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.

Amity Gaige’s fourth novel tells the entrancing story of Juliet and Michael Partlow. As their marriage stalls after two children and relative normalcy in suburbia, Michael has a wild idea to take the whole family aboard a boat and sail for a year. Juliet, entangled in postpartum depression and unable to muster the strength to finish her dissertation for her Ph.D., begrudgingly agrees to the adventure.

The structure of the novel is a duet between Michael and Juliet, with Juliet’s lyrical, rhythmic first-person narration driving the story forward. She is a student of confessional poetry, and she is transfixed by the wind and its many faces. Entries from Michael’s captain’s log while aboard the Juliet weave throughout, veering more toward a diary. He journals about his childhood, his father’s early death, his initial attraction to Juliet and their problems as a couple. 

This marriage isn’t perfect, and it’s debatable whether Michael and Juliet are running from their problems or tuning in to fix them. But the sea opens up an avenue toward peace, with unending amounts of water to dump their minds into.

Unafraid and perhaps unaware of all that could possibly go wrong, Michael and Juliet’s daughter, Sybil, easily trades Barbie houses and elementary school for seashells and bottle caps. Their younger son, Georgie, called Doodle, watches Sybil and mimics her. When the sea brings squalls, Juliet and Michael must learn to communicate and come together on a whole different level.

With taut prose and well-paced action, Sea Wife provides an excellent escape from reality while exposing universal truths about marriage, motherhood and childhood trauma. In a world where so many “shoulds” are thrown upon mothers, this story’s mother does her best to be honest. While in the beginning Juliet gives away too much of herself in service of her family, the sea and her sailing adventure bring forth her confidence and free her from traditional gender roles.

The sea changes this family. They cannot go back to the lives they had before. Sea Wife is brilliant, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful.

It’s not often a contemporary novel is narrated by an inanimate object. In the 18th century, this convention was quite a bit more popular, referred to as “it-narratives” or “object narratives.” Francesca Momplaisir takes this classic form and combines it with contemporary issues in My Mother’s House, narrated by the titular dwelling.

When we first meet the house, called La Kay, it is describing its own suicide by fire. La Kay wants to burn itself down because of a man named Lucien. Decades before the fire, Haitian immigrant Lucien moved to Queens, New York, with his young wife, Marie-Ange. Now she is dead, and Lucien, elderly and frail, is estranged from their three daughters. Amid the fire, Lucien swears that “his girls” are in the house’s fireproof safe room. Is Lucien mistaken in his addled state?

Though we first meet Lucien when he’s weakened, we learn soon enough that he’s not a good man. Momplaisir shows how Lucien’s wickedness and perversity allow him to exploit other Haitian immigrants, especially women. In this way, Momplaisir illuminates the darker side of immigrant life, in particular Haitian immigrant life, with parents separated from their children—by the parents’ own design—and people with expired green cards or visas who descend into the perilous underground economy or are otherwise forced to live in sketchy circumstances. There is also the ghastly legacy of colorism, in which light-skinned Haitians like Lucien are valued over those of darker hues. La Kay watches Lucien’s crimes for years, and even after it sets itself on fire, it still watches and waits.

Still, Momplaisir makes you feel an ember of sympathy for Lucien, whose sole refrain since childhood has been “I am nothing.” He’s nothing without his wife, his daughters, the women whom he uses, discards and then reels back in. He seems buffeted by love, an emotion whose demands he can’t understand or fulfill. Yet these women survive against terrible odds. 

In Momplaisir’s novel, cracks of light are always there to penetrate the dark.

Emily St. John Mandel follows her bestselling post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, with a more intricately layered—and better—novel about having money, not having money and the guilt, sorrow and panic of gaining it and losing it. The Glass Hotel is also, by the way, a bit of a ghost story.

The Hotel Caiette, the glass hotel of the title, is a super luxury hotel in a remote corner of Vancouver Island, a “five-star experience where your cell phone doesn’t work.” A young local woman named Vincent winds up working there as a bartender after some youthful bohemian years off the island. She is smart, witty and elegant. She catches the eye of Jonathan Alkaitis, the investment-fund mogul who owns the hotel and who soon invites her to become, essentially, his trophy wife. It’s a transaction she accepts. She moves to a posh house in Connecticut and thrives among the uber-wealthy. But it turns out that Alkaitis is running a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme. When it collapses, Vincent eventually begins a third life as an itinerant cook on an international container ship.

Mandel’s narrative does not unfold as directly and cleanly as this summary suggests. Rather, the story circles through time, deepening with each pass. This is one of its wonders. Another is how lively and sometimes mysterious the novel’s minor characters are. Vincent’s half-brother Paul, for instance, doesn’t steal money but instead appropriates an essential part of Vincent’s creative being. Alkaitis’ beloved older brother was a talented artist who died of a drug overdose, and that shapes Alkaitis’ interactions with one of his more vulnerable investors, an artist who painted a portrait of the brother. The wily Mandel even brings back characters from Station Eleven to playfully suggest that we are reading about a parallel universe.

Mandel is a vivid and observant storyteller. Some small observations make you laugh out loud. For example, that you can distinguish wealthy people from the Western U.S. from wealthy people of New York, because the former are prematurely weathered from all their skiing. But other observations are more somber. As Mandel writes, “There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life.” In this novel, the hauntings are literal and metaphorical.

The Glass Hotel is a dark, disturbing story but also an enthralling one.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Emily St. John Mandel discusses The Glass Hotel, the “kingdom of money” and the dangers of international waters.

Micah Mortimer is a single, middle-aged man whose life is governed by routine. On Mondays, he mops his floors. Fridays are for vacuuming. He runs every morning. He lives alone, managing an apartment building. And he finds most people perplexing. “Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.”

Micah’s carefully calibrated world is upended when he returns from his morning run to find a teenage boy named Brink on his stoop. Brink is the son of Micah’s college girlfriend, and he is convinced Micah is his father. They quickly determine the math makes that scenario impossible, but Brink lingers. He’s gotten into some trouble in college and is reluctant to go home and face his parents. Brink’s presence triggers a chain of events that threaten not only Micah’s daily routine but also his entire carefully structured life. Soon he finds himself rethinking his place in the world.

Not a word is wasted in this slim, beautiful novel. Reading Anne Tyler is always pure pleasure, and Redhead by the Side of the Road is the author at her best. This joyful book is a powerful reminder of how much we need human connection.