Readers of Helen Oyeyemi’s latest mind-teaser will know they’re in for an unusual experience when the novel’s narrator, a 38-year-old hypnotist, begins the story by describing a set of Czech days-of-the-week underwear, a gift from a former boyfriend. And that’s before the narrator boards a train for a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” with his current love and their pet mongoose. Such is the uncommonly inventive setup of Peaces.

Otto Shin is one half of “a starry-eyed young couple” and has happily adopted the surname of his partner, Xavier. As the novel begins, they and their mongoose have boarded a sleeper train called The Lucky Day at their local station “in deepest Kent.” The ride was a gift from Xavier’s aunt. But, in one of the novel’s many engagingly bizarre flourishes, Otto and Xavier don’t quite know where they’re going. Even more curious: When Xavier calls his aunt from the train to check in on her, she says she’s in the company of someone named Yuri. Yuri claims to be a friend of Xavier’s, but Xavier doesn’t know who he is.

That’s just the start of the book’s many complications. Soon Otto and Xavier meet the train’s owner, Ava Kapoor, a theremin player who lives full time on The Lucky Day and has her own pet mongoose. Ava is days away from collecting an inheritance, but a series of events threatens her bounty. Among the characters that deepen the plot are a composer named Karel, who wrote a piece Ava used to play; Karel’s mysterious son, Přem; and a doctor assigned to assess Ava’s state of mind.

The story’s second half is convoluted, and Oyeyemi tends to overwrite, as when she describes a photo of a “fainting couch upholstered in brocade the color of Darjeeling tea in the fourth minute of brewing.” But fans of the British writer’s previous work, such as the PEN award-winning What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, will enjoy this novel’s surreal twists and imaginative scenarios. Peaces is like the work of a hypnotist: Those open to its allure will inevitably fall under its thrall.

When a story is set in an invented universe, the line its author must walk is a bit more treacherous than when a tale is set in a recognizable “real” world. In The Ladies of the Secret Circus, Constance Sayers proves she can walk that line with grace and power.

Sayers’ second novel (after 2020’s A Witch in Time) unfolds through two narratives, eight decades apart. In the 1920s, a woman named Cecile is part of a wondrous family circus with a magical secret. A love affair might set her free but could also cost her everything. In the 2000s, Lara, a descendant of that same family, prepares for her wedding day and is shaken to her core when her fiancé goes missing. As she searches for answers, Lara is drawn into a web of secrets and magic that leads her to Cecile’s journals and beyond, as she uncovers a dark curse stretching back generations.

The novel’s massive network of connections—tactile and ethereal, physical and mystical—makes for a luxurious reading experience, like a rich tapestry. The Ladies of the Secret Circus is a book to get lost in, not just because of the fantasy elements that layer it with intrigue but also because of the emotional connections that tie it all together. Through beautifully orchestrated prose and careful, confident pacing, Sayers constructs a story that feels like sitting down with an older relative and slowly, over hours, getting all the family secrets in one juicy, enchanted package.

Perfect for fans of Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches series or Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, The Ladies of the Secret Circus is just as much about the secrets we keep in the name of family as it is about the spells we cast in the name of love.

In Creatures of Passage, 10-year-old Dash Kinwell is stuck, unsure how to proceed after witnessing the school’s merry janitor, Mercy, commit an act of molestation.

The novel’s setting of 1977 Anacostia, in the southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C., is magical and liquid, and so is author Morowa Yejidé’s storytelling style. Sequences flow between past, present and future, between concrete and fantastical, in a stream of vignettes. States are “kingdoms,” the Suitland Parkway is “the imaginable forest,” cars drive themselves and giant vegetables grow at night. Subtle clues hint at how the plot fuses together, emerging amid enjoyable sketches of characters such as Find Out, a man who can locate anything in his junkyard (and beyond). 

The adults around Dash wander “with burdens that [keep] them frozen even as they [move] from one place to the next.” His great-aunt Nephthys ferries passengers around in her 1967 Plymouth, a ghost thumping around in the trunk. Osiris, Nephthys’ deceased twin brother, journeys through death only to arrive back at the banks of the river where his body was recovered, and where he now visits with Dash. Dash’s reclusive mom, Amber, sees future catastrophes in her dreams, and they’re recorded in a section of the newspaper called “the Lottery.” Meanwhile, Mercy calculates his next attack.

