“Part of our friendship, of any relationship really, is the tacit agreement to allow a generous latitude for flaws and grievances.” These are the words of Riley Wilson, speaking about her lifelong bond with her best friend, Jenny Murphy. But while this agreement has worked for them in the past, it won’t anymore. 

In We Are Not Like Them, written by co-authors Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, we meet Riley and Jenny as their friendship is tested as never before: Riley is a Black journalist covering the recent murder of a Black teenage boy by a white police officer, who turns out to be Jenny’s husband, Kevin. 

In chapters that alternate between Riley’s and Jenny’s points of view, we begin to understand each woman’s perspective on events. Through Riley, we see how traumatizing it is for a Black journalist to cover police-involved killings, and we see her unease in broadcasting other people’s trauma in order to further her career. Through Jenny, we understand the private fears of a police officer’s spouse and the relentless pressure on cops and their families to “back the blue,” no matter what. 

While We Are Not Like Them is fundamentally about the loyalties and betrayals among their communities—and each other—Riley and Jenny are not caricatures. Pride, a Black writer, editor and publishing veteran, and Piazza, a white journalist and podcast host, have written these women as complex, layered people who do their best to navigate infertility, shame, absent maternal figures and the generational trauma wrought by racist violence. 

Hopelessness is certainly a theme in the novel, especially in the epilogue that centers on Tamara, the murdered boy’s grieving mother. But We Are Not Like Them is ultimately about the inherently hopeful act of having grace when the people we love make mistakes—even terrible ones. This is an excellent book club selection or a starting point for interracial friend groups or families to talk candidly about race. 

Award-winning Lebanese American author Rabih Alameddine’s sixth novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope, is as complex and multifaceted as its narrator. The story is a shape-shifting kaleidoscope, a collection of moments—funny, devastating, absurd—that bear witness to the violence of war and displacement without sensationalizing it.

Mina Simpson, a transgender Lebanese American doctor, arrives on the Greek island of Lesbos to volunteer at a refugee camp. It’s the closest she’s been to Lebanon since she left her home country decades ago, and the first time she’s seen her brother (who flies in to visit her) in years. On Lesbos, Mina meets a family from Syria and becomes close with the family’s mother, who is dying of cancer and whom Mina steps in to help however she can.

As Mina struggles to make sense of the crisis unfolding before her, she recounts the winding path of her life: her Lebanese childhood, her experiences in medical school in the U.S. and her comfortable middle age in Chicago with her wife. Moving between past and present, the novel unfolds in short chapters with whimsical titles that perfectly encapsulate Mina’s dry humor, wisdom and compassion (e.g., “When You Don’t Know What to Say, Have a Cookie”). 

Interspersed with these chapters are sections addressed to a gay Lebanese writer whose work has had a profound impact on Mina’s life, and who seems to be a reflection of Alameddine himself. “Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative,” Mina tells the unnamed writer in one of these chapters, an unsettling truth that Alameddine embraces in this novel. He refuses to offer easy solutions to impossible situations; his characters do not learn lessons. This is not a novel about transformation. Its strength lies in its slipperiness, its thoughtful engagement with the messy in-betweens and the harsh but revelatory realities of liminality.

Mina, her fellow volunteers and the refugees they meet are all seeking something: safety or wholeness, a new home, old friends, a different narrative through which to understand their lives. The Wrong End of the Telescope is a gorgeously written, darkly funny and refreshingly queer witness to that seeking.

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.