Awakenings can be brutal. Consider Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author Ayad Akhtar, growing up in Wisconsin as the child of Muslim doctors who came to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1968, riding his bike around the neighborhood and listening to a father who thought America was the greatest place in the world. Along the way to becoming a celebrated American playwright, Akhtar would learn harsh realities about the only country he has ever called home, a country where the treatment of people of color is very different from that of white people.

In Homeland Elegies, Akhtar mixes fact and fiction about the awakening that marked his journey to Broadway. He has divided the book into eight chapters, bookended by an overture and coda about a professor who has conflicting feelings about her role as a teacher and who taught Akhtar that America is still “a place defined by its plunder.”

Racism dominates each story. Among the characters is one of Akhtar’s father’s best friends from medical school, a devout Muslim who grows disenchanted with America and who was secretly the love of Akhtar’s mother’s life. There are also white police officers and mechanics in Scranton, Pennsylvania, whose prejudices become alarmingly manifest when Akhtar’s car overheats on the highway, as well as an unscrupulous Muslim businessman who gives white America a taste of its own capitalism by exacting revenge on U.S. towns that wouldn’t build mosques.

The book’s most nuanced sections involve Akhtar’s father, a complicated man who grows to like Donald Trump after treating the future president for a mysterious ailment in the 1990s. In a powerful closing chapter, Akhtar documents his father’s disillusion with Trump as part of a larger story of a malpractice suit in which the elder Akhtar’s religion is a complicating factor.

Despite long tangents, Homeland Elegies shows what American life is like for people with dark skin, as when Akhtar and his father park their car poorly outside a convenience store, a miscue that gives a gun-toting white man an excuse to hurl racist imprecations. For readers unaware of such assaults, Akhtar’s latest will be a rude awakening, and an important one.

In her long writing career, Mary Gordon has frequently embraced themes surrounding women’s lives, feminism and family love. Her new novel, Payback, returns to those themes as it follows the lives of two women.

In 1972, Agnes Vaughan, an idealistic young art history teacher at a Rhode Island girls’ school, wonders whether she’s making any difference in her students’ lives. She decides to take Heidi Stolz, an overprivileged, antagonistic girl and the school’s “least obviously lovable” student, under her wing. Agnes sets up a project that will send Heidi to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. But the project backfires when Heidi finds herself out of her depth and is raped by a man. When she returns home and asks Agnes for help, Agnes instead blames Heidi. Heidi runs off, and Agnes is so appalled by her error that she quits her job to look for the girl, who has disappeared.

The story moves forward to 2015, as Agnes prepares to leave Rome, where she’s lived since 1972. She has slowly constructed a new life but still secretly despairs at having betrayed Heidi’s trust. The novel then moves into Heidi’s perspective, and we learn how she reinvented herself as reality TV star Quin Archer, host of “Payback,” a show that lets victims confront their victimizers. Heidi’s current goal is to make Agnes pay for what she did.

Payback resists categorization; it’s part satire and part meditative character study with a lot of interiority. Agnes’ sin is of its time, and readers may wonder how it merited decades of obsession. Still, Payback offers many pleasures, not only the range in voices but also the evocation of two eras, the early 1970s and the current decade, with the right amount of period detail. Agnes’ sections offer some of the novel’s most beautiful writing, with wonderful observations on families, life in Italy, aging and the passage of time. This is an intriguing addition to Gordon’s body of work.

In Madeleine Ryan’s debut novel, A Room Called Earth, the young autistic narrator relishes getting ready for a house party in Melbourne, Australia. She attends to a series of preparation rituals: picking out her outfit, dabbing the backs of her ears with her grandmother’s perfume, making a vegan sandwich, dancing in front of the living room mirror, collecting martini ingredients and having the taxi drop her a block from the party so she can enjoy the approach. Her high heels hurt soon after she arrives. She endures hearing about an acquaintance’s latest crush. She is about to leave when she meets a man in line for the bathroom, and they enjoy a refreshing conversation.

In the vein of Virginia Woolf, the narrator’s incisive commentary pierces through descriptions of quotidian affairs. “We can’t go without experiencing ourselves for a millisecond,” she says, and she never fights her subjective perspective. She inquires into what people really mean by what they say, pokes through the rooms of the party house and analyzes every encounter she witnesses.