So mesmerizing are Yejidé’s unhurried, lyrical chapters that it’s easy to forget the real conflicts, such as financial crises, racial tensions and substance abuse, looming in the background. This contemporary fairy tale’s grandeur and psychedelic wonderment undergird a serious warning, urging readers to make sense of the story’s message of family, justice, trauma and healing and to find a way toward a saner future.

Anyone who has read Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpieces knows that, in his works, little is as it first appears. Situations are not quite as his unreliable narrators believe. First-person protagonists speak in formal prose that sounds not quite right. And his later works are wonderfully unclassifiable—not quite detective fiction or dystopian sagas but borrowing from these forms while veering into original terrain.

He continues his genre-twisting ways with Klara and the Sun, a return to the dystopian tenor of Never Let Me Go that, like that work, explores whether science could—or should—manipulate the future.

Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend available for purchase. Like Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day, she speaks in quirky locutions such as “I was able to bring several speculations together.” She and other AFs are on display in a store, where the prime real estate is the front window. The advantages of that position include access to the Sun, from which AFs derive “nourishment.”

A teenager named Josie, suffering from an unspecified illness, insists that her Mother purchase Klara. What follows is the story of Josie’s home life and Klara’s role in the family’s affairs. Among them are the Mother’s trauma from the death of another daughter, a young man sweet on Josie and, most provocatively, the issue of whether science can correct injustices wrought by illness or one’s station in life.

Ishiguro is an expert at slowly doling out information to build tension. The wonder of this book is that he incorporates many elements, from environmental damage to genetic testing, without the story seeming heavy-handed.

But the predominant theme in Klara and the Sun is loneliness. “Humans, in their wish to escape loneliness,” Klara says, “made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom.” As Ishiguro notes in this brilliant book, each person has their own Sun, a source that gives them strength, and feels enervated when the source leaves them in shadow.

Argentinian novelist Betina González’s English-language debut is a wild romp of aggressive deer, abandoned children and a cultish back-to-nature group of adults who have taken to the wilderness.

The story is told by three residents of an unnamed American city that’s barely survived some kind of economic or environmental apocalypse. Both Vik and his elderly co-worker, Beryl, are employees of the local natural history museum, though Beryl’s roots in the community date back to the 1970s, when she joined a commune of young people experimenting with mind-altering drugs. Beryl now leads her fellow senior citizens in an all-out armed war against the deer that have begun attacking people. (Note: There is some graphic animal cruelty here, so if you are sensitive to that, this is not your book.) 

At the same time, Vik, a chronically ill taxidermist from the (fictional) Caribbean island of Colonna, realizes that an intruder has broken into his home and is living in his closet. Meanwhile, Berenice, the daughter of the town florist, uncovers ties to the old commune after her mother disappears.

The storylines gradually come together over the search for a plant that originated in Colonna called albaria. It’s so potent that one dose creates life-altering hallucinations and a lifelong addiction.

The lively pace and absurdity of American Delirium could easily go off the rails, but González keeps a tight control over each of her characters even as they navigate their ever-stranger adventures. The novel is well served by translator Heather Cleary’s light touch, which allows for a certain amount of zaniness without sacrificing the plot or the well-defined characters.

In the author’s afterword, González explains that she drew inspiration from an international array of news stories, and it’s clear that some of the strangest elements in the novel are taken directly from these real-life events. Perhaps one person’s magic is another person’s realism after all.

Due to an unintended quirk of timing, I read Or What You Will immediately after Sofia Samatar’s magnificent, book-obsessed fantasy A Stranger in Olondria, so perhaps I was primed for a book about books. Or a fantasy novel about novelists forced to live in an all-too-flawed reality, or a meditation on mortality or a meta-literary escape to a near-mythical elsewhere. The fact that Jo Walton uses an reference to Samatar’s masterpiece as an emotional lever only heightens the connection between the two works. But this is not a review of Olondria. And although there is a concrete relationship between the two books, Walton’s story of an imaginary friend concerned for the incipient demise of his progenitor, bestselling author Sylvia Harrison (also referred to as the owner of his “bone cave,” in a somewhat distressing allusion to David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks), and seeking a route to mutual immortality deserves its own evaluation.

