Take Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, King Lear, “The Jewel in the Crown,” “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization; pass them along to DJ Danger Mouse for a bit of a mashup; and you’d have a sense of the shape and scope of Preti Taneja’s debut novel, We That Are Young.

Impressive in its heft (literally, as it clocks in at nearly 500 pages, and figuratively, as it won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize for first-time novelists), We That Are Young chronicles the changing of the guard within a family-owned multinational conglomerate, set against the backdrop of the Indian anti-corruption riots of 2011-12.

Much like some of the most thrilling novels of the past decade, We That Are Young relies on individual narratives that are self-serving and suspect. One central element is clear: Its patriarch, Devraj Bapuji, a former prince and founder of the largest business empire in India, is an unsympathetic lunatic. All the central characters—Devraj’s three daughters who stand to be potential heirs (Sita, Radha and Gargi), plus his right-hand man’s two sons (Jeet and Jivan)—are deeply flawed, so it’s a bit difficult to pick a side. Factor in the casual and untranslated bits of Hindi, and this epic novel announces itself from the outset as no beach read or airplane book; it demands (and rewards) one’s full attention.

Like India itself, the novel is beset with contradictions, as impossible wealth and crushing poverty huddle with one another in an uneasy embrace. And while the setting is uniquely Indian, hints of the rising tide of global income inequality are impossible to ignore.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted of the rich nearly a hundred years ago, “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” And yet, when the rich are turned loose against one another as they are in We That Are Young, they are still beleaguered by, and often powerless against, the same forces of human nature that bring out our best and basest selves.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The fevered victims of Ling Ma’s astounding debut novel aren’t exactly zombies. As their bodies fall apart, they’re not bumbling about the ruined world or trying to kill you. Instead, they enact and re-enact the rituals of their former day-to-day lives. Retail workers fold shirts in empty stores. Old women laugh at the television and change the channel. Families mime the act of sitting down for dinner, chatting about their days; they clear the plates and do it again. In the world of Severance, the drone of normal life becomes a buzz too loud to ignore.

The novel follows the story of Candace Chen, the 20-something daughter of Chinese immigrant parents whose mother has recently died of Alzheimer’s. Candace splits her narrative into two timelines: before Shen Fever decimates the global population (she calls this “the End”) and after (“the Beginning”). In the End, she works in the Bible production department of a New York City publishing company. She has a boyfriend named Jonathan with whom she watches classic New York City movies. As Shen Fever begins to spread, Candace continues to work—until she is one of the only living humans in New York, capturing the deserted metropolis via photographs posted to her anonymous blog, NY Ghost.

In the Beginning, Candace has joined a group of survivors led by a man named Bob. Bob leads the group on “stalks” into homes throughout the Midwest, gathering supplies and killing any of the fevered. The stalks are enacted as ritual, the survivors conducting a type of prayer over each house they enter. There is repetition here as well. The internet once rendered this world “nearsighted with nostalgia,” as Bob says, and the Beginning is supposed to be a second chance. But the stalks are laden with memories of who we once were. The fevered are even described as having the eyes of someone who is incessantly checking their phone, or who is staring at their computer, glazed and unseeing.

“It was like burrowing underground and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working,” Candace says of one of these stalks, though she easily could’ve been referring to a Bible she’s working on, or when she’s drifting about the city as NY Ghost, or even when she’s moisturizing her face.

Ma’s engrossing, masterfully written debut transforms the mundane into a landscape of tricky memory, where questions of late-stage capitalism, immigration, displacement and motherhood converge in such a sly build-up as to render the reader completely stunned. It’s just an office novel, after all, with some worker-bee politics and consideration of the commute, the lunch break, the after-work cocktails. But Severance demands to be wondered at, only to flip around the gaze and stare back at you.

To be a millennial is to have been betrayed by an economy that once promised you everything. So after that fails, where do you look for yourself? In religion, in family, in memories on the internet? As a reader of Candace’s blog writes to her, “How do we know . . . that you’re not fevered yourself?”

David Chariandy is a gifted writer whose two novels were finalists for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize. The most recent of these, Brother (2017), is his first to be published in the United States. It is a lyrical coming-of-age story that speaks to timely issues of police brutality and prejudice.