The freedom to experience the narrator’s inner world makes room for objective reality. Melbourne’s neighborhoods come alive. Mud and stars, butterflies and books inhabit the narrator’s consciousness like companions. There’s a sacredness surrounding the individuals she meets and with whom she speaks, shown by the treatment of dialogue on the page. Short exchanges are set apart from the rest of the text with double spaces, while long speeches are crammed into single-space blocks, a visual expression of how people can crowd and overwhelm the narrator. But with the man she meets in the bathroom line, the anxiousness and intensity of the party give way to the pleasure of shared company.

A Room Called Earth, written by a neurologically diverse author, culminates in unexpected intimacy, not only between the narrator and her new friend but also between the reader and an extraordinary mind.

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, takes us deep into the heart of one woman’s struggle to make sense of her life and family. 

Gifty was born in Huntsville, Alabama, after her family emigrated from Ghana. Now she’s finishing up a Ph.D. at Stanford, studying addiction and reward-seeking behaviors in mice. She has a personal connection with her chosen subject: When she was 10, her adored older brother, Nana, died of a heroin overdose after a basketball injury left him hooked on opioids. Their mother spiraled into depression soon after. Over a decade later, Gifty brings her mother to California after the older woman shows signs of another approaching breakdown. As Gifty keeps a watchful eye on her mother and continues her research, she begins to experience the pull of the strong evangelical Christian faith of her childhood, which she’d intended to leave behind in Alabama.

Gifty’s determination to better understand her family’s suffering and the tension between two opposing belief systems (faith and science) forms the heart of this empathetically written novel. As Gifty begins the final months of her experiments, the narrative shifts in time to include stories of Gifty’s father, known as the Chin-Chin Man, as well as Nana’s tragic tumble into addiction and Gifty’s single summer spent in Ghana. Gifty’s move from the tight embrace of organized faith to the wide-open questions of the sciences is depicted in exquisite detail. The casual but cutting racism of the all-white church of her childhood, the alienation she felt as a Black Christian woman pursuing a science degree and the unease with which she encounters other students in her lab are all unforgettable.

Gyasi’s bestselling debut novel, Homegoing (2014), was a multigenerational saga that traced the families and fortunes of two Ghanaian half sisters over three centuries. Despite its focus on a single family, Transcendent Kingdom has an expansive scope that ranges into fresh, relevant territories—much like the title, which suggests a better world beyond the life we inhabit.

How you respond to life’s challenges can define your story. Do you let the hard times dominate your outlook, or do you look at these events as a chance to start fresh? Author Larry Watson considers these questions in his new novel, The Lives of Edie Pritchard. In Edie’s case, more often than not she opts for a new beginning, turning her back on the people she loves. It’s a complicated, challenging choice. Most people resign themselves to their lot in life, but not Edie, which makes her story fascinating but also profoundly sad.

When we first meet Edie in 1967 Montana, she is the wife of Dean Linderman. Her biggest problem is keeping the advances of Dean’s fraternal twin, Roy, at bay, despite her own obvious attraction to the other brother. After Roy is assaulted by a couple of angry men from another town, things take a drastic turn. Dean and Roy want vengeance, prompting Edie to insist that she and Dean move away. When Dean refuses, Edie leaves without him.

The novel picks up 20 years later, with Edie in a new town and new life. She has married Gary Dunn and has a teenage daughter. After learning that Dean has cancer and only a few months to live, Edie decides to visit him despite Gary’s warnings. Mad with jealousy, Gary follows her and confronts her, but again, Edie makes a choice to run away from the man controlling her life and start over.

Flash-forward another 20 years to 2007, when Edie’s granddaughter is caught up in her own love triangle with two brothers. “We know how that goes,” Edie’s friend muses. “History repeats itself down through the generations.”

Watson’s writing style is simple but powerfully effective. It’s easy to sympathize with Edie and understand the difficult choices she makes. Everyone has a moment when they wish they could just chuck everything and start over. Watson leaves enough room for readers to ponder whether they should.

Odie Lindsay’s debut novel is filled with the rich and complex texture of the American South. Some Go Home is set in the fictional town of Pitchlynn, Mississippi, where the sweet tea flows with extra sugar and the families all know each other’s business.

