With her 2020 debut, Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy established herself as a powerful new voice in fiction. With her follow-up, Once There Were Wolves, the Australian author proves that her particular brand of deeply evocative literary lightning can indeed strike twice. Intense, emotional and rich with beautifully rendered prose, McConaghy’s novel is a powerful meditation on humanity, nature and the often frightening animalistic impulses lurking within us all.

Inti Flynn and her sister, Aggie, were raised in two different households by two different parents who each had their own very specific reasons to distrust humanity. Inti turned to the wild for inspiration, comfort and fulfillment. Now grown and working in conservation, Inti arrives in Scotland to release the first gray wolves, absent from the region for centuries, back into the country’s Highlands. As local farmers respond with resistance and the wolves struggle to adjust to their new home, Inti finds herself caught between a sister who needs her, a man who wants her and a community that perhaps wants her gone for good, and that’s all before the dead body shows up.

As McConaghy navigates Inti’s emotional state through past and present, from the wilds of Alaska to the town halls of Scotland, it becomes clear that Once There Were Wolves is as much concerned with charting Inti’s own wild nature as it is with the wild nature of the wolves she so loves. Whether McConaghy is writing about the deep, wordless connection between two sisters or the strange respect that forms between ideological enemies, her prose never feels overwhelmed or even particularly hurried. There’s a density of meaning to her language, filling every paragraph with poignant, poetic life, and it’s clear even in the opening chapters that she’s mastered this world and these characters.

Once There Were Wolves is another triumph for a rising fiction star, offering an intensely realized world for readers to get lost in.

Miranda Fitch, the protagonist of Mona Awad’s third novel, All’s Well, might best be described—to borrow the title of the 1988 Pedro Almodóvar film—as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A professor of theater studies at a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, she’s laboring mightily to stage a student production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which she thinks of as a “problem play,” one that’s “neither a tragedy nor a comedy. Both, always both.”

Apart from a rebellious cast, Miranda’s primary obstacle is unremitting pain from an injury she sustained when she tumbled from a stage during her promising but brief acting career. The resulting hip injury led to serious back problems unrelieved by the ministrations of a string of doctors and physical therapists, transforming Miranda, divorced and not yet 40 years old, into a pill-gobbling automaton who has abandoned all hope of her own happy ending.

All’s Well quickly leaves behind this depressingly naturalistic scenario to veer into the realm of fabulism when Miranda encounters three mysterious men in a local pub. The trio, who inexplicably have intimate knowledge of her life and struggles, grace her with what seems like a miracle cure. But as she discovers, even healing can come at a price.

Awad efficiently portrays both Miranda’s confrontation with chronic pain and the slowly evaporating patience of the people in her orbit (her ex-husband, Paul; colleague and friend Grace; and Mark, the last in a chain of physical therapists) with her lack of improvement. Anyone who’s been similarly afflicted or knows someone who has will recognize this scenario. Awad leaves it to the reader to assess how much of Miranda’s mental turmoil is the product of an inexplicable but desperately welcome truce in her battle with pain, and how much flows from her encounter with supernatural forces. It’s a wild, at times over-the-top ride, but like Shakespeare’s eponymous work, there’s both pathos and humor in this story of how we suffer and the ways in which we’re healed.

It’s been nine years since the publication of Jeanne Thornton’s debut, The Dream of Doctor Bantam, and her second novel, Summer Fun, has been worth the wait. Dizzying and deliciously weird, it’s a sprawling yet intimate story about music, hidden trans histories and the transformative act of creation.

Gala, a trans woman living in small-town New Mexico, is obsessed with a classic 1960s pop band called the Get Happies and their mysterious lead singer, B       . In a series of remarkable letters to B       , full of whip-smart observations and dark humor, Gala slowly reveals the true story of B       ’s life and music, shedding light on herself in the process.

This is no ordinary epistolary novel. Thornton discards convention, choosing instead to use the form to explore the possibilities of cross-generational queer and trans conversations. Gala’s letters act as a kind of portal, a manifestation of trans magic. She addresses B        directly, often inhabiting the singer’s thoughts and emotions. Gala tells B       ’s story from the inside, as if she were the one who lived it. Each letter is a small act of discovery, an unfolding mystery. The unique epistolary format makes space for deep connections, not only between Gala and B        but also between Gala and the reader. It is impossible not to read these heartfelt missives without becoming wholly invested in her world.

