It seems unlikely that the Goncourt Prize-winning author Marie NDiaye set out to be the Camus of cuisine, but her latest novel, The Cheffe, brings to mind a number of parallels with the much-revered 1942 French novel The Stranger. First of all, its narrative is laid out in the first person, entirely in flashback. Second, the loner narrator seems to have an ambivalent relationship with his memory. And third, the novel is populated with somewhat astringent characters who aren’t much on small talk.

But let’s leave Monsieur Camus aside for the moment and consider the complicated relationship our narrator has with the woman he refers to throughout the book merely as “the Cheffe” (cheffe being the French word for a female chef). It’s quite clear from the outset that the Cheffe has passed on, and our narrator has some score-settling to do, some to a journalist and some apparently to himself in the wake of her departure.

While it’s not strictly necessary, it is helpful if the reader has some sense of French restaurant culture, which combines the military and the monastery in its rigorous discipline. Real-life chefs often wax nostalgic about the fearsome hierarchy in the kitchen, where even an arched eyebrow from le boss can reduce a sensitive young cook to a puddle. That goes double when the cook in question is carrying not just a knife but also a torch; the narrator’s unrequited love for the Cheffe runs through the novel like saffron threads through a bouillabaisse.

The Cheffe herself is somewhat inscrutable in a quintessentially Gallic way; obviously passionate about her food, but outwardly indifferent to the response it gets. In fact, when her restaurant gains its first star, she concludes, “It’s all over.” It isn’t, actually, but it sets into motion a cycle that propels the book to its unexpected climax. And like a great meal, The Cheffe leaves us pleasantly sated but still wanting more.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and writes extensively on food-related topics both in magazines and on his blog, templeofthetongue.com.

Late in The Topeka School, Ben Lerner’s brilliant new novel, a character asks, “How do you rid yourself of a voice, keep it from becoming part of yours?” Voice is one of the central themes of this ingenious work that also serves as a commentary on the current political climate.

One of the book’s three narrators is Adam Gordon, the protagonist of Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. When Adam was 8, he suffered a concussion that left him with migraines so severe that his speech became slurred. Now, in the late 1990s, Adam is a Kansas high school senior and a fierce debater who has taken part in national tournaments. Adam’s story makes clear that communication as well as voice—how people communicate or don’t, from debaters to therapists to anti-gay Reverend Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church—are as integral to the story as Adam and his parents, Jonathan and Jane Gordon, psychologists at an institute called the Foundation.

Jane is the author of a bestselling book that some women have told her saved their marriage. Because of its success, Jane has received abusive phone calls from men, especially after her “Oprah” appearance, as well as harassment from Phelps and his crowd. Jonathan, meanwhile, struggles with his wife’s success and with his own fidelity. He left his first wife after he met Jane, and now with Jane’s career on the rise, he begins to have feelings for Sima, another Foundation psychologist, who is also Jane’s best friend.

In the midst of these stories is that of Darren Eberheart, Adam’s classmate, who has committed a violent act that will have ramifications for the people around him.

The importance of speech in the novel lets Lerner comment on the state of politics, from glancing references to some people’s inability to decode irrational arguments to more direct critiques, as when he writes of a legendary debater at Adam’s school whose right-wing Kansas governorship would become “an important model for the Trump administration.”

“How do you keep other voices from becoming yours?” is a key question of our time, or, for that matter, any era. The Topeka School provides no clear answers, but it memorably demonstrates how hard it can be to recognize insidious utterances for what they are. 

Lara Vapnyar’s sixth book is a clever novel encompassing love and death, couched in an instruction manual.

A writer living in New York and the mother of two, Katya is in the middle of a divorce, is engaged to a rich man she doesn’t love and is still in love with another man who will never be hers. Meanwhile, Katya’s dying mother makes notes for a math textbook that’s very different from the guides she wrote in Moscow. This textbook is intended for nonmathematicians, as it applies math to real life. These notes are Katya’s last link to her fading mother, who uses the math to make sense of her messy life.

