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.

The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World is a poetic novel about a real telephone booth in Otsuchi, Japan, a rural town decimated by the 2011 tsunami. Known as the “Wind Phone,” the disconnected rotary telephone allows grieving family members to speak, in a way, to loved ones who have passed on.

Yui lost her mother and daughter in the tsunami, and in the days following the catastrophe, she lived in a shelter with other survivors. Her existence was confined to a mat, and she was joined in her grief by a man who carried around an empty picture frame, observing the world through its void. As Yui begins to live again while trying to heal from her pain, she hears of the disconnected telephone that carries people’s words to the dead.

When Yui makes her first pilgrimage from Tokyo to the phone booth, she meets a widower named Takeshi along the way. Takeshi’s daughter has gone mute from the trauma of losing her mother. On their first visit, Takeshi goes to the phone to speak to his late wife, but Yui hangs back, hesitant. Yui and Takeshi become friends and travel monthly to the Wind Phone, but still Yui does not speak to her lost family.

Between chapters that follow Yui’s story and the experiences of other grieving people who visit the phone booth, author Laura Imai Messina intersperses bite-size sections that are almost like poems. They have titles such as “Parts of Yui’s Body She Entrusted to Others Over the Years” and “Two Things Yui Discovered After Googling ‘Hug’ the Next Day.” These snippets are lovely breathers, a chance for the reader to marvel at the tiny details that make up a life.

The English-language debut from Messina, an Italian author who lives in Japan with her husband and children, unfolds over the course of many years as a tender tribute to grief and what it teaches us. Healing is not linear, and the ones we lose never truly leave us. It can be unfathomably painful when we’re reminded of our losses, even though remembering our loved ones is often what can heal us. The phone booth is a magical place that not only connects the living to the dead but also the living to the living.

In 2017, Imbolo Mbue won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Behold the Dreamers, but it’s taken 17 years for the novel she began before that one, How Beautiful We Were, to reach publication. Readers who enjoyed Behold the Dreamers will be pleased that Mbue persisted to tell this powerful story of the fateful clash between an American oil company and the tiny African village forced to live with the consequences of its environmental destruction.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: The cast audiobook of How Beautiful We Were is exquisite. Read our starred review.

Set in an unnamed country that Mbue says bears some resemblance to her native Cameroon, the novel chronicles more than four decades in Kosawa, the only one of eight “sibling villages” that must live with the “curse that came from living on land beneath which oil sat.” As the deaths of their children mount and the damage to their agriculture becomes more catastrophic, the villagers’ frustration turns to desperation. They kidnap several oil company representatives, which initiates a series of events that brings both disaster and hope to the community.

Mbue narrates her story through the voices of five members of Kosawa’s Nangi family—Thula, a young woman who evolves into an activist; her mother, Sahel; grandmother Yaya; uncle Bongo; and brother Juba—along with a collective of Thula’s contemporaries she calls the Children. While there are clear villains and heroes, the political and ethical questions faced by Mbue’s characters are never presented in black-and-white terms, even when Mbue describes Kosawa’s response to the oil company’s intransigence. Mbue devotes considerable attention to issues like patriarchy and the beauty and role of myth and magic in the lives of Kosawa’s villagers, deepening and contextualizing the novel’s tragic elements.

How Beautiful We Were proceeds at a deliberate pace that’s appropriate for the moral gravity of the story and the fateful choices—wise and unwise, but always undeniably human—made by Mbue’s characters. To those disinclined to question the role that economic exploitation plays in supporting our modern lifestyle, reading this novel may prove an unsettling experience.

The much-anticipated sequel to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, The Committed invites debate through its complex portrayal of political alignments, racial identity and, as the narrator admits, selfish flaws. It’s richly layered with philosophical arguments and intellectual ideas, as well as a small but engrossing dose of criminal thrills.

The Committed follows its narrator, a Vietnamese refugee and former spy known only as “the Captain,” and his “blood brother” and best friend, Bon, after their “reeducation” in a refugee camp at the end of The Sympathizer. The Captain and Bon are adjusting to life in 1980s Paris. Working at a restaurant and living among a burgeoning population of Vietnamese immigrants, the Captain ruminates on the differences between communism and global capitalism, going so far as to embrace capitalism in one of its most complicated forms, as a drug dealer. As unexpected as his new role is, the Captain embraces it with the same ease with which he embraced his ability to lie as a spy.

The Captain’s close association with a French Vietnamese woman gives him access to a wealthier and more influential class of clientele for his newfound business enterprise. But at the same time, he finds himself drifting further from Bon, who is seeking more idealistic pursuits. As the Captain puts it, he finds himself in “a place where I could watch myself becoming more about me and me alone, the best justification there was for capitalism.”

While it is helpful—and should be a prerequisite based on its Pulitzer Prize status alone—it isn’t necessary to read The Sympathizer to become enmeshed in the pages of The Committed. Reminiscent of John Le Carré’s deeply textured spy novels, The Committed proves Nguyen is no one-hit wonder when it comes to fine literature.

In 2016, Sebastian Mote is living a solitary suburban life as a high school art history teacher. Newly single, he throws himself into his work, serving as adviser to his northern Virginia school’s newly formed LGBTQ social group. In Let’s Get Back to the Party, we flash between the hot, sticky months of summer 2016, when Sebastian marvels at the ease with which the younger generation proclaims their sexuality, and memories of his adolescence, when as an insecure boy he found solace in the beauty of paintings and sculpture. His only friend was skinny, quiet Oscar Burnham, another boy questioning his sexual identity. They furtively explored their feelings, but when Oscar’s family moved away, he left Sebastian behind, no letters, no calls.