Reflecting on the impossibility of authenticity in the music industry, Gala muses as B       , “No one gets to sound like who they are; that isn’t how success operates.” But Thornton proves this isn’t always the case. Gala’s narration is singular—assured, sarcastic and yearning. She’s determined to tell her story, as well as B       ’s, through her own particular lens, unrefined and vulnerable, full of messy contradictions. Thornton’s plotting is masterful, her prose elegant and her characterization nuanced. But it’s the emotional heft of Gala’s narrative voice that sets this novel apart.

Summer Fun is unpredictable and delightful, structurally innovative and epic in scope. It’s a heartbreaking yet hopeful addition to the growing canon of literature that celebrates the complexity of trans lives.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, there were more than 26 million refugees worldwide at the end of 2019. Amid food insecurity, oppression and injustice, the global refugee crisis shows no signs of slowing, as migrants dare to cross dangerous seas on overcrowded ferries, fishing trawlers or other vessels in hopes of finding a better life. Many refugees fail to reach the next shore, becoming victims of dangerous waters or border patrols who turn them away.

For Amir Utu, a 9-year-old Syrian boy in Omar El Akkad’s riveting second novel, What Strange Paradise, the voyage is at first a grand adventure, like in the comic books he reads. But after washing ashore on an unnamed island’s beach as the only survivor, Amir soon learns that this is no adventure but rather a matter of survival. Almost at once, he is pursued by soldiers combing the beach, and he must flee to escape them, though he barely understands why he is running in the first place.

Amir’s flight brings him in contact with 15-year-old Vänna Hermes, who takes pity on him, hides him from the soldiers and tries to help him to safety. Amir is unable to understand Vänna’s language, but as the pair builds an unusual bond, Amir finds a friend amid a hostile world.

An international journalist and author of the acclaimed novel American War, El Akkad shapes What Strange Paradise mostly through Amir’s point of view, alternating between the boy’s immediate past and his present situation as he struggles to comprehend his plight. The author’s decision to focus on Amir’s youthful innocence serves to downplay the serious political undertones of the refugee crisis, transforming the boy’s tale into an intimate action-adventure story that’s laced with hope and compassion, emotions with the power to transcend borders and worldly disputes.

Sunjeev Sahota’s brilliant second novel, the 2015 Booker Prize short-listed The Year of the Runaways, was a sweeping and absorbing look at hardscrabble Indian immigrant life in working-class England. His third book, China Room, is a shorter, more intimate novel that still tells a compelling and devastating tale. It’s also partially based on a true story.

The novel alternates between two storylines in the 1920s and 1990s. The earlier timeline, which is based in part on Sahota’s great-grandmother’s experiences, is set in India’s heavily agricultural Punjab region. Notoriously patriarchal, rural India has been slow to offer women certain rights and opportunities, especially a century ago. Three brothers are married to young girls, including 15-year-old Mehar, in a triple ceremony. The girls are ruled with an iron fist by their mother-in-law, Mai, who barks orders like a military general and demeans them every chance she gets. Mai permits nightly visits between her sons and their new wives, but only in pitch darkness. In the confusion, an illicit affair begins.

The second story, set during the summer of 1999, centers on Mehar’s great-grandson. Narrating from 2019, the man describes traveling to India, seeking refuge from the heroin that has wrecked his health and the racism that has broken apart his family in the U.K. While trying to overcome his addiction, he finds himself going cold turkey in the now rundown “china room” where Mehar used to live along with her sisters-in-law. The man’s story somewhat echoes Mehar’s, and when he falls for a female doctor who’s more than a decade older than he, the local village is rife with gossip.

Through short chapters and sparse, tightly wrought prose, Sahota’s novel is both easy to read and difficult to put down. Something of a hometown hero, not only in the old steel town of Sheffield, where he currently resides, but also to British Indian and Asian writers, Sahota cements his place in a vibrant literary canon alongside Salman Rushdie, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Hari Kunzru and others.

In Anuk Arudpragasam’s elegantly discursive second novel, memory, trauma and collective action determine the arc of lives.

A Passage North begins in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where a young man named Krishan is mulling over an email from his cryptic ex-girlfriend, an activist named Anjum, whom he dated years ago in Delhi, India. Moments later, Krishan learns his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has mysteriously fallen down a well and died. 

These two events set the wheels in motion for Krishan’s journey to the center of himself. He boards a train to northern Sri Lanka to attend Rani’s funeral, but his journey exists more in mind than body. He meditates on his brief but engulfing love affair with Anjum and is haunted by the government-sanctioned persecution of the Tamil people.