In secular and chaotic post-Soviet Russia, math provides a clear-cut rationality in which Katya’s mom can put her faith. But to Katya, her mother’s cryptic math notes pose more questions than answers. Still, she discovers creative connections between concepts such as “operations in curved space” and her situation. Her house is like artist M.C. Escher’s “spatial paradox,” with staircases leading nowhere and rooms that don’t attach. Negative numbers take up actual, painful space. Parallel lines meet in a multidimensional universe where losing a mom feels similar to falling in love.

Graphs, illustrations, pictures and notes in the text add levity. Katya is very funny as well. She gets in trouble for laughing in sensitive situations. Her behavior is extreme and childlike. She’s easy to love, and her first-person voice is accessible and engaging. The men to whom she’s attached are bright and witty, sharing her love of literature and film. She mentions Alice Munro as a favorite author, and Vapnyar’s own admiration of Munro shows in the earthy, elegant prose.

Toward the end, the math associations fall away, and the anecdotes become shorter and more serious. The dark side of comedy shows through in a culminating glimpse of a life on the verge of sweeping change. Ultimately, Katya is narrating her tale to herself, a self-help guide to grow up and become the adult her mother wishes her to be.

A math workbook about love and death, Divide Me by Zero yields humorous and profound life lessons.

Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, British writer Deborah Levy’s latest novel is an evocative journey across a shape-shifting personal and political landscape. As Levy peels back each new layer of this at-times enigmatic story, there are new pleasures disclosed at every turn.

Levy’s narrator, Saul Adler, is a young English historian and the son of a passionate socialist. Saul’s specialty is communist Eastern Europe, and in the summer of 1988, he’s embarking on a research trip to East Berlin. Shortly before his departure, as he’s about to pose for a photograph taken by his artist girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau, who plans to capture him navigating the famed zebra crossing on London’s Abbey Road, he’s grazed by a passing automobile, an event that upends his already fragile psyche.

The remainder of The Man Who Saw Everything’s first half follows Saul to East Germany, where he finds himself entangled in a sexual triangle with his translator and minder Walter Müller and Walter’s sister, Luna, a Beatles-obsessed nurse who’s desperate to escape to the West, specifically Liverpool. Levy expertly navigates the complicated geometry of these relationships, all of them shadowed by the menace of the Stasi in the regime’s dying days.

In the novel’s second half, middle-aged Saul lies in a London hospital in 2016, just after the Brexit vote, under circumstances that seem to evoke his earlier mishap. In scenes that slip effortlessly into Saul’s dreams, hallucinations or episodes of pure memory, Levy excavates bits of his painful emotional life and casts a fresh light on some of the novel’s earlier events. Despite the occasional elusiveness of this technique, Levy’s storytelling is grounded in direct prose and vivid images, like the blossoms of a cherry tree that “fall like pink rain” or a copper relief sculpture in Berlin, ironically titled Man Overcomes Space and Time.

The Man Who Saw Everything is both intensely personal and fully cognizant of how the events of a rapidly changing world can alter lives in unexpected ways. Levy’s ability to keep these elements in balance with subtlety and assurance is a testament to her considerable artistic skill.

We already replace knees and lenses and hips with superior mechanical parts. We can implant devices to augment our abilities, from delivering insulin to stimulating the heart to beat. What happens when we can replace the whole body? Such is the question at the heart—or maybe CPU—of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein.

The mechanics of the story are a bit convoluted to sum up in the space allotted, but try to follow along. In alternating chapters, four stories run parallel, one of them in the distant past (the summer of 1816, to be precise) and three in the present. The first tale is a (more or less) straight recounting of the circumstances surrounding Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s creation of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The other three take place in contemporary society and concern a cryogenics facility in Arizona, a young transgender doctor who is mesmerized by an artificial intelligence specialist named—get this—Victor Stein and a recently divorced boor who has perfected a robotic sex doll.

In many ways, though, the story is just a pretext for extended meditations on the meaning of love, the meaning of life and the coming “singularity,” in which consciousness can be uploaded like so many data points to be retransferred to a previously frozen human body or to a “more human than human” replicant à la Blade Runner.

