Most of us accept that much of what we read, watch or see online is untrue. It’s generally understood that these deceptions are fundamentally “bad”—morally wrong, politically manipulative and/or personally harmful. Yet in Fake Accounts, a young woman who is well aware that deception is bad nevertheless seems to thrive on it.

The premise of Fake Accounts is that the narrator snoops on her boyfriend Felix’s phone and learns that he’s a popular anonymous conspiracy theorist, but he’s actually the least interesting part of the story. Emboldened by Felix’s online fakery, the narrator decides that she, too, will create a fake life for herself. She moves to Berlin and lies about her identity to her roommate, her employer and a rotation of OkCupid dates. And in the grand tradition of unreliable narrators, the reader must wonder if the narrator is lying to us as well.

Plenty of fiction and nonfiction explores how performance of the self on social media can be detrimental to our lives. Fake Accounts raises the bar on this theme, prompting the question of how much distance a person can really put between oneself and an online persona. The narrator believes she is not motivated by nefarious means. She’s not a con artist; she seems to have nothing to gain except her own amusement. What she tells herself is that her fakery is an experiment in self-presentation.

Contrary to the widely accepted belief that the internet brings people together, first-time novelist Lauren Oyler homes in on the alienation that arises when we mediate our presentations of ourselves through technology. Can relationships based on lies foster genuine connection? Is “genuine connection” even the goal anymore in the 21st-century attention economy? The answers you arrive at while reading the wild literary ride that is Fake Accounts may make you uncomfortable.

Milk Fed will make you hungry. I began reading it at breakfast, and before I knew it, I had consumed an entire box of Chocolate Cheerios. It’s about food and Jews and sex—an irresistible combo meal. With hints of Jami Attenberg’s mishpucha and spiced with Jennifer Weiner’s chutzpah, it is graphic, tender and poetic. Melissa Broder’s approach is perfectly sautéed lesbianism, a rom-com that turns serious.

Rachel is an assistant at a Los Angeles talent management firm who is disordered about food. She considers a clove cigarette and a cup of diet hot chocolate a meal. But beyond her restrictive relationship with food, she also has an unresolved appetite for sex and love. Not coincidentally, she meets her love interest at the counter of her favorite frozen yogurt shop, Yo!Good.

Miriam, the Yo!Good server, is an Orthodox Jew, a “zaftig girl” who “surpassed plump, eclipsed heavy.” Their romance begins with the seduction of a frozen yogurt hot fudge sundae, sprints past Sabbath dinner and then slow-dances into kisses, third base and noisy orgasms. To Rachel, Miriam is either a golem or a gift. Being a “Chanel bag Jew” rather than a “Torah Jew,” Rachel accepts the gift, and while she once admitted that “God isn’t, like, texting me Hi or anything,” she learns to appreciate God as well. “I’m down with it,” she says.

Rom-coms are never without their complications, and as Rachel begins to consume obsessively, her actions are not without fallout. Deep down, Rachel longs not to love but to be loved, a consequence of issues with her withholding mother. “Why did it feel so much safer to be wanted or needed than to be the one who wanted or needed?” Rachel says.

For those who enjoyed Broder’s The Pisces, much of Milk Fed will be welcome in its familiarity. But this is an even better book that’s enhanced by its Jewishness, its ripeness, its dreams.

Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, “Everyone has three lives: a private life, a public life, and a secret life.” It’s the latter of these we see on full display in British author Sarah Moss’ slender yet weighty Summerwater.

One rainy, gloomy summer day in a Scottish holiday park, a dozen or so people are cooped up—or occasionally not—in their cabins, alone with each other, alone with their thoughts. Every other chapter extracts a stream-of-consciousness core sample from the rich vein of a character’s internal monologue.

Becky, a rather petulant teen, is not having a good time because the cabin’s size requires her to share a room with her slightly older brother, Alex, an arrangement neither of them finds satisfactory. David, a retired doctor, reminisces about days gone by, when the other cabin owners were more like a community and less absentee landlords. He also ruminates about whether he should have sold the place back when the park, not unlike himself, still had the prospect of better days ahead. Meanwhile, a young wife named Milly fantasizes about Don Draper, alternately castigating and absolving herself for not being more present with her husband. There are more such moments, of course, but these are illustrative of Moss’ main thesis: It’s not much of a happy holiday for any of the participants.

