Celebrated Japanese author Minae Mizumura’s third work of fiction, the coyly titled A True Novel, is vast, and we’re not just talking about the hefty page count—though it IS quite a brick, at nearly 900 pages, and has been broken into two volumes. But what’s really enormous is the span of the story, in both time and territory, not to mention the ever-shifting gradations of the socioeconomic class system of modern Japan. Mizumura covers a lot of ground here. The 165-page prologue is your first clue.

That prologue—really more of a frame—explains how this novel came to be. It’s told in the first person by a writer named Minae Mizumura, and its job is to introduce us to the novel’s centerpiece, a mysterious man called Taro Azuma. At first we see only glimpses of Taro. Minae meets him in the '60s, when she’s a little girl and he’s a 20-something private chauffer for an American who does business with her father. An encounter many years later with a young Japanese man, Yusuke, brings back Minae’s memories of that time—as well as a ready-made story for the author’s next book. Or at least that’s the conceit of the prologue; it’s hard to tell how much if any of the framing story is “true” (much of it bears more than a passing resemblance to the author’s own upbringing) and it doesn’t really matter, anyway.

In addition to introducing the central character, novel’s prologue also ushers in one of the main themes of the novel: stored memories, secrets hidden within stories, accessible only from particular locations and usually painful to dredge up. Minae, the narrator, struggles with telling Taro’s story because it means opening up the locked “magic chest” inside her that contains her memories of Japan and all her complicated feelings about having left that country for the United States. In one way or another, everyone in the novel shares this struggle.

Minae’s prologue eventually gives way to another framework: the story she hears from Yusuke, who recounts the story he heard from Fumiko, a maid who knew Taro from childhood. It’s a love story, partly modeled on Wuthering Heights, with a troubling twist in the final pages that casts an unsettling light on everything before it. But the stories around that love story are what really fascinate. The novel—which was serialized upon its original publication in Japan, and has been ably translated by Julie Winters Carpenter—encompasses generations and continents, and Mizumura’s unfussy prose draws clear pictures of the various shifting cultural patterns and behaviors. During the decades covered here, Japan’s economic situation changes, classes merge and trade places and Western style goes in and out of fashion. In the end, it’s no surprise that the great love at the story’s center fights to survive, given all that’s going on around it.

In the 1990s, a war in Sierra Leone killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the country. Yet writer Aminatta Forna, who is from Sierra Leone, has dedicated her absorbing new novel, The Hired Man, to that other 1990s war-torn region, Yugoslavia, thus subtly illuminating the prolonged aftereffects of all wars.

Duro is a Croat living in the ghostly town of Gost. One day, an Englishwoman named Laura arrives with her son and daughter. Laura has purchased an old house, and enlists Duro’s help in refurbishing it—including uncovering an obscured mosaic. The gradual unveiling of its contents mirrors Duro’s gradual revelations about the area’s violent past.

At first, that past seems far away. Duro’s present life is unremarkable. He likes his coffee and daily exercise, delights in repairs and ends his days with a beer at the local pub. He becomes fond, even protective, of Laura and her children, and shares with them his country’s natural treasures, including endless fields of wildflowers. But beneath the calm beauty is pain: The wildflowers exist because the fields are mine-strewn and thus off-limits. Eventually we learn that Duro participated in the fighting, that the ownership of Laura’s house is contentious and that she is acutely vulnerable to the area’s lingering animosities.

Forna’s decision to write from the perspective of a Croatian man is risky, but Duro is exceedingly convincing: melancholy, not maudlin; stoical, not hard-boiled. He tries to be hospitable and open to Laura while playing down his loss. “Laura,” he muses, “was one of those people who preferred the music of a lie to the discordance of truth.” His memories of the war are an impressive record of the so-called banality of evil.

Nowadays, Croatia’s beaches are as popular as the war was abhorrent, but Forna’s point is taken. Whether you’re gazing at Angkor Wat, dining in once-occupied Paris or having your burek and rakija in Gost, you’re standing on haunted ground.

A portrait of Haiti derived from facts alone would be grim. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, suffers from catastrophic deforestation and is frequently visited by the United States military. In 2010, an earthquake added insult to perennial injury.

Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, Claire of the Sea Light, offers a somewhat different picture. Deforestation rates a mention. And yes, the justice system is corrupt or nonexistent. But her portrait of Haiti’s people makes for a crucial difference. The living is decidedly not easy, but there’s summertime here in spades.

