrator muses on departmental politics, campus “cancel culture” and her uncomfortable perch as a feminist who’s somehow landed on the wrong side of the #MeToo movement. She’s funny, biting and given to bouts of narcissism and self-loathing. As she single-mindedly pursues Vlad, she slowly reveals past and present bad decisions, leading to a shocking climactic scene.

Part dark comedy and part satire, with a dash of the gothic and plenty of literary allusions, Vladimir is a little hard to pin down. But if you imagine the Netflix comedy “The Chair,” whose faculty characters are almost done in by contemporary campus politics, crossed with the acidic love-hate relationship at the heart of Tom Stoppard’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, you wouldn’t be too far off.

Vladimir is Julia May Jonas’ first novel, but she’s also a playwright who teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York. With her background as a dramatist, she brings notable verve and drama to this sharp campus novel.