In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible is part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one’s self, and that makes it well worth reading for anyone seeking a hopeful, warm journey that crackles with magic.
Danzy Senna’s tale of a novelist’s venture into Hollywood is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.
Rachel Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species.
Anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.
The careful balance between Intermezzo’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Sally Rooney’s fourth novel her most ambitious yet.
Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk looses her deft, dark satirical wit on the rigid patriarchal world of pre-World War I Europe. The result is an enchanting, unsettling bildungsroman like nothing you’ve read before.
Renowned director Pedro Almodovar turns his deeply textured, boundless talent to 12 short stories involving elements of autobiography and fantasy in The Last Dream.
Centered on a teen love triangle in a North Dakota community dominated by sugar beet farming, Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red might just be a new American classic.
Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast Daniel M. Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women’s hotel in his debut novel.
Anna Montague explores friendship, aging, grief, regret and love with both creative and contemplative depth in her noteworthy debut, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
Haruki Murakami’s latest masterwork, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
Though it delves into real challenges facing women and queer people in the early 20th century, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s witty sophomore novel, Mutual Interest, never takes itself too seriously.
William Boyle has a pointillist’s eye for detail. In Saint of the Narrows Street, you can smell the cigarette smoke and desperation wafting from the dive bar and the freezer lasagna reheated when the priest drops by.
In Gliff, Ali Smith offers a paradoxical benediction over life in our increasingly anxious age: “Unbelievable believable hope. . . . Impossible, possible.”
Beena Kamlani’s detailed historical debut, The English Problem, follows an Indian man who journeys to England in the 1930s to study law and support Indian independence, but finds himself caught between his ambition, his heart and his values.
Emily Austin’s third novel, We Could Be Rats, is a heartfelt and stirring read for those interested in fiction that tackles themes of mental health, family relationships and reconnection.
In her first novel, playwright Betty Shamieh has crafted a page turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.
Charmaine Wilkerson’s second novel, Good Dirt, reminds us that we need access to a multitude of stories for a full understanding of our country’s rich and complicated past.