Claire is a young girl whose mother died while delivering her. Her father, adoring but unfit, makes the painful decision to offer her to a woman whose own daughter has died in a traffic accident as comical as it was tragic. In a parallel storyline, the local schoolmaster’s son, who joined the “dyaspora” to Miami, returns home and must face having raped his household’s servant girl and fathered a son by her. What’s more, his one true love was actually a man who fell to bullets long before.

Somehow, Danticat’s sweet touch makes this bad medicine go down. Her prose is simple and concrete, her characters vivid and warm. There is a timelessness about this tale that elevates it almost to parable. It recalls other novels of the Caribbean, from The Old Man and the Sea to A House for Mr. Biswas. Almost 20 years after Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, Danticat has become the Naipaul of her generation.

Though Danticat resides in Miami, this novel’s strongest character is the one who stays behind. Her reasoning? “She liked her ghosts nearby.”

A celebrity in his native Spain, Javier Marías is puzzlingly unknown in the U.S. His novels are considered modern classics. He’s often tipped for the Nobel Prize. And his works have been translated into 42 languages in 52 countries. His latest prize-winning bestseller, The Infatuations, comes to America this month, and those who like their lit cerebral would do well to see what the fuss is about. Philosophical and provoking, a paradox of coolheaded intensity, this novel is, above all, addictive.

María Dolz, frustrated with her job in publishing, finds a small joy each morning in the café where she breakfasts, observing a beautiful couple who seem very much in love. One day they stop appearing, and María learns to her horror that the husband has been murdered. When the wife returns to the café, María offers her condolences—it is the first time she has ever spoken to the woman. The widow invites her to her home, and there she meets Javier Diaz-Varela, the husband’s best friend. María can see that the handsome Diaz-Varela is infatuated with the widow, and yet she becomes infatuated with him herself. They begin an affair. And from there, María finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery she would rather know nothing about—and must try to separate truth from fiction.

Marías’ style is distinctive: The story is told primarily through long internal monologues in which the narrator reflects on what has been said in conversation and even imagines whole conversations between others. Marías does this through long, drawn-out sentences, a sort of hybrid of Italo Calvino and Henry James. This description might horrify some and intrigue others, but the horrified shouldn’t turn away too quickly; somehow, this style manages to compel. Examining what underlies (and undermines) love, truth and justice, the prose never rambles but zeroes in on some of humanity’s most discomfiting characteristics, all of which relate to death and romantic love.

And uncertainty, perhaps the most uncomfortable element of human life, takes center stage. Marías keeps us guessing from beginning to end: about the crime, about the motivations, about what María is hearing from the other characters and what we can believe. A trip through the mind and heart that is somehow both quiet and edge-of-your-seat, The Infatuations fascinates as a whole new breed of psychological thriller.

It’s 1983, the third year of the Iranian Revolution. Azar and her husband, both political activists, have been captured and are being held separately at Evin Prison. Azar is pregnant, a condition that brings her both hope and worry. What sort of life will a child born in prison, in a war-torn country, have to look forward to?

Omid is left sitting alone at the kitchen table after his parents’ arrest. He, his siblings and his cousin are raised by their grandparents while their parents serve time for their rebellion. What lessons can children of war learn from their parents’ experiences?

In her debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree, author Sahar Delijani attempts to answer these questions while exploring the impact war has on its prisoners and those left safely outside. It’s a story Delijani knows all too well; she was born in prison during the Iran-Iraq conflict. And while both of her parents survived their imprisonment, Delijani’s uncle was one of thousands killed in a mass execution at the war’s end.

As the novel pings between the revolution of 1983 and the protests that followed the 2009 election, Delijani contrasts the experiences of parents and the children who follow in their footsteps decades later. Parents worry for their children as history repeats itself; the offspring come to realize how young and bold their parents were as they embarked on a revolution.

Children of the Jacaranda Tree is a beautifully rendered tale that reads almost like a collection of connected short stories, with characters’ perspectives and histories being unveiled as they intersect with one another. Throughout this thought-provoking account, a jacaranda tree stands as a stalwart witness to it all, providing comfort in its consistent presence.

Lavanya Sankaran’s perceptive first novel explores the fortunes of those affected by the proclivities of others, set in a Bangalore increasingly divided between tradition and modernization. In The Hope Factory, the author’s fluid prose shifts from observant to incisive to beautifully descriptive as she introduces readers to Anand, a businessman with his own auto parts company on the verge of success, and Kamala, a maid in his house holding on to her tenuous existence and her son Narayan with both hands.

