Fiction 
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2012
In this gritty novel about the dehumanizing horse-trading of modern-day slavery and arranged marriage, the protagonist puts deformed people to work as beggars on the steps of Hindu temples while scheming to marry off his oldest daughter. Jeyamohan’s depictions of grotesque behavior evoke the surreally ecstatic mood of such dark-hearted classics as José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night.
Krilanovich tells a wonderfully strange and slyly contemporary tale of Gilded Age California. Its wayward teen heroine, Paulette, thinks she’s found a chance at a new life by shacking up with the boho scion of a robber baron, until her tramp father shows up with a band of anti-capitalist revolutionaries. There’s nothing quite like this incendiary novel.
Inspired by a late 20th-century Medellín film critic and priest, Colombian writer Abad’s novel brims with humanity. Luis awaits a heart transplant at age 50. Meanwhile, the narrator, his decades-long friend, tells of Luis’s persuasive passion for cinema and both men’s spiritual devotion, in the process showing with heartrending clarity how their lives’ deepest meaning derives from friendship.
It’s a familiar story—coastal elites move to the country—but Mason turns it on its head in this seriously funny tale of a California family arriving in Vermont by showing more interest in the locals. Each are fascinating human beings, not objects of curiosity, even those who turn out to be part of an occult group of hollow-Earthers.
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Mathis aces a range of tones in this remarkably accomplished debut collection. “Girlhood Lessons,” an athem of resilience, begins with the narrator’s matter-of-fact descriptions of her abusive family’s double standards for girls. “Empty Apartment” is a sly ghost story about an English teacher preparing to lecture on Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” All the stories are worthy of attention.
This understated and remarkably compressed novel opens with Magnolia, a 30-something daughter of Haitian immigrants, sheltering in place during a mass shooting. The ordeal floods her with grief, and the novel swells into a moving reflection on everyday violence and the tenuous nature of home, not only in America but in Haiti, where Magnolia’s parents have repatriated.
Mew, a London-based writer, returns to his native Dublin, where he’s swept up in a mysterious revolt. Ridgway sets the stage with wondrous fantastical and dreamlike details—Mew’s means of travel was a magical urban turnstile, which transports pedestrians between the two cities—and packs the narrative with sharp ideas about Dublin’s literary legacy and history of revolutionary politics.
Oates continues her spectacular winning streak after Butcher and Fox with a collection of stories that stand with her greatest work. Take the title entry, about a ridiculous middle-aged suburbanite hoping to make a “teenaged mistress” out of a family friend. Like many of the entries, it’s taut with tension and veers in a surprising but inevitable direction.
Not only is Nunez a sharply funny and fiercely intelligent writer, she’s a remarkable storyteller. Her wide-ranging tales hold the reader in her grip, even as she flits from one digression to another, because she’s always deepening a theme or honing an idea, whether about people’s instinct to philosophize or the gravitational pull of deviant behavior.
At the center of this bighearted novel of working-class life in Portland, Ore., is the mutually healing bond between a relentlessly bullied eight-year-old boy and his next-door neighbor, a jilted housepainter. Never treacly or sensational, Vlautin’s authentic story has the reader caring about its characters as if they were the reader’s own found family.
Cusk’s portrait of an eternally youthful and maddeningly ethereal movie star has become one of the most misunderstood novels in some time. Far from an attack on a real-life celebrity, the story, about an aging author writing about an unnamed actor, is a sly and boldly weird meditation on fiction, mortality, and personhood.
Two teen girls run away to 1980s Los Angeles in this thrilling novel. After one of them throws herself into becoming a porn star, they’re driven apart. With an insightful two-part narrative that revisits these events decades later, Rowbottom offers a nuanced view—from sobering to titillating and back—of her characters’ attempts to empower themselves.
Copious footnotes, a psychiatrist’s frame story, a ghastly crime—yes, this archly told novel is coded by the DNA of fiction by Vladimir Nabokov and David Foster Wallace. But it’s very much doing its own thing with the sprawling story of an Indian family broken apart by a mother’s filicide, incarceration, and subsequent new life in a Nebraska Christian commune.
With the irreverence of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the narrative pyrotechnics of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, Johnson’s novel doesn’t make things easy. Its story, doled out in conflicting versions, follows a Black cop whose partner kills a white teen. Though the novel causes no shortage of discomfort, it’s completely worth the effort.
The Nigerian short story writer’s lyrical debut novel takes a measured view of the desire for motherhood and its unspoken burdens. The themes are enhanced by a visionary and subtly dystopian conceit involving the links between a spate of suicides by pregnant women in Lagos and an exploitative urban development scheme for the city’s elite.
This beautiful novel functions as a dialogue of the unsayable between a father and daughter. Sufien, a Palestinian cab driver in the U.S., escaped the 1948 Nakba as a young boy. Now, decades later, raising his daughter, Layla, with his Jewish wife, he still nurses a longtime dream of becoming a writer. In Assadi’s hands, his story comes to brilliant life.
A mania-inducing new star, a Hamlet-like dream, and murderous metalheads drove the three previous entries in the Morning Star series. This one, a Faustian tale about a famous photographer threatened by possible revelations of a dastardly youthful deed, is the best yet. Packed with insights into Marlowe’s play, Knausgaård’s page-turner has loads to say about the cost of ambition.
Kawakami preserves what was so arresting in her earlier work—alluring depictions of Tokyo nightlife, women’s complex friendships, and acute loneliness—and blows them out into a sweeping noir. Its story of two women who open a Tokyo bar is woven with dense and fascinating layers, after one of the women learns that the other has been charged with kidnapping.
Added to the pantheon of fiction about literary obsessives—think 2666—is this fascinating metafictional novel about a Victorian novel by Englishwoman Eliza May Drayden, who invites comparisons to the Brontës. Blended with Daanje’s narrative of Drayden are long sections devoted to the critics and readers who build their lives around her work. It’s endlessly stimulating.
Lee’s deceptively simple story of a 10-year-old Korean immigrant’s introduction to the ways of the world not only skewers the model minority myth, but it pokes fun at the conventions of a bildungsroman, leaving the reader to join with the middle-aged narrator in recognizing how little can be learned from one’s own experiences.
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