Surprisingly, it’s the sexbot engineer who poses some of the most cogent practical questions surrounding the possibility of cryogenic revival, including this one on inheritance: “Actually I was about to say, you can’t take it with you, but maybe you should! You drop dead. All your relatives spend the money, then bingo! You’re back! Then what?”

Of course there are deeper concerns as well: What happens to the soul in the interregnum between death and reanimation? How do you love someone “forever” when forever is, quite literally, forever? What does gender mean in a replicant body . . . or no body at all?

Much like its spiritual predecessor, B.F. Skinner’s 1948 novel, Walden Two, Winterson’s book occasionally sets up straw men to knock down, but also like Skinner, she may turn out to be more prophetic than she, or we, imagined.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, just down the road from SpaceX. The closest he’s gotten to robotics was assembling a Mr. Machine toy in 1966.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” according to Thoreau. That’s if they’re lucky. What if, like the narrator of Tash Aw’s latest novel, the desperation is noisy and violent? When We, the Survivors opens, such desperation has caused Ah Hock to take another man’s life.

Ah Hock is a Chinese citizen of Malaysia, a country where everybody—every man, woman and child—is on the hustle, and everybody is fungible. When the workers at the fish farm where Ah Hock is foreman come down with cholera, he and everyone else assumes they can be replaced easily, cheaply and permanently. It matters not if the substitutes are refugees from Myanmar, Nepal, Indonesia, Bangladesh or Mars. Indeed, bosses seek out these refugees because they can be paid much less than native Malaysian workers. There’s no thought given to sick leave, health insurance or even how people come down with cholera in the 21st century in the first place. But the economy is booming, and the replacements all have jobs.

Ah Hock’s boss is out of town, and he knows he’ll be canned if he can’t find a work crew, even though no part of the emergency is his fault. If he’s fired, he’ll probably be thumped back down to the bottom of a brutal economic hierarchy. He is no longer very young, and his body can’t tolerate the grueling physical labor of his youth.

Told to two interlocutors, a shadowy “you” and an uptight scribbler named Su-Min who writes a novel based on Ah Hock’s adventures, We, the Survivors begins and ends after the homicide. In between, the narrative loops through different, crucial times in Ah Hock’s life. Through most of that time, he maintains a reluctant friendship with a scoundrel named Keong. At times a drug dealer, gangster and fixer, Keong is a creep, but a fascinating one. He knows how the corrupt, inhumane hyper-capitalism of Malaysia works, and he works it to his advantage. Ever on the brink of violence, Keong knows everybody who’s anybody. Sometimes he’s flush, sometimes not. But his dedication to his “little brother” Ah Hock is genuine, and when Ah Hock goes to Keong for help, the hustler of hustlers does his utmost. It’s not enough.

The author of The Harmony Silk Factory, Aw brings us a steamy, smelly, muddy, Hobbesian Malaysia most tourists avoid. If there’s a book that’s a masterpiece of the wages of the worship of Moloch, it’s We, the Survivors.

Former New York Times reporter Amy Waldman left an indelible imprint on readers with her debut, The Submission, which examined the fallout of 9/11 at Ground Zero. Eight years later, Waldman returns with an even more ambitious novel, A Door in the Earth, which proves to be as politically provocative and challenging as its predecessor.

Drawing on her years based in Afghanistan, Waldman takes readers deep into the heart of the country, transporting us to a remote and largely unremarkable village, ringed by mountains far from the ongoing military conflicts that make headlines overseas. Guiding us is Parveen Shamsa, an earnest medical anthropologist who has recently graduated from Berkley. Inspired by a fictional bestselling memoir by Dr. Gideon Crane, which shed light on the abysmal state of women’s health in Afghanistan, Parveen has left the comforts of home in California to volunteer at the women’s clinic established by Dr. Crane and to reconnect with her own Afghan heritage. 