At nearly every turn, Anand and Kamala find all that they have worked for may be out of their hands to keep. They are each making their own way, engineering their own destinies (and that of their families) with determination and grit. Themes of wealth and poverty, power and lack thereof, goodness and corruption form a familiar framework that any reader can relate to. The main characters’ worries and questions are those of all of us.

While a few minor plotlines are thin or at least not satisfyingly developed, the truthful depiction of Anand and Kamala never wavers. Sankaran deftly draws their struggles with empathy and enough humor to keep their plights from veering to the maudlin. Her style and use of language is specific and direct, rich in cultural idioms that create a real and simultaneously exotic world for readers not as intimately entrenched in South Indian culture as she is. The well-chosen title of this novel reminds us we have to work to keep hope alive in the face of life’s disappointments and derailments.

If you could guarantee your child a rich life in exchange for forfeiting your right to see her, would you do it? The question informs the engrossing new novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, whose surprise international bestseller, The Kite Runner, so enchanted readers 10 years ago.

The child in question is Pari, whose long-suffering father arranges her adoption by a well-to-do Afghan and his half-French wife, Nila. Pari’s brother Abdullah stays behind, and their fates diverge in predictable ways: Pari becomes a professor of mathematics while Abdullah ends up selling kabobs.

The novel jumps backward and forward in time, with settings as diverse as Monterey, Paris, Kabul and Athens. The relationships between the far-flung cast members—including Idris, an Afghan-American physician, modeled probably on Hosseini himself; a Greek plastic surgeon and adventure photographer; a former Afghan jihadi and his iPod-toting son—are sometimes obscure. But the female characters steal the show, most notably Nila, who gleefully explodes the stereotype of the downtrodden Afghan woman. An acclaimed poet, as fond of men as she is enslaved to Chardonnay, she evokes a time when Kabul was downright chic.

Then there’s the flip side of the book’s opening dilemma. Having escaped, what obligation does one have to the motherland? Can an expat enjoy success when his or her country so desperately needs help? “For the price of that home theater,” Idris muses, “we could have built a school in Afghanistan.” After a trip back, he experiences worse culture shock upon returning to America, a situation familiar to anyone with experience in both countries. Ultimately Idris decides that Afghanistan was “something best forgotten.” But his story also suggests that life in America, with its stresses and mass distractions, is no Elysium either.

Do Pari and Abdullah reunite? Hosseini certainly isn’t given to facile resolutions. To the distances of space the novel adds the ravages of age. Ultimately, And the Mountains Echoed is about the human endeavor to transcend differences.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Americanah, begins in a train station in Princeton, New Jersey, where Ifemelu is on her way to Trenton to get her hair braided. This errand, seemingly simple, could stand as a microcosm for a plot that is all about transitions—epic, life-altering journeys from Nigeria to America and London, the transition from high school to college, the evolution of teenage crushes to true love, right down to the minute, but no less significant, detail of where a black girl can get her hair done.

Americanah is an engaging novel about love, change and identity in today’s globalized world that is not to be missed.

Ifemelu and Obinze fell in love as teenagers in Lagos. The military dictatorship in Nigeria made it almost impossible for them to complete college, and both hoped to go to the United States. Ifemelu left Africa first, living in Brooklyn with her aunt and cousin Dike, and then on to college in Philadelphia. The plan was for Obinze to join her, but, unable to get a visa after 9/11, he instead went to London and plunged into the dangerous life of an undocumented immigrant. Both young people did whatever they could to survive, and the subsequent feelings of shame and embarrassment changed their relationship.

Fifteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man with a family in newly democratized Nigeria. Ifemelu is at Princeton, the author of a wildly successful blog about race in America with the wonderful tongue-in-cheek title Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (those formerly known as Negros) by a Non-American Black. She has a sexy academic boyfriend and a lively and diverse group of friends. But she is homesick for Nigeria, and realizes that her thoughts of returning are all wrapped up in her unresolved feelings for Obinze.

As she did with Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie creates a multigenerational tale, spanning three continents and incorporating the complicated politics of Lagos, the slippery codes of race and class, and the emotional network of family and friends. The novel is stuffed with characters—single mothers, students, hairdressers, cab drivers, academics—each a perfectly realized portrait in a lively tapestry. Adichie’s observations are needle-sharp when it comes to race, but her empathy makes Americanah—a term that is used for Nigerians who go to America and return with an exaggerated sense of superiority—a warm and surprisingly funny read. Americanah is an engaging novel about love, change and identity in today’s globalized world that is not to be missed.

Mohsin Hamid’s ambitious novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, puts a new spin on the self-help book, a genre known for its glib pronouncements and superficial imperatives (Get an Education! Learn from a Master!), and offers a piercing look at the economic realities of developing countries by tracking a young man’s rise from poverty to wealth.