The novel centers on Colleen, a war veteran turned small-town beauty queen. Colleen marries Derby Friar, who took on his mother’s maiden name to escape the stigma of his estranged father, Hare Hobbs. Hare is on retrial for the violent murder of a Black man named Gabe who, decades earlier, worked the same land with Hare.

As Colleen and Derby prepare for the birth of their twins, Derby takes a job renovating the historic Wallis House, the site of the infamous murder. Derby’s boss is JP, a house flipper from Chicago. JP has returned to Pitchlynn to fulfill the final wishes of his late wife, Dru: to raise their infant daughter in Dru’s hometown. Alarm rips through the small Mississippi town as JP threatens Wallis House with modernization. Dru’s aunt, Susan George, comes on the scene to thwart JP’s renovation plans. Susan had a painful history with Dru, as Susan’s daughter fell to her tragic death from a magnolia tree on the Wallis House property.

The novel follows generations of Hare’s descendants, as well as Gabe’s granddaughter and her husband, Doc, who works as a corrections officer where Hare is being held before his trial. These vividly imagined lives intersect in Pitchlynn, where each person is either running from a troubled past or running back home, desperately seeking closure and acceptance.

Told in hypnotic and at times sharp-witted prose, Some Go Home asks what land means to us, what we will do for that land and who we’ll become along the way. It’s a story of class and race intersections, of how the haves often send the have-nots to do their bidding. With racially motivated violence and scenes of animal cruelty, Some Go Home is often difficult to read as it reflects on trauma, war, family and how the sins and shortcomings of our ancestors replay in our own lives. It’s a relevant story that begs us to reconcile the past with the present so that we can finally begin to move forward.

Reminiscent of adventurous Arctic tales like Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Peter Geye’s Northernmost, Migrations portrays a woman whose tragic life yields profound wisdom.

Abandoned by her mother as a child, Franny struggles with a sense of home but easily identifies with the sea and with birds. She is constantly searching for her lost mother, and along the way, she meets a professor-activist fighting mass extinction from his teaching post in Galway, Ireland. They marry, but Franny continues to roam, haunted by her past. Following a stint in prison, she travels to Greenland without her husband. There, she convinces the captain of a fishing ship to take her aboard, as the Arctic terns she tracks on their last migration can lead the crew to what might be the last schools of fish. Together, this crew creates an unlikely family of restless souls.

Details of Franny’s story emerge in unpredictable blips, like the tiny flashing lights of the bird-tracking devices that Franny and the crew watch on her laptop. Toggling back and forth in time and from place to place, the plot floats through gut-wrenching vignettes of Franny’s escapades, strung together like clues on a life-or-death scavenger hunt. Her life is a series of calamities, some of which she causes. It’s unclear whether she’s migrating from or to something.

Whether she’s in Australia, Trondheim, Greenland, Galway, Scotland, Yellowstone or Antarctica, Franny’s unsettled heart sets the scene. She’s endeared to the fishing crew, but they are also the enemy; she is a vegetarian, a lover and protector of wild animals, among whose numbers she counts herself as both predator and prey. The narrative, set in an unspecified future time, resides on the suspenseful, razor-thin edge between her extremes.

Although Franny may not know where home is, she is home to conflicting truths. Prepare to mourn a bleak image of the future and to embrace an everlasting hope in Franny’s heroic example.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Charlotte McConaghy on finding hope amid humanity’s destructive impact on the earth.

Grace Turner was a rising Hollywood star, a beautiful actor taken under the wing of legendary director and writer Able Yorke. As her fame grows, so does Able’s control over her. He molds her into the perfect starlet, but behind the scenes, his growing manipulation and verbal abuse spiral into something even darker.

“He wanted Marilyn without the overdose, Winona without the shoplifting, Gwyneth without the health shit,” Grace explains in the novel. “I was untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling down a path to immortality so rapidly, so immaculately, that not one person stopped to question how it all worked so well, a fortysomething man and a teenager being so inextricably linked.”

By the time she’s 21, Grace is addicted to vodka and pills. On the eve of her first awards season, Grace steps away from the spotlight, fleeing first to her parents’ home in unfashionable Anaheim, California, then to a moldy Malibu beach house in the shadow of Able’s home. The paparazzi flock to capture her dazed, disheveled appearance as she adjusts to living on her own for the first time in her life. A trip to the gas station to buy food—dill-flavored potato chips, a pack of Babybel cheese, water and a slice of pizza (she doesn’t know how to cook)—is like throwing bread crumbs to seagulls. Soon photos of her are plastered across gossip websites, and Grace is at a crossroads: Will she be a Hollywood cautionary tale, or a comeback story?

