It is easy to act as if fiction and history were separate. But they cannot be completely divided. Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos and Oksana Lutsyshyna's Ivan and Phoebe help readers connect with time past.
Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans is a sexually-explicit, cynical novel about young people striving. Such Kindness, by Andre Dubus III, grapples with injury, addiction, masculinity and loneliness.
While not a new concept, Garrett Neiman makes distinct contributions to the conversation; as a rich white man, he has insider's access to that population — and doesn't shy away from self-indictment.
A young student in East Berlin falls in love with a much older writer in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a love story and a rich portrait of people watching their country disappear.
In their latest book CROWNED: Magical Folk and Fairy Talesfrom the Diaspora, Kahran and Regis Bethencourt retell fairy and folk tales with Black children as the main characters.
Sarah Viren's memoir, drawing from two life episodes, has the page-turning quality of a thriller. But instead of solving mysteries, she untangles philosophical tensions in pursuit of what is real.
Isabel Allende's latest is a tale of two child immigrants — a boy who escapes Nazi occupied Vienna in 1938 and a girl who escapes military gangs in El Salvador in 2019 — and their shared experience.
Karin Boye's novel is an outlier in that it was authored by a woman and, though narrated by a man, still expresses interest in women's inner life and acknowledges the subtleties of sexism.
S.A. Cosby's latest is a dark, wildly entertaining crime novel with religious undertones — and one that tackles timely issues while never losing itself or sounding preachy.
Despite its weighty, multi-tiered approach — this is not, on multiple levels, an easy read — Darrin Bell's debut graphic memoiris difficult to put down.
Megan Abbott's Beware the Woman centers on a pregnant newlywed who finds herself isolated in her husband's family cottage. Katie Williams' My Murder is told from the perspective of a murdered woman.
Brandon Taylor deftly explores the idea of youth's possibilities and the constraints of time, space, class and wealth disparities through the intersecting lives university students and townspeople.