Unfortunately, the reality of life in the village as well as increasing doubts about the veracity of Crane’s book slowly disabuse Parveen of her youthful naivety, pulling back the veil of her innocence and privilege. When American troops turn their attention to the village, also owing to Crane’s memoir, and begin to pave a road to improve access, this seemingly benign action triggers devastating results for both Parveen and the villagers.

A Door in the Earth is a deeply chilling, multifaceted examination of not just the situation in Afghanistan but also the more pernicious and complex consequences of awakening the sleeping giant that is America and receiving its attentions—whether benevolent or not. Waldman plays out Newton’s third law of motion on the human scale, demonstrating that for every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction. As Parveen learns a little too late, “there is no such thing as an innocuous interaction: there were always repercussions, always collateral damage, for others.”

Jacqueline Woodson, who is completing her stint as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, returns to her beloved Brooklyn for her second novel for adults, Red at the Bone, which explores the effects of an unplanned pregnancy on an African American family.

The story opens in 2001 at a coming-of-age party at a Brooklyn brownstone. Sixteen and outfitted in her mother’s lace dress with a matching corset, garters and stockings, Melody plans to enter the party to an instrumental version of Prince’s “Nikki,” much to her grandparents’ discomfort. 

But there’s another catch to both the day and the dress. At 15, Melody’s mother, Iris, was pregnant and unable to wear the carefully made dress. Iris’ own coming-of-age birthday was left unmarked, and after her dismissal from private school, the family opted to move to another part of Brooklyn where they could also join a new church. But despite the shame and disruption of baby Melody, Iris was determined to move forward, ultimately getting her high school diploma, enrolling at Oberlin College and moving, almost permanently, out of Melody’s life. 

Over 21 brief chapters, Red at the Bone, which draws its title from the romantic feelings Iris has for another woman at Oberlin, moves backward and forward in time, examining the effect Melody’s birth had on each character, from her disappointed but loving grandparents to her devoted father and his resolute yet fragile mother. Along the way, the reader learns more about the history of the family’s losses, from 9/11 to the Tulsa Race Riots of 1912.

Kin and community have always been of primary concern for Woodson; her National Book Award-winning memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, explored her own childhood transition from Ohio to South Carolina and then New York. Her books combine unique details of her characters’ lives with the sounds, sights and especially music of their surroundings, creating stories that are both deeply personal and remarkably universal.

Though Red at the Bone lacks the cohesion of Woodson’s previous work, this lyrical, lightly told coming-of-age story is bound to satisfy.

Some stories are eternal, and while writers don’t necessarily repeat them word-for-word through the generations, they are capable of crafting compelling echoes that evoke both the time we’re in and the universal emotional constants of humanity. Evoking that sense of universality becomes more difficult when you’re telling a story that’s an open homage to one of the most famous and influential works of literature in human history, but in his insightful and wickedly funny way, Salman Rushdie pulls it off with Quichotte. 

A retelling of Don Quixote, Quichotte follows a man who, on a quest to win the heart of a daytime TV star, has redubbed himself “Quichotte” (pronounced “Key-shot”) and committed his life to the pure pursuit of what he calls “The Beloved.” To aid him in his quest, he imagines a son called Sancho, and the two journey together on a road trip through a half-imagined, enchanted version of the American landscape, staying in hotels where the TV is always on. 

Quichotte and Sancho’s story is woven through a metanarrative, as Rushdie reveals that their story is actually being imagined by a man who writes spy novels under the pen name Sam DuChamp. DuChamp and Quichotte’s stories are both, in their ways, tributes to Cervantes’ epic quest for love and acceptance, full of journeys to redemption and understanding in a world that seems to have gone mad around them, and it’s in this metafictional journey that Rushdie’s already witty and precise prose really comes alive. By structuring Quichotte as a narrative within a narrative, he’s given himself an inventive way to say something about a world obsessed with everything from reality television to hacktivism.

Quichotte is a story of breathtaking intellectual scope, and yet it never feels too weighty or self-serious. Like Cervantes, Rushdie is able to balance his commentary with a voice full of tragicomic fervor, which makes the novel a thrilling adventure on a sentence-by-sentence level and another triumph for Rushdie. 

