How you respond to life’s challenges can define your story. Do you let the hard times dominate your outlook, or do you look at these events as a chance to start fresh? Author Larry Watson considers these questions in his new novel, The Lives of Edie Pritchard. In Edie’s case, more often than not she opts for a new beginning, turning her back on the people she loves. It’s a complicated, challenging choice. Most people resign themselves to their lot in life, but not Edie, which makes her story fascinating but also profoundly sad.

When we first meet Edie in 1967 Montana, she is the wife of Dean Linderman. Her biggest problem is keeping the advances of Dean’s fraternal twin, Roy, at bay, despite her own obvious attraction to the other brother. After Roy is assaulted by a couple of angry men from another town, things take a drastic turn. Dean and Roy want vengeance, prompting Edie to insist that she and Dean move away. When Dean refuses, Edie leaves without him.

The novel picks up 20 years later, with Edie in a new town and new life. She has married Gary Dunn and has a teenage daughter. After learning that Dean has cancer and only a few months to live, Edie decides to visit him despite Gary’s warnings. Mad with jealousy, Gary follows her and confronts her, but again, Edie makes a choice to run away from the man controlling her life and start over.

Flash-forward another 20 years to 2007, when Edie’s granddaughter is caught up in her own love triangle with two brothers. “We know how that goes,” Edie’s friend muses. “History repeats itself down through the generations.”

Watson’s writing style is simple but powerfully effective. It’s easy to sympathize with Edie and understand the difficult choices she makes. Everyone has a moment when they wish they could just chuck everything and start over. Watson leaves enough room for readers to ponder whether they should.

Odie Lindsay’s debut novel is filled with the rich and complex texture of the American South. Some Go Home is set in the fictional town of Pitchlynn, Mississippi, where the sweet tea flows with extra sugar and the families all know each other’s business.

The novel centers on Colleen, a war veteran turned small-town beauty queen. Colleen marries Derby Friar, who took on his mother’s maiden name to escape the stigma of his estranged father, Hare Hobbs. Hare is on retrial for the violent murder of a Black man named Gabe who, decades earlier, worked the same land with Hare.

As Colleen and Derby prepare for the birth of their twins, Derby takes a job renovating the historic Wallis House, the site of the infamous murder. Derby’s boss is JP, a house flipper from Chicago. JP has returned to Pitchlynn to fulfill the final wishes of his late wife, Dru: to raise their infant daughter in Dru’s hometown. Alarm rips through the small Mississippi town as JP threatens Wallis House with modernization. Dru’s aunt, Susan George, comes on the scene to thwart JP’s renovation plans. Susan had a painful history with Dru, as Susan’s daughter fell to her tragic death from a magnolia tree on the Wallis House property.

The novel follows generations of Hare’s descendants, as well as Gabe’s granddaughter and her husband, Doc, who works as a corrections officer where Hare is being held before his trial. These vividly imagined lives intersect in Pitchlynn, where each person is either running from a troubled past or running back home, desperately seeking closure and acceptance.

Told in hypnotic and at times sharp-witted prose, Some Go Home asks what land means to us, what we will do for that land and who we’ll become along the way. It’s a story of class and race intersections, of how the haves often send the have-nots to do their bidding. With racially motivated violence and scenes of animal cruelty, Some Go Home is often difficult to read as it reflects on trauma, war, family and how the sins and shortcomings of our ancestors replay in our own lives. It’s a relevant story that begs us to reconcile the past with the present so that we can finally begin to move forward.

Reminiscent of adventurous Arctic tales like Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Peter Geye’s Northernmost, Migrations portrays a woman whose tragic life yields profound wisdom.

Abandoned by her mother as a child, Franny struggles with a sense of home but easily identifies with the sea and with birds. She is constantly searching for her lost mother, and along the way, she meets a professor-activist fighting mass extinction from his teaching post in Galway, Ireland. They marry, but Franny continues to roam, haunted by her past. Following a stint in prison, she travels to Greenland without her husband. There, she convinces the captain of a fishing ship to take her aboard, as the Arctic terns she tracks on their last migration can lead the crew to what might be the last schools of fish. Together, this crew creates an unlikely family of restless souls.

Details of Franny’s story emerge in unpredictable blips, like the tiny flashing lights of the bird-tracking devices that Franny and the crew watch on her laptop. Toggling back and forth in time and from place to place, the plot floats through gut-wrenching vignettes of Franny’s escapades, strung together like clues on a life-or-death scavenger hunt. Her life is a series of calamities, some of which she causes. It’s unclear whether she’s migrating from or to something.

