So many good books! Initially I was going to narrow the list a little, but I couldn't figure out a good heuristic for keeping some and removing others.
The following is only the first sentence or so from the Publisher's Weekly review, and a link to the full PW review.
Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
Millet follows up Sweet Lamb of Heaven with a lean, ironic allegory of climate change and biblical comeuppance. A group of friends, successful “artsy and educated types,” plan an “offensively long reunion” at a summer house “built by robber barons in the 19th century,” somewhere on the East Coast. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781324005032
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The sequel to Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride filled with violence, hidden identity, and meditations on whether the colonized can ever be free. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780802157065
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Mandel’s wonderful novel (after Station Eleven) follows a brother and sister as they navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt. Settings include British Columbia’s coastal wilderness, New York City’s fashionable neighborhoods and corporate headquarters, a container ship in international waters, and a South Carolina prison. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780525521143
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
O’Farrell (This Must Be the Place) concocts an outstanding masterpiece of Shakespearean apocrypha in this tale of an unnamed bard’s family living in Stratford-upon-Avon while his star is rising in London. In 1596, 11-year-old Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith, comes down with a sudden, severe illness. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780525657606
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman) delivers another genius work of radical historical fiction. Libertie Sampson, a freeborn Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, is pushed by her mother, a doctor, to follow in her footsteps. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616207014
The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
Literary critic Smallwood debuts with the brilliant story of a young academic powering through her existential dread. Dorothy languishes in “adjunct hell” at a university in New York City, teaching up to four literature and writing courses per semester (including a course she designed titled “Writing Apocalypse”), while her affable boyfriend helps pay the bills from her two therapists. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593229897
Memorial by Bryan Washington
In Washington’s debut novel (after the collection Lot), the fractures in a couple’s relationship span from Houston, Tex., to Osaka, Japan. Ben, a day care teacher, lives with his cook boyfriend, Mike, in Houston’s slowly gentrifying Third Ward. When Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Houston from Japan with plans to stay at Ben and Mike’s place, awkwardness ensues. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593087275
Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz
Northern Florida looms large over the 11 stories that comprise Moniz’s smart debut collection, a comingling of themes of adolescent discovery, family strain, and temptation’s dangerous appeal. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780802158154
My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee
Lee’s action-packed picaresque (after On Such a Full Sea) chronicles how an ordinary New Jersey college student ended up consorting with international criminals. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781594634574
The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
This is a first novel, but I hope it took years and years to write since it is so powerful and beautiful. It is an antebellum story of a flourishing Mississippi plantation some people refer to as “Nothing” and others call “Elizabeth,” the name of the owner’s mother. This is a love story of two gay enslaved men, Isaiah and Samuel (not their original African names), who’ve been assigned to look after the horses and who work together in perfect harmony in the barn. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593085684
Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman
Schulman’s wonderful, intricate novel (following Three Weeks in December) is set in the palpably near future. When the superstar of the biological research world, 33-year-old Frankie Burke, joins the team at an ape foundation in the Midwest, she thinks things are finally falling into place. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781609454371
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Bennett (The Mothers) explores a Louisiana family’s navigation of race, from the Jim Crow era through the 1980s, in this impressive work. The Vignes twins, Desiree and Stella, were born and raised in Mallard, La., the slave-born founder of which imagined a town with “each generation lighter than the one before.” https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780525536291
When Nietzsche Wept by Irving Yalom
This talky first novel by psychotherapist Yalom ( Love's Executioner ) is set in 1882 Vienna, where Joseph Breuer, an eminent physician and mentor of Sigmund Freud, has applied his recently discovered talking cure to a woman afflicted with multiple symptoms of hysteria. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780465091720
