The first thing you’ll notice about award-winning Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star is how big it is. At almost 700 pages, it’s a book that takes up considerable real estate not just on the nightstand or in a bag but also within the mind, demanding a particular kind of mental stamina.

It’s August on the southern coast of Norway, and a big, bright celestial object has appeared in the sky. No one knows what to make of this new star. There are speculations from scholars and experts on its sudden presence, but could there be more to this phenomenon than just science?

The title’s biblical innuendo is on point. Knausgaard not only directly and indirectly philosophizes about Jesus, Satan, purgatory, sin and resurrection but also uses these touchstones to inspire the characters whose various points of view fill these pages. There isn’t just one story to follow in The Morning Star but several, as the narrative bounces from one captivating, relatable, likable character to another.

Amid these characters’ experiences in love, marriage, teenage angst, career disappointments, mental health and global warming, the novel progresses with an unflagging consideration of the roles and significance of living and dying. In this way, The Morning Star feels at once about nothing and everything. 

Knausgaard is more interested in using the novel's considerable length to introduce loose ends instead of neatly tying them up. Then again, for those who have read Knausgaard’s previous work (such as his six-volume My Struggle series), this probably doesn’t come as a surprise. 

The Morning Star is dark, eerie, mesmerizing and, yes, totally worth its size.

What does it mean to listen? What can you hear if you pay close attention, especially in a moment of grief and questioning? In The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki explores how we find meaning in the world and why each of our voices matter.

As the novel opens, young Benny Oh’s father dies suddenly and violently. Benny’s loss and confusion is palpable, made all the more difficult by the voices he begins to hear emanating from all the objects around him. These voices are a burden, weighing Benny down with the emotional resonance of all things, from a silver spoon to a pair of scissors. He doesn’t know what to do with this information, and neither do the people around him. 

As Benny follows these voices and begins to sneak out of school, his mother, Annabelle, struggles to understand her child, even as she grieves and hoards. Annabelle’s job is to monitor the news, and her home bursts with plastic bags full of old newspapers and CDs, as well as her own piles of clothes in need of folding, unfinished craft projects and so much more. Ozeki’s brilliance is to never let Annabelle’s pile overwhelm the reader, offering glimpses of it only through Annabelle’s and Benny’s eyes, who in their grief often have trouble registering the tangible reality around them.

As Benny and Annabelle try to find ways to be in and make sense of the world, questions of communication, loss and connection emerge. Ozeki’s prose is magnetic as she draws readers along, teasing out an ethereal and haunting quality through an additional narrator: that of a sentient Book, who speaks with Benny and helps to tell his story. The Book’s observations are beyond a human’s scope, with a universal objectivity blooming from a communication matrix among all books, like a mycelial network.

Benny and Annabelle are characters you’ll never stop rooting for. They’re worthy of readers’ love as Ozeki meditates on the nature of objects, compassion and everyday beauty. After reading, you’ll be eager for this book to find its way into other readers’ hands.

The title of Pulitzer Prize finalist Joy Williams’ slim, wry novel Harrow, her first in 20 years, resonates through several connotations: to pillage, to plunder, to cultivate with a harrow, to torment, to vex. Indeed, this is a wonderfully vexing novel, one whose symbols open up to the real world.

Khristen is a teenager whose life has been shaped by a story told by her mother about when infant Khristen died and came back to life, and by her subsequent presumed specialness. The world that surrounds Khristen is in ruins, marred by environmental collapse. Her mother disappears, and her boarding school for gifted teens shutters. Little makes sense to her as she tries to figure out what survival means.

As we follow Khristen on her journey, we see the decimated landscape, hear harrowing conversations and observe a world that seems past redemption. Yet as Khristen arrives at a resort located near an odoriferous, puzzling lake known as Big Girl, we see her desire—and that of her friend Jeffrey—to save this place, no matter how challenging and gruesome it may be. Humans have destroyed the land, and yet in this novel, they can’t quite let it go. 

Khristen proves a compelling, ineffable character who escapes categorization. She’s worth rooting for and deserving of our curiosity as we try to understand her. Precise and distanced, beautifully rendered and sparse, Williams’ prose is fascinating, her voice captivating. The sentences are at once clear and mysterious. The descriptions of this world, one that is not quite ours but close, are striking. The dialogue is haunting and engaging.

Harrow creeps into your world. I finished the novel in two sittings and spent days trying to make sense of all that it offers, noticing water and land through a different lens, imagining the possibilities when we believe in the greatness that others see in us, and what happens when we choose not to.

Italian Fever succeeds in joining together a mystery plot with a travel narrative, ruminations on art, and a ghost story. Italy makes the perfect setting for Valerie Martin's novel, which follows an author's assistant to Tuscany after her employer, DV, has been found dead. Lucy Stark, the novel's intrepid and likable protagonist, sets off to Italy to put DV's affairs in order. She becomes ill with the fever of the title, and then finds herself entangled in the very situations that led to DV's demise.

