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.
In Everybody Says It’s Everything, Xhenet Aliu returns to the small-town Connecticut setting of her debut novel, Brass, to deliver the story of a family who seem to have little in common with one another.
Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue’s thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel inspired by a real-life railway disaster.
In her thrilling historical novel, The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue takes readers on a doomed train ride at the turn of the 20th century.
Nicole Cuffy takes the fearlessness of her excellent debut, Dances, to a whole new level in O Sinners!, which explores the allure of a California cult.
In The Expert of Subtle Revisions, Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s oddball intellectual characters are buffeted about by all kinds of crazy passions, which have everything to do with the workings of their beautiful minds.
Ghosts and doppelgangers abound in Stuart Nadler’s poignant, ornate tapestry of a novel, which shifts among the perspectives of members of a Jewish family originally from Vienna.
Sameer Pandya’s Our Beautiful Boys is an incisive and thoughtful novel that speaks to contemporary culture and unearths some timeless truths about the good—and bad—kids inside us all.