Dictatorships cannot abide desire. That visceral human gravitation, the movement of the marrow in the direction of want, is the antithesis of totalitarianism. To express it—and especially to express it in a manner the gatekeepers of mainstream society deem aberrant—is to express a dangerous, powerful kind of freedom. 

Freedom—its presence and absence, the longing for it—colors every page of Carolina De Robertis’ masterful, passionate and at times painful new novel. Cantoras tells the story of five women who must navigate a society in the grips of overwhelming oppression, at a time when being a woman who loves other women carries a sentence of at best ostracization and at worst obliteration.

Cantoras begins in late-1970s Uruguay, a country under the control of a merciless military government. Seeking refuge from the oppressive atmosphere of the capital, five women travel to an isolated coastal village called Cabo Polonio. It soon becomes a haven where the women can live as they wish, to be lovers, friends, confidants—to be free. So liberating is this place that the women decide to pool their money and buy a small home there. 

From that first visit to Cabo Polonio, De Robertis unfurls the stories of each of the women’s lives—their hopes, their secret pasts, the suffering they’ve been made to endure by a society in which living openly is more often than not a dangerous pipe dream. The novel covers some 35 years, frequently changing focus from one character to another and yet at all times retaining a powerful sense of intimacy. Each of De Robertis’ central characters is of incredible emotional depth. 

Cantoras is at its most powerful when dissecting consequences of desire. Several of the central characters are subjected to horrific violence at the hands of the military dictatorship, but they are also sometimes subjected to violence at the hands of their relatives, people who cannot accept them as they are, who want desperately to “fix” them. In this atmosphere of repression, Romina, one of the five women, thinks, “the path into the forbidden was in fact wide open right in front of you . . . stepping onto it could be a kind of rightness, a vitality more powerful than fear.”

The bond the five women form—the way they orbit, attract and repel, take solace and find strength in one another—is the most moving part of Cantoras. By the end of the novel, there is a sense that the reader has done more than simply peer in on the lives of strangers, that instead they have experienced something organic and deeply human—a dangerous, powerful kind of freedom.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Carolina De Robertis on Cantoras.

When you’re 66, like the three longtime buddies in Richard Russo’s latest novel, you’ve got lots of events to look back on. One of the most devastating events in the lives of these three men is the driving force of Chances Are . . .—a surprising work that is as much a mystery as a meditation on secrets and friendship.

The friendship began at Minerva, a Connecticut college, in the late 1960s, a time when nervous young men wondered whether their draft number would draw a tour of duty in Vietnam. The three college buddies, all of them on scholarship, met when they were hired to sling hash at dinners for Theta house, the least rebellious sorority on campus: Lincoln as server because he was the most handsome, Teddy as cook’s helper, Mickey as dishwasher.

Each man comes from a lower-class background, which Russo describes at length in a long prologue. Lincoln’s mother lost most of the family fortune after her parents died. She then married Wolfgang Amadeus Moser, known as Dub-Yay, a domineering man who ran a copper mine. Teddy was a bookish sort who suffered a basketball injury in high school that had lifelong repercussions. Mickey, a construction worker’s son, disliked school but was passionate about rock music. 

One of the common bonds the three men forged at college centered on Jacy Rockafellow, a child of privilege engaged to another child of privilege, a law student named Vance. Jacy’s engagement didn’t stop the three “hashers” from falling in love with her.

Then, in 1971, tragedy strikes. At Lincoln’s family’s house in Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, Jacy joined the three men for a farewell Memorial Day weekend. But Jacy disappeared and was never heard from again.

Now, as the 2016 presidential campaign begins, the old friends gather at the Chilmark house for a September get-together before Lincoln, now a commercial real estate broker, reluctantly sells the property. Much has changed in their lives, but one thing hasn’t— lingering questions about what happened to Jacy that weekend.

Fans of Russo’s work will know what to expect from Chances Are . . . , including the many scenes of male bonding and the colorful dialogue. If some of the material is familiar, the book is nevertheless a moving portrait of aging men who discover the world’s worst-kept secret: You may not know the people you thought you were closest to.