Michael lives with his older brother, Francis, and their mother, Ruth, in the Park, a public housing complex on the edge of Toronto. Like many of the other residents, Ruth is from Trinidad and works double and triple shifts as a cleaning woman. A strict single parent, she has high expectations for her sons. But Francis and Michael have their own dreams, often escaping to the Rouge Valley, an urban oasis where they are free to imagine their future. Charismatic Francis is drawn to hip hop and begins hanging out with neighborhood kids at the local barbershop where they experiment with beats and rhymes, while Michael begins a romance with Aisha, whose father is from the same part of Trinidad as Ruth. But the legacy of poverty and casual prejudices that confront the brothers erodes their confidence and derails their plans. A tragic shooting in the summer of 1991 results in a police crackdown and leads to another act of violence that changes their lives forever.

The novel alternates between the boys’ high school years, as they struggle to establish themselves, and a grimmer, sadder present in which the family must navigate lost hopes and fractured dreams. But when Aisha is called home for her father’s funeral, there is a realization that loss can bring an opportunity for new growth.

Despite its brevity, Brother delivers an epic impact. The novel is poetic without being sentimental and heartbreaking without being manipulative. There are insights here that some may find difficult to take in, yet it would be unwise to disregard. Chariandy has something vital to share about what occurs when young lives are cut down. As readers, it is our duty to listen.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Chariandy for Brother.

“[Life] is a space full of agreeable and disagreeable surprises,” Pablo Escobar said in an interview in the late 1990s. In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Chula Santiago and her family’s maid, Petrona, slowly build a friendship fraught with both types of surprises. Told with suspense and mystical lyricism in the vein of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende, this debut novel by Ingrid Rojas Contreras stings and heals, like salt on a wound.

To support her large family, teenage Petrona is sent by her mother from the Hills into Bogotá, Colombia. Meanwhile, feeling guilty over her own wealth and desperate for a confidante, young Chula obsesses over the mysterious Petrona. Each girl must make a choice: Lured by money and first love, Petrona must decide between the Santiagos and the guerillas; Chula must decide between her family and Petrona.

Chapters narrated by Chula are full of sensations. Imbued with a mix of Catholicism and her mother’s indigenous beliefs, the plot moves along dreamily as Chula witnesses traumatic events through a child’s lens. She calls on the cows in her courtyard to protect her. She calms herself by counting fly parts and the syllables Petrona speaks. She searches for the Blessed Souls of Purgatory, of whom she believes Petrona is a representative. Alternate chapters narrated by Petrona are more straightforward and action-based, giving the novel a robust balance of fantasy and realism.

The novel climaxes as politics become personal. Police all over South America search for Escobar as tragedy descends on the Santiago family. Rain finally appears after a historic drought, mimicking the story’s deluge of Chula’s vivid impressions. Safety and calamity collide. Contreras deftly brings the novel to a calm closing, with the Santiago women in Los Angeles and Petrona back in the Hills. Escape becomes a way of life for the two young women, providing a colorful perspective on a tragic existence.

Crystal Hana Kim’s sensual debut novel doesn’t feel like a debut at all. Set in South Korea in the 1950s and ’60s, If You Leave Me is a delicately woven story of love, family, war and isolation.

Haemi and Kyunghwan, two old friends and almost lovers, meet at night while their refugee village sleeps. They get drunk on makgeolli, a milky rice wine, to forget the misery of war. When Kyunghwan’s cousin Jisoo begins to court Haemi, Haemi’s mother urges her to think of what Jisoo can provide for their family—food, wealth and honor. Haemi and Jisoo marry soon after he brings back medicine that saves her sick brother’s life.

When both Jisoo and Kyunghwan leave for war, Haemi finds work in a local hospital. Jisoo returns with a lame arm, and Kyunghwan heads for the metropolis of Seoul. Haemi learns to care for Jisoo, and together they have several daughters. Each birth and the haze afterward leave Haemi scarred, more ghostlike and less human. This is a life she would never have chosen for herself, and daydreams of Kyunghwan become her escape. Amid rice paddies, mountains and vivid flowers, Haemi lives in her memories. Her daughters tell stories of their goddess mommy who exists in the ether.

Through the lyrical, surprising and chilling prose of If You Leave Me, Kim forces readers to examine the pressure put on women by societies that demand they adhere to one kind of life. Under different circumstances, Haemi may have been able to choose her own life. Instead, she does the best with what she has.

This is a story worth weeping over, with a fiery and complex heroine that earns the reader’s love.