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. 

Yearning to find a better life and, more specifically, a purpose in life, is universal and natural. So it’s easy to see how the characters in Brian Castleberry’s debut novel, Nine Shiny Objects, each disillusioned and frustrated by their dead-end lives, would embrace a cultish quest toward utopia on earth.

Things start innocently enough as Oliver Danville, a failed-actor-turned-hustler in 1947 Chicago, reads of an aviator who sees nine bright objects in the sky. Convinced that there’s nothing for him where he is, Oliver hitchhikes west, looking for “a sign that might lead to his true calling.” Before long he dubs himself the Tzadi Sophit, leader of the Seekers, a community of outcasts and idealists with dreams of a society free of racial, ethnic, sexual and social bigotry.

Castleberry could easily have followed Oliver’s exploits from there, but instead he switches gears. Each subsequent chapter jumps ahead in the narrative by five years, introducing another character—a down-on-her-luck waitress, a traveling book salesperson/aspiring songwriter, a painter, a radio host, a poet, a teenager and others—and chronicling how their lives intersect with the Seekers. If that sounds busy and even confusing, it is; you may need a set of cue cards to help keep track of who’s who.

Much of the story revolves around a pivotal event in the establishment of Oliver’s community, in which an outsider attacks one of its members, leading the Seekers to resettle in a Long Island subdivision. But if the Seekers think things will get easier for them, any New Yorker could tell them otherwise.

The scope of the novel—from its vast conspiracies and social commentary to its decades-long timeline—is at times impressive to behold. Castleberry’s intricate narration (some sentences seem to run on for pages at a time) may even compel you to read some passages over again just to make sure you didn’t miss something. But it’s worth it to take your time and savor this one.

Lauren Cress has been drifting through life for the 10 years since she became an orphan. Her relationships with men are often perfunctory. She’s slow to open up to her colleagues at the college where she works as an adjunct instructor, teaching writing to international students. But in the classroom, Lauren comes to life. She’s a dazzling teacher who connects with her students, even when they don’t understand why they’re required to write personal essays.

“Knowing how to express yourself to one another in real ways . . . it can help with loneliness and distance,” Lauren explains.

Lauren’s insatiable but hidden desire to be known and understood thrusts her into an all-consuming friendship with Siri Bergström, a student from Sweden. Siri also knows the pain of losing a parent; her mother died when Siri was 5, though no one knows exactly how. When Siri invites Lauren to come home to Sweden with her, Lauren dives headfirst into the friendship, though she knows it’s unwise.

As the Swedish summer celebration of Midsommar draws near, Lauren finds herself swimming in the complexities of her relationships with Siri and the friends and siblings who welcome her. But when her friendship with Siri threatens to unravel, Lauren withdraws into herself, blocking out all signs of life around her.

In The All-Night Sun, author Diane Zinna displays her deep understanding of the writing craft, born in part of her experience as a creative writing teacher and former executive co–director at AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Her stunning debut novel is a twisting tale of grief, hope and self-deceit, a story as mesmerizing as the young women at its heart.

In Natalie Bakopoulos’ richly told Scorpionfish, readers step into contemporary Athens with Mira, a Greek American woman who has returned to the city while she grieves her parents’ deaths as well as a dissolving relationship. As we enter the mess of her universe, counterpoints appear from her neighbor, the Captain. The alternating voices of these broken, fragmented people explore how each tries to repair and save the self, and how their personal connections become integral to that process.

As Mira and the Captain get to know each other—sitting together and apart, talking across their balcony walls—the conversation reveals their layers and the ways that each sees the other. The newness of their connection allows them to puzzle through the complexities of their past loves, friendships and familial bonds. Each is navigating the ending of a relationship; each is reevaluating priorities. As we witness this growing friendship, the specificity of place—of the sea, the city and the interior emotional realm—cradles the characters’ attempts to understand what it means to be human and to love.

Bakopoulos’ prose is descriptive, full of images and details, and yet some sentences are so clear and axiomatic that the reader may need to pause and think, recognizing truths they’ve always known. In a certain way, reading Scorpionfish is a rereading, a remarkable recognition of how language can work, how grief and love and loss can be so particular, so meaningful, so universal—and how words can make those resonances propulsive and haunting.

As a high school dropout, a single mother and a Japan-born ethnic Korean, Yu Miri has always been a controversial yet surprisingly popular cultural outsider in Japan. Her first novel was banned by the courts. Her second novel, published in 1996, won a prestigious literary award for young writers. In her brief, moving, poetic new novel, Tokyo Ueno Station, Miri remains focused on Japan’s marginalized people.

Kazu, the central character, is a homeless man who haunts the perimeter of Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Gift park, the largest and most important cultural park in the city. The park lies adjacent to Ueno metro station, not far from what was once known as the demon’s gate at the unlucky northeast edge of the city.

Kazu is an impoverished and uneducated laborer from the rural northern province of Fukushima who must live, for most of his life, far from home to earn money to support to his family. He arrives in Tokyo to work on the construction of the site of the 1964 Olympics. Successive misfortunes send him to the homeless encampment at the edge of the park. Now Kazu drifts along the pathways of the park, overhearing snatches of conversation and remembering conversations with a more learned homeless friend who explains the meaning of the museums and nearby historical monuments.

All this we learn indirectly, slowly, in pieces. Time collapses in this novel, with the present, past and historical past interwoven. There is a mesmerizing, wavelike tumult and calm in the story’s movement. We gradually surmise that the isolated Kazu is now a ghost. Kazu reflects that he was born in 1933, the same year as the emperor. And his ill-fated son is born on the same day as the emperor’s son. This is supposed to be fortunate, but Kazu’s mother repeatedly tells him that he has no luck. That seems true regarding Kazu’s personal journey, but a thoughtful reader must wonder if bad luck alone explains the sorry fate of this wandering soul.