Or What You Will, like the cuisine at the Teatro del Sale in Firenze (Walton steadfastly refuses to call the city “Florence,” citing a preference for its Italian name), begs to be devoured slowly, in courses that may be individually savored and committed to memory. Walton’s prose is kin to chef Fabio Picchi’s carrots, or maybe the porcini mushroom soup: excellence wrought from the most prosaic of elements. It even includes something like Maria Cassi’s political comedy: There are anecdotes about the abstract nature of Victorian women’s legs, Canadian threats and biblical inerrancy. A rather lengthy paragraph on the Canadian emigration system is especially, ah . . . poignant. But for those (like me) who have only experienced Firenze in books, this is likely not the most effective route to explain this book. Let me try again.

Walton’s nameless, chameleonic, probably mostly imaginary narrator says he (and he is, by his own admission, an indisputably and irrevocably male aspect of fantasy novelist Sylvia’s mind) “will ask you to do nothing but read, and remember, and care.” He then spends the full length of Or What You Will weaving the brutal reality of Harrison’s long life with a melange of Renaissance apocrypha, Shakespearean comedy and Greek mythology. Throughout, he dodges between narrating the negotiations of the creative process, narrating the creation itself and playing his part in Sylvia’s latest book, all the while slowly unfolding his plot to save Sylvia’s life (and his own). Walton’s snark keeps any potential mawkishness at bay, and the result is a thoroughly memorable story about magic, meddling gods, learning to love properly and all the ways the worlds we create can save us in the ones we’re born into.

It’s a worthwhile reminder that creativity has value and that the proper standard of value is rarely monetary. Or What You Will is the literal manifestation of escapism, but it also may be among escapism’s most effective champions. Walton’s Firenze is an island of charming dysfunction in a world whose dysfunction more often frightens, and its fictional analogue, Thalia, is a theatrical idyll. Walton’s narrator is equal parts Melpomene and the archangel Michael, though he denies the latter. It is fantastical, but tangible all the same, less escapist than transporting, and suffused with joy and the tacit hope that maybe, just maybe, the salvation Sylvia finds in crafting her books might be attainable for the reader as well.

A mysterious illness grips a country. The public health department scrambles to respond and enforce mandatory quarantines. It’s a story that could have been ripped from headlines about the coronavirus. But that’s where the similarities with The Down Days end—at least we should hope so, or else we’re in for a wild ride.

The Down Days is set in Sick City, a coastal African city afflicted with a deadly laughter epidemic that has turned society upside down. People have reorganized their daily lives around not getting sick and making a quick buck however they can. Although the Virus Patrol and mandatory health checks give the appearance of a government in charge, residents are increasingly suspicious. Rumors abound that the citizenry is being doped with hallucinogens, and lately, rumors carry as much weight as the truth. After all, why put your faith in science if it can’t explain—or cure—this disease?

At the center of the novel is Faith, a “dead collector” who is asked by a teen girl to find her missing baby brother. But in the twisty plot of The Down Days, the fates of a dozen characters are woven together, including some who turn out to be ghosts. The line between the living world and the afterlife has blurred, and Sick City must contend with the goings-on of the spiritual realm along with everyday existence. It’s complicated, and the reader doesn’t know any better than the characters about what’s real, what’s a hallucination, who is a ghost or who is a charlatan. Ultimately, the novel asks you to imagine an alternate reality that constantly changes shape. 

Readers who enjoy meaty speculative fiction like The Power by Naomi Alderman will find much to chew on in The Down Days, which poses extremely timely questions about faith, authority, hope and conspiracy theories.

In the thought experiment of Little Eyes, Samanta Schweblin’s latest novel, kentukis are the latest craze. They’re motorized, furry pets, like anonymous webcams on wheels.