Whether she’s in Australia, Trondheim, Greenland, Galway, Scotland, Yellowstone or Antarctica, Franny’s unsettled heart sets the scene. She’s endeared to the fishing crew, but they are also the enemy; she is a vegetarian, a lover and protector of wild animals, among whose numbers she counts herself as both predator and prey. The narrative, set in an unspecified future time, resides on the suspenseful, razor-thin edge between her extremes.

Although Franny may not know where home is, she is home to conflicting truths. Prepare to mourn a bleak image of the future and to embrace an everlasting hope in Franny’s heroic example.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Charlotte McConaghy on finding hope amid humanity’s destructive impact on the earth.

Grace Turner was a rising Hollywood star, a beautiful actor taken under the wing of legendary director and writer Able Yorke. As her fame grows, so does Able’s control over her. He molds her into the perfect starlet, but behind the scenes, his growing manipulation and verbal abuse spiral into something even darker.

“He wanted Marilyn without the overdose, Winona without the shoplifting, Gwyneth without the health shit,” Grace explains in the novel. “I was untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling down a path to immortality so rapidly, so immaculately, that not one person stopped to question how it all worked so well, a fortysomething man and a teenager being so inextricably linked.”

By the time she’s 21, Grace is addicted to vodka and pills. On the eve of her first awards season, Grace steps away from the spotlight, fleeing first to her parents’ home in unfashionable Anaheim, California, then to a moldy Malibu beach house in the shadow of Able’s home. The paparazzi flock to capture her dazed, disheveled appearance as she adjusts to living on her own for the first time in her life. A trip to the gas station to buy food—dill-flavored potato chips, a pack of Babybel cheese, water and a slice of pizza (she doesn’t know how to cook)—is like throwing bread crumbs to seagulls. Soon photos of her are plastered across gossip websites, and Grace is at a crossroads: Will she be a Hollywood cautionary tale, or a comeback story?

The similarities to Harvey Weinstein are inescapable, but in an author’s note, Ella Berman writes that she began the novel months before the New York Times and The New Yorker began publishing bombshell revelations about the disgraced megaproducer’s history of mistreatment and sexual assault. The Comeback flirts with but never devolves into a formulaic revenge plot, which would cheapen what turns out to be a surprising and satisfying story. First-time novelist Berman deftly captures the entertainment industry in all its fickleness and offers a complex, compassionate portrait of the lasting scars of abuse and trauma.

It may occur to the reader of Luster that the title has a double meaning. “A soft glow” is the dictionary definition of luster, and given that the protagonist, Edie, is an artist, that reference makes sense. But if we are to read the title as “lust-er,” as in one who lusts, that interpretation makes sense, too. Luster is a gritty novel about appetites—for sex, companionship, attention, money—and what happens when they are sated.

Luster is narrated by Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman in Brooklyn with a crappy job and crappier apartment. She begins dating Eric, an older white man she meets online who is in an open marriage. Then Edie is fired from her job for inappropriate sexual behavior and subsequently evicted from her apartment. Eric’s wife, Rebecca, invites Edie to stay in their suburban New Jersey home until she gets back on her feet.

Despite the open relationship that brought Eric and Edie together, this is not a particularly sexual novel. The beginning is front-loaded with intimate scenes, including some violence that may or may not be consensual BDSM. But the remainder of the book focuses on the wary relationship between Edie and Rebecca, as well as Rebecca’s adopted Black daughter, Akila. It might come as a relief to Edie that this happy suburban family whose home she has stumbled into is, actually, anything but happy. Or it might just be a disappointment.

Some readers will view Edie as an unlikable narrator who makes destructive choices. Others will read her as lost and complicated, struggling to stay afloat in a racist and sexist world. Either way, Edie is deftly written as a young woman saddled with generational trauma and suffering from the rootlessness of an addict’s child.

Leilani’s writing is cerebral and raw, and this debut novel will establish her as a powerful new voice. There are no easy answers or resolutions in Luster, and no one comes out looking good. But the author has proven herself to be a keen social observer—especially about the truths that some people don’t want to see.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Raven Leilani discusses the want and rage of her female characters in Luster.

Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline blends fantasy, monsters and contemporary First Nation struggles in a powerful and inventive novel. Dimaline drew inspiration from stories of the rougarou—a werewolf-like creature that is always on the lookout for misbehaving boys and girls—that she heard about as a child in the Métis community near Canada’s Georgian Bay in Anishinaabe territory.

Set in a small community in rural Ontario, Empire of Wild opens a year after Victor Beausoleil walked out in the middle of a heated argument about land rights with his wife, Joan. Nobody has seen him since, and though Joan’s close-knit family assumes Victor has left the marriage, she is convinced that something is preventing his return. His absence is getting to her when, one hungover morning, she stumbles into a tent revival service set up in a Walmart parking lot and believes she sees Victor there, dressed in a suit and leading the congregation in prayer. The minister, who introduces himself as Eugene Wolff, assures Joan that he is not her husband. But something about the situation doesn’t seem right, especially after Joan encounters the church’s financial backer, the creepy Thomas Heiser.

