1. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new voice.
2. The Last Karankawas by Kimberly Garza
A blazing and kaleidoscopic debut about a tight-knit community of Mexican and Filipino American families on the Texas coast from a voice you won’t soon forget.
3. Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch
As rising waters—and an encroaching police state—endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a “carrier” travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history.
4. Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain.
5. Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma
What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? A new creation by the author of Severance, Bliss Montage crashes through our carefully built mirages.
6. A Dream of a Woman by Casey Plett
An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.
7. Jollof Rice And Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stores by Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
Popular Nigerian author Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi makes her American debut with this dazzling novel which explores her homeland’s past, present, and possible future through the interconnected stories of four fearless globe-trotting women.
8. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm: A Novel by Laura Warrell
Passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, jazz and soul: a provocative debut novel about the perennial temptations of dangerous love, told by the women who love Circus Palmer—trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man—as they ultimately discover the power of their own voices.
9. Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman
A whirlwind romance between an eccentric archivist and a grieving widow explores what it means to be at home in your own body. Dead Collections is a wry novel full of heart and empathy, that celebrates the journey, the difficulties and joys, in finding love and comfort within our own bodies.
10. Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson
A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.
11. My Government Means To Kill Me: A Novel by Rasheed Newson
Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of political and social reckoning.