Niall Williams demonstrates his genius for making you laugh out loud while breaking your heart at the same time in Time of the Child, his follow-up to This Is Happiness.
Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.
Our Evenings is a masterful accomplishment: an intricate vision of the conflict between an open, generous Britain and a clenched, intolerant one from Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst.
Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox is filled with wonder, conveying 12-year-old Tomoko’s enchantment with her extended family during the year she spends with them, from 1972 to 1973.
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.
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.
An award-winning poet and translator, Clare Pollard has great fun with these cleverly revealing fairy tales told amid gossip, flirtations and sex at the court of Versailles.
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.
Tracy Chevalier’s 12th book is potent, bewitching and addictive as it elegantly glides along the line between historical drama and something more experimental.
With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), turning it into a fiery family epic teeming with rage, revenge and revolution.
In Yael van der Wouden’s mesmerizing debut, The Safekeep, Isabel lives a circumscribed life in her dead mother’s house until her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, alarming Isabel when an obsessive attraction develops between the two.
Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, My Beloved Life is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.
In Valerie Martin’s captivating Mrs. Gulliver, she lifts the star-crossed dramatics of Romeo and Juliet but eschews tragedy, offering us instead an idyll.
Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history and storytelling that reshapes worlds.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force presents the dynastic legacy of the Sonoro family—one that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger.
With thrilling, adventurous sentences, and a profound understanding of the soul, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine.
As in her debut novel, West, Carys Davies writes exquisitely of the wilderness in Clear, telling the tale of two men who connect on a nearly uninhabited Scottish island during the Highland Clearances of the 1800s, when many rural Scots were forcibly evicted from their land.
Percival Everett’s visionary and necessary reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James, is a standout in an era of retellings. Everett matches Mark Twain in voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while deeply engaging with what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.
The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.
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