An explanation of how kentukis work emerges slowly, mysteriously, encounter by encounter. If you purchase a kentuki, you become its “keeper.” Someone else will purchase the rights to be the “dweller,” operating the toy and observing the keeper’s environment through the kentuki’s lens. Kentukis can be one of a handful of endearing animals, from dragons to moles. The people behind them, too, are a host of believable characters, ranging from preteen boys and teenage girls to retired people. But the kentukis’ too-good-to-be-true cuteness, coupled with the ordinary lives of the people who interact with the toys, foretells horrifying consequences.

Drawn in quotidian elegance, the novel is a string of nonstop, colorful vignettes that follow a handful of international kentuki connections: Peru-Germany, Italy-Norway, Croatia-Brazil, Sierra Leone-Hong Kong, among others. The randomness of the assorted connections breeds unpredictability. Kentukis can move on their own, but only so far, and not on rough terrain. They make noise, not speech. Many connections create ways to communicate, but some communication becomes unwanted, and some develops into co-dependence. Some keepers grow fearful or wary of their kentukis, while some dwellers are set off by their keepers’ strange behavior. The links spread across the globe like a sticky web.

Kentukis raise real-world questions about privacy and increasingly invasive, animated technology. Like Furbies or clowns, kentukis are both adorable and horrible. They’re reminders of basic human needs and vulnerabilities. They’re objects of obsession and companionship, and yet they can also be too close for comfort.

If Schweblin’s sci-fi thriller Fever Dream made sleep difficult, Little Eyes raises the unease quotient. The book seems to watch viewers creepily as it unfolds. 

Is it too early to declare Megan Angelo’s debut one of the best novels of 2020? Maybe. Even so, it’s probably one of the funniest and most hopeful dystopian stories you’ll come across this year. Set in 2015 Manhattan and in a fictional community in 2051 California, Followers tells the story of three women who are all social media influencers and reality TV megastars of their time.

When Orla, a wannabe author who blogs about celebrity gossip, ends up with a roommate named Floss, a shameless fame chaser, they concoct a scheme to use the public’s collective obsession with famous people to their advantage. This is in 2015, when living without social media and smartphones is far more daunting for these young women than the seemingly unlikely concern of surviving without access to clean water.

But then comes the spill. Bringing back long-forgotten memories of Y2K hysteria, Angelo presents a future in which Apple and Instagram no longer exist. The internet as we know it is gone, but this advanced civilization nevertheless functions with self-driving cars, robots, networks and devices. Society is still obsessed with celebrity, and Floss’ daughter, Marlow, is its new star. Living in the government-created community of Constellation, where everyone is filmed 24/7 for the rest of the country’s viewing pleasure (and as a corporate marketing tool), Marlow begins to realize that maybe she has a choice—one that connects her back to Orla in the most surprising way.

Even if you aren’t a fan of science fiction or reality TV, Followers delivers a shrewd look at human relationships, habits and obsessions. Of all the doomsday scenarios out there, perhaps it won’t be too bad if this one comes true after all.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Megan Angelo shares her vision of the future and explains why landlines should make a comeback.

The best alternate histories seem real, not just because they’re able to both replicate and twist historical details with precision and care, but also because they’re able to capture an emotional landscape. First Cosmic Velocity, the debut novel from Zach Powers, is full of attention to physical, geographic and historic detail, but what makes it a truly gripping work of imagination is its ability to create an emotional reality for its lead character amid an ambitious, delightfully strange look at a different version of the Soviet space program.

It’s 1964, and the space race is in full swing. The Soviet launch program in Star City continues its progress under the watchful eye of its Chief Designer, and to all outward appearances, everything seems to be a success. Within the walls of Star City, though, a different story is unfolding. The cosmonaut program has only partially succeeded. The astronauts go up, but they never come back down. Instead, the Chief Designer and his team have relied on twins to create an elaborate ruse, as the surviving twin carries the burden of continuing the life of their deceased sibling after a “successful” space mission. First Cosmic Velocity follows the last of these twins, Leonid, as he embarks on a publicity tour even as the space program and its closely guarded secrets are at a crossroads.