With her 12-year-old nephew riding shotgun and armed with Native medicine and advice from community elders, Joan goes in search of the truth. The quest will take her deep into indigenous traditions and present-day struggles over property and ownership.

Like Dimaline’s award-winning The Marrow Thieves, a chilling YA novel that takes place in a dystopian future of ecological devastation and gruesome colonization, Empire of Wild seamlessly mixes realistic characters with the spiritual and supernatural. As much a literary thriller as a testament to Indigenous female empowerment and strength, Empire of Wild will excite readers with its rapid plot and move them with its dedication to the truths of the Métis community.

Alex Landragin’s Crossings weaves a remarkable tale across centuries, landscapes and human lives. A bookbinder receives a manuscript from a baroness with explicit direction to not read what it holds. When the baroness dies soon after, the bookbinder discovers that the manuscript contains three tales—a ghost story written by Charles Baudelaire for an illiterate girl, a dark love story of a Jewish German exile who is unable to leave Paris at the edge of the Nazi invasion, and the tale of a woman who lives through seven generations.

Each story is rich with characters, ideas and keenly imagined moments. The points of connection, however, are what make the text compelling and open to so much discovery. As the preface ends, readers learn that the book can be read in two modes: one narrative at a time, or through the “Baroness” guided sequence that hops between the three stories. In this method, the stories weave through time and space to create a fourth text, one in which nuances and subtext emerge through unexpected connections. As characters, objects and phrases appear and reappear, time blends, and the questions of what makes us who we are, how our choices impact our futures and how other people perceive us become central to the telling.

The prose is engaging, asking you to keep up as the story jumps from ending to beginning, tangling time and stretching the edge of what a narrative can do. There’s a tension between wanting to read quickly, to let yourself be absorbed in this fantastical and real world, or slowing down to allow each story to breathe. The beauty here is the multiplicity of the reading experiences, of the chance to do both, as each iteration of the novel asks different questions and demands a different mode of attention from the reader.

An ambitious fable that speaks to our need to classify and control, Pew tells the story of a person of indeterminate race and gender whose arrival throws a community into an existential crisis at the same time that they are readying themselves for the ominously named Day of Forgiveness.

Arriving at church one morning, residents of a small Southern town find a young person asleep in a pew. The person, who refuses to identify themselves or even speak, appears to be gender nonconforming as well as racially nonspecific. A well-intentioned family volunteers to take the stranger home, naming them Pew after the church bench where they were found. 

Pew’s silence creates a kind of blank slate that draws in members of the community; confessing fears, dreams and past transgressions is easier to a wordless stranger. But kindly curiosity quickly becomes threatened by Pew’s utter refusal to self-identify, reveal anything about their past or even allow a doctor to examine them. The community’s compassion turns quickly to fear and skepticism, and soon Pew is moved behind lock and key, separated from the other children and eventually relocated to a different part of town. 

In Pew, Catherine Lacey explores the human need to classify along with the narrowness of the human imagination. The townspeople’s urgent need to know just who and what Pew is appears shallow, even racist, when their level of care seems to ebb and flow with this information or lack of it. With creepy allusions to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and a timely exploration of gender’s mutability, Pew is provocative and suspenseful, a modern-day parable about how our fear of otherness stands in the way of our compassion. 

At 81, Lilia Liska is a crabby presence at her assisted living center, offering tart replies to her neighbors’ small kindnesses. But Lilia, the main character in Yiyun Li’s new novel, Must I Go, has a secret obsession: rereading the self-published diaries of Roland Bouley, the man she had a brief affair with 65 years ago. Roland never knew that he was the father of Lilia’s first child, Lucy, nor that Lucy killed herself at age 26.

Lilia bears some resemblance to Elizabeth Strout’s indelible character Olive Kitteridge. As with Olive’s story, suicide is a theme; Lilia returns repeatedly to Lucy’s death, understanding as little now as she did then. Like Olive, Lilia walled off her heart long ago and is now trying to make sense of her long life, her loves and losses.

The novel’s first two sections follow Lilia in close third person through both the present and past, when as a 16-year-old she met the charismatic Roland. The novel’s third section switches gears to explore Roland’s diary, annotated with Lilia’s notes for granddaughter Katherine (daughter of Lucy, granddaughter of Roland). This turns the novel into something both old-fashioned—an epistolary novel, more or less—and experimental, a kind of collage. Lilia’s notes speculate about details left unsaid, about Roland’s practical wife, Hetty, and his longtime lover, Sidelle. Her notes are often funny, taking the self-important Roland down a peg: “Let’s forgive Roland his bluffing. Let’s enjoy it. . . . He wore his lies like tailored suits.” This is a novel to sink into, knowing that you may not remember all the extended family members Lilia mentions, nor all the names Roland notes in his diary entries from the 1940s.

