Tracking the mysterious life and death of her role model, the unnamed narrator in Barbara Bourland’s Fake Like Me discovers how to follow her own lead.

A painter almost loses her chance at a successful career when her Manhattan studio-home burns. She has a summer to remake the paintings in her “Rich Old Ugly Maids” series or else she’s done for as an artist. She jumps at the chance to live and work at an artists’ retreat called Pine City in upstate New York, where her heroine, sculptress turned performer Carey Logan, lived and died. The narrator’s ability to complete her project depends on finding out what happened to Carey.

Fake Like Me roars with creative impulse. Bourland captures the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants nature of the narrator’s artistic life with whirlwind descriptions of gallery shows, love affairs and hard work both in the studio and out. Intensity ratchets up in novel’s middle, as she hunkers down to get her summer job done. When asked at a Pine City party whether her art is political, she answers, “I make things that are emotional. . . . And it’s all that I am.” Her work is huge and unwieldy, an exploration of the seven virtues: prudence, humility, chastity, modesty, temperance, purity and obedience. Like Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowsk’s TV series “The Decalogue,” “Rich Old Ugly Maids” turns religious concepts inside out with visceral attack.

As the narrator grapples artistically with these concepts, she also grapples with the inner workings of life at Pine City. The more she knows the artists there, she begins to questions them and the relationships she thought would provide guidance. Questions lead to an urge to act in the only way an artist knows. The writing becomes fierce and urgent, the fine line between creation and destruction blurred. The climax comes as summer ends, and this up-and-coming painter risks all to make a final splash in the dangerous waters of the upper-echelon art world.

Part thriller, part performance art and wholly revolutionary, Fake Like Me confronts American art culture with female bravado.

Desperation can lead a person to extreme decisions they wouldn’t otherwise countenance. For a parent, what could be more heart-wrenching than the choice to leave one’s child behind and move to another country in search of a better life? That’s the decision made by the title character of Patsy, Nicole Dennis-Benn’s follow-up to her assured debut, Here Comes the Sun. But one of the satisfying nuances of her second novel is that this heartache is only partly due to the knowledge that, by emigrating from Jamaica to America, single mother Patsy will leave behind her 6-year-old daughter, Tru.

As the novel opens, it’s 1998, and Patsy is still in love with her childhood friend Cicely, who moved to America several years earlier. Patsy hopes to secure a tourist visa—her previous application was declined two years earlier with no explanation—and rekindle their romance. Soon, Patsy leaves Tru and Mama G, her religious mother who collects Jesus figurines, and flies to New York, where Cicely meets her at the airport.

Patsy’s surprise upon reuniting with her friend is one of the many turns this novel takes. Cicely lives in a brownstone in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, is married to an abusive would-be real estate mogul and is raising a son Tru’s age who takes violin lessons at a prestigious music academy. Over the next decade, Patsy fails to find the America—or the Cicely—of her dreams and has to settle for a job cleaning bathrooms in a faux-Jamaican restaurant before securing gigs as a nanny for a host of privileged women.

The story moves back and forth between Patsy’s increasingly disheartening experiences in America and Tru’s grim situation back home. Tru has to live with her father, Roy, a police officer she barely knows. As Tru enters her teens, she struggles with depression and her sexuality, all the while wondering why her mother has been gone for much longer than the promised six months and why she never calls.

The pace sometimes flags, but this moving work about the immigrant experience is distinguished by Dennis-Benn’s compassion for her characters and her acknowledgment that issues related to sexuality and immigration require subtlety and understanding.

Parenting isn’t easy even under the best of circumstances, but what Taz and Marnie have is an unfinished fixer-upper, a dwindling bank account, no permanent job prospects and a baby scheduled to arrive any day. But new beginnings are in the air, and Taz and Marnie are excited to embark on this next phase of their marriage, put down roots and grow a family.

