Zadie Smith writes eloquent, powerful and often quite humorous novels with social issues at the fore, and The Fraud is no exception. Its firm grounding in the past offers a rich reflection of the present.
A masterful storyteller, Emma Donoghue brings her dazzling talent and imagination to this historical novel based on a true story of risk, love and two young women discovering themselves by way of each other.
The Romantic spans most of the 19th century, and William Boyd is both interested in and very knowledgeable about the period. Fascinating details hum beneath the exuberant plot.
While The Vaster Wilds is often a dark story with only slivers of hope, Lauren Groff’s inimitable style and language makes it a memorable, immersive novel.
Melanie Dobson’s characters find redemption, discover their own strength and experience the power of family relationships to pull us down—or lift us up.
Amanda Cox’s hopeful, heartwarming novel touches on complicated relationships, the value of friendship and the impact of trauma with great heart and kindness.
C Pam Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in Zhang’s second novel, but there is outrageous beauty.
Readers will savor this shrewdly trenchant take on the higher-ed experience.
If you’re going to narrate your novel from the point of view of a poet, you must be able to think like one, and this is where Do You Remember Being Born? achieves its greatest success.
Brendan Basham binds together myth and history in Swim Home to the Vanished, drawing inspiration from the Diné creation tale as well as what is known as the Long Walk—the U.S. government’s forced removal of the Navajo people from their ancestral lands.
In The Unsettled’s short but perfectly paced chapters, Toussaint, Ava and Dutchess tell of not only their disappointment and despair but also their dreams, crafting a heartbreaking tale about Reagan’s America that deftly weaves the past and present into the possibility of a bright, if still-unfolding, future.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma writes beautifully about the stars and the people who watch them in her second novel, Digging Stars.
In Raul Palma’s brilliantly constructed nightmare, the prose is as consistently fresh and inventive as the devil is inescapable.
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