The first months of the 2020s have brought us excellent books by Latino authors. One is Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s memoir, Children of the Land. Another is Afterlife, Julia Alvarez’s first novel for adults in over a decade. It couldn’t be more timely, a moving portrait of a retired English professor and novelist dealing with her husband’s sudden death and the plight of fellow Latinos in her Vermont town.

Antonia Vega is still reeling a year after the death of her husband, Sam, a beloved local doctor. Since then, she has been so adrift that she sometimes pours orange juice into her coffee. Ever the novelist, she often quotes favorite authors, from Wallace Stevens to Shakespeare, to help her cope.

Family and neighborhood events complicate Antonia’s grief. As Alvarez has done so beautifully in previous books, she offers a memorable portrait of sisterhood, as Antonia is one of four sisters who emigrated years ago from the Dominican Republic. 

The oldest sister and a former therapist, Izzy has been known to engage in irregular behavior, as when she wrote to Michelle Obama “to offer to design her inauguration gown.” Her latest escapade is more consequential: She gets lost on the drive to Antonia’s 66th birthday party, and the other sisters, including Tilly and fellow therapist Mona, frantically search for her.

In a parallel story, a man named Mario, one of several undocumented Mexicans who work at the dairy farm next to Antonia’s house, asks her to help him bring his girlfriend to Vermont. But he doesn’t tell Antonia the whole truth about their situation. The withheld information leads to complications neither he nor Antonia could have anticipated.

In one moving scene after another, Alvarez dramatizes the sustaining power of stories, whether for immigrants in search of a better life or for widows surviving a spouse’s death. True to its title, Afterlife cannily explores what it means to go on after a loss. As Alvarez writes about Antonia, “The only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them.” This is a beautiful book.

Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, Days of Distraction, offers a thoughtful reflection on gender, relationships and racial and ethnic identity in 21st-century America, as seen through the observant eyes of a young Chinese American woman.

Employed as a Consumer Technology Reporter for a San Francisco-based publication, Chang’s narrator Alexandra (Jing-Jing to her family) writes “about gadgets for people with money to spend.” Between her dissatisfaction with the emptiness of her job and the not-so-subtle discrimination against women working in the tech world, she’s ready for a change.

With her white boyfriend, identified only as “J,” Alexandra embarks on a cross-country drive from the West Coast to Ithaca, New York, where J will enter a Ph.D. program in biochemistry at Cornell. She abandons her writing for a part-time job with a “major social media company that shall not be named” that pays her $30 an hour to do nothing more than “keep an eye on tech news and upload stories into the app.”

Along the way, relying on an accumulation of narrative fragments that defines Chang’s style, Alexandra gradually begins to unearth stories about the lives of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. when they began to arrive in large numbers in the 19th century, especially the unsubtle prejudice against them that included bans on interracial marriage. Among the most interesting is the story of Yamei Kin, the first woman of Chinese descent educated at an American university (Cornell), who went on to carve out a distinguished career as a nutritionist. Kin’s marriage to a white man provokes Alexandra to ruminate on the challenges in her own interracial relationship, ones that transcend the ordinary tensions that accompany the young couple’s uprooting and relocation.

Days of Distraction is less noteworthy for its action or plot twists than it is for Alexandra’s precise, fresh insights into life in a country where people who look like her have ultimately thrived. But as the novel reveals, that eventual acceptance sometimes has a steep price.

Corrections officers oversee approximately 1.5 million prisoners across the United States. On a daily basis, guards supervise prisoners in every facet of their lives, from daily showers to bed checks, meal prep and service to prisoner intake and strip searches. Officers are constantly exposed to insults, physical violence, hepatitis, AIDS and other infectious diseases. And that’s just for starters. David Moloney chronicles the lives of nine such corrections officers as they perform their daily routines in his unflinchingly graphic debut novel, Barker House.

Officially known as the Barker County Correctional Facility in New Hampshire, the facility reeks of stale urine, fecal waste, sweat, bad breath and the slop inmates eat in the cafeteria. The atmosphere is at once claustrophobic and abhorrent. It’s not the kind of job you look forward to day after day, nor the kind of job you can just walk away from and forget at the end of a shift. It stays with you. It eats away at you.

Moloney draws on firsthand experience as a former corrections officer in depicting life inside Barker House’s drab, concrete walls. In alternating chapters, the guards take readers on a tour of the facility as they interact with criminal offenders and drug addicts. Virtually no one is left unscathed, physically or mentally. When one of the guards can’t take it anymore and ends his life with a bullet to the brain, the other guards reel from the tragedy and come together in surprisingly sentimental fashion.