When Marnie dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Taz’s already shaky world collapses completely, and the birth of his beautiful daughter, Midge, gets swept up in the death of the love of his life. But Taz’s best friend, Rudy—a forever cheerful, funny, handy and generous man—turns out to be an excellent babysitter, grocery shopper, cheerleader, job assistant and whatever else Taz needs.

Best of all, Rudy introduces Taz to Midge’s new nanny, Elmo. She is hardworking, witty and loving—basically, the bright spot in an otherwise melancholy life. But when Elmo starts filling the spaces left behind by Marnie, Taz is quick to push her away. After all, how could he even begin to think about moving on?

A tender tale of loss and fatherhood, Pete Fromm’s A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do is a beautiful story about what happens when your village comes to the rescue and gives you a second chance at happiness.

There are a handful of novelists from the past century whom I think of as sorcerers. Like Merlin of Arthurian fame, such authors (T.H. White, A.S. Byatt and others) find a way to inhabit vast stretches of time, accounting for everything that’s happened before and what’s to come, making past and future converge with vertiginous force onto the present moment. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and both Shelleys, Blake and Byron all worked this time-dissolving magic as well, weaving into a single spell the opposite principles of ancient myth and modernity, city and countryside, nature and the supernatural, individual history and collective fate.

Still in his 30s, Max Porter has securely joined this order of poets and novelists with two short novels. In Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (2015), a widower with two little sons suffers the shattering visitation of Crow. There is no way around grief, Crow instructs; you must grind through it, all its bitter nonsense, derangement and chaos. Now, in Lanny, Porter turns this same screw of his imagination, offering the ultimate incarnation of nature and its pitiless sovereignty: a being who haunts the edges of a village, chronicling every word uttered in pub, house or street. It calls to the sweet, brilliant boy Lanny, drawing him into the woods, away from his parents’ home and from his kind old friend Mad Pete. The creature summons little Lanny to a doom we cannot know or understand, even after we’ve read this magnificent story.

This awful, awesome personage—this human-hungry thing—goes by many names, such as Dead Papa Toothwort, Pan, Oberon or the Green Man. Toothwort sings the ancient, recurrent Song of the Earth, rising above a chorus of perplexed and panicked human voices. Boy, mother, father, artist, the entire village—all must face the music. All are done for. 

Lanny is one of the most beautiful novels of the past decade.

Perhaps the greatest irony of our modern era is that in a time when we appear more connected than ever, most of us have never felt more alone. Certainly this is true for May Attaway, the protagonist of Jessica Francis Kane’s meditative second novel, Rules for Visiting.

Largely preferring the company of plants to people, May is a single, middle-aged woman who lives in her childhood home with her father and cat and works as a gardener at the local university. She is the first to admit that although her world is relatively small and uneventful, the life she has cultivated for herself is a comfortable one (albeit mundane and vaguely hermitic). When she is gifted with an unanticipated month of paid vacation, May is inspired to revise her stance on relationships and broaden her horizons. Armed with little more than an Emily Post guide to etiquette, a book of quotations on friendship and a suitcase named Grendel (after the friendless monster in Beowulf), May sets out on a transformative pilgrimage to reconnect with the four women she considers her dearest friends. 

A 21st-century novel for those with old-fashioned sensibilities, Rules for Visiting is an empathetic yet enigmatic read. May’s story is not for the impatient, as the narrative perambulates through a series of discursive musings on friendship, flora, family, grief and how connections can fail or flourish in this modern age. For much of the novel, May keeps the reader at arm’s length, charming with her wry wit but using these rhetoric sleights of hand as substitutes for real understanding and intimacy. But as May becomes more comfortable with the art of connecting with the people in her life, she reveals more of her true heart to the reader as well, gradually shedding light on the trauma that led to such a closed-off life. 

Rules for Visiting takes its time to fully take root, but the end result is a sturdy novel that blossoms rather beautifully.

Although it may seem that every square inch of the earth has been mapped, there are still places that are mysterious. The Kamchatka Peninsula is one such place. You’ve seen it on a map, extending like a swollen appendage from the northeastern edge of Russia into the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk. Maybe you’ve wondered about the people who live there. Does anyone live there?

