Jamie Quatro cultivated a reputation as a provocateur with her two previous books, the story collection I Want to Show You More (2013) and her debut novel, Fire Sermon (2018). She complicates Southern Christian narratives through characters who hold faith in one fist and lust in the other, carrying out sins like adultery while maintaining deep relationships with the divine.

Quatro continues this inquiry with her second novel, Two-Step Devil, a narrative in three acts. The first introduces a 70-year-old man who calls himself the Prophet. Living alone in Alabama in 2014, the Prophet detests organized religion, but the inside of his cabin is covered with paintings of his visions from God. He is also taunted by a figure he calls the Two-Step Devil. One day, at a gas station, the Prophet sees a teenage girl, drugged and zip-tied, being shoved into the backseat of a car. 

After a bumbling rescue, the Prophet helps the girl, Michael, regain her health. Their time together is beautiful, a quiet kinship, but it can’t last. Michael must eventually move on to the next stage of her life, and she narrates the vulnerable second section as if she’s giving a hurried walking tour of Chattanooga, Tennessee, intercut with memories of her childhood sexual assaults and coercion into trafficking.

In the novel’s third section, Two-Step steps into the spotlight—quite literally, as the story is now structured as a play, with the Prophet wasting away upstage. The devil ecstatically monologues at the reader (“Greetings, fleshsacks!”) on the misconceptions in Christian narratives, and goes wildly off-script from scripture.

Two-Step Devil is a bold interrogation—even a condemnation—of rigid adherence to Christian rules, and it’s apparent that it is intended first and foremost to provoke. While it is rousing to see a Christian writer lay claim to their God in this way—challenging their religion to do better, and insisting upon critical thought amid ambivalence rather than blind faith—the story can be tedious and pretentious, as during the devil’s lectures, or gratuitously violent and unsettled, as in Michael’s section. Still, Quatro’s characters are beguiling, and Two-Step Devil is often tender, especially during the Prophet’s section. Quatro’s prose ranks among the best Southern writing: “When God looked down at the planet, he was seeing what people saw when they looked up: darkness, with a few brave lights trembling here and there. The darkness was evil and the lights were God’s children staking a claim.” 

Quatro excels at getting the hairs on your arms to stand on end, if not through narrative suspense, then through the radical nature of her narrative aim: taking on the South’s political obsession with following religious guidelines, its dogged insistence on dogmatic good versus evil, which is completely impotent when a person is caught in the throes of actual evil. Without question, Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South, our patron saint of Southern discomfort.

Elizabeth Strout’s 10th novel, Tell Me Everything, brings together Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge and Bob Burgess, all characters from Strout’s previous novels, following their lives and others’ in the small town of Crosby, Maine.

Tell Me Everything traces the interactions between Bob and Lucy, who’ve built a friendship from their weekly walks along the river. (Lucy and her ex-husband, William, left New York for good when COVID-19 cases surged; and Bob is now married to Margaret, a minister.) Bob and Lucy share confidences and old puzzling stories, and after Bob introduces Lucy to Olive Kitteridge, Lucy visits Olive in her apartment, where they trade stories too. Olive plays a supporting role in the novel, but she gives voice to one of the novel’s themes: “Everywhere in the world people led their lives unrecorded.”

Though the point of view dips into and out of many characters, the heart of Tell Me Everything is Bob Burgess. Bob faces late-midlife reckonings with his difficult brother, who blames Bob for a family tragedy; his troubled ex-wife, Pam; and Lucy, the friend who knows his secrets. When Bob, a lawyer, agrees to take on the case of a lonely man charged with murdering his mother (a woman that Bob, Olive and other characters remember from childhood, and not fondly), he lets this case take over his life. This murder mystery runs through the novel, adding a layer of darkness and propelling the action forward.

At the same time, Tell Me Everything is also a novel about all those unrecorded lives that Bob, Lucy, Olive and others share stories about, trying to find meaning and purpose in them. The narrative combines two of Strout’s preoccupations: the reverberating, intergenerational effects of poverty, and the power of connection and empathy, demonstrating how stories can illuminate our worst moments and commemorate our best.

Because it returns to beloved characters from My Name Is Lucy Barton, The Burgess Boys and Olive Kitteridge, and even includes cameos from Strout’s first two novels, Tell Me Everything may be most gratifying for Strout’s longtime fans. But these very human characters, with their specific yet universal questions about others’ lives and their own, are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.

The early 2020s have been marked by affliction, from the tragedy of COVID-19, to racism and police brutality, to a broad insensitivity toward others’ suffering. On the hopeful side, there have also been demonstrations of considerable love and support. Put that contrast into a novel, and exciting literature is the result. An excellent example is Small Rain, Garth Greenwell’s moving yet unsentimental third novel.