Martin's descriptions of Italy resound with familiarity, but also allow the reader to enjoy discovering the country along with Lucy. In Rome, Lucy wonders at the wild taxi ride from the station through the racket and beauty of the ancient city, how immense and yet livable it was, for there were no tall buildings to intimidate the pedestrian, and how magical and marvelous it appeared in the crisp autumn light. Italy itself becomes a character in the novel, appearing as both a gracious host and an enigmatic, sometimes threatening, environment. The other terrain Martin deals with concerns writers and their marketplace. As Lucy notes of DV's latest project, The book was awful. DV's books were always awful, but what made this one worse than the others was the introduction of a new element, which was bound to boost sales: There was a ghost in the villa. While Lucy's assessment of her employer criticizes the reading public for buying such tripe, Martin uses DV's work and the question of audience as an illuminating framework for larger discussions about art. When Lucy visits the Villa Borghese to see Bernini statues, or meets with an expatriate American artist connected with DV's death, the idea of art permeates and forms Martin's novel.

Italian Fever also contains some of the spooky elements Martin's readers may remember from Mary Reilly, one of her earlier books. As Lucy explores DV's rented Tuscan villa, "The whisper of the paper as she lifted the envelope out of the drawer made sudden intrusive explosions in the ponderous stillness of the house. She could feel it brooding over her like some heavy, muffling feathered creature settling down upon the smooth, hard shells of its own future." The eeriness of the novel provides a mythical quality to its mystery, and lends added import and intrigue to each element of this already densely packed narrative. 

Eliza McGraw is a graduate student in Nashville.

The debut novel from British literary sensation Smith is an expansive work that teems with characters and voices as diverse as the city in which it is set: London. Spanning 25 years, the narrative focuses on Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, two World War II veterans who are now married. Smith’s hilarious epic tells the story of their two multicultural families while touring modern London, touching down in a Jamaican hair salon, an Irish poolroom-cum-immigrant cafe and an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square. Smith, brilliantly satirical, takes race, politics and history into account in a novel that has earned her comparisons to everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie. 

You never know what a person might be going through. A famous novelist may be plagued by insecurity. A childhood friend who grew up in a manor house may have epilepsy. Good fortune isn’t always the panacea some would believe.

Sally Rooney (Normal People) knows this well. Her first two novels were laser-sharp investigations into the lives of characters in their 20s and early 30s. She continues this work in her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, an ambitious novel that deepens her earlier themes.

As with Rooney’s debut, Conversations With Friends, the new book focuses on a quartet of characters. Alice is a novelist with mixed feelings about her early success. She says of her public persona, “I hate her with all my energy,” animosity that leads to a spell in a psychiatric hospital.

After years in New York, she moves to Dublin and meets Felix, who works in a warehouse. She invites him to Rome for an event promoting the Italian translation of her book. Their relationship deepens but not without tension over the imbalances between them.

Meanwhile, Alice’s university friend Eileen has become a low-paid editorial assistant. She has rediscovered feelings for Simon, who grew up in the aforementioned manor house and is deeply religious.

Throughout the book, Alice and Eileen exchange long emails. Interspersed among them are disquisitions on socialism versus capitalism, political conservatism and whether the nature of beauty can survive in a social-media era.

Unlike Rooney’s previous novels, parts of this one feel self-consciously artsy, with a chapter-long backstory and paragraphs that run for many pages. But on the way to its heartfelt destination, this flight is still smooth despite brief, mild turbulence. Rooney writes with uncommon perceptiveness, and her ability to find deeper meaning in small details, such as knowing how a friend takes his coffee, remains unparalleled.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a brutally honest portrait of flawed characters determined to prove “that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.”

Nigerian American author Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström’s debut novel is as much a liberating battle cry as it is a searing, multifaceted examination of the hearts and minds of Black women navigating white-dominated spaces. Told from multiple perspectives, In Every Mirror She’s Black follows three Black women whose lives intersect in Sweden due to one wealthy white man named Jonny von Lundin.

Kemi, a first-generation American, is offered a lucrative position as Jonny's marketing firm's new diversity and inclusion adviser after a campaign's racial insensitivity makes international headlines. Brittany-Rae is a former model now working as a first-class flight attendant, which is where she first captures Jonny’s attention and is soon swept up in a passionate romance with him that appears to be the stuff of fairy tales. Finally, there is Muna, a Muslim refugee from Somalia who is the only surviving member of her family to be granted asylum in Sweden and now carves out a living as a janitorial worker at Jonny’s company. 

Despite Kemi’s, Brittany-Rae’s and Muna’s vastly different backgrounds and circumstances, all three women initially believe that Sweden (and Jonny) could be the answer to their prayers and an opportunity for a fresh start, unburdened by their past and its traumas. Unfortunately, each woman soon learns that Sweden's “utopia” poses its own set of significant challenges and that its principles of inclusivity and tolerance only extend as far as the whitewashed homogeneity of the population. For immigrants and people of color, a hidden dark side roils just below Sweden’s glittering facade, transforming the country from refuge to prison for each of these women.

