Let’s face it: We’re all a little delusional. We may think that we are more (or less) attractive or talented than we are. We may imagine past exploits as more epic than they really were. For the most part, though, these self-deceptions are harmless and don’t interfere with our real-world functioning. Bianca, the protagonist of Jennifer Givhan’s second novel, Jubilee, on the other hand, has amped up her fantasy to Calvin and Hobbes proportions. She believes that her lifelike, yet quite inanimate, doll named Jubilee is her baby. Her living baby.

Many people with PTSD color outside the lines of typical social behavior, and Bianca packs quite a bit of trauma in her trunk, as we see in chapters that pingpong between the eras “Before Jubilee” and “With Jubilee.” Bianca’s first love, Gabe, is abusive, and over the course of the novel, we see their relationship swing back and forth, with transgressions being met with forgiveness in ever-amplifying cycles until the relationship becomes unsustainable.

Fortunately, Bianca escapes and meets Joshua, a made-to-order Really Nice Guy who is willing to indulge her illusion (as does most of her family) in the hopes that she will reintegrate her somewhat split personality. It doesn’t hurt that he is working on his master’s degree in family counseling. But the real world intrudes on their fragile truce between reality and fantasy, ushering in potentially devastating consequences not only for their relationship but also for the family they have so tentatively forged.

Givhan, who, like her protagonist, is a poet, paints a surrealist canvas with vivid colors, even invoking images from artists such as Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo. The richness of her language and her eye for nuance animate her depictions of both the bleak exterior landscape of California’s Imperial Valley and the bleak interior landscape of Bianca’s damaged soul. Through it all, Givhan has forged a compelling tension between psychological drama and romance that makes for a riveting read.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful, profound novel Jack will not be for every reader.

First of all, it’s a slow read. It has fewer than 300 pages, and if it had a vigorous plot, you’d rush through it in less than a week. Instead, you’ll find yourself spending much longer in the tangled, contradictory thoughts of John Ames Boughton—the titular Jack. You’ll want to stop and consider the foolish and wise things he thinks. You’ll wonder why he seems so eager to defeat himself. If you allow yourself the time, you could easily spend a month reading and thinking about Jack, about old-time Christian debates regarding grace, redemption and love.

Second, there’s the whole moral problem of Jack. You’ve seen him and felt him in the midst and at the edges of Robinson’s previous novels in the widely hailed Gilead cycle: Gilead, Home and Lila. He is the prodigal son of Reverend Robert Boughton of Gilead, Iowa. Since boyhood, Jack has had a shameful talent and urge for petty theft. Now, much older and out of prison, he flops in a single-occupancy hotel on the white side of segregated St. Louis just after World War II. At the beginning of the novel, he finds himself locked in a whites-only cemetery after hours, where he meets a young Black woman named Della Miles who has come there because Jack once praised the place to her. In the mysterious darkness, they talk about poetry and Hamlet and the coincidence that they are both children of ministers. He is aware of the shame that will result from her being discovered there. He wants to protect her. Yet he tells her he is the Prince of Darkness. You wonder if he is joking or really believes it.

Third is the question of Della. She is young, smart and from a good Christian family. She teaches English at the local Black high school. She is the beloved daughter of an esteemed Baptist bishop in Memphis. The risk to her and her family’s reputation in associating with Jack could be devastating. So why in God’s name would she fall in love with Jack? What does it even mean that she believes she has seen his holy human soul?

These are just a few of the spirit-boggling questions a reader will encounter by dipping into Robinson’s glorious new novel.

Though this book is categorized as a novel, there is little that, on the surface, appears fictional in British writer Martin Amis’ capacious “novelized memoir,” Inside Story. The book, he writes in its opening pages, “is about a life, my own, so it won’t read like a novel—more like a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours.” These short stories might better be called “episodes” that congeal into a metanarrative that is largely about the author’s lasting friendships with three late writers whose deaths left various scars on his personal landscape: his dear friend Christopher Hitchens, his mentor Saul Bellow and his parents’ close friend, the poet Philip Larkin.

Amis’ account sprawls back and forth across decades and continents, shifting not only in time but also in tense and voice, interrupted by a sometimes overwhelming quantity of explicating footnotes. This intentional disregard for conventional storytelling further blurs the line between truth and imagination. The reader presumes that much of the content is true at heart, with specifics morphed by the passage of time and the untrustworthiness of memory. But which parts are made up?

Readers might suspect that the character of Phoebe Phelps, a quirky, often infuriating girlfriend from the 1970s who remains Amis’ obsession for his entire adult life, is based in truth, if perhaps wildly exaggerated. But was she really a former escort turned high-class madam masquerading as a financial executive? Who knows? Amis certainly isn’t saying, nor should he. The important thing is that Phoebe drops a tantalizing, if dubious, bombshell halfway through that provides the book’s most compelling plot twist.

In one of the labyrinthine footnotes late in the book, Amis says of Bellow, “All the dead were in his custody, and he couldn’t let them go.” These elegant words might be applied to the real-life Amis as well. Now 71, this once-young buck of the British literary scene cannot help but look death, mortality and the meaning of life squarely in the face. And he does so with a singular panache and much offhanded wit, forging through upheavals past and present: 9/11, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Trump presidency, totalitarianism, Islamism, the sexual revolution, Alzheimer’s and cancer, among many other dark realities.

Most readers will likely deem Inside Story more memoir than novel. It is certainly a sui generis work either way. Early on I christened it a “kitchen sink” book (as in, “everything but the”) and had to laugh, about halfway in, when the fictional Amis actually “poured the [drink] down the kitchen sink.” Yet whatever its hybrid status suggests, it regally caps Amis’ estimable literary career with cheeky candor and more than a touch of razzle-dazzle.

Depending on one’s perspective, a work of art deemed avant-garde is either a welcome innovation or a stinging repudiation of the status quo. Few people are indifferent. And no avant-garde artist provoked more extreme reactions than Adrianne Geffel, the fictional pianist at the center, or perhaps it’s better to say the periphery, of Adrianne Geffel, music critic David Hajdu’s debut novel.

The reason periphery is a tempting word here is because the reader rarely hears directly from Geffel. Hajdu has structured this clever work as an oral history, the unnamed author of which has long known about the “idiosyncratic American pianist and composer” active in the 1970s and ’80s, whose works inspired a Sofia Coppola film and a George Saunders story and who had a neurological condition that prompted “auditory hallucinations.” She “heard music almost all the time.”

This book is an attempt to figure out what happened to the “Geyser on Grand Street,” as a SoHo newspaper dubbed her, who disappeared in the mid-1980s at age 26. A portrait of Geffel slowly emerges through interviews with people who knew her—from her parents, who fed baby Adrianne formula in part because they could buy it at a discount, to her teachers at Juilliard and a classmate who insinuated himself into Geffel’s life to latch on to her fame.

The result is the literary equivalent of negative space in art: creating a picture of a subject by focusing on surrounding details. Hajdu does this to entertaining effect, even when some of the interviewees’ stories wander and slow the narrative momentum. He has fun satirizing figures in the music world, among them teachers who think students should get into prestigious schools through connections because it’s more “convivial” that way, critics who use their interview with the author to plug their books, and prominent publications that report on trends in music long after the trends have become passé.

Adrianne Geffel is an uncommon treat: a smart parody that even detractors of the experimental are likely to welcome.

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.