Greenwell’s unnamed protagonist, a 40-ish gay poet, has had fraught relationships with family members, among them his estranged father, a lawyer who became rich through medical malpractice cases. But the narrator has found happiness with his partner, L, a university instructor with whom he lives in Iowa.

L and the narrator kept to themselves throughout the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That plan is forced to change when the narrator develops stomach pain so agonizing that “on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” After initial reluctance, he goes to urgent care, where he hopes to receive a quick diagnosis and return home.

To his horror, they send him to the emergency room for imaging. When a doctor tells him, “I thought I was going to send you home with some antibiotics but you are much more interesting than that,” it’s only the beginning of a long hospital stay that includes invasive tests, endless IV bags and no certain diagnosis.

As in his previous novels Cleanness and What Belongs to You, Greenwell writes in long, discursive paragraphs that digress with philosophical asides. This book is ostensibly about the narrator’s ailment, but that’s really a construct that allows Greenwell to observe both the ills and the positive aspects of modern society, from insensitive nurses who belatedly answer the narrator’s distress call with “We do have other patients,” to the myopia that patriotism and religion can produce, to welcome gifts of generosity, most notably from a young nurse who treats the narrator as a person rather than a case study. At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work.

Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel, Misinterpretation, follows the life of a 30-something Albanian interpreter in present-day New York City. Married to Billy, a film professor at NYU whom she had met while working for the United Nations, she seems purposeful, comfortable and happy.

But underneath this unintentional charade, she struggles with memories of war and poverty from her childhood in Albania. This personal connection to the constant parade of translation clients coming in and out of her life makes it nearly impossible to set boundaries with them, and she often puts their needs before Billy’s and her own.

Things take a turn for the worse when she signs up to interpret for a Kosovar torture survivor named Alfred while also setting out to help a Kurdish poet named Leyla. Unable to stop herself from taking on Alfred and Leyla’s problems, she takes risks that put her own life and marriage on the line.

Xhoga unfolds the story in the squares and streets of New York City, and also gives a few glimpses of Albania’s capital, Tirana, to which our protagonist escapes briefly to see her aging mother and find herself. Supporting characters with diverse experiences and various social statuses provide different perspectives on the protagonist’s struggles, although disappointingly, many storylines are left without conclusions. 

It is hard to say exactly why Xhoga chose to keep her protagonist unnamed. Regardless, her narration immerses readers in the ongoing melancholy and helplessness that she feels for being unable to save every troubled person who comes her way. Questions come up repeatedly: How much of ourselves do we see in others? And how much of their pain can we ignore for our own sanity?

Misinterpretation is compassionate and well written, giving all of us a chance to consider how our histories impact the decisions we make today.

From a women’s prison in California’s Central Valley to an elite community in 1950s Cuba, novelist Rachel Kushner is a master of the singular setting and bold protagonist. Creation Lake is no exception and, in fact, raises the stakes with its cerebral take on the spy thriller. 

Brainy, ruthless and beautiful, Sadie Smith (not her real name, mind you), has made a career of undercover work exposing and identifying radical activists. Once an employee of the U.S. government, she’s gone freelance and is working for a foreign conglomerate, trying to push eco-protestors into committing acts of violence. Sadie’s latest mark is an artsy, privileged Frenchman, Lucien, who ‘met’ Sadie in Paris. Believing that their encounter was a happy accident, Lucien has asked Sadie to accompany him to a small village where his family owns property and his school friend Pascal leads Le Moulin, a small agricultural cooperative protesting corporate farming. Lucien hopes Sadie can help them translate their ideas for an English-speaking audience; Sadie’s goals are a bit different. 

The Moulinards of Le Moulin, a sketchy and disorganized bunch at best, draw influence from an older revolutionary, Bruno Lacombe, who communicates only through rambling philosophical emails sent from an underground cave. Skeptical of all modern interpretations of civilization, Bruno believes that cultivating our Neanderthal characteristics might be the only way to survive. Despite her cynicism, Sadie is drawn in by the purity of Bruno’s ideas and by the extreme choices he’s made for his life, choices that force her to reconsider her own. 

Creation Lake is no Emily in Paris: Sadie’s corner of France is stale baguettes, superhighways, cheap wine and Guns N’ Roses cover bands. Sadie herself is no less acerbic; her only weakness seems to be a reliance on booze and vanity over her surgically enhanced (but tastefully so, she reminds us) bosom. Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species, should we take the time to think it through.