Of course, people do live in Kamchatka, both in real life and in Julia Phillips’ powerful debut novel. There are those from the indigenous and the white Russian population. The book opens when two little white girls are snatched from the seaside by a creep. The rest of the book concerns both the search for these two girls and the mystery of how they could have vanished on a peninsula all but cut off from the rest of Russia by a mountain range.

The book’s many characters are introduced in the preface, which calls to mind all those classic Russian novels with sprawling casts. But at the same time, Disappearing Earth is utterly contemporary. Cellphones are as inescapable in Kamchatka as they are anywhere else, even though they’re frequently out of range.

Phillips’ focus is on her female characters. There are the missing Golosovsky girls and their desperate mother; unhappy schoolgirls; a new mother going out of her mind with boredom; and a bitter vulcanologist with a missing dog. We hear from a native woman whose own daughter disappeared years before, as well as from her other daughter and her daughter’s children. Most of these women brush or bump up against each other, connected, sometimes tenuously, by the disappearance of the Golosovsky girls. The men in their lives aren’t so much useless as they are in the way. The cops give up the search, and husbands, fathers, boyfriends and brothers just don’t get it.

Besides the deep humanity of her characters, Phillips’ portrayal of Kamchatka itself is superb. Has there ever been a novel, even by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, set in such a strange, ancient, beautiful place, with its glaciers and volcanoes and endless cold? It’s a place where miracles might happen—where what is lost can once again be found—if you jump over a traditional New Year’s fire in just the right way. Phillips’ stunning novel dares to imagine the possibilities.

Early in Sarah Blake’s debut novel, the titular character, wife of Noah, smashes a pair of gerbils with a hard thwack of her spoon. The reader doesn’t yet know that there are spare gerbils—they brought extras of the “clean” animals, Naamah explains—so in this brief moment, she becomes an exterminator, an Old Testament God in her power and willful engagement with easy death. She is the one who determines which species will survive the interminable floodwaters—not Noah, not her sons or their wives, and not God.

But perhaps most alarming is that she cannot see the gerbil, nor any of the animals on the ark. She can hear them, smell them, but she has gone blind to them. “When someone dies and you forget how they look or how they laughed, that is how they forgot the land,” Naamah says. In the same way, she has forgotten how to see the animals to whom she is protector. And as she begins to take long swims in the sea—once a punishment and now an escape from the holding cell of the ark—she seems on the cusp of forgetting her former life altogether.

Beneath the surface of the water, there is an angel who seduces Naamah, inviting her to the depths where a ghastly world awaits. Soon her life on the surface becomes just as adrift, as she succumbs to dreams that seem endless, and she explores this dreamland and its mysteries with the help of a cockatoo named Jael. When the waters begin to recede, Naamah’s hallucinatory experiences continue, and the promise of firm ground seems to offer no assurance of stability to a woman so irretrievably, determinedly lost.

Revelatory, ethereal and transfixing, Naamah cracks open the ancient tale of Noah to reveal a danger that exists in supposedly safe places, the force of a woman charged with maintaining the world’s tremulous balance and the depth of our mind’s eye. Blake has previously published two poetry collections, and her language and storytelling style are as playful as they are sensual, as fluid and surreal as they are crisp and hyper-realistic.

In the tradition of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Naamah plucks a female character from myth and imbues her with sexuality, personality and intimacy, making her an altogether more modern hero—the kind of woman capable of giving a stern talking-to to a vengeful god.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book feature from Sarah Blake on Naamah.

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise is not exactly what it seems. Though the story explores the ways adolescent experience reverberates through adulthood, it also brilliantly topples all expectations of narrative fiction.

