Bestselling young adult author Nicola Yoon’s first book for adults is a provocative mashup of body snatcher horror in the vein of The Stepford Wives, with the intraracial introspection of Ellis Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class. 

One of Our Kind is built around the complex truth that while white liberal guilt is more remarked on in popular culture, the angst of the Black middle class is just as powerful. Jasmyn Williams is, in many ways, a lucky woman. As a public defender, she has work that matters, as well as a loving husband, an adorable 6-year-old son she cherishes and a second child on the way. And yet, as successful as both Jasmyn and her husband, King, are, they live in the shadow of racist violence. The solution King suggests is relocating to Liberty, a utopian Black enclave just outside Los Angeles. 

Moving to an elite outpost isn’t an easy choice for Jasmyn, but she never could have anticipated the danger that would unfold in this idyllic retreat. Black folks in Liberty seem strangely culturally whitewashed, and are apathetic about Black lives outside their sphere. Even Jasmyn’s one simpatico friend—a schoolteacher with a big Afro who’s married to another Black woman—eventually succumbs to a conservative makeover that seems to rob her of her personality and racial consciousness. And something is decidedly unwholesome about the local Wellness Center. Yet, though Liberty harbors dangerous secrets, Jasmyn’s anxieties stretch beyond it. News of police killings seeps into her consciousness through her phone like poison, and feelings of threat are her constant companion. This puts her at odds with the other Black folks who came to Liberty to forget racial danger. 

The paradoxes and discontents of the upwardly mobile Black bourgeoisie are territory the Jamaican-born, wildly successful Yoon knows intimately and draws with precision. Like Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age and Come and Get It), Yoon vividly captures the racial and political zeitgeist that haunts the Williams family. The embodiment of striving Black middle-class anxiety, Jasmyn constantly judges herself and others, and is ambivalent even on vacation, feeling guilty “because how is this her life? Why should she have so much when others have so little?” As troubled as she is compelling, Jasmyn is a potent illustration of the effects of racial trauma. 

At times, Jasmyn’s constantly watchful point of view feels painfully earnest. Still, while One of Our Kind lacks the humor of racial satires like Jordan Peele’s Get Out or Percival Everett’s Erasure, Yoon’s observations are bold and razor sharp even when she’s immersed in her characters’ failings.

Soccer, like life, may be a beautiful game, but as in life, part of the beauty relies upon a key ingredient: cooperation. Introduce disharmony and the luster is tarnished. Readers will find plenty of corrosion in Godwin, Joseph O’Neill’s intellectually challenging new novel centered, at least ostensibly, around the world of football.

Godwin shifts between two narrators. The first is Lakesha Williams, one of the co-founders of the Group, a Pittsburgh cooperative for science and medical writers who want to be self-employed without the insecurity of freelancing. She’s dealing with an HR issue regarding writer Mark Wolfe, who got into a scuffle with a security guard and gave too-honest feedback to a client who didn’t receive a grant. Mark is a misanthrope who fantasizes about a future “when our kind no longer roams Earth and we shall at last have some peace.”

Mark is also our other narrator. In his private life, he lives with his wife, Sushila, and has a half brother named Geoff, a slippery character and aspiring sports agent who lives overseas. Geoff contacts Mark with an unusual request: He wants Mark to come to England and help him find Godwin, a “special prospect” from somewhere in Africa whom Geoff wants to sign.

These two seemingly disparate stories converge in satisfying ways and include characters who may at first seem secondary but take on greater significance, among them a French scout who may know where Godwin is; Mark’s mother, who he feels robbed him of an inheritance; and a Group member who ingratiates herself into a position to affect the collective’s operations.

Netherland, O’Neill’s brilliant 2008 book, was not just a story about a Dutch expat protagonist’s incipient passion for cricket but, more than that, a commentary on postcolonialism. Similarly, while the search for a soccer player is the engine of Godwin’s plot, the book is really about power: those who have it, those who don’t and those who scheme to get it. O’Neill’s excellent novel builds to a cynical ending that may not comfort, but it’s an undeniably appropriate finish to a story of what can happen when idealism snags on the lure of capitalism.

What can you say about Charles Lamosway, the protagonist of Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit? He’s not a particularly happy man. Though he has a few friends and is devoted to his difficult mother, he’s essentially lonely. A white guy with ties to Maine’s Penobscot Nation, Charles lives right across the river from the reservation. From his side of the river, he can see the house of his ex-girlfriend Mary and their adult daughter, Elizabeth, across the water. Elizabeth, raised by Mary and Mary’s husband, Roger, doesn’t know that Charles is her father. Charles thinks it’s time for her to know, as he puts it, “that her blood is her blood.” Indeed, he’s desperate for her to know.

Charles’ mother, Louise, is elderly and racked with dementia. But she has never been well. Even when Charles was a child she’d be overwhelmed by periods of such intense depression that she’d spend days in bed, cut off from Charles and her husband, Fredrick. As with Elizabeth, Fredrick wasn’t Charles’ biological father. Yet he’s not as intent on finding out about his own bio-dad as he is determined to make Elizabeth find out about hers. Then he discovers something about his daughter that makes him more determined than ever.

Fire Exit is Talty’s first novel, following his 2022 short story collection, Night of the Living Rez. It is beautifully written, sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds. This reviewer couldn’t help but think of the stories of Raymond Carver. Like Carver’s, Talty’s characters are working class, bedeviled by money troubles, drink, mental illness, lousy parents, estranged kids and difficult relationships. But in Talty’s writing, the particular history and context of the Penobscot Nation are always present. One reason Mary doesn’t want Elizabeth to know about Charles is that she wanted to raise her as a Native, supported by a community and traditions that Charles just couldn’t provide. As he puts it, “I knew and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong, what it was like to feel invisible inside the great, great dream of being.” This is a moving, humane book.