In Tara June Winch’s engaging third book, The Yield, a young woman named August Gondiwindi flies back to Australia, rents a car and drives seven hours inland to the aptly named town of Massacre Plains. This is the small town where August grew up in the care of her grandparents. It’s a place “where the sun slap[s] the earth with an open palm.” It’s the place she fled as a teenager after the traumatic disappearance of her older sister and protector. She is returning after many years for the funeral of her grandfather, Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi, a revered Wiradjuri (indigenous Australian) elder. She soon discovers that her grandmother and family members are being evicted from their lands because an extraction company has acquired the mineral rights and plans to excavate a vast open-pit tin mine.

Even with a slightly pat ending, this thread of Winch’s narrative is irresistible, as she offers the reader both a tactile and spiritual feel for the forbidding landscape. Her portrayal of August’s rediscovery of herself and her ties to her home is moving. She presents the legacy of oppression and strife among local indigenous people and European settlers with great nuance.

But it’s when this initial thread intertwines with two other storylines that the novel fully realizes itself. One of these narratives is a long letter, a testimony of sorts, from an early 19th-century missionary who finds his calling among the oppressed Wiradjuri. In contrast to church and government powers, he comes to oppose the policy of tearing children from their families in order to “civilize” them. He realizes that the supposed “stupidity” of the indigenous people is actually a profound understanding of their environment. He worries constantly that his ministrations are not helpful, and he discovers that his advocacy makes him a hated outsider.

The other and most innovative thread involves excerpts from the dictionary of Wiradjuri words that Poppy begins compiling near the end of his life. Stripping a people of their language is a standard method for snuffing out indigenous cultures. Poppy’s effort is an act of resistance and affirmation. But the dictionary appears to be lost, and one of August’s quests is to find it.

Winch, an award-winning Aboriginal Australian writer who is now based in France, uses this dictionary of recovered indigenous words to transmit the deeper story of Gondiwindi family history. We read it—and the novel as a whole—with both sorrow and hope. 

In Drifts, Kate Zambreno ponders an early self-portrait by German artist Albrecht Dürer. Drawn from his own mirrored reflection, the portrait is realistic except for Dürer’s hand, which had been too busy sketching to model for the drawing. “Perhaps it’s impossible to record the self at the immediate moment of contemplation,” Zambreno writes. She tries it anyway: “The publishing people told me that I was writing a novel, but I was unsure.”

Zambreno is the author of six previous books, most of which defy easy categorization. Roxane Gay, in her 2012 essay “How We All Lose,” describes Zambreno’s Heroines as a “hybrid text that is part manifesto, part memoir, and part searing literary criticism” and praises its unashamed subjectivity. This description could readily apply to Drifts. The title comes from Zambreno’s experiments with a new form. Rather than combat “monkey brain,” as her yoga instructor calls the conscious mind in its chaotic, web-enabled 21st-century state, Zambreno’s “drifts” lean into it, seeking to honor and somehow capture the distracted present tense. “I wanted my novel, if that’s what it was, to be about time and the problem of time,” as well as  “the problem with dailiness—how to write the day when it escapes us.”

The cast of characters includes the writer’s partner, her dog, her neighbors and her correspondents, but also Rilke, Kafka and Dürer, to name a few. And yes—quite a lot happens, even if the action isn’t necessarily the plot. To that end, Drifts is a kind of inverted mindfulness exercise in book form, fixed on pinning moments down like so many butterflies. Zambreno has abstained from the novelist’s traditional task of keeping a story arc aloft. 

If this sounds like veiled criticism, it isn’t, though it probably should be taken as a warning to anyone hungry for more conventional fare. But for readers in the mood for an adventure, this is a giddily enjoyable read, emotionally conspiratorial in tone, full of brilliant critical observations and realistic depictions of the dramas in a modern artist’s daily life, the small ones as well as the life-altering ones.

In her 2017 debut novel, The Lucky Ones, Colombian-born author Julianne Pachico ruminated on her home country throughout 30 years of civil war, when rebels and cartels rendered the country lawless. In her second novel, she updates her gaze to present-day Medellín. The Anthill is riskier and more ambitious than The Lucky Ones, but every bit as absorbing.

Lina is a 30-something doctoral student from Britain, daughter of a Colombian mother and English father. She has returned to Colombia after a long absence to volunteer at a day care center run by her childhood friend, Mattías. From the opening page, a sense of foreboding troubles Lina. Who is the stranger who greets her? What kind of a day care facility would be called the Anthill? Who are the other volunteers? Where do the children come from?

The answers unfold in due time, the tension steadily rising like the cable cars that whoosh uphill to connect downtown Medellín with poorer, higher neighborhoods. Medellín is itself a vivid character in the book, a metropolitan tourist destination of swinging nightclubs and placid poverty, a city that has turned Pablo Escobar’s private zoo into a theme park. As Lina struggles to distinguish herself beyond the designation of “the new volunteer,” she wrestles with the violent politics of the country she knew as a child and the threats within this new, almost peaceful iteration of the country.

Lina learns some of the truths of Colombia that Medellín tourist brochures never divulge. Mattías, leftist and anti-clerical, seems devoted to his work yet keeps his distance from Lina, in whose house he was raised. His attitudes suddenly shift midway; there are intimations of a feral child locked away behind Anthill doors. 

Vivid and at times surreal, this assured novel cements Pachico’s reputation as a gifted writer to watch.