The novel opens in the mid-1980s at an elite high school for the performing arts, where students compete for roles in a rarefied bubble of camaraderie and pressure. Two rising sophomores, David and Sarah, have an intense sexual relationship over one summer, which ends shortly after school begins. Their bitter breakup and estrangement become the talk of their classmates, and even their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley, seems obsessed as he invites Sarah to confide in him and continues to pair the two teens in classroom exercises. When a British director brings his troupe of young actors to the high school for an ill-fated production of Candide, Sarah is drawn into a hapless relationship with the production’s star while her bland classmate Karen pines for the group’s louche director. 

Just when this hothouse atmosphere gets a bit too stifling, there is a shocking spiral of events that ricochets the action into the future and completely transforms the premise of the novel. What readers may have believed to be true about David, Sarah and Karen may not be true, but it may not be completely false either. It is not until the final pages of the novel’s short coda that another layer of events is uncovered and the complete picture falls into place. Or does it?

Trust Exercise questions the very nature of fiction, and in a novel that depicts the fluctuating power dynamics between parents and students, students and teachers, and men and women, it suggests that the one who has the most power is the one who remains to tell the final version of the story. 

We trust novels to tell us a story exactly the way it happened, but fiction, Choi suggests, has its own rules.

When Driss Guerraoui, the owner of a diner near Joshua Tree National Park, leaves his restaurant one night, he’s killed in a mysterious hit-and-run while crossing the street. But this wasn’t an accident; it was murder, concludes his daughter Nora, as a variety of surprising details about her father’s life emerge. He was, after all, feuding with Anderson Baker, the owner of the bowling alley next door.

As aspiring composer Nora returns to her hometown to help run the family diner and grieve with her mother and sister, she encounters a variety of ghosts from her childhood, including Baker’s son, A.J., who in high school wrote “raghead” on her locker, bullying her because her parents emigrated from Morocco out of fear of political unrest.

Moroccan-born Laila Lalami was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Moor’s Account, and her much-anticipated fourth book, The Other Americans, doesn’t disappoint. The story carefully unfolds from multiple viewpoints, including that of Nora’s immigrant mother, Maryam; her jealous and seemingly highly successful sister, Salma; and even her dead father. There’s also Detective Coleman, an African-American woman investigating the case, as well as a Mexican immigrant who witnessed Driss’ death and remains haunted by his ghost but is afraid to come forward and risk deportation. Nora also reconnects with her high school friend Jeremy, now an Iraq War veteran and sheriff’s deputy.

Lalami’s crisp, straightforward prose offers the perfect counterpoint to the complexity of her plot, which artfully interweaves past and present. Reminiscent of Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth in its depiction of the enduring effects of family secrets and betrayals, The Other Americans also addresses a multitude of other issues—immigration, prejudice, post-traumatic stress, love and murder—with what can only be described as magical finesse.

Sally Rooney became a literary sensation in her native Ireland with the release of her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, in 2017. Now, the brilliant, Booker Prize-nominated Normal People has only enhanced her reputation.

The novel is partly set in the small Irish town of Carricklea. Sixteen-year-olds Marianne and Connell attend the same school but are worlds apart socially and financially. Marianne is plump, uncool and unliked. She comes from a well-off family, which isolates her from her blue-collar classmates. The star of the football team, Connell, is a slightly aloof, decent, sweetly unassuming guy who picks his mother up from her cleaning job.

A clandestine affair starts between the two, but at school Connell barely acknowledges Marianne. Marianne is treated badly at home, too, where she is ignored by her widowed mother and bullied by her brother. Connell’s casual cruelty evokes all the insecurities of teen life, of fitting in and worrying about what people think. It sets a precedent: Marianne longs for Connell’s love, and he appears unable to give it. The complex relationship between the two—their incredible closeness and dysfunction—is masterfully done.

Both Marianne and Connell receive academic scholarships to Trinity College in Dublin, and over the years, their lives bisect and cross. Marianne becomes popular, while Connell becomes introverted and distant. They become best friends, relying on each other’s counsel as they both enter into new relationships. But there is also a fractious, complicated longing that neither seems to know how to handle. Marianne’s bad choices in boyfriends—bullies and emotional abusers—only put Connell’s qualities in sharp relief. But he, too, is suffering. Depression sees him visiting a therapist and scuppers his relationship with a college girlfriend. 

