Fiction 
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At the beginning of Savaş’s lean and heavy-hitting novel, the narrator faces a “moment of panic” with her partner: they’ve decided to put down roots, having spent the past several years living far from their respective homelands. The story, framed as an apartment search, blossoms into an indelible meditation on the meaning of home.
The year’s best novel of a woman on the edge centers on a New York City high school English teacher in exile from Palestine, where her parents died years earlier in a car crash. As she subjects her body and her apartment to compulsive cleaning rituals, obsesses over the city’s filth, and deviates wildly from her school’s curriculum, the narrative builds to a wickedly funny joke about the currency of trauma stories.
Stunning in its beauty and brutality, Mexican poet Mendoza’s saga follows two soldiers from opposing sides of a war who become lovers after meeting on a battlefield. The imagistic prose calls to mind the films of Alejandro Jodorowski, while interludes of oral storytelling evoke the author’s Indigenous heritage. The result is an unforgettable new twist on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo.
Thomas follows up his acclaimed memoir, Sink, with a brilliant stream-of-consciousness narrative about a paramedic working in the emergency room of a Philadelphia hospital. As the narrator, Joseph, receives a series of battered and bloodied patients, he takes in the city’s violence, reflects on his time in the Army, and reckons with the demands of his needy family, all while going broke. It’s a tour de force.
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In this blistering bildungsroman, a young man works on an Obama-like candidate’s presidential campaign in New York City. Cunningham, now a writer for the New Yorker, worked for the real Obama back in 2008, so it’s a treat to get these glimpses behind the curtain. But what thrills the most is seeing the way Cunningham so perfectly applies his chops as a critic to his descriptions of politics as performance.
Marxist purveyor of literary smut? Overrated romance author? With success comes detractors, but no matter what labels people throw at Rooney, her work stands as some of the most arresting contemporary fiction. Her latest, a compulsive tale of two brothers saddled with grief over their father’s recent death and struggling to make sense of their relationships with women, more than holds up to scrutiny.
Price, one of the best writers ever to take on New York City, calls back to his masterpiece Lush Life, once again taking inspiration from a deadly event and casting the story against a broad canvas of urban life. Every detail in this one, about the victims of a tenement collapse in Harlem and those drawn to the disaster, is written with laser-like precision.
As tensions mount between a local conservationist and a logger in 1970s Montana, Ted Kaczynski’s new neighbor gets caught in the middle. Meanwhile, Ted, an eccentric hermit motivated by his hatred of modern life, carries on the terror campaign that will eventually see him brought to justice as the Unabomber. Loskutoff’s deeply considered novel of ideas has the pacing of a thriller, and its heartbreaking ending is impossible to shake.
Hollinghurst trains his famously exquisite and exacting prose onto the life of aging gay actor Dave Winn. Half Burmese, half British, Dave was bullied at boarding school and typecast throughout his career, and now faces a new form of ugliness in Brexit-era xenophobia. Hollinghurst’s achievement is in crafting Dave with a deep sense of dignity, showing how his hero has lived a good life despite adversity.
Many novelists have drawn from Covid-19’s world-changing effects, but it’s Uruguayan writer Trías who best captures the pandemic’s strain on interpersonal relationships and the melancholia-inducing loss of a way of life. She does so with the story of a deadly epidemic spawned by toxic algae, combining sobering ecofiction with nightmarish dystopian elements for an unforgettable speculative novel.
Aboriginal Australian author Wright fires on all cylinders in her latest epic, which stands alongside Carpentaria as one of her masterworks. Among the many threads of this polyphonic saga of climate change and generational oppression is the story of Cause Man Steel, who sets out to save Australia by gathering millions of feral donkeys for use as transport.
Satire is alive and well, as evidenced by Tulathimutte’s flamboyant collection. One protagonist takes to an incel message board after failing to convince women he’s a feminist. Another sabotages his first potentially serious relationship with a man out of fear he’ll be rejected for his kink. A throbbing heart beats at the center of the hilarity and ribaldry, making this irresistible.
Mukasonga, long known for her portrayals of the Rwandan genocide, took up the intersection of tribal myths and Christianity with her previous novel, Kibogo. She masters the theme with this story of a feminist and anti-racist Pentacostal cult in early-20th-century Rwanda under Belgian rule. Her depictions of spiritual visions, injustice, and superstition are by turns beautiful, stirring, and wickedly funny.
The best autofiction has an argument to make. Greenwell’s, an intimate medical narrative about a poet’s sudden debilitating pain and invasive testing during a weeks-long hospital stay, doubles as a blistering treatise on the inadequacies and indignities of American healthcare. What makes it shine is Greenwell’s elegant prose, in which he sustains one sinuous thought after another throughout the narrator’s harrowing experiences.
In Mengestu’s wonderful novel, told in a hypnotic recursive structure, an Ethiopian American journalist explores his identity and lineage. The action takes place over three days, but the narrator ranges freely over decades of memories, guided at times by what might be the ghost of his biological father. It’s a fascinating and immersive blend of rumination and fabulism.
Sahota frames his perfectly layered working-class drama around an election. For factory employee Nayan, the union is his life, but he’s opposed in his run for general secretary by a woman of Indian descent who works in retail, and their clash fuels meaty intersectional disquisitions. As election day looms, readers won’t be able to put this down.
Among the many spine-chilling and crafty conceits in Enriquez’s collection is the “ghost pandemic” plaguing a Buenos Aires neighborhood in “My Sad Dead,” where innocent victims of violent crime haunt the narrator. Enriquez’s nimble style, handily rendered in English by McDowell, extends to incisive body horror and troubling generational trauma. It’s intriguing and disquieting in equal measure.
If no unhappy families are alike, there’s no end to the ways of portraying one on the page. Messud, drawing on her own family history, brilliantly succeeds in this multigenerational story of a pied-noir clan’s exodus from Algeria during the war of independence. As they scatter around the globe, Messud pores over their resentments and secrets without a hint of sentimentality.
This razor-sharp Irish noir begins with a loner unwittingly playing host to drug-dealing kidnappers and their innocent bounty, the teen brother of an associate who owes them money. It expands to so much more, though, as Barrett deploys deep psychological realism to plumb for the truth of how each of his characters ended up where they did.
Stefánsson’s magnificent opus glows with the magic of the aurora borealis. It takes place in Iceland’s Westfjords, where a man who’s lost much of his long-term memory begins his search for answers in a church. From there, Stefánsson unspools a vivid set of stories of people on the precipice of change, which cohere into an endlessly pleasurable narrative of self-discovery.
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