Perhaps the one thing upon which they can all agree is that the Ukrainian—or perhaps Romanian or Bulgarian—family in one of the neighboring cabins parties way too loudly, and there’s nothing like a gloomy, rain-drenched day to offer the opportunity to obsess. As we all learned from watching the movie Deliverance, nothing sets up a potential catastrophe better than the combination of outsiders and wilderness, and on this point Moss does not disappoint. Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it happens “gradually, and then suddenly.”

A character in Jamie Harrison’s latest literary crime novel observes, “Everyone [has] a core of hell and doubt and sorrow.” But the story’s star, Polly, discovers a brighter perspective.

In 2002, 42-year-old Polly has recovered physically from a recent bike accident, but she still suffers periods of confusion. When Polly’s children’s favorite babysitter, Ariel, goes missing on a kayak trip, the incident triggers a flood of jarring memories in Polly’s fragmented mind. Her “spells” toggle the narrative between July 2002 and the summer of 1968, a structure that suggests cyclical rather than linear time, as she exists fluidly in both eras at once.

Polly spends part of her childhood with her great-grandparents Dee and Papa, whose backgrounds in archeology, myth and art create a chaotic but loving household. Also living with Papa and Dee are Rita, Polly’s parents’ friend whose husband dies in the Vietnam War, and Rita’s son, Edmund. Eight-year-olds Polly and Edmund explore the landscape together, avoiding “the witch” and eavesdropping on adult conversations. This stimulating and permissive upbringing makes for a lively narrative.

Since timelines and events are murky to Polly, sensations dominate the narrative, from the smells and tastes of Dee’s exotic meals to sights from around New York, Michigan and Montana, as well as memories of physical closeness and warmth. The text is idiosyncratic, composed of lists and phrases, a mosaic of impressions from past and present. After Ariel disappears, Polly follows suspicious, incongruous images of sexual predators and water deaths, leading her to a truth that her family is finally ready to face together.

Reading The Center of Everything is like traveling further and further into a dream, spiraling around fragments toward a point of love and wonder. It’s a redemptive and hopeful novel guided by earthy, reliable men, women and children who inspire and encourage.

Worlds blend rapidly in Daniel Loedel’s debut, Hades, Argentina. As the novel opens in 1986, Tomás Orilla, living as Thomas Shore in New York City, has “spent eight years officially disappeared.” But his world begins to crack open when he is called back to Argentina for the first time since 1976, the year of his torture and escape.

He travels to Buenos Aires for a funeral that yields to a search for a lost love and the desire to revisit and reexamine the past. Like Orpheus seeking Eurydice, Tomás accepts a challenge from his old mentor, the Colonel, and returns to the places and events of 1976 to see what could have been, and how one choice could change fates.

As Tomás reenters the world of Argentina’s dirty war, time blurs, and the surreal blends with reality. As he relives trauma and torture, readers experience it with him, seeing a slice of history that is rarely talked about and feeling immersed in the ways that love, guilt and regret drive so many decisions.

Loedel’s prose is clean, tight and engaging, with a rhythm that invites you to keep reading and to see where the story goes and what sense you can make of it. Most interesting, perhaps, are the questions posed: What does it mean to be a hero or to be complicit in a dangerous regime? What choices do we really have? Who are we, and who did we imagine we would become?

Even as the novel invites questions and focuses on language rather than answers, the reader won’t be able to look away. They will bear witness to human choice and compunction, to love and loss, to the fantasy that helps make sense of what is real.

It sometimes feels like romantic relationships are becoming harder and harder to navigate. Meeting someone, getting to know them, constantly finding ways to communicate about everything, searching for common ground, trying and failing to move forward or take a leap of faith—it’s all exhausting. The routine isn’t entirely disheartening, though, and to the most curious of minds, it can be fertile ground for analysis and creation. So it is with Bryan Washington’s debut novel, Memorial, a celebratory lamentation of modern love.