The similarities to Harvey Weinstein are inescapable, but in an author’s note, Ella Berman writes that she began the novel months before the New York Times and The New Yorker began publishing bombshell revelations about the disgraced megaproducer’s history of mistreatment and sexual assault. The Comeback flirts with but never devolves into a formulaic revenge plot, which would cheapen what turns out to be a surprising and satisfying story. First-time novelist Berman deftly captures the entertainment industry in all its fickleness and offers a complex, compassionate portrait of the lasting scars of abuse and trauma.

It may occur to the reader of Luster that the title has a double meaning. “A soft glow” is the dictionary definition of luster, and given that the protagonist, Edie, is an artist, that reference makes sense. But if we are to read the title as “lust-er,” as in one who lusts, that interpretation makes sense, too. Luster is a gritty novel about appetites—for sex, companionship, attention, money—and what happens when they are sated.

Luster is narrated by Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman in Brooklyn with a crappy job and crappier apartment. She begins dating Eric, an older white man she meets online who is in an open marriage. Then Edie is fired from her job for inappropriate sexual behavior and subsequently evicted from her apartment. Eric’s wife, Rebecca, invites Edie to stay in their suburban New Jersey home until she gets back on her feet.

Despite the open relationship that brought Eric and Edie together, this is not a particularly sexual novel. The beginning is front-loaded with intimate scenes, including some violence that may or may not be consensual BDSM. But the remainder of the book focuses on the wary relationship between Edie and Rebecca, as well as Rebecca’s adopted Black daughter, Akila. It might come as a relief to Edie that this happy suburban family whose home she has stumbled into is, actually, anything but happy. Or it might just be a disappointment.

Some readers will view Edie as an unlikable narrator who makes destructive choices. Others will read her as lost and complicated, struggling to stay afloat in a racist and sexist world. Either way, Edie is deftly written as a young woman saddled with generational trauma and suffering from the rootlessness of an addict’s child.

Leilani’s writing is cerebral and raw, and this debut novel will establish her as a powerful new voice. There are no easy answers or resolutions in Luster, and no one comes out looking good. But the author has proven herself to be a keen social observer—especially about the truths that some people don’t want to see.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Raven Leilani discusses the want and rage of her female characters in Luster.

Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline blends fantasy, monsters and contemporary First Nation struggles in a powerful and inventive novel. Dimaline drew inspiration from stories of the rougarou—a werewolf-like creature that is always on the lookout for misbehaving boys and girls—that she heard about as a child in the Métis community near Canada’s Georgian Bay in Anishinaabe territory.

Set in a small community in rural Ontario, Empire of Wild opens a year after Victor Beausoleil walked out in the middle of a heated argument about land rights with his wife, Joan. Nobody has seen him since, and though Joan’s close-knit family assumes Victor has left the marriage, she is convinced that something is preventing his return. His absence is getting to her when, one hungover morning, she stumbles into a tent revival service set up in a Walmart parking lot and believes she sees Victor there, dressed in a suit and leading the congregation in prayer. The minister, who introduces himself as Eugene Wolff, assures Joan that he is not her husband. But something about the situation doesn’t seem right, especially after Joan encounters the church’s financial backer, the creepy Thomas Heiser.

With her 12-year-old nephew riding shotgun and armed with Native medicine and advice from community elders, Joan goes in search of the truth. The quest will take her deep into indigenous traditions and present-day struggles over property and ownership.

Like Dimaline’s award-winning The Marrow Thieves, a chilling YA novel that takes place in a dystopian future of ecological devastation and gruesome colonization, Empire of Wild seamlessly mixes realistic characters with the spiritual and supernatural. As much a literary thriller as a testament to Indigenous female empowerment and strength, Empire of Wild will excite readers with its rapid plot and move them with its dedication to the truths of the Métis community.

