Helene Wecker’s debut, The Golem and the Jinni, materialized like magic on the 2013 literary scene. In that startling and scintillating novel, the author gave life to the inanimate clay of one old legend (the golem) and in the same breath gave complex shape to the shifting sands of another (the jinni). The reader’s delight was redoubled by this magnificent synthesis of Jewish and Arabian folklore. The friendship between Chava the golem and Ahmad the jinni in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City seemed as implausible—and as irresistibly alluring—as peace between two immemorially warring civilizations.

Like all great storytellers, Wecker knows we can never have enough of a good thing, so Chava and Ahmad are back in The Hidden Palace. Wecker’s arithmetic is plain: In the sequel, there are now two golems and two jinn. This epic mitosis exponentially augments the story’s narrative power and emotional consequences.

Chava and Ahmad have learned to conceal their true identities in order to live among human beings, so it comes as a shock when the newcomers—Yossele the golem and Dima the jinniyeh (a female jinni)—return us violently to the fearful origins of the legends. Yossele is no more than raw, animated clay, ready to kill anyone in order to protect its maker. Dima is a wild creature of wind and fire, ready to deceive and destroy a human being on a whim.

In Wecker’s novel, real-life events have an inexorable impact on mortal and supernatural characters alike. Whether you’re a monster or a human being, you have no choice but to confront the enormity of the sinking of the Titanic, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire or the Great War. From one crisis to the next, a strange and unbreakable alliance develops among many persons and elemental creatures, burgeoning into something even more marvelous than the rabbinical spell and the desert magic that brought the golems and jinn into being. 

As for the “hidden palace”—where and what is it, if it’s important enough to stand as the title? Could it be Ahmad’s grief-stricken, obsessive experiments with metal and glass, after he thinks he’s lost everything? Perhaps. But the author may be daring the reader to participate in the palace’s symbolic creation, to bear witness to its noble construction out of a secret and miraculous communion of Jewish clay and Arabic element. 

Fans of The Golem and the Jinni have waited eight years for this sequel, a minor eternity perfectly in keeping with the precarious immortality of Wecker’s hopeful monsters. It has been worth the wait. 

It’s rare when a book is decidedly grim—dire, even—yet still manages to be as full of comfort, humor and hope as One Two Three, a thought-provoking allegory about corporate greed, environmental activism, parent-child relationships and the bonds and betrayals of sisterly love. 

The residents of the fictional town of Bourne were poisoned 17 years ago by a chemical leak into the water supply, and “the only people who did not die or leave were the ones who could not.” The Mitchell family is among those still stuck in the fading, abandoned town, with matriarch Nora struggling for years to make ends meet and to bring a class-action lawsuit against Belsum Chemical. The leak caused her husband’s death not long before their triplet daughters were born, two of whom were affected in utero by the chemical. 

With nicknames “One,” “Two” and “Three,” the girls, now 16 years old, take turns narrating. Mab describes herself as “a boring straight white girl”; Monday is autistic and maintains what’s left of Bourne’s library in their small home; and Mirabel is super smart but can’t walk or talk, so she communicates electronically through an app she calls “the Voice.” Frankel reveals their stories in artful prose laced with humor, much of it dark. For instance, when Mirabel gets angry at her sisters, she reminds herself “that if I killed them both I would never be able to use the toilet again when my mother was not home.”

The town is filled with wonderful characters, including Mrs. Shriver, the high school teacher who teaches history achronologically because she doesn’t believe in cause and effect. The plot takes off when a new student arrives from Boston named River Templeton. He’s the descendant of Belsum’s founders, who have plans to reopen the plant. Mab and Mirabel quickly fall for River, while all three sisters scheme clever ways to use him to gather information that will help their mother’s lawsuit.

The result is a warm, funny tour de force that has much to say about big business, the ways that tragedies unfold, the power of citizens to effect change and the passing of civic responsibility from one generation to the next. As Mirabel explains, “It’s not our mother—our mothers, the last generation—who can fix this. They can’t. It is up to us now, the daughters, to move our town forward, to save us all, to tell a different story.” One Two Three is a very different story indeed—one that is delightfully memorable and wildly empowering.

The incident that gives You People its title occurs on a bus in London. Shan, a line cook at an unassuming neighborhood restaurant called Pizzeria Vesuvio, sees a woman and her young son on the bus. Shan has seen them before, and with each sighting, the boy has looked sicker. Shan fled torture in Sri Lanka and entered England without documents, and the boy reminds him of the son he left behind. Shan looks at the pair with deep feeling, but the mother screeches at him, blaming him and “you people” for crowding out her son’s medical treatment.

By this point in the novel, we know quite a bit about the interior lives of Shan and his restaurant co-workers. Many of them are also without documents, and all are misfits. Nia is the daughter of a spirited Welsh woman and a Bengali father whom she’s never met, though Shan considers her a white Brit. Tuli, the restaurant owner, is a mysterious figure who lends his employees money, meets furtively with drug dealers and petty thieves, and travels the city at night on unknown errands. We wonder what price his employees will pay for his generosity.