A father dies mysteriously, and his daughter, too young to remember what she saw—if she saw anything—is whisked away. It takes another death to bring Billie James back to Greendale, Mississippi, when her late grandmother leaves her a dog, some money and the house where her father died.

Billie’s parents—Pia, a wispy blonde who later becomes a medieval studies scholar, and Cliff, a tall, black budding poet and activist—met on a Freedom Riders bus, but their bond didn’t last. In the Delta in the 1960s, interracial relationships were frowned upon. When Cliff died in 1972 while 4-year-old Billie was visiting him, Pia came for her, and they moved on. At the start of The Gone Dead, it’s 2003, and Billie has returned to the “contradictory spell of the South,” a place she barely remembers. Billie finds a sense of purpose by traveling back roads to old haunts and showing up on the doorsteps of those her father knew. Finding out how her father died (by his hand or another’s) becomes her focus, though the divide between white and black, wealthy and poor—still as stark and confounding as ever—frustrates her search.

With an actor’s ear for dialogue and a directorial vision, Chanelle Benz creates characters and scenes like a playwright. Her debut novel skillfully reveals and also conceals, building tension within her characters and between the past and the present that is left largely unresolved. Chapter by chapter, each told from a different perspective, The Gone Dead spreads out like the Mississippi River’s many tributaries, showing how one person’s life affects others, even long after death. Most of the people Billie meets—Mr. McGee, the original landowner’s son who was there the night her father died; Carlotta, one of her dad’s many girlfriends; and her Uncle Dee, who lives in a former motel and drives a truck as far away from Greendale as he can only to come back—know something they aren’t telling her. This complicated place and people that molded Cliff James and gave weight to his poetry is the same place and people that became his undoing.

Benz’s poetic words capture the weariness of a South still mired in old prejudices and transgressions but longing for freedom and redemption.

What comes to mind when you hear the word Appalachia? Whatever it is, it probably won’t be the same after you read this engrossing, sometimes shocking and often witty debut novel from Madeline Ffitch, who is part of the direct-action collective Appalachia Resist.

Helen has little knowledge of the foothills of Appalachian Ohio when she moves there from Seattle with her boyfriend, seeking cheap land to park their camper and relocate his landscaping business. But he soon leaves to work in the oil fields up north, and Helen is left to cope with the approaching winter alone. She earns a little doing tree work with Rudy, an alcoholic loner escaping civilization who’s living in a lean-to on abandoned coal company land. He introduces Helen to Lily and Karen, a couple living on the Women’s Land Trust, where no males are allowed.

Lily is expecting their first child, and when she gives birth to Perley, a boy, they are forced to move. Helen offers to let them live on her 20 acres, and while Lily cares for Perley, Helen and Karen build a “house” for the four of them, “basically livable,” though the porch leaks, the front door lets in daylight top and bottom, their toilet is a bucket, and multiple black snakes soon take up residence.

In alternating chapters, Lily, Karen, Helen and Rudy share what life is like for them in this downtrodden corner of Appalachia—a hill town with a hardware store, a school, an IGA grocery store, a diner and 30 bars. They survive, barely making it through each winter by eating acorns they’ve gathered in the fall, even the ones full of grubs, for “a burst of protein.”

But the outside world encroaches on their nontraditional, isolated life when, at age, 7, Perley asks to go to school. Though Karen objects, calling school “regimental brainwashing,” the two mothers relent, and Perley gets his first taste of television, electricity and a real friend his age. Their situation disintegrates when social services find Perley’s living conditions unacceptable, place him in foster care and mandate that Lily and Karen come up with a “reunification plan” within 90 days. The remainder of Ffitch’s remarkable novel portrays the ways in which they try to meet that goal, bringing all their skills and wiles to bear to allow their son to come home.

Ffitch’s survival saga of strong, independent women will appeal to readers of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina and the realistic novels by Manette Ansay, especially Vinegar Hill.