Moloney sugarcoats nothing in this novel. Instead he pulls back the veil on this dark underbelly of society in stark and brutal prose. Barker House is not for the faint of heart or a reader looking for a fun escape (in fact, you may want to take a shower after finishing), but its importance as a portrait of our corrections system is undeniable.

Dispensing with Midwestern niceties and Southern platitudes, Brandon Taylor announces his arrival to readers with Real Life, a devastating wallop of a debut novel.

Impressive in its economy, the novel spans the course of a single weekend in the life of Wallace, a black graduate student who has moved from Alabama to a Midwestern university town. While navigating his simmering feelings of alienation and his inability to reconcile past wounds, Wallace reaches a boiling point amid conflicts and confrontations with colleagues and friends, as well as an unsettling sexual relationship with a former frenemy. As Wallace’s carefully constructed barriers begin to crumble, he spirals into hyper-intellectual ruminations on topics such as grief, privilege, racism, trauma, queer sexuality, violence, academia and the messy ways in which they all mix.

These heavy, uncomfortable topics make for a heavy, uncomfortable reading experience, one that shares more than a few similarities with Hanya Yanagihara’s juggernaut, A Little Life, both in terms of subject matter and tone. But while A Little Life could be unnecessarily grim and upsetting, the discomfort of Real Life has a point: to unsettle, to provoke and, hopefully, to cause white readers to reassess their own privilege and biases.

The discomfort of 'Real Life' has a point: to unsettle, to provoke and, hopefully, to cause white readers to reassess their own privilege and biases.

As Wallace reflects on a rather disastrous dinner party, “This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things. There is a pause. And a silence.” Taylor isn’t serving up pablum here but cold hard truths, and the reader's job is to witness.

Real Life will undoubtedly unsettle some readers, but it will do the opposite for others, offering relief and validation at finally having their own experiences and truths recognized and reflected in a novel, and artfully so. Taylor’s language is breathtaking in its precision and poetry, and he has a real talent for writing beautifully about ugly, brutal things. The result is a book that can only be described as the perfect union of the two—brutiful—and should be considered essential reading for all.

In Deacon King Kong, the venerable James McBride’s first novel since winning the National Book Award in 2013 for The Good Lord Bird, a grief-stricken church deacon nicknamed Sportcoat shoots Deems, a 19-year-old drug dealer, at a Brooklyn-area housing project called the Cause Houses in 1969.

The shooting shocks the community of the Causes Houses and nearby Five Ends Baptist Church and triggers a chain of subplots that McBride explores in touching and intriguing ways. Such a web of interconnected relationships could produce confusion when from the pen of a less talented writer. McBride, however, gives every character finely tuned identities and experiences. Aside from Sportcoat and Deems, there is Officer Potts Mullen, a worn-down white beat cop who yearns for the heart of cynical yet warm-hearted African American pastor’s wife Sister Gee. Soup is a recently released ex-convict and Nation of Islam convert who seeks to heal the community that he used to hurt. Italian mobster Tommy Elephante, also known as the Elephant, is the neighborhood boogeyman who is pursuing a treasure hunt left behind by his deceased father. These subplots are tied together by a mysterious link that reveals itself over time.

These are just a few of the threads that comprise the web of experiences that generate the book’s ultimate protagonist, the Cause Houses. The characters are mere microorganisms; the Cause is the body. McBride imagines the project building not just as a setting but also as a living being that speaks, laughs, cries and, most importantly, loves. 

Deacon King Kong engages with serious issues including grief, poverty, drug use and gun violence, among others. At the same time, it is an incredibly funny novel. McBride’s comedic language and timing are precise and dynamic. Comedy is cultural, and in a truly exceptional move, he gives authentic comedic voices to characters with wide-ranging racial and cultural backgrounds.

Deacon King Kong finds a literary master at work, and reading the book’s 384 pages feels like both an invigorating short sprint and an engrossing marathon. It is a deeply meditative novel that leaves the reader swept up in a wave of concurrent and conflicting emotions. Deacon King Kong reaffirms James McBride’s position among the greatest American storytellers of our time.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: James McBride discusses creative freedom, the black church and examining race in fiction.

Celebrity often looks glamorous to outsiders. And who wouldn’t have envied the life of Irish actress Katherine O’Dell? Her daughter, Norah, acknowledges her mother’s elegance, like the way she’d leave a last bite of toast on her plate with “a little wavy-over thing she does with her hand, a shimmy of rejection or desire.” Even at the breakfast table, her mother was a star.

