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.

“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.