Born in India and raised in Wales, author Nikita Lalwani moves us through the first parts of her third novel with ravishing, insightful prose. Of Shan’s regretful memories of arguments with the wife he decided to leave behind, Lalwani writes, “He would leave the soiled furnace of their words when it was too overwhelming—and walk around outside for hours.” Or about Nia’s need to rid herself of her lower-class Welsh accent, Lalwani writes, “That was one of the first things she did at Oxford, along with getting rid of her home-bleached locks. She remembered wearing those new vowels like furs, feeling that showy and ridiculous.” This is just a tiny sample of Lalwani’s great skill and empathic heart.

Lalwani’s novel takes the reader under the skin and inside the souls of these characters. Its early pages are a magical read, as we are invited to ponder generosity and human kindness.  But when the story bends toward plot—danger, rescue, relief—a bit of the magic is lost. It remains a very good novel, just not the very great novel we’d hoped for.

Of the many questions one might ask after a tragedy, one of the likeliest is: What if? What if the victims had been elsewhere on the day of the disaster? That’s the question Francis Spufford addresses in his graceful second novel, Light Perpetual.

The story begins with a devastating fictional variation on an actual event. On a Saturday in 1944, “an eager crowd of women” comes to a Woolworths in the English town of Bexford to see a wartime novelty: a shipment of shiny new saucepans. Everyone is having fun until a V-2 warhead crashes through the ceiling and “in a ten-thousandth of a second” sends plaster and bricks and roof tiles everywhere. Among the dead are five children.

But what if the bomb had landed farther away? Spufford imagines the lives those five children might have led, starting in 1949, when each would have been 10 years old, and revisits them every 15 years. The result is a clever commentary on the changes in Western society as seen through Spufford’s characters. There’s Alec, who works as a newspaper compositor before desktop publishing threatens his profession; Vern, a wannabe real estate mogul who isn’t averse to shady dealings; Jo, who tries to forge a music career in a male-dominated era; her sister, Val, who falls for a skinhead; and Ben, who grapples with schizophrenia and its repercussions.

Light Perpetual derives considerable power from dramatizing the experiences its characters missed: the chance to build and lose a fortune, to see one’s dreams realized or else rerouted toward more modest achievements, or just to hold a loved one’s hand. Spufford shrewdly reminds readers that tragedy deprives the world of not only noble people but also scoundrels, and this fact is part of the fabric of history.

Late in the novel, Jo says of her attempts to become a recording star, “But none of it worked out! None of it went anywhere,” to which her son replies, “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t any good.” That’s the biggest message of this book: A road might lead to a dead end, but the journey could still be worthwhile.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Featuring vibrant characters, all of whom have rich interior lives, Francis Spufford’s novel is perfect for audio.

Some books leave you with a feeling for which there are no words, or at least no words in English that you know of. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts is one of those books. The feeling closest to what is evoked by this beautifully crafted novel is a stroll during the blue hour on the first warm evening of spring. (Surely there’s a word for that in German.)

Whereabouts is narrated by a middle-aged woman who lives in a country that is much like Italy—and likely is, as the novel was written in Italian and translated by the author. The woman is unmarried and has no children. She has loads of friends and a satisfying enough career in academia. Her father died suddenly when she was young. She had a contentious relationship with her mother, who is alive but fading, and now their relationship has mellowed a bit. The narrator is neither depressed nor ecstatically happy. She tends to regard everything she sees with a cool, pleasurable equanimity. Even the most shocking kerfuffle in the novel (which we won’t reveal here) passes like a storm cloud. 

One of the many joys of this little book, besides Lahiri’s usual gorgeous writing, is that there’s almost no plot. The chapters are short, some less than a page, with headers like “In Spring,” “At the Register,” “At My House.” They are all about the narrator watching, listening and thinking, whether about a favorite stationery shop suddenly turned into a luggage store, how some old flame has aged (and how she ever could have loved him in the first place) or the intimacy of a manicure.

Another lovely thing about the book is that you don’t even have to read its chapters in order. The novel is like a contemporary orarium, a collection of private devotions to read for insight and comfort before going to bed. Whereabouts is even physically small, just the size for a purse or a roomy pocket, to pull out and enjoy when you have a moment. It is a jewel of a book.

Fiona Mozley’s Hot Stew couldn’t be more distinct from her first novel, Elmet, a finalist for the 2017 Booker Prize. But this lively story of class conflict in contemporary London offers more evidence of Mozley’s talent and versatility, marking her as a writer whose work promises both thoughtful entertainment and surprises.

At the heart of the novel is the city’s Soho neighborhood, where most of the ensemble cast’s members live and work. Agatha Howard, whose sizable inheritance supports the adage about all great fortunes arising from great crimes, has decided to renovate one of her extensive real estate holdings. But the neighborhood has long been home to London’s sex trade, so Agatha’s plan sparks a clash with a determined group of sex workers based there, led by Nigerian-born Precious and her older companion, Tabitha.