Åkerström, who moved to Sweden in 2009, has crafted an absorbing, if unsettling, narrative that dissects the realities of what it means to be a Black woman in the world today. She writes with genuine empathy for her characters and sheds light on their struggles with the understanding that there is no single Black experience. Rather than shying away from or oversimplifying difficult and complex topics, Åkerström has effectively packaged themes of racism, immigration, fetishism and otherness into an engrossing story that will enlighten its readers, regardless of their nationality or race. 

A community center, a co-op, a post office, a depot—in the churchless seaside village of Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s conjuring, these are the hallowed spaces where unholy thoughts arise. His latest book to be translated into English, Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night is a loosely structured novel set in rural Iceland. Its world appears cemented in a far earlier time until the reader is yanked back to the modern age by delightfully unexpected mentions of Die Hard and other pop culture references.

Ágústa, the female post officer who reads all the mail, connects this village to the broader world. Here, news travels more frequently than its subjects do. The novel’s collective narrator is a (distinctly male) chorus of unnamed villagers who report the goings-on in the village beyond Ágústa’s divulgences. This chorus adds a suitably cozy, gossipy feel to a novel so concerned with secrets.

Desire—of a carnal, spiritual and intellectual nature—is the plot’s binding agent. In one case, a man’s zeal for Latin and astronomy sends the local Knitting Company belly up, and in another, the village police officer aches for nothing but to paint moorland birds. The majority of villagers experience desire in a more traditional form, however. 

It must be said that the narrator’s fascination with breasts is at times perplexing and serves no shrewd narrative goal (as the voyeuristic “we” narration of the neighborhood boys in Jeffery Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides does, by revealing the dark underpinnings of suburban male fantasies) beyond to say: These village men really like peeping decolletages. In one instance, a farmer named Krísten has a routine of jogging in a transparent top, inexplicably removing her bra partway through the exercise. (Ow!) One could read moments like this as a product of wishful thinking on the part of an unreliable “we” narrator, but one suspects they are endemic to Stefánsson’s own fictive reality. 

Stefánsson’s observational writing soars when he lingers over life’s mundane wonders—a steaming cup of tea, a cloudy sky undulating over a field, lunchmeat, the silence of fish—and his abundant cottagey humor fits the landscape. A supernatural event at the depot rounds out the mysteries of this universe, where even Reykjavik is a distant thought. 

Fourteen years ago, Colm Tóibín gave us the exquisite novel The Master, a lyrical and probing portrait of Henry James that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Magician takes a similar approach to Nobelist Thomas Mann, and though Tóibín has not quite captured lightning in a bottle a second time, this deeply researched, highly accomplished fictional narrative still makes for compelling reading. While The Master focused on just five years in James’ life, The Magician covers some 60 years in Mann’s, lending it a more sweeping trajectory. In many ways, it is as much about Mann’s eccentric family as about the great writer himself.

Tóibín has assuredly drawn heavily on Mann’s diaries, which were published to great attention in 1975, 20 years after Mann’s death. Those private papers revealed truths the circumspect writer had been careful to conceal during his lifetime, particularly regarding his sexuality. Since the 1912 publication of Death in Venice, speculation existed about Mann’s attraction to men, but the father of six was largely able to deflect such talk. Tóibín makes Mann’s generally repressed but occasionally acted-upon sexuality one of the throughlines of the narrative in The Magician, but it is by no means the sole focus of this meaty fictional biography.

Mann lived through the shattering events of the first half of the 20th century, but he was born into the placid, privileged world of the fin de siècle German bourgeoisie—a world he re-created in his 1901 masterwork, Buddenbrooks. Propriety and discretion were his watchwords, so it is all the more remarkable that he sired a brood of rule-breaking offspring. The opposite of their cautious father, three of Mann’s children were openly gay, and two of those, Erika and Klaus, were political and artistic provocateurs. The family also had deep-seated emotional disorders; Mann’s two sisters and two of his children, as well as his sister-in-law, died by suicide.

Mann himself, as Tóibín presents him, was a stoic observer of all of this familial drama, trussed by his Teutonic restraints. Only the horrific disruption of World War II, which scattered the family and jettisoned Mann and his wife, Katia, to Los Angeles, seemed to awaken the elder statesman to the evils of the wider world and the fragility of his family. The pages of Tóibín’s novel dealing with the war years crackle and soar above the rest.

In addition to the colorful Manns themselves, The Magician is populated by literary and cultural icons—Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden (who married Erika to protect her with British citizenship), Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss, Gustav and Alma Mahler, Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt—underscoring how Mann lived within the circumference of more than one great circle. His children dubbed him “the Magician” because he performed tricks for them at dinner, but Tóibín suggests Mann was more audience than performer—“the Observer,” perhaps, transfiguring his observations of others into enduring art, even though he never fully understood himself.