Varied as the “sinners” in this collection, the stories in this debut collection are anything but small. With a strong voice and engaging characters, Sohail writes stories that are frightening, funny, wistful, and bold. Her protagonists are usually female, and she’s particularly concerned with their liberation—and with the pitfalls they encounter on their way. The…

Our editors share a few of the most memorable books of the year

Perfect Happiness by You-Jeong Jeong, translated into English from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert, weaves together the perspectives of different characters close to Yuna Shin, focusing on their knowledge of the events surrounding the disappearance of Yuna’s ex-husband, Joon-Young Seo. Altogether this thriller is a chilling look at a sociopath’s psychological abuse and its effect…

In 1962, temperatures plummeted across the United Kingdom, ushering in one of the country’s coldest winters in nearly two hundred years. Rivers froze. Some places were buried in more than twenty feet of snow. The extreme cold persisted for months, a period that came to be known as the Big Freeze. Anbara Salam’s The Salvage—a…

What does it mean to see yourself only through the eyes of others? Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s gripping new novel is a deceptively straightforward story of amnesia, betrayal, and forgiveness in which the narrator, having suffered a concussion, has lost all memory of himself. Joe knows how the world works—he can Google, buy cigarettes, recognize accents—but…

Tamar Shapiro’s Restitution is a thought-provoking exploration of how personal pain cannot be resolved through retribution but may be to some extent assuaged by empathy. The novel follows two siblings, Kate and Martin; although they grew up in Illinois, their mother Lena fled East Germany in 1953. When the Berlin Wall falls, Lena suggests that…

In 1958, the diverse population of Amdo—one of the three Tibetan regions, spanning modern-day Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan, and home to Tibetans, Han Chinese, Hui Muslims, and Mongols——rose up against the Chinese Communist Party in response to the party’s attempt at collectivization. The Red Wind Howls tells of the rebellion’s aftermath, during which Tibetans suffered…

The Shadow of the Mammoth is the latest of Fabio Morábito’s work to be translated into English, and his second collection of short prose. In it, he brings together eighteen short stories, anecdotes, essays, and fables; though the genres vary, all are thought experiments driven by unusual premises, with unexpected outcomes. A labyrinthine fun house,…

In “Domestication,” one of the twenty-eight stories in Lauren D. Woods’s smart and memorable collection, The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, two adolescents play in an abandoned house that’s surrounded by coyotes. The pair pretend to be married, although the unnamed protagonist qualifies that she and Christopher “aren’t in love and don’t want to be.”…

This short novel will offend some readers. Strange, because anyone who reads past the dedication should know what they’ve picked up: “For all the hot queer sluts. You know who you are.” Still, pearls will be