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.

Happiness is an amorphous thing, a kind of fog about which it is easier to speak peripherally—the pursuit of happiness, the idea of happiness, the absence of happiness. In Tell the Machine Goodnight, author Katie Williams considers a future in which the ingredients of happiness have not only been identified but also commodified.

Set a couple of decades from now, the novel centers on Pearl, a technician working for Apricity, the hot tech corporation of the day. Apricity designs oracles—machines that, given a sample of the user’s DNA, return a number of recommendations to improve the user’s life, to make them happier. The recommendations can be ambiguous or downright cryptic: “Eat tangerines”; “Wrap yourself in softest fabric”; “Tell someone.” More often than not, the connection between doing these things and experiencing greater happiness is unclear, but Pearl’s clients almost always follow the machine’s instructions. And they almost always report feeling satisfied with the results.

The Apricity construct is clever and flexible enough to support the weight of the narrative. Williams does an admirable job of weaving myriad characters’ stories together, with the Apricity machine as the intersection at which all the tales meet. Some of the characters treat the machine with unwavering reverence, others with outright disdain. Its recommendations are used as clues, divine prophecy and the basis for performance art.

But the novel is at its best when it pushes the technology to the background and turns instead to the emotional mechanics of happiness. Williams is a deft observer of small human details, and in moments when she pinpoints these details, the story shines.

For all its imaginative and speculative power, Tell the Machine Goodnight is not a particularly futuristic book. Its primary concern is something so fundamentally human that it transcends time—our insatiable need to feel better, to decipher whatever happiness means.

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