Perhaps the greatest success of the novel is Powers’ ability to get inside Leonid’s head, to paint a portrait of the psychological whiplash he’s endured throughout his life. The novel jumps back and forth between Leonid’s childhood as a poor boy in Ukraine and his adulthood as a person whose entire existence is built on lies. What does that do to a person? What choices can they make when they’ve surrendered their very autonomy to a cause? Powers is unafraid to probe the confounding, often darkly comic answers to these questions, even if the answers are sometimes frustratingly uncertain.

This attention to emotional detail, combined with a powerful supporting cast and a masterful sense of historical table-setting, makes First Cosmic Velocity a delightfully complex page-turner for space enthusiasts and fans of alternate histories. You will never look at the space race the same way again.

Some novels are masterpieces of world building and detail, with page after luxurious page of topography and wardrobe. Sometimes, the world can be so elaborate that it overtakes the story and any questions that story might ask. A great storyteller knows what to tell us and what to leave out, and a great novelist knows when the book should be short.

The Parade, the latest compelling tale from Dave Eggers, is a short book, but not at the expense of anything it needs to function as a taut, direct and lean narrative. There’s not an ounce of fat on this book, and that makes it both inviting and the kind of novel that will linger in your brain for hours, even days, after you’ve read it.

Eggers sets his tale in a nameless country just coming out of a painful civil war. Two men, who refer to themselves by numbers rather than names to simplify their relationship, have been hired to pave a road that serves as both a symbolic and literal unifier of the country. It’s a simple job, largely automated thanks to sophisticated machinery, but the two men approach it very differently. One is businesslike, Spartan and committed to keeping to his schedule without any complications, while the other is carefree and eager to take in the culture. As the road project marches along and their journey becomes complicated by their conflicting personalities, the novel asks us to ponder the dueling ideas of isolation and immersion in a foreign land, and how much is too much of either.

The novel is sparse, free of proper names and major geographic and political details because it doesn’t need them. In deliberate, measured prose, Eggers marches his characters down the road toward uncertainty, building tension and conflict until the novel’s complex and thoughtful climax. The purposeful vagueness makes the novel feel timeless and universal, while Eggers’ way of pouring on the emotional details when it really counts makes it haunting.

The Parade is a tight, thrilling, brisk read that will make you ponder your place in the world.

BookPage starred review, February 2019

Imagine that the world never transitioned out of the ice age, but humanity’s long history has stayed more or less the same. To get through the winter, humans hibernate. Within this world, all the great artists, writers, historical figures, Shakespearean characters and Grecian myths endure, but they are reframed within an alternate reality that centers on humanity’s 16 weeks of sleep.

The pharmaceutical company HiberTech has developed a drug that allows humans to sleep dreamlessly through the winter, expending 30 percent less of their bodies’ hibernal fat reserves and requiring less strenuous preparation for the “Hib.” This comes with a caveat: One in every 3,000 who take the drug doesn’t quite wake up. Referred to as Nightwalkers, these unlucky people appear to have some vestige of their past lives rattling around, but their consciousnesses are nowhere to be seen. HiberTech has been developing methods to rewrite what’s left of the Nightwalkers’ consciousnesses in order to “redeploy” them. After all, one in 3,000 makes for good business.

A select few humans don’t hibernate, including Charlie Worthing, who joins the Winter Consulate to help keep the rest of humanity safe during the four months of winter. Charlie soon finds himself escorting a Nightwalker to Sector 12 in northern Wales to claim a bounty from HiberTech’s headquarters—and to follow up on rumors of a viral dream.

As Charlie is pulled deeper into a mystery he hadn’t meant to sign up for, readers are looped into a tale of dreamers, thieves and an elusive, mythical creature called the Gronk who folds its victims’ laundry, collects severed pinkies and has a strong preference for Rodgers and Hammerstein show tunes. 

Jasper Fforde is in fine form in his 14th novel, stringing along this adventure with wry wit, a sometimes-bonkers plot and a joke that takes a hundred pages to sneakily find its punchline. If not for the absurdity of the tale, Early Riser could’ve easily been a mere allegory of the dangers of global warming and Big Pharma. But what matters most is the nature of humanity, as empathy saves the day, and our good guy has no reason to wonder just how good he is.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.