But as Anne Enright reminds us in Actress, celebrity is often accompanied by gloom. This touching novel charts a star’s decline, from early Broadway and Hollywood fame in 1948 to her sad later years, when she was reduced to degrading stage roles and a commercial for Irish butter.

One of the saddest ironies is that Katherine, “the most Irish actress in the world,” wasn’t Irish. She was born in London to a stage-actor father who never had a great career. Katherine’s life was more successful—and more checkered, with relationships with domineering men, suspected interactions with IRA members and struggles with mental illness, culminating in her rash decision to shoot a producer in the foot after he declined to produce one of her scripts.

All of these events are relayed from the perspective of Norah, a novelist, who travels to London to meet people from Katherine’s past and seek answers to several mysteries, among them the identity of her father.

The pacing is too leisurely at times, but Actress is at its best when Enright examines the complexities of this unusual mother-daughter bond. Memorable descriptions of even secondary characters make this book a treat, as when Norah reminisces about her thespian grandfather who “carried his handsome like an unwanted gift—one he offered to the world, but could never quite give away.”

Late in the novel, when ruminating on events that can harm, Norah says, “You can also be destroyed by love.” As Enright shows, love often looks glamorous, but sometimes it’s only a guise.

Along with climate change and the rise of populist nationalism, immigration is one of several subjects that have dominated the news in the first two decades of the 21st century. It’s no surprise, then, that an accomplished novelist like Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga would turn his attention to this challenging topic. Amnesty, the story of a brutal crime and its reverberation in the life of a self-described illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, is the tension-inducing, morally complex result of that effort.

Four years after dropping out of a fraudulent college and overstaying his student visa in Sydney, Dhananjaya “Danny” Rajaratnam, originally from Sri Lanka, lives in a storeroom above a grocery store, performs occasional odd jobs and also runs a small home-cleaning business. When one of his clients, a married woman, is found stabbed to death, Danny quickly realizes that her lover, a man named Prakash—an immigrant like Danny, but who obtained Australian citizenship—is likely the killer. 

Over the course of a single day, in a series of text messages and cellphone conversations, Prakash and Danny engage in a cat-and-mouse game over whether Danny will share with the police the knowledge he possesses that could implicate Prakash in the crime. In an effort to deter Danny, Prakash threatens to expose the young man’s illegal status. Danny’s situation is complicated by the fact that he’s a member of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. Before fleeing the country, he faced detention and torture and knows he risks that fate if he returns.

Though Adiga’s sympathies clearly lie with Danny, he’s careful not to telegraph the result of this dramatic confrontation. As Danny roams the streets of Sydney and wrestles with his conscience, we see glimpses of the anxiety of life in an “archipelago of illegals, each isolated from the other and kept weak, and fearful, by this isolation.” Add to that troubling reality the weight of an ethical crisis of life-changing dimensions, and the result is a work of deeply consequential fiction.

We’re living in a moment when predatory men are being held responsible for the power they wield against women—especially younger women. Typically we hear about it when the now-adult women discuss their abuse years later. In My Dark Vanessa, first-time novelist Kate Elizabeth Russell gives voice to a 15-year-old girl who enters into a relationship with her teacher.

Vanessa Wye is a bright but socially disconnected girl at a Northeastern boarding school. Jacob Strane, a literature teacher who is 27 years her senior, zeros in on her loneliness and grooms his young student for a sexual relationship. Vanessa’s narration switches back and forth from the early 2000s, when she is an enthralled student keeping the relationship a secret, to 2017, when a reporter from a feminist blog reaches out to her in the hopes that she’ll discuss Strane’s abuse. It turns out that Strane had other victims, and they have come forward.

Those who want to deny sexual abuse of children are quick to point out how “willing” the children seem, particularly teen girls who are “asking for it.” Russell has clearly done her psychology homework on how sexual abuse transpires. Her storytelling is particularly strong when she shows how manipulation and coercion operate, and how predators intentionally choose isolated victims whose distress is unlikely to be noticed.

Still, as both a teen and an adult, Vanessa balks at the characterization that she had no agency. She insists their love was mutual, albeit complicated, and that she tempted him into risky behavior. “I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me,” she wonders, pondering sexually suggestive photos that Strane took of her as a teen. 

The reader is able to see heartbreaking truths that Vanessa can’t yet bear to look at, and this conflict is utterly gripping. It’s painful for the reader to view Vanessa’s experience through a more critical lens than she does, and this divide between reader and narrator will surely prompt us to ask questions about the creepy men in our own lives.