The novel follows two men who are in love with each other. Through a major miscommunication, Benson, a Black day care worker in Houston, ends up living with his boyfriend Mike’s Japanese mother, who doesn’t seem all too happy to be the guest of someone she has never met before. Mike, on the other hand, is a chef who must travel to Japan to help his father, who is dying of cancer, through his final days.

As the novel begins just before Mike’s departure, the two men are unsure of their path forward together. This classic will-they-won’t-they scenario gives Memorial a timeless feel, but by placing two gay men at the center of this familiar setup, Washington poses fresh questions about contemporary romantic relationships with quiet grace. From the intermittent use of text messages and shared photographs to the mastery of a decade of slang, his writing is invigorating, reminding the reader of the realities every human must face and how we’ve all learned to communicate them.

Memorial is more than just a love story—though it is a very good love story. It’s this generation’s response to centuries of love stories, to a whole history of them. It’s what is coming; it’s what is here.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Short story maestro Bryan Washington discusses his game-changing new novel.

Don’t be deceived by the brevity of Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, What Are You Going Through. Like its National Book Award-winning predecessor, The Friend, this exquisite portrait of female friendship, aging and loss packs more insight into its barely 200 pages than many serious novels twice that length.

The novel’s unnamed narrator is a writer whose middle-aged friend, dying of cancer (“fatal,” as she prefers to say instead of “terminal”), asks her to serve as a companion in the New England rental house where she plans to end her life with a “euthanasia drug”—even as she confesses that “you weren’t my first choice” for this challenging assignment. Over the course of the succeeding weeks, with a “new intimacy that made secrets and lies intolerable,” and that at various moments is touching, profound and even wryly humorous, the women bond over shared stories of their lives, old movies, music and fairy tales, in something the narrator’s ex-partner observes “does sound a little like a sitcom. Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia.”

Borrowing the opening line of Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier—“This is the saddest story I have ever heard”—Nunez confronts the reality of death without succumbing to despair. Whether she’s summarizing the improbable plot of a serial killer potboiler or recounting a conversation between the narrator and a “once beautiful woman” at the gym, she’s an economical, graceful storyteller. She also touches lightly but provocatively on subjects like climate change, the #MeToo movement and the malign influence of Fox News on one elderly woman’s psyche, then eases her story along almost before we realize it.

Sooner than she would like, the narrator faces the reality that what she’s come to think of as a “fairy tale” will end, and that, paradoxically, “the saddest time that has also been one of the happiest times in my life will pass. And I’ll be alone.” It’s a good bet that most readers will share that same wistful feeling when they reach the novel’s final page.

The liminal space between art, artist and audience takes an unexpected, beautiful and haunting form in Scott O’Connor’s masterful Zero Zone, which brings to light the intangible thoughts and feelings swirling around an interactive art installation in the desert.

Jess wasn’t always the artist in her family; her brother, Zack, was. But after their parents’ deaths, their California aunt teaches Jess to use art as a way to navigate and contain her emotions. Jess goes to art school and falls in love with a fellow student, while Zack retreats into an underground film scene. Jess’ art explores light and space, and as she attempts to create an ambiance for her internal struggles, she discovers room to empathize with others’ troubles, too.

Then one of Jess’ installations, titled “Zero Zone,” becomes the setting for a showdown between viewers who refuse to leave. Police are called to the scene. Similar circumstances threaten to repeat themselves two years later, and Jess must decide whether to act as a distant artist or in a new, more involved manner.

The chapters shift like a camera lens focusing for the shot. Early chapters take a panoramic view of Jess’ troubled past. Middle chapters zero in on her artworks and follow the stories of the young people involved in the standoff at Zero Zone. Final chapters click past, rapid-fire, as Jess’ story collides with those of the Zero Zone audience.

Zero Zone celebrates burgeoning female relationships, such as the ones between Jess and her aunt and between the women who see Zero Zone as a haven. In contrast, dangerous relationships with charismatic men tint the story with an eerie hue. An intimate experience of art from the inside out, Zero Zone raises questions about to whom art belongs: its creator or its recipients. Untangling the web of answers makes for a tantalizing inquiry.