The author of three other novels, two story collections and a memoir, Li was born and raised in pre-capitalist Beijing, came to the U.S. for graduate school in immunology and later earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s a wide-ranging writer who can brighten dark themes with humor and hope. 

Yearning to find a better life and, more specifically, a purpose in life, is universal and natural. So it’s easy to see how the characters in Brian Castleberry’s debut novel, Nine Shiny Objects, each disillusioned and frustrated by their dead-end lives, would embrace a cultish quest toward utopia on earth.

Things start innocently enough as Oliver Danville, a failed-actor-turned-hustler in 1947 Chicago, reads of an aviator who sees nine bright objects in the sky. Convinced that there’s nothing for him where he is, Oliver hitchhikes west, looking for “a sign that might lead to his true calling.” Before long he dubs himself the Tzadi Sophit, leader of the Seekers, a community of outcasts and idealists with dreams of a society free of racial, ethnic, sexual and social bigotry.

Castleberry could easily have followed Oliver’s exploits from there, but instead he switches gears. Each subsequent chapter jumps ahead in the narrative by five years, introducing another character—a down-on-her-luck waitress, a traveling book salesperson/aspiring songwriter, a painter, a radio host, a poet, a teenager and others—and chronicling how their lives intersect with the Seekers. If that sounds busy and even confusing, it is; you may need a set of cue cards to help keep track of who’s who.

Much of the story revolves around a pivotal event in the establishment of Oliver’s community, in which an outsider attacks one of its members, leading the Seekers to resettle in a Long Island subdivision. But if the Seekers think things will get easier for them, any New Yorker could tell them otherwise.

The scope of the novel—from its vast conspiracies and social commentary to its decades-long timeline—is at times impressive to behold. Castleberry’s intricate narration (some sentences seem to run on for pages at a time) may even compel you to read some passages over again just to make sure you didn’t miss something. But it’s worth it to take your time and savor this one.

Lauren Cress has been drifting through life for the 10 years since she became an orphan. Her relationships with men are often perfunctory. She’s slow to open up to her colleagues at the college where she works as an adjunct instructor, teaching writing to international students. But in the classroom, Lauren comes to life. She’s a dazzling teacher who connects with her students, even when they don’t understand why they’re required to write personal essays.

“Knowing how to express yourself to one another in real ways . . . it can help with loneliness and distance,” Lauren explains.

Lauren’s insatiable but hidden desire to be known and understood thrusts her into an all-consuming friendship with Siri Bergström, a student from Sweden. Siri also knows the pain of losing a parent; her mother died when Siri was 5, though no one knows exactly how. When Siri invites Lauren to come home to Sweden with her, Lauren dives headfirst into the friendship, though she knows it’s unwise.

As the Swedish summer celebration of Midsommar draws near, Lauren finds herself swimming in the complexities of her relationships with Siri and the friends and siblings who welcome her. But when her friendship with Siri threatens to unravel, Lauren withdraws into herself, blocking out all signs of life around her.

In The All-Night Sun, author Diane Zinna displays her deep understanding of the writing craft, born in part of her experience as a creative writing teacher and former executive co–director at AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Her stunning debut novel is a twisting tale of grief, hope and self-deceit, a story as mesmerizing as the young women at its heart.

In Natalie Bakopoulos’ richly told Scorpionfish, readers step into contemporary Athens with Mira, a Greek American woman who has returned to the city while she grieves her parents’ deaths as well as a dissolving relationship. As we enter the mess of her universe, counterpoints appear from her neighbor, the Captain. The alternating voices of these broken, fragmented people explore how each tries to repair and save the self, and how their personal connections become integral to that process.

As Mira and the Captain get to know each other—sitting together and apart, talking across their balcony walls—the conversation reveals their layers and the ways that each sees the other. The newness of their connection allows them to puzzle through the complexities of their past loves, friendships and familial bonds. Each is navigating the ending of a relationship; each is reevaluating priorities. As we witness this growing friendship, the specificity of place—of the sea, the city and the interior emotional realm—cradles the characters’ attempts to understand what it means to be human and to love.

Bakopoulos’ prose is descriptive, full of images and details, and yet some sentences are so clear and axiomatic that the reader may need to pause and think, recognizing truths they’ve always known. In a certain way, reading Scorpionfish is a rereading, a remarkable recognition of how language can work, how grief and love and loss can be so particular, so meaningful, so universal—and how words can make those resonances propulsive and haunting.