If there is a reading list for the #MeToo era, My Dark Vanessa deserves to be at the top of it.

Colum McCann’s ambitious new novel tells the true story of the friendship between two men brought together by tragedy. The title, Apeirogon, refers to a shape with an infinite but countable number of sides, and this image serves as a metaphor for both political complexity as well as the episodic manner in which the story unfolds.

Palestinian Bassam Aramin’s life was transformed when, jailed as a teenager, he became interested in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. Upon release, Bassam co-founded Combatants for Peace, a grassroots movement committed to nonviolence in Israel and the West Bank, and got a degree in Holocaust Studies in England. After Bassam’s daughter was shot and killed by an Israeli border guard in 2005, he joined the Parents Circle-Families Forum, an organization founded for Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost relatives to the violence. There, he met graphic designer Rami Elhanan, 19 years his senior, whose daughter was killed in a suicide bombing in 1997. The two men have made it their lives’ work to travel together all over the world, telling their daughters’ stories in their quest for peace. 

Apeirogon takes place during a single day as the men make their separate ways to a monastery in Beit Jala, a Palestinian Christian town in Bethlehem, where they have a speaking engagement. Bassam leaves from his home in Jericho, traveling through checkpoints, worried he will be stopped for having a headlight out, and Rami is on his motorcycle, crossing in and out of Israel-occupied territories. 

As in earlier novels (Dancer, TransAtlantic), McCann mixes history and fiction, shifting narrators, place and time into a seamless though sprawling whole. Through 1,001 brief fragments that lead up to and away from two monologues, one by each man, McCann interweaves their lives with topics as diverse as soccer, avian migration and, in a tip of the hat to Let the Great World Spin, Philippe Petit, who walked a tightrope strung over the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods in 1987 Jerusalem. Segment after segment evokes the experiences of McCann’s protagonists, their families and the divided land in which they live.

McCann’s protagonists believe that if a country’s commitment to peace leads the way, the most complex politics will sort themselves out. Apeirogon makes space for this belief, a placeholder for a future where irreparable loss transforms violence, where grief leads to reconciliation.

Once in a while you come across a novel whose protagonist is so engaging that you find yourself thinking, Oh no! or Don’t do that! interspersed with sighs of relief and some heartfelt rejoicing when things go right for a change. Lily King’s Writers & Lovers is one of those novels.

Casey Kasem, née Camila Peabody, is a struggling writer trying (and failing) to make ends meet as a waitress, living in her landlord’s converted shed and walking his dog in the morning to get a break on the rent. She lacks health insurance. She’s $70K in debt, and though she has many supportive friends, her love life is a shambles. On top of this, her beloved mother recently died, suddenly and prematurely, and no one seems to know why. Casey’s father, a pervert who’s bitter over Casey’s failure to become a golf pro, is a waste of space.

King is one of those rare writers who can entwine sadness, hilarity and burning fury in the briefest of moments. There’s a lot of this in her restaurant scenes, which are so finely observed that you may wonder if King ever worked in a sad little eatery once upon a time. Though some of Casey’s co-workers are funny and caring, others leave her quivering with rage. The moment when she finally quits (or is fired) will make you want to put on Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” and dance around the room.

Casey’s story, like so many stories in real life, is messy. She’s messy. But Lily King’s book isn’t. It’s a pleasure.

King’s other characters are just as well drawn, including Oscar, Casey’s somewhat older lover. He’s a successful writer, a widower, a Kevin Costner look-alike and father of two adorably rambunctious boys. Then there’s Casey’s other lover, Silas, who’s younger and unsettled. King doesn’t hesitate to bring up how financial insecurity impacts love; should Casey move in with Oscar and the boys just because she’s about to be evicted and can’t afford rent? Nor can Casey choose whether to write for love or money; she has to write for both reasons.

Though the year is young, this reviewer thinks the word for 2020 is going to be “messy.” Casey’s story, like so many stories in real life, is messy. She’s messy. But King’s book isn’t. It’s a pleasure.

Sue Rainsford’s fresh and exciting first novel, Follow Me to Ground, reads like a dark fairy tale. First published in Ireland to glowing reviews, the novel is now reaching a much wider audience.

Our narrator is Ada, a healer who lives with her father in a small village. Ada and her father have strange and unexplainable gifts, and the other villagers, or Cures, come to the healers with a mix of reverence and fear. They open Cures on their couch and sing their sickness away. For particularly troublesome illnesses, Ada and her father temporarily bury Cures in the Ground and bring them up again, healed.