The pain of long-held secrets and the lies necessary to preserve them are the subject of Bill Clegg’s intricately plotted second novel, The End of the Day. Narrated from six points of view, the novel spans the late 1960s to the present day for a group of characters disparate in social class but united by their connections to the circumstances by which one of them entered the world.

After newspaper journalist Hap Foster becomes a new father, his joy quickly turns to grief when the man he believes is his own father dies in an accidental fall. Christopher Foster’s sudden demise precipitates the unlocking of a vault concealing the trove of secrets that is the story of Hap’s birth and upbringing.

That story links three women: Dana Goss, an upper-class New Yorker whose family once inhabited an estate in rural Connecticut; Jackie, a working-class girl who was Dana’s close childhood friend before settling down to raise her family in the same small town; and Lupita Lopez, now living in Hawaii, who emigrated from Mexico as a 4-year-old and whose family has served Dana’s for many years.

The events that shadow the rest of their lives occur at a picnic on the night of July 4, 1969, a date Dana comes to think of as “the last day of what she would imprecisely call her youth, a period where her actions didn’t yet have consequences, or if they had, they hadn’t mattered very much.” Clegg discloses those consequences, and Dana’s flawed perception, at a measured pace, slipping smoothly from the life of one character to another and from present to past, revealing how entire lives have been marked indelibly by teenage impulses and mistakes. Though Lupita believes at one point that she is “safe from the truth,” The End of the Day explains with painful clarity why, in some lives, that can never be.

A long time ago, amid circumstances that no one seems so sure about anymore, a small Jewish village in Poland fell off the map of the world. Surrounded by thick forests, Kreskol has existed in a self-sustained bubble of peaceful isolation for decades, thereby missing the best of human civilization—like electricity, indoor plumbing and the internet—as well as the worst, namely the Holocaust and the Cold War. It is surprising, then, that what brings this peace crashing down isn’t an epic catastrophe but rather something as mundane as a marital dispute.

When young Pesha Lindauer disappears, everyone suspects foul play by her husband, Ishmael, who is also nowhere to be found. Having no means to further investigate the scandal, the rabbis convince young Yankel Lewinkopf, an outcast and an orphan, to find his way to the nearest town and inform the authorities of the suspected crime. Yankel leaves reluctantly, only to return three months later in a helicopter with gentiles who are less interested in solving the crime than in immediately thrusting Kreskol into the 21st century.

First-time novelist Max Gross is funny, insightful and mysterious in sharing what is essentially a coming-of-age story not only for Pesha, Ishmael and Yankel, each of whom realizes that they can choose to lead a different life, but also for an entire village that’s at once suspicious of and fascinated by the inundation of money and modern conveniences.

The Lost Shtetl is a fascinating combination of adventure, laughs and heartache, perfect for fans of Michael Chabon.

The voice of North African novelist Meryem Alaoui is a welcome one. Her debut, Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, is a powerful character study of a lively young sex worker who meets a filmmaker seeking her expertise.

The fast-moving novel is told by quick-witted and resilient Jmiaa, who reflects on her life in a bustling working-class Casablanca neighborhood, including the small bars, the open-air markets and the women who spend their evenings alongside her, drinking and chatting as they wait for potential clients. As a prostitute, Jmiaa keeps her mother in the dark about her occupation while earning enough money to support both herself and her 7-year-old daughter. Jmiaa also pays her pimp, Houcine, for protection and helps her dead-beat ex-husband, Hamid, who forced her into sex work after his business failed.

Aspiring Dutch filmmaker Chadlia is visiting Casablanca to research a movie about Moroccan urban life, and she hires Jmiaa as a consultant to keep the plot and dialogue authentic. But when Chadlia has trouble casting the film, Jmiaa steps in to help, opening doors into a life that neither woman could have predicted.

Straight From the Horse’s Mouth follows a familiar rag-to-riches storyline, but Jmiaa’s unfaltering optimism will keep readers hooked. She is matter-of-fact about the day-to-day details of her profession, boasting of her ability to provide for her family and proudly defending the women who share the streets with her.

Alaoui is ably served by her translator, Emma Ramadan, who captures Jmiaa’s irreverent spirit and sass. A simple glossary at the end adds context to the shop names, local personalities and food that contribute to the richness of everyday details.