At a wedding in which Sebastian is his friend’s plus-one, he catches a glimpse of Oscar. A stilted conversation ensues, and Oscar spends the entire reception scrolling through a gay hookup app. Stung, Sebastian realizes he still feels abandoned by Oscar all these years later.

Their lives become entwined again as each grapples with what it means to be a middle-aged gay man, bookended by the generation that bore the brunt of the AIDS epidemic and by the kids who have come of age in a more open-minded America. Oscar and Sebastian are each pulled into a platonic yet complicated relationship with someone of another generation: Sebastian with a younger student and Oscar with an older writer made famous for his sexual exploits in 1970s New York.

Zak Salih’s first novel is a gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now. He imbues Sebastian and Oscar with complexity and flaws, two men unsure about the path their life is meant to take. Salih offers a cleareyed exploration of the sometimes fine line between friendship and romance, and how past slights can rear their heads in the most unexpected ways.

Set shortly after the Supreme Court’s historic marriage equality ruling and during the year of a divisive presidential election and the Pulse nightclub massacre, Let’s Get Back to the Party is a raw and captivating debut.

Laird Hunt has a reputation for sensitively chronicling women’s lives, as in Neverhome, his Civil War tale of an Indiana woman who becomes a Union soldier. He returns to the Indiana setting in his delicate new novel, Zorrie, a powerful portrait of longing and community in the American Midwest.

Zorrie Underwood is born in the early 20th century. After her parents die of diphtheria, she is raised by a stern aunt who tells her “people [are] born dreaming of devils and dark roses and should beware” and slaps Zorrie if she wakes up crying.

These experiences would cow a less hearty soul, but not Zorrie, who can beat almost every boy in school at arm-wrestling. When she is 21, her aunt dies and leaves her with nothing, so Zorrie sets out on her own. The most consequential of her early jobs is at the Radium Dial Company, where she decorates clock faces with paint containing a translucent powder that glows. Along with her colleagues, she is unaware of its toxic effects.

Soon she gets a job splitting and stacking wood for elderly couple Gus and Bessie. She marries their son, Harold, “the best-looking fellow Zorrie would ever see.” Hunt movingly documents their life on the farm, from picnics and watermelon seed-spitting contests to Zorrie’s continuation of her work during a pregnancy that ends in a miscarriage. Hunt chronicles the events of Zorrie’s life with swiftness and precision, including Harold’s death during World War II and, most enigmatically, Zorrie’s acquaintance with Noah Summers, whose wife is confined to a state hospital for setting their house on fire. Hunt tells their stories with a quiet sensitivity rarely seen in modern American fiction.

Late in the novel, when thinking of her neighbors and the world at large, Zorrie realizes “it was silence and not grief that connected them, that would keep them forever connected, the living and the dead.” Despite occasional dry passages, Zorrie is a poetic reminder of the importance of being a happy presence in other people’s memories.

In her engrossing and darkly lyrical debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, Bajan author Cherie Jones unspools a discomfiting allegory of race, class and intergenerational trauma in a far from idyllic fictional Caribbean community.

It begins with a bloody fable about an act of rebellion gone wrong: A disobedient girl loses her arm to a monster because she didn’t heed her mother’s warnings about the dangers of the tunnel, that it has “monsters that live down in there, how any little girls go in there they never come back out.”

This allegory becomes a touchstone—and the rest of the novel an elaboration on that cautionary tale—as headstrong Lala finds her life quickly unraveling after she marries a man that her grandmother characterizes as “a louse.” By leaving her grandmother’s house for a man whose slickness is easily mistaken for charm, Lala chooses a life she thinks will mean freedom but only brings pain and even more restrictions, setting in motion a series of tragedies with wide-reaching ramifications.

Several related events—Lala’s act of defiance, her husband’s botched and deadly burglary of a wealthy British visitor and the traumatic death of their baby—occur in quick succession, but their consequences and interconnectedness are revealed at a slower pace. However, one thing is clear from the start: Life in this place they call “Paradise” is nasty, brutish and fragile, if not always short.

Even as tragedies and indignities pile up, the murkiness surrounding the novel’s events will compel readers to continue reading. Questions arise about how a simple robbery went so wrong and how Baby died—but most importantly, why? What are the roots of these characters’ discontent and recklessness?

A bleak and complex picture emerges through this ensemble story, with chapters that alternate between generations and time periods as well as individual points of view. When Lala’s grandmother Wilma tries to make sense of it all, her answer is all too familiar: Willful women who tempt men, who don’t listen, sow the seeds of their own destruction. In the fable, the monster might have stolen the girl’s arm, but she was “slack-from-she-born” and “force-ripe” (sexually precocious) and above all, “own-way” (disobedient). She brought it on herself; bad girls reap what they sow. On this topic, both Wilma and Lala’s husband agree. Even the police officer tasked with investigating Baby’s death identifies with Wilma’s worldview.

Like the fearsome Wilma, author Cherie Jones is a powerful storyteller. Like the policeman, many readers will feel compelled to follow her into the dark even though there’s precious little joy or light to be found there.