While Ada and her father appear to be human, they are decidedly not human, but something other. The churning and gurgling Ground is sacred to Ada, as she came from it. She remembers the taste of it, the tang of dirt in her mouth. Not only does the Ground have powers, but so does Sister Eel Lake. The Cures know to stay away from the lake that’s rumored to contain giant killer eels.

Ada’s life, while odd, is small and quiet until she meets Samson, a male Cure in the village. She grows curious and then entranced with Samson, creating a rift between herself and her father. Samson’s sister, Olivia, is pregnant and seeks help from the local healers, but Ada finds something troubling about the woman.

Both a coming-of-age story and a piece of ancient folklore, Follow Me to Ground is a pleasure to read. Seeing the world from Ada’s perspective is intoxicating, and as she grows in her power, we feel lucky to be taken along for the ride. With language that’s visceral and jarringly beautiful, Rainsford has created a mysterious world that left me wanting to hear more tales of the strange healers and their trusting Cures.

The Vietnam War has generated a substantial body of literature since its end in 1975, but the same can’t be said of the civil war that raged simultaneously in the country of Laos. Paul Yoon’s novel Run Me to Earth, a pensive tale of war’s savage toll on innocents during and after the conflict, partially remedies that absence.

As Yoon explains in an author’s note, more than 2 million tons of ordnance rained down on Laos, a country half the size of California, between 1964 and 1973. That’s more than was dropped on both Germany and Japan during World War II. Thirty percent of these cluster bombs failed to explode on impact, leaving a residue of lethal, baseball-size “bombies.” 

Amid this version of hell on earth, three local teenagers—Alisak, Prany and his younger sister, Noi—are recruited to work for a doctor named Vang who ministers to the war-ravaged civilian population. When these well-meaning but untrained children aren’t struggling to aid the doctor in an abandoned farmhouse converted into an ill-equipped government hospital, they’re navigating speedy motorbikes across bomb-strewn fields, guided only by “safe lines” of sticks and their own daring. 

When helicopters arrive to evacuate the three young characters (as well as the hospital’s remaining patients, save for the dying, who are left behind), Yoon follows them to a prison camp run by Laotian rebels, a small town in southern France and even New York’s Hudson River Valley. Their subsequent acts of revenge, self-sacrifice and profound courage all resonate with their wartime experiences, when they were, in the words of one character, “still just children. Children hired to help others survive a war.” 

Run Me to Earth is a melancholy reminder that valor isn’t limited to those who win medals on the battlefield, and that to many noncombatants, the question isn’t who wins or loses, but whether one will survive the madness.

Lizzie Benson, the protagonist of Jenny Offill’s smart, provocative new novel, Weather, has a lot on her mind.

Lizzie has opted out of a Ph.D. program and is underemployed at a university library in Brooklyn. She is the major supporter of her younger brother, Henry, whose addictions were the primary reason Lizzie abandoned graduate school in the first place, and her husband is losing patience. She actively avoids a bigoted neighbor, is cowed by the officious crossing guard at her son’s elementary school and frets over the dwindling attendance at the workplace meditation class. Not to mention her bum knee. After the 2016 election, her pessimism increases. 

Lizzie’s former thesis adviser, Sylvia, who is now the host of a popular “doom and gloom” environmental podcast called “Hell and High Water,” hires Lizzie to field her listeners’ questions. Lizzie finds herself spending hours in a highly polarized virtual world, addressing the concerns of survivalists, doomsday preppers, climate-change deniers and panicky environmentalists. She grows obsessed with the psychology behind disaster planning and survivalism, exacerbating the situation by web surfing and watching reality shows on extreme couponing and animism. But as worrying as these issues are, nothing quite compares to Lizzie’s enmeshed relationship with Henry, whose fragile hold on sobriety is tested by a wife and new baby.

Like Offill’s award-winning Department of Speculation, Weather is short, absorbing and disturbingly funny. Its structure—quotations, lists, jokes, articles and emails mixed with Lizzie’s trenchant observations—echoes our current fragmented world and ever-shortening attention spans. As the tensions between the doomsday predictions and everyday relationships fray and fester, Lizzie finds it more and more difficult to keep from tipping over into despair. She begins to look to her loving family for stability, even as she tests their patience.

The title itself connoting climate conditions and the human ability to withstand and survive change, Weather feels both immediate and intimate, as Lizzie’s concerns become eerily close to our own.