“There is a dead whale. It rolls idly in the warm shallows of this island, among cartoonish sea animals with tentacles, suction cups, and goopy eyes,” narrator Evangeline tells us in the opening of Crissy Van Meter’s debut novel, Creatures. “This island” is Winter Island, a fictional island off the Southern California coast that resembles Catalina Island, and where main character Evangeline, or Evie, has lived almost her whole life.

Winter Island is a place for summer people, fishermen, rock stars, druggies and other assorted ne’er-do-wells. It’s also a slightly wild place, with orcas and dolphins within sight, its dormant volcano, abandoned research buildings and frequent storms. As the novel opens, Evie is about to get married, her alcoholic dad has died, and after many years away, her mother has returned to Winter Island for the wedding. And now the dead whale in the harbor has made its smelly presence known to all.

The novel’s narrative follows a nonlinear, nonchronological structure, returning first to Evie’s peripatetic childhood and adolescence. Evie’s dad, a loving but flawed single parent, tries and fails repeatedly to quit drinking and doing drugs, which puts Evie and her dad at the mercy of friends and acquaintances. Sometimes they are homeless. The narrative then leaps forward to Evie’s married years, back to her youth, then forward to the wedding weekend. In between are short interludes that offer the feeling of lyrical essays. The novel’s structure is intriguing and unusual, but it can be hard to follow.

Creatures is filled with evocative writing, particularly in the descriptions of the natural landmarks familiar to Evie, which witness essential moments in her growing up. Likewise, Evie’s first-person narration is vivid and close, although some scenes, and some of the novel’s other characters, seem underdeveloped. For instance, I wanted more of a sense of Evie’s friend Rook and Rook’s son Tommy, and a clearer sense about Evie’s dad’s early death.

Still, with its beautiful writing and redemptive ending, Creatures is an imaginative, atmospheric debut.

Briskly told and devilishly well-plotted, Such a Fun Age follows a young black babysitter and her affluent white employer in the months following a racially motivated public altercation in an upscale grocery. Although strewn with emails, tweets, blogs and texts, Kiley Reid’s game-changing debut novel is rooted in classic dialogue-driven storytelling and is a marker for precisely where our culture is today.

Alix Chamberlain and her family have recently relocated to Philadelphia. Alix makes her living as a blogger, and now with an established brand, LetterSpeak, she has speaking engagements and a book contract. Emira is the babysitter for Alix’s precocious and sensitive toddler, Briar. Almost 26, Emira is frustrated by her lack of money and direction. Even more so, she fears the imminent loss of her health insurance.

When a security guard in an upscale grocery store accuses Emira of kidnapping Briar, a crowd gathers. A white bystander named Kelley films the altercation, then offers to send the video to the local news. Emira is mortified, but she and Kelley begin dating, while the existence of the video remains a sore point between them. When the news that Kelly and Alix had a relationship in high school comes to light, Emira feels even more uncomfortable. Despite assurances from her boyfriend and employer that they are acting on her behalf, it’s not clear who speaks for Emira and why she can’t speak up for herself.

Such a Fun Age hits every note just right—from Alix’s self-righteous frustration to Emira’s ambivalence about accepting help. What takes the book to the next level is its willingness to go beyond where the story naturally leads. This is a tale without a heroine or villain; instead it’s a clear-eyed look at the complex transactional relationship that exists between mothers and nannies, while never shying away from the tender closeness that often grows between babysitters and their charges.

Smart, witty and even a bit sly, this penetrating social commentary is also one of this year’s most enjoyable novels.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Kiley Reid shares the three things you must know before reading Such a Fun Age.

In the opening chapter of Miranda’s Popkey’s bedazzling, psychologically fraught first novel, the unnamed narrator is a graduate student spending the summer in Italy, caring for the young twin brothers of a wealthy classmate who has already begun distancing herself. In her off hours, the narrator reads Sylvia Plath’s journal and describes herself as “daffy with sensation, drunk with it.”

Seeking advice on how to manage her rebellious young charges, the narrator knocks on the bedroom door of the boys’ mother, an elegant Argentinian psychoanalyst. The woman changes out of her bikini in front of the uncomfortable narrator and tells her that the boys are timid, eager to please and need to be punished. Later in this chapter, the psychoanalyst describes the dynamics of her first marriage to one of her college professors. The narrator never tells the psychoanalyst that she, too, has had a love affair with a professor.

Miranda Popkey’s first novel is a slender volume with the power of lightning.

Subsequent chapters span 20 years of the narrator’s life. Each has at its center a conversation with another woman or sometimes several women. Most of these women are social outsiders. In one chapter, the narrator meets a friend at a San Francisco museum where a Swedish artist is exhibiting work about female subjugation. The friend is distraught because of her breakup with her boyfriend. She admits she had an affair, but later she confesses that she invented the affair to get out of the relationship. The narrator observes that “beneath the first premise of our friendship was the understanding that we were, both of us, bad people.”