Alex Landragin’s Crossings weaves a remarkable tale across centuries, landscapes and human lives. A bookbinder receives a manuscript from a baroness with explicit direction to not read what it holds. When the baroness dies soon after, the bookbinder discovers that the manuscript contains three tales—a ghost story written by Charles Baudelaire for an illiterate girl, a dark love story of a Jewish German exile who is unable to leave Paris at the edge of the Nazi invasion, and the tale of a woman who lives through seven generations.

Each story is rich with characters, ideas and keenly imagined moments. The points of connection, however, are what make the text compelling and open to so much discovery. As the preface ends, readers learn that the book can be read in two modes: one narrative at a time, or through the “Baroness” guided sequence that hops between the three stories. In this method, the stories weave through time and space to create a fourth text, one in which nuances and subtext emerge through unexpected connections. As characters, objects and phrases appear and reappear, time blends, and the questions of what makes us who we are, how our choices impact our futures and how other people perceive us become central to the telling.

The prose is engaging, asking you to keep up as the story jumps from ending to beginning, tangling time and stretching the edge of what a narrative can do. There’s a tension between wanting to read quickly, to let yourself be absorbed in this fantastical and real world, or slowing down to allow each story to breathe. The beauty here is the multiplicity of the reading experiences, of the chance to do both, as each iteration of the novel asks different questions and demands a different mode of attention from the reader.

An ambitious fable that speaks to our need to classify and control, Pew tells the story of a person of indeterminate race and gender whose arrival throws a community into an existential crisis at the same time that they are readying themselves for the ominously named Day of Forgiveness.

Arriving at church one morning, residents of a small Southern town find a young person asleep in a pew. The person, who refuses to identify themselves or even speak, appears to be gender nonconforming as well as racially nonspecific. A well-intentioned family volunteers to take the stranger home, naming them Pew after the church bench where they were found. 

Pew’s silence creates a kind of blank slate that draws in members of the community; confessing fears, dreams and past transgressions is easier to a wordless stranger. But kindly curiosity quickly becomes threatened by Pew’s utter refusal to self-identify, reveal anything about their past or even allow a doctor to examine them. The community’s compassion turns quickly to fear and skepticism, and soon Pew is moved behind lock and key, separated from the other children and eventually relocated to a different part of town. 

In Pew, Catherine Lacey explores the human need to classify along with the narrowness of the human imagination. The townspeople’s urgent need to know just who and what Pew is appears shallow, even racist, when their level of care seems to ebb and flow with this information or lack of it. With creepy allusions to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and a timely exploration of gender’s mutability, Pew is provocative and suspenseful, a modern-day parable about how our fear of otherness stands in the way of our compassion. 

At 81, Lilia Liska is a crabby presence at her assisted living center, offering tart replies to her neighbors’ small kindnesses. But Lilia, the main character in Yiyun Li’s new novel, Must I Go, has a secret obsession: rereading the self-published diaries of Roland Bouley, the man she had a brief affair with 65 years ago. Roland never knew that he was the father of Lilia’s first child, Lucy, nor that Lucy killed herself at age 26.

Lilia bears some resemblance to Elizabeth Strout’s indelible character Olive Kitteridge. As with Olive’s story, suicide is a theme; Lilia returns repeatedly to Lucy’s death, understanding as little now as she did then. Like Olive, Lilia walled off her heart long ago and is now trying to make sense of her long life, her loves and losses.

The novel’s first two sections follow Lilia in close third person through both the present and past, when as a 16-year-old she met the charismatic Roland. The novel’s third section switches gears to explore Roland’s diary, annotated with Lilia’s notes for granddaughter Katherine (daughter of Lucy, granddaughter of Roland). This turns the novel into something both old-fashioned—an epistolary novel, more or less—and experimental, a kind of collage. Lilia’s notes speculate about details left unsaid, about Roland’s practical wife, Hetty, and his longtime lover, Sidelle. Her notes are often funny, taking the self-important Roland down a peg: “Let’s forgive Roland his bluffing. Let’s enjoy it. . . . He wore his lies like tailored suits.” This is a novel to sink into, knowing that you may not remember all the extended family members Lilia mentions, nor all the names Roland notes in his diary entries from the 1940s.

The author of three other novels, two story collections and a memoir, Li was born and raised in pre-capitalist Beijing, came to the U.S. for graduate school in immunology and later earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s a wide-ranging writer who can brighten dark themes with humor and hope.