For readers unfamiliar with the Sri Lankan Civil War, A Passage North offers perspective on the Sinhalese-dominated government’s conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The insurrectionist Tamil Tigers fought to form an independent state so their ethno-linguistic minority group could escape subjugation, rape and killing. Arudpragasam raises questions about unfettered devotion to higher causes as Krishan struggles to find his own true purpose, the way Anjum seemed to find hers by forming a politically active commune away from Delhi—and away from their life together.

Arudpragasam expertly captures the ambiguity of romance between two young people who feel the call of the broader world even as they cling to each other. Krishan recalls meeting Anjum through the queer scene in Delhi, where he was enraptured by her easy confidence, her knowledge of poetry and languages, and the way she stared back at men who ogled her, forcing them to confront their own gaze. While Arudpragasam’s writing remains observational throughout, this love story adds heat and intrigue to an otherwise philosophical novel.

In A Passage North, past and present bleed together. Flipping through the novel’s pages, the reader will notice an absence of white space and section breaks outside of chapter demarcations. There is no direct dialogue either. In this way, the novel is reminiscent of José Saramago’s work. But Arudpragasam’s writing is exceptionally graceful, which allows the text to flow despite its density. The lack of action may frustrate some readers, but this structure creates an otherwise impossible narrative reverie. Ultimately, A Passage North is an elegant story whose discursive nature pays off.   

Remember the smoke monster from “Lost”? It appears that he’s alive and well and living in Violet Kupersmith’s debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body. Add in two-headed cobras, hungry ghosts, body-hopping and body horror (both the more ordinary kind that involves explosive emesis and incontinence, and the kind that involves eldritch distortions), then throw in Vietnam’s history as a chew toy of empires, and you have a small part of what goes on in this kaleidoscopic book.

On its surface, Build Your House Around My Body concerns Winnie Nguyen, a Vietnamese American woman who’s come to Vietnam to teach and to find herself. One day, she disappears. Every chapter heading refers to her vanishing; one chapter is set 62 years before her disappearance, while another’s events occur the day after. It’s as if the workings of the cosmos depend on the fate of this messed up, seemingly insignificant young woman.

And how messed up she is, despite her longing to be good. When she is told that good Vietnamese girls don’t drink coffee, she never touches it again. But Winnie just can’t make her life work. She exists in a state of squalor, both internally and externally, reflecting the condition of Saigon’s noisome open-air markets, sleazy sex motels and creepy karaoke bars and beer joints.

Kupersmith’s grasp of her story’s secondary characters is as firm as her grasp of Winnie. There’s the gentle and befuddled Long and his estranged brother, Tan, both in love with a combative girl named Binh. There are Winnie’s ridiculous fellow teachers at the Achievement! International Language Academy. There are fortunetellers and shape-shifters, pepper and rubber plantation tycoons, and a lady who may or may not be a paraplegic who sells fake lottery tickets.

It would have been easy for a book with so much going on to collapse into incoherence, but it’s an engaging read the whole way through. Build Your House Around My Body is an unsettling and powerful work.

The long overdue publication of Richard Wright’s short novel The Man Who Lived Underground could not be timelier. In the opening section, which he began writing in 1941, Wright (Native Son, Black Boy) constructs a harrowing episode of a falsely accused Black man named Fred Daniels who is beaten near senseless by police officers intent on getting a confession. Sadly, Wright’s brutal realism still resonates 80 years later. When his agent and publisher originally rejected the book, Wright pared down the material into a truncated short story with the same title. This new edition, which languished in manuscript form among his papers, restores Wright’s original vision.

Richard Wright’s forgotten, foreboding allegory has now been published 80 years after his original publisher rejected it.

Triggered by a true story that Wright read of a man who lived underground in Los Angeles for a year, the novel is set in an unidentified city. Once Fred Daniels escapes police custody, he descends through a manhole and encounters a dank, subterranean network of tunnels that leads him to the cellars of a series of businesses—butcher, jewelry store, insurance company with a safe full of money, greengrocer. His thefts from these establishments come to mean nothing, for he now lives in a world where such material possessions are meaningless. He listens to hymns through the walls of a church and begins to view sin and salvation from a new perspective. He becomes alienated from the “normal” world, seemingly forgetting that he has left a wife and infant behind, and his alienation frees him in ways that can be viewed as either liberation or insanity.

