New Literary Fiction To Read This Year

Moving between Pakistan’s dazzling chaotic cities to its lawless feudal countryside, This Is Where the Serpent Lives powerfully evokes contemporary feudal Pakistan, following the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters whose lives are linked through violence and tragedy, triumph, and love. In matters of power and money and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between paths that are moral and just and more worldly choices that allow them to survive in the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their culture.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of I’m Glad My Mom Died comes a sad, funny, thrilling novel about sex, consumerism, class, desire, loneliness, the internet, rage, intimacy, power, and the (oftentimes misguided) lengths we’ll go to in order to get what we want.

In this story of intense friendship and grit, two down-and-out teens escape their lives and chase a different future through rock-climbing — from the New York Times bestselling author of My Absolute Darling. With a magnificent gift for nature writing and a joyful appreciation for the redemptive power of friendship, Gabriel Tallent gives readers a rollicking, adrenaline-filled, and soul-searching novel about risking everything to change your life.

On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, one of our great novelists delivers a playful and profound work about memory, love, and the writer’s endgame.

An electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next.

Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubinstein family, it could go either way … Sharply observed and laced with humor, This Is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters — a big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations — from the bestselling author of Isola.

A powerful, award-winning novel that follows the lives of two women as democracy starts to crumble in Hong Kong. Everyday Movement reveals existential questions that interrupt normal life: Belonging, patriotism, and the meaningfulness of an electoral democracy, as well as the pampering sense of normalcy created by consumerism. Fiery and tender, Leung’s writing captures the heartbreak, turmoil, and rebirth in bearing witness to and engaging with a shattering reality.

Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff’s electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region — from New England to Florida to California — these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: The ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.

In this mesmerizing debut, two enigmatic and unforgettable siblings confront what — and who — they’re willing to sacrifice for their art. Heralding the arrival of an impressive new talent, What You Make of Me lays bare the thin line between success and sacrifice.

A woman’s desperate flight from an Apache raid unfolds into a sweeping tale of the Mexico–U.S. border wars. Part epic, part alt-Western, Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. It weaves past and present, myth and history into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty — and an homage to the spark in us that still thrills to its memory.

A brilliant, sweeping tour de force moving between the U.S. and modern India, following the illicit liaisons, real estate dramas, political ambitions, and mortal betrayals of one prominent Delhi family — from the author of the National Book Award finalist The Association of Small Bombs.

An award-winning international author’s stunning U.S. debut about two estranged friends who are forced to reunite over one feverish weekend and reckon with the choices that tore them apart. Weaving together the friends’ past and present, Strange Girls is an ingenious portrait of a fraught friendship, and an exploration of the ties forged in the intensity of the college experience, and the scars left when they break.

An intense, atmospheric novel about the devastating power of friendship, set against the backdrop of two cataclysmic events.

The intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope.

The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times, and for all time.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls returns with his first stand-alone novel since Chances Are … — a spellbinding page-turner about a crime in a small town that exposes long-held secrets and betrayals among a group of lifelong friends.

Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout’s new novel tells the story of a chance incident that sparks a powerful realization in a beloved teacher’s life — a poignant meditation on loneliness, friendship, parenthood, and the importance of truth in a capsizing world.

A richly drawn, captivating, and endlessly amusing novel of love and subterfuge between a lady’s maid and her clandestine lover, set in the country estates of nineteenth-century England. A deliciously funny, gorgeously detailed, utterly enthralling novel, A Perfect Hand is a glorious novel of class, gender, and England on the cusp of enormous change.

A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind — a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers.

A trio of women bond in friendship as a neighborhood tries to seek justice from a system that has forgotten them. “The Shape of Dreams is a powerful prayer, a novel that indicts the injustice for which there is no quick solution … [It is] a song of furor and tenderness that will leave its mark” (Walter Mosley, bestselling author of the Easy Rawlins series).

From Mieko Kawakami, award-winning author of Breasts and Eggs, comes a bold novel of sacrifice and the tumultuous bonds of sisterhood, set in the gritty Tokyo of the 1990s. A story of enduring friendship and deep betrayal, Sisters in Yellow is a masterpiece of teenage dreams and adult cruelties that confirms Mieko Kawakami as one of the great writers of her generation.

New York City, East Village, 1984. A young woman with the power to see the ghosts of her friends is haunted by the one who refuses to return — a dazzling, big-hearted debut of friendship and community during a time of devastation and defiance.

A sweeping novel about friendship, love, and the lifelong pursuit of art from Dave Eggers, the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle, Hologram for the King, and The Eyes & the Impossible. The novel is a wild and beautiful examination of the rules and market forces of the art world, but chiefly it’s about two friends who believe they can change the world, and bring new meaning to it, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, stay true to their ideals, and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either.

Once again brilliantly combining the lyrical observation of F. Scott Fitzgerald with the laser-bright social satire of Evelyn Waugh, Jay McInerney gives us the stunningly accomplished and profoundly affecting final volume in the tetralogy charting the marriage of Russell and Corrinne Calloway, now in their sixties, against the backdrop of various crises that have bedeviled our society in the past forty years.

From the beloved, award-winning author of the culture-changing hits Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: The tale of a mother and daughter traveling together after the collapse of a marriage and the dissolution of their traditional family structure. Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.