While Agatha deploys her wealth and connections to enlist a politically ambitious police officer in her plan, the women take to the streets to summon popular support for their cause, even as they recognize they’re “hardly going to get Bob Geldof and Bono fighting in [their] corner.” Mozley subtly wires these characters and others, including a semiretired mob enforcer, a modestly successful actor and an ex-drug addict whose disappearance heightens police pressure on the district, into a complex network of unpredictable and intriguing connections. 

Whether the scene is a déclassé Mayfair men’s club or a fetid cellar that affords refuge for a collection of homeless people, Mozley brings her diverse settings to life, as well as the clashing desires and ambitions of her colorful characters. Hot Stew’s title is an apt one, as Mozley consistently stirs in tasty ingredients and exciting spices, and keeps raising the temperature all the way to its startling climax. 

You may think you know a thing or two about the music industry, but from the opening pages of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, it’s clear that debut novelist Dawnie Walton knows a thing or two more.

Walton spins the story of Opal Jewel, a young Black woman from Detroit who has rock ’n’ roll aspirations. Opal meets British singer-songwriter Nev Charles at an open-mike night, and after deciding to make music together, they start to ascend the rungs to rock stardom. But when a concert tragically ends in racial violence, they disappear from the spotlight.

Years later, music journalist S. Sunny Shelton, who’s spent her life unwillingly linked to Opal and Nev’s story, decides to curate an oral history about them in time for a hopeful reunion. When Sunny’s interviews unveil the truth behind the group’s troubled past, it seems like this story of a band lost to time may end in disaster.

While the novel’s interwoven voices and oral history format will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six, a more apt comparison would be to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, as its perspective makes it both timely and prescient. Through viewpoints that leap from Opal, Nev and Sunny to Opal’s family members, readers begin to understand the band’s glamorous, tragic story from every angle.

Music is at the heart of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, and Walton makes us love these musicians in the same way that we love our favorite bands. She uses this love to dig deeper, grappling with racism and other sinister themes to reveal the true essence of rock ’n’ roll. It’s not just about sex and drugs and parties; it’s a way to express the complexity and sadness of our everyday lives. Using music to cope is glorious and human, and Walton doesn’t just cope—she triumphs.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Debut novelist Dawnie Walton discusses the legacy of Black women in rock and the strange ways that music moves us—just a few of her pieces of inspiration for The Final Revival of Opal & Nev.

Andrea Lee’s lush and lyrical Red Island House is an episodic novel of race and culture that flirts with fabulism as it portrays a couple at odds with each other and their island home. It’s set in Madagascar, an island nation that floats between Africa and India both culturally and geographically. “Though defined by cartographers as part of Africa, Madagascar really belongs only to itself,” Lee writes. 

The novel is a bit like that as well. The protagonist, Shay, is a refined academic and an expatriate American. Senna is a big and brash Italian man. They meet at a wedding in Como, Italy, and fall inexorably in love. He’s older and wealthy, and it’s a second marriage for them both. 

When Senna builds his dream vacation home in the rough northwestern reaches of Madagascar, on the tiny island of Naratrany, he tells Shay that it’s for her, like an elaborate wedding gift. But she knows better. The house is a fantasy of Senna’s that long precedes her arrival, and it proceeds regardless of her wishes or comfort. Their visits to Naratrany expose and exacerbate the space between them, and each time they touch down there, Senna becomes a terrain that Shay doesn’t recognize and can’t navigate. With time, tiny cracks become cleavages. 

In Madagascar, Shay is thrust into a role she doesn’t want, as mistress of the Red House, a vast neocolonial manse that requires nearly a dozen staff members to maintain. The fact that Shay is Black complicates things in ways she can’t quite come to terms with. The Red House is not a plantation, the people who work there aren’t enslaved, and yet there is something deeply discomfiting in its hierarchical social arrangements. What can Shay make of the man and the marriage that put her in this position? “Through years of her Naratrany holidays, she never shakes the sensation that her leisure is built on old crimes,” she thinks. The tableau haunts and unsettles her. 

At first Shay believes she can wall off these problems at the Red House, but the rot cannot be contained. The ebb and flow of Shay’s marriage is just part of the story, as Red Island House contains vignettes about a fascinating array of characters and entanglements in the Naratrany society that surrounds though never quite embraces the couple. From the feuding female entrepreneurs whom Shay calls “Sirens” to the local éminence grise who may or may not have spiritual powers, it’s a complex and seductive tapestry.

Shay’s volatile, uneasy relationship with the island, a place she and Senna can occupy but never possess, parallels the one she has with her husband. She knows her relationship with her second home “is incomplete, deliberately detached, based in guilt and fear—unworthy of the people and place.” What’s more interesting is that she also admits that her attitude is “in no way superior to that of Senna, who, for his part, has always viewed the country as his personal playground; as if it were indeed Libertalia, the fictional pirate colony that has captivated Western imagination since it was first born from Daniel Defoe’s pen.” This description captures both Shay’s ambivalence and Lee’s style, which is rife with cultural allusions of all sorts.

Lee’s striking writing is layered and thick with evocative descriptions of people, landscapes, feelings and foreboding. Sociological and psychological, it’s prose with the abstract feel of poetry. The stories of Red Island House are vibrant and enchanting despite the current of dread that runs through the novel from the start.