In a later chapter, the narrator crashes into the shopping cart of another woman at a Vons grocery store in Santa Barbara. They end up getting drunk together and going for a swim, and the other woman confesses that she abandoned her child. “I did the worst thing a woman can do, even though men—you know, you must know, men do this all the goddam time,” the woman tells her.

The narrator thinks she’s the smartest person in the room, and she probably is. She is keenly observant, but her sense of self wavers, and her self-knowledge tends toward the self-lacerating. Only at the end of the novel does the narrator see glimmers of redemption.

In the abstract, Topics of Conversation is about social and sexual power, anger, envy, pain, honesty, self-delusion and female identity. In the moment, the novel is riveting, disturbing and thought-provoking. It’s a slender volume with the power of lightning.

In surveying Britain’s social history over more than a century through the interconnected lives of 12 characters, all of them black women (save for two exceptions), Bernardine Evaristo has set an ambitious agenda for herself. Both in substance and style, her vibrant novel Girl, Woman, Other, co-winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2019, achieves that goal with a striking gallery of the lives and loves, triumphs and heartbreaks of these dozen memorable human beings and the world they inhabit.

Bookended by the story of Amma Bonsu, a lesbian playwright whose drama, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, is making its debut at the National Theatre, Girl, Woman, Other follows each of Evaristo’s characters through independent, short-storylike sections, while subtly linking each portrait to provide depth and texture. Farmer or banking executive, schoolteacher or cleaning-business proprietor, the novel’s characters cut across many levels of British society, with a focus on a span of time from the Margaret Thatcher era to the days of Brexit.

Some of these women wrestle with questions of sexual identity, while others must deal with incidents of physical violence and emotional abuse. Whether it’s Shirley King, whose idealism has curdled into cynicism after a lifetime of teaching high school history, or her former student Carole Williams, who fights to rise in the male-dominated world of international finance, Evaristo never stumbles in her ability to portray these figures with empathy, honesty and, at times, sharp humor. In every case, she skillfully reveals their struggles to define what it means to live meaningfully as spouses, lovers, friends and simply good people.

One of the principal pleasures of Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s energetic, at times playful style. Hers is a unique sort of prose that nods in the direction of poetry in both format and occasionally in content. She dispenses with the use of some conventions of punctuation without ever sacrificing readability. This exciting, often unsettling novel succeeds by respecting both the dignity of its subjects and the intelligence of its readers.

Before reading Marley, I dug out my Bantam Classic paperback of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and reread it. As if I needed such an excuse: It’s one of my favorite books, and Ebenezer Scrooge’s story of greed and selfishness never gets old.

I was equally excited to read Marley, which promised to deliver the untold origin story of Scrooge and his partner Jacob Marley’s sordid business. But whereas Dickens’ novel is ultimately uplifting—our stingy protagonist wholly embraces the lessons learned from ghostly visitations and immediately sets about amending his ways—Marley is anything but. It’s darkly haunting in its own way, but also devilishly fun reading.

There are good reasons for the heavy chains wrapped around Jacob Marley’s ghost when he visits Scrooge that fateful Christmas Eve, and author Jon Clinch spares no detail as he depicts Marley in this prequel as a harsh, uncaring, coldly calculating, deceitful individual, showcasing his malevolent influence on Scrooge. The novel follows the pair from their first meeting at Professor Drabb’s Academy for Boys in 1787—where Marley immediately extorts money from Scrooge—to Marley’s deathbed in 1836. Throughout, Marley’s obsession with money motivates every waking moment of his life. While Scrooge crunches the numbers (or cooks the books, if you will), Marley carries on the nastier businesses of cons, smuggling and slave trading, using various aliases and dummy corporations along the way, even going so far as to keep secrets (and cash) from Scrooge. Marley is, for want of a better phrase, more of a scrooge than Scrooge.

Clinch—who pulled a similarly remarkable feat with his first book, Finn, about the father of Huckleberry Finn—has successfully added a layer of depth and intrigue to Dickens’ beloved characters. Rereading Marley each Christmas may become as much of a tradition as rereading A Christmas Carol.

Imagine a single sentence worthy of its own page. This Is Happiness opens with such a line, reporting that it has stopped raining. Why, you wonder, does this declaration deserve its own page? Especially in a novel about an ordinary Irish village called Faha. 

Things have not gone irreversibly wonky in Faha, nor is the town enchanted like Brigadoon. It rains a lot in this village, because (to adapt James Joyce’s words) rain is general all over Ireland. When the rain stops, it’s news.

The narrator of the tale is Noel Crowe, called Noe. An old man when we meet him, Noe is looking back on a stretch of surprisingly rainless days from when he was a teenager in the late 1950s or so. At that time, Faha was clamoring about its new electricity, and Noe befriended one of the workers, an elderly man named Christy who was lodging with Noe’s kindly grandparents.

The beauty and power of Irish author Niall Williams’ writing lies in his ability to invest the quotidian with wonder. A truly peerless wordsmith, he even makes descriptions of gleaming white appliances and telephone wire sing. Readers will never forget the scene in which Christy and Noe get drunk in a pub and try to ride home on their bikes, nor Noe’s first kiss in the balcony of a movie house, an experience he endures from the fast-living sister of the girl he has a crush on. The book is hilarious among its many other virtues.