An unnamed protagonist is born in a small village in an unidentified Asian country. After his family moves to the city, he begins to attend school. He proves to be clever and resourceful, though it is matters of chance such as birth order and gender that allow him to continue his education. He begins his steady climb up the ladder of success, first as a DVD delivery boy and gradually branching out into a business of his own, overcoming poverty, corruption and violence. At the same time, a pretty girl in the neighborhood also negotiates a climb to the top. Their paths cross several times in the novel and they anchor one another, each providing a reflection of how far they’ve come and what has been discarded along the way.

In his previous novels Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both set in the author’s hometown of Lahore, Pakistan, Hamid’s protagonists were also young men, struggling with social and religious changes, as well as their engagement with the West. The scope of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is wider, looking at the opportunities wrought by global economic development with a critical, and sometimes brutally honest, eye. Hamid’s use of the second-person voice draws the reader close but allows him to shift perspective, offering objective details about the city or speculating about the effects of a low-protein diet on a teenage boy with a night job. The real delight of the novel is that beneath the blustery chapter headings, despite the relentlessly upwardly mobile rise of the narrator, lies a tender and romantic story of two people eventually finding happiness not based on their income. Perhaps being rich in love beats wealth in the end. 

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Read a Q&A with Mohsin Hamid for How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

Herman Koch’s mesmerizing and disturbing novel starts out slowly, as two couples meet for dinner at a pricey, somewhat snobbish restaurant in Amsterdam. The two men are brothers: Serge, in the midst of a campaign to become the prime minister of the Netherlands, and Paul, a high school teacher. Paul and his wife Claire arrive first, as usual, for as Paul well knows, Serge “never arrived on time anywhere,” preferring to make a grand entrance.

Paul’s aversion to this whole evening planned by Serge and his wife Babette escalates with the arrival of each skimpy yet ridiculously overpriced course. From the “Greek olives from the Peloponnese, lightly dressed in first-pressing, extra-virgin olive oil from Sardinia,” to the tiny 19-euro appetizer lost in the “vast emptiness” of Claire’s plate, to the miniscule portions of guinea fowl accompanied by a mere shred of lettuce, Paul becomes increasingly fascinated with the “yawning chasm between the dish itself and the price you have to pay for it.”

At this point, the reader assumes that The Dinner will remain what it seems on the surface to be—a subtle, yet piercing, skewering of the haughty, conceited, upper-class brother by his intellectually superior, middle-class sibling. But as the main courses arrive, the reason for the arranged dinner becomes clear: The four of them must deal with the shocking actions taken by their 15-year-old sons against a homeless person. The reader is drawn into their dispute, forced to think about what he or she would do in a similar situation. How hard is it to admit our children’s failings—and how far are we willing to go to protect them?

Koch’s fast-paced, addictive novel raises these questions and more. Readers will be able to identify with the faults and fears of each of his perceptively drawn characters. Already a bestseller in Europe, The Dinner is sure to find an enthusiastic American readership as well.

Shani Boianjiu’s eye-opening and brutally honest debut novel chronicles the abrupt coming-of-age of three young Israeli girls—Yael, Lea and Avishag—who grow up in a small village, attend high school together and are conscripted soon afterward into the Israeli army. In school, their days are spent passing notes in class, waiting impatiently for recess, vying to see who can find the spot with the best cell phone reception and determining the location of the next weekend party.

After graduation they are sent to infantry boot camp, and are dispersed to different sites, portraying, in alternating voices, the harsh world in which they suddenly find themselves. Yael is stationed at a training base, where soon she is teaching shooting to new recruits. Lea is assigned to the military police at a checkpoint near Hebron, where Palestinian construction workers line up to be admitted each morning. She feels a kinship with one sad-faced man—only to be shocked when he stabs one of her fellow soldiers. Avishag watches a monitor on the Israeli-Egyptian border in boring 12-hour shifts. She is sickened by the discovery of the body of a Sudanese man skewered on a barbed-wire fence—one of many trying to escape. Boianjiu goes beyond their service to explore its effect on their lives. The young women saw and experienced more than they were prepared for—and when those years are over, they initially feel a letdown.

At 25, Boianjiu was the youngest recipient ever of the prestigious “5 Under 35” award, given by the National Book Foundation to new authors to watch. In this gripping debut, she weaves together the familiar coming-of-age milestones such as sexual initiation, the fierce bonds of friendship and the need for independence with the shocking realities of military life—even beyond the battlefield.