The quality of Rooney’s writing, particularly in the psychologically wrought sex scenes, cannot be understated as she brilliantly provides a window into her protagonists’ true selves. Ultimately, when life bashes them and there is nowhere to turn, they find they always have each other.

If you’re a scientist, you tend to believe in facts, not ghosts. You can imagine, then, how MIT professor of theoretical physics Helen Clapp must feel when she starts receiving text messages from her friend, Charlotte “Charlie” Boyce, shortly after Charlie’s early death. 

That’s the premise with which Nell Freudenberger opens her third novel, Lost and Wanted. And what a novel it is, a work about cold, hard science that is also a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time.

Charlie and Helen, who met at Harvard during freshman orientation in 1989, came from disparate backgrounds. They were, respectively, “an upper-middle-class black girl from Brookline and a work-study white science nerd from Pasadena.” Helen became a physicist, wrote two popular books for laypersons about quantum cosmology and black holes, and co-published a celebrated model for “quark gluon plasma as a black hole in curved five-dimensional space-time” with a former boyfriend named Neel Jonnal. 

Charlie, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles and became an executive television producer. She had a daughter after marrying a “blindingly attractive” surfer whose brother was in jail for drug possession. But life wasn’t always easy for Charlie. At Harvard, a professor’s advances persuaded her to abandon her thesis on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, author of Dangerous Liaisons, and give up her dreams of studying at Oxford. Later, she contracted the lupus that led to her death.

Shortly after Charlie dies, Helen’s 7-year-old son, Jack, whom she had through an anonymous donor, claims to have seen a ghost in their house. And that’s when the texts start arriving, messages containing information that only Charlie could have known. 

Also arriving in Massachusetts: Charlie’s surfer husband, who plans to live with his in-laws, and Helen’s former boyfriend Neel, who accepts an MIT post to continue groundbreaking work on gravitational waves. 

Refreshingly, the science in Lost and Wanted is never window dressing, as the technical concepts that Freudenberger describes at length are integral to the plot. And the story takes unexpected turns on its way to a heartbreaking conclusion. It is a magnificent novel.

In his 2001 collection of poems, Landscape with Chainsaw, James Lasdun staked his claim as a poet who finds the best words about the most difficult things: displacement, broken dreams, the fragile integrity of nature and the just-as-fragile nature of integrity. Since then, Lasdun has found an equally impressive place in the field of fiction. His latest novel demands no less acclaim than his poetry and is no less exquisite in its crafting.

Afternoon of a Faun is a sustained meditation on the #MeToo movement, shining uncompromising light into the darkest areas of our current malaise—this surreal era in which a person called to administer our nation’s highest justice can be publicly accused of having perpetrated unconscionable sexual offenses.

It is the maddening elusiveness of facts that motivates and saturates Lasdun’s novel. Marco Rosedale, a celebrated English journalist, finds himself accused by a former colleague of sexually assaulting her decades earlier. Julia Gault intends to publish an account of the incident in her memoir. Rosedale fights back with the help of his famous father, one of the most distinguished lawyers in the United Kingdom. As layer upon hidden layer of the story unfolds, the first-person narrator (who is Marco’s closest friend) discovers his feelings about Marco and Julia (whom he also knows personally) radiating into disturbing regions of his own accountability.

Without spoiling anything, I want to bear witness to this novel’s most unnerving aspect: the Heisenbergian principle that no one—not any of us—can stand by and observe a desperate situation without actually affecting and even abetting its outcome. In Stéphane Mallarmé’s haunting poem “Afternoon of a Faun” (the origin of Lasdun’s title) and Debussy’s great musical setting of it, an oversexed mythical creature cannot even remember whether or not he has ravished the nymphs. The elusiveness of facts turns out to be, tragically, the foundation of myth.