Fiction 
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Tawada concludes her dystopian trilogy about a Japanese expat searching for her lost homeland in a world where Japan has literally vanished from maps with a stellar finale. Loyal readers and newcomers alike will savor the closer’s mix of whimsical Wes Anderson–style charm and piercing insights into authoritarianism, xenophobia, and climate change.
This linked collection constitutes one of the best works of fiction about life after Covid-19. Millet writes with exhilarating freedom about people’s anxieties and contradictions, as when her characters confront the tension between their left-leaning worldviews and their own self-interest. Not only are the stories revelatory; they’re completely hilarious.
What begins as a moody forensic murder mystery morphs into a brilliant millennia-spanning saga about a scientist who examines the well-preserved body of a woman found in a Northern England bog. North intriguingly ties both women’s stories together as they clash with friends and foes while pursuing their ambitions.
Over the course of this compassionate and quick-witted narrative, an artist copes with her husband’s decline from Lewy body dementia. With this novel and its marvelous predecessor, Rabbits for Food, about a woman’s mental breakdown, Kirshenbaum establishes herself as one of the finest contemporary writers of illness.
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What’s a writer to do when her novel in progress, about snail conservation and mail-order brides in Ukraine, is interrupted by the Russian invasion? For Maria Reva, the protagonist of this scintillating metafiction, the answer is to begin writing about the war. In the real Reva’s hands, the solution feels at once liberating and reverent.
Szalay delivers a lean and muscular novel about a man who leads a guilt-filled life after accidentally killing someone as a teen. It builds to a gut-wrenching finale, which stays with the reader as much as the author’s indelible portrait of a man who’s simply trying to live.
With her trademark deep moral clarity and eloquent prose, Oates transcends the trappings of dark academia and police procedurals to spin the story of a pedophile teacher and his untimely death. Along the way, she offers a fierce examination of the predator’s enablers and the unraveling of his twisted self-justification.
There’s plenty of god and sex in Raymond’s beautiful novel, about a spiritually minded nature writer and his affair with a married woman. What ties it all together, though, is an affecting and complicated portrayal of the friendship between the writer and his lover’s husband, which leads to one surprise after another.
Haynes’s gimlet-eyed collection amounts to a searing examination of the Black respectability politics shaping his characters’ families and communities. No good deed goes unpunished in this volume, and whether the stories’ moments of confrontation and disillusion elicit circumspection or rage on the part of the protagonists, Haynes’s writing is thoroughly cathartic.
One of the most undeservedly overlooked books of the year, this collection blends gritty realism and allegorical fantasy with profoundly affecting stories of men and boys and their yearning for acceptance, either in contemporary Wales or the depths of the ocean among a herd of horny seahorses.
With this portrait of a nail salon, Thammavongsa crafts a mischievous and resonant novel drawn from the frame’s negative space: the immigrant workers’ native language, in which they exchange bawdy jokes and pass judgment on their unsuspecting English-speaking clients. It’s a fascinating view into lives that remain invisible to others.
Daanje unfurls a staggering modernist work of love, guilt, and the slippery nature of identity. It takes place in the years after WWI, when a woman recognizes an amnesiac veteran as her long-lost husband. The story grows increasingly complex as the veteran wonders if he should trust his wife’s version of the past.
Folk transcends her novel’s bizarre conceit—a lowly San Francisco tech worker pursues her sexual attraction to airplanes by flying on them as much as possible, hoping to be forever united with one in a crash—by shaping it into a universal story of modern love and exploitative labor.
A divided America provides the inspiration for Walter’s exciting, redemptive, and tragic novel of men armed with guns and the desire to set things right. It opens with an isolated retiree’s well-meaning but misguided quest to save his grandchildren from a Christian nationalist militia, and it builds to a moving depiction of a fractured family’s reconciliation.
Howell’s debut collection blooms with harrowing beauty. In spare and candid stories about Black women and girls’ desire, turmoil, and misguided attempts at self-improvement, Howell explores her characters’ poignant compromises and self-erasure. The imagery is unforgettable, as when a woman’s use of an anti-aging cream turns her into a little girl.
McCann’s novel of a journalist’s adventures aboard an underwater cable repair ship off West Africa explores the lingering appeal of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as the reporter compares the colonial trade routes depicted by Conrad to the cables that connect the modern world. It’s a page-turner packed with ideas.
Brown takes on class tensions and the rise of populist grifters in this sly and ambitious satire. It begins with a magazine article about an illegal rave at a country estate and develops into a nuanced story of the fledgling writer’s motivations and the famous controversial columnist who exploits her.
The Nobel winner offers a much more accessible but no less stunning story than the one found in his demanding Septology. After a bachelor makes his annual voyage from his rural village to the city of Bergen, he has an unexpected encounter with his childhood sweetheart. From there, the magical novel grows increasingly surprising and poignant.
With this quest narrative set in ancient Polynesia, Johnson raises profound questions about the nature of oral history and storytelling, and the ways in which a person’s cultural mythology shapes who they are. The narrative follows a girl’s mission to save her island’s people from starvation, and it transports readers with its evocative detail and heart-stopping drama.
Flournoy’s empathetic follow-up to The Turner House follows four friends from their early 20s into middle age. Holding together the free-ranging novel, which delves into the housing crisis, campus politics, climate change, Covid-19, and much more, are the women’s lasting friendships and the author’s astute depictions of their rich inner lives.
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