Buy, rent, get your hands on this book somehow and savor every word of it. Its title says it all: Plunging into This Is Happiness is happiness indeed.

Award-winning poet and novelist Michael Crummey’s work draws imaginatively from the history and landscape of his native Newfoundland. The Innocents, his fifth novel, is the riveting story of an orphaned brother and sister whose relationship is tested by hardship and isolation in 19th-century coastal Labrador.

Ada and Evered Best live in a cove in the far northern province. Their home is a stretch of rocky coast with a simple shelter, and they survive with only the most rudimentary information passed down by their parents. The siblings support themselves by catching and salting cod, which they trade for supplies twice a year, as well as by tending a small garden and trapping the occasional animal for meat. The repetition of the changing seasons defines the pair’s existence—the breaking of the ice at the end of the long winter, the return of the cod, the annual gorging on the sweet berries that grow wild farther inland. As the years pass, their relationship changes, and when they enter puberty, their connection becomes more complicated. Though Ada and Evered once welcomed the occasional visitors who found their way to their coastline, their intimacy, developed in innocence, seems shameful in the light of even the most casual observation.

Crummey found the inspiration for the novel from an archival passage by a traveling clergyman who met an orphaned brother and sister living in a remote northern cove. When the clergyman approached them, the boy drove him away at gunpoint. Crummey has transformed this fragment into a richly fashioned story told with great sensitivity—one that is as credible as it is magical.

The Innocents reminds us of all the reasons we read—to understand, to imagine, to find compassion and to witness the making of art.

Elif Shafak’s 11th novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, opens to the early dawn in the outskirts of Istanbul, where Tequila Leila is lying in a dirty dumpster, still wearing her her eight-inch purple slingback stilettos. She is dead. Her heart has stopped beating. Her skin is changing color to the grayish-white of a ghost. Yet her brain hasn’t quite stopped thinking. For 10 minutes and 38 seconds, Tequila Leila recounts flashbacks of people, places and things from her childhood in the tiny village of Van to her life as a prostitute in Istanbul. Try as she might to remember how she was murdered, what she ultimately remembers are five friendships and a very pink birthday cake.

These recollections, which begins from her birth in January 1947 to her death in November 1990, give glimpses of life as a woman in a country where personal, political and moral values are heavily dictated by religion and men. These glimpses are heartbreaking. They are unfair. And yet they also represent courage, beauty and hope, like a rag-tag team of misfits who are determined to stick it to the man against all odds.

Born in Strasbourg, France, to Turkish parents, author Elif Shafak moved to Ankara, Turkey, in the early 1970s after her parents divorced. Raised by a single mother in a strongly patriarchal environment, Shafak grew up in a lonely and curious world suspended between her independent, forward-thinking mother and a more spiritual, uneducated, old-world grandmother. This remarkable coexistence has made her not only the most widely read female author in Turkey but also an award-winning international author and TED speaker.

Did you see the movie Call Me by Your Name, based on the book by André Aciman, and wonder what happened to poor Elio after his romance with Oliver? Aciman’s latest novel, set about two decades after the momentous events of the first, has the answer.

In a nod to Elio’s reputation as a musical prodigy, the book is divided into musical sections: “Tempo,” “Cadenza,” “Capriccio” and “Da Capo.” Surprisingly, it starts not with Elio’s journey but with his dad’s. In “Tempo,” Mr. Perlman has gotten a divorce and, one day on a train, meets a grumpy-looking girl who’s young enough to be his daughter. They fall instantly in love. In “Cadenza,” Elio meets a man old enough to be his father at a recital. They fall instantly in love. In “Capriccio,” Oliver, about to decamp from New York for a teaching job in New Hampshire, throws a party with his wife in their nearly denuded apartment. Enjoying his last view of the Hudson River, sipping prosecco and nibbling finger foods, he pines for the boy he deflowered so many years ago. As for “Da Capo”—well, that would spoil things, but if you know what Da Capo means, and if you read the first book, you have an idea.

As with the first book and movie, much of the action takes place in Italy, with great food and tipple, hidden museums full of Renaissance art, passionate music, cooling fountains and warm, honey-gold sunshine. We see nothing of the dark side of Italy, with right-wing politics or trash rotting in the streets because everyone’s on strike. In other words, the characters are as overprivileged as ever, and Aciman populates his novel with a sensual, almost overripe type of a man who swears he can’t live without Balvenie Doublewood 17 Year Scotch. Better yet, Aciman’s people are as foolish as ever, and their foolishness is their point of connection with the reader.

It’s tempting to describe Find Me as a pleasant, post-summer diversion, but it’s deeper than that. It will remind you of that one person you loved and lost and maybe found again. True, the book is lush, but it’s also bittersweet and nostalgic and a bit heartachey. Autumnal is probably the best word to describe it.