While issues of race launch the story, these issues weren’t the impetus for the novel. As Wright explains in an accompanying essay, “Memories of My Grandmother,” The Man Who Lived Underground is an attempt at something far more complicated: an allegory for religion, guilt and alienation. It was inspired by Wright’s deeply religious grandmother, who lived apart from the world even as she lived among people—hating anyone who did not share her beliefs but adhering to society’s rules. It’s informed, too, Wright says, by blues rhythms and surrealistic perceptions, and it borrows, consciously or not, from the hard-boiled urban fiction of the era.

Wright also reveals in his essay a long fascination with stories about invisible men, and The Man Who Lived Underground at times pulses with a certain pulp fiction sensibility, located somewhere between Wright’s usual gritty realism and a more heightened, fabulist realm. “I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom,” he writes. Enigmatic and haunting, Wright’s restored novel adds layers to his legacy as one of the leading Black writers in American literary history.

Just as the protagonist of Lorna Mott Comes Home returns to the United States after 18 years in France, author Diane Johnson returns to fiction 13 years after her last novel, Lulu in Marrakech. But while Johnson’s reemergence will be welcome news to fans of her leisurely writing style, the reception to Lorna Mott’s San Francisco homecoming varies among the book’s characters.

Art historian Lorna lands stateside at the time of “the handsome new president, Obama.” She has left her second husband, Armand-Loup, and his “wild infidelity” back in their French town of Pont-les-Puits. As Johnson memorably shows, the U.S. has changed during Lorna’s absence. Astronomical property prices and increased homelessness are two of many manifestations of a widening wealth chasm.

Lorna’s three grown kids from her first marriage are also different. Divorced Peggy makes crafts such as personalized dog collars to make ends meet. Ex-hippie Hams and his pregnant wife, Misty, struggle financially. Curt had “a thriving software enterprise” until a bike accident put him in a five-month coma. He’s now in Southeast Asia, trying to find himself. Complicating the picture further are Lorna’s first husband, Ran; his wife, Amy, “a Silicon Valley millionairess”; and their daughter, 15-year-old Gilda, who gets pregnant by a Stanford-bound 20-year-old.

Sound complicated? It is, but delightfully so, and that’s before an unusual complexity: In Pont-les-Puits, mudslides dislodge the bones of people interred in a cemetery, including those of an American painter. French authorities have named Lorna as the painter’s next of kin and would like for her to pay for his reinterment.

Lorna Mott Comes Home takes time to develop its characters, much like the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton, the comedy-of-manners forebears to whom Johnson is often compared. But admirers will savor the ease with which Johnson moves from one storyline to the next. 

Early in the novel, Lorna gives a poorly received lecture on medieval tapestries that had “a romantic history of being lost, hidden, forgotten through the centuries.” That’s the poignant essence of this novel. Like those tapestries, a life is fragile and vulnerable to being forgotten, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful.

There’s an intimacy to Jason Mott’s fiction, retained even when the scope of his narrative widens. But even by these standards, his fourth novel is a uniquely tight, personal story that digs into deeply emotional territory. Through two interwoven storylines unfolding in a witty, often devastatingly incisive style, Hell of a Book is a journey into the heart of a very particular American experience, one that far too many don’t live to tell.

Hell of a Book is named for the novel written by Mott’s protagonist, an unnamed author embarking on a booze-fueled book tour across the United States, hopping from hotel room to hotel room and interview after interview. But the author is less keen to talk about his book than about the Kid, a mysterious and possibly imaginary Black child who has appeared by the author’s side and now follows him everywhere. 

As the author and the Kid get to know each other, Mott intersperses their tale with that of Soot, a Black boy who endures bullying in his small town for the color of his skin, and whose childhood seems to be on a tragic and all-too-common trajectory.

You may think you see where these two stories are headed, where they will converge and knit together, and what they will have to say at the end, but you don’t. And even if you could, Mott’s bittersweet, remarkably nimble novel would still keep you turning the pages. 

Hell of a Book is a masterwork of balance, as Mott navigates the two narratives and their delicate tonal distinctions. A surrealist feast of imagination that’s brimming with very real horrors, frustrations and sorrows, it can break your heart and make you laugh out loud at the same time, often on the same page. This is an achievement of American fiction that rises to meet this particular moment with charm, wisdom and truth.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Hell of a Book author Jason Mott discusses the new confidence he’s found as a writer. “I hope that it leads to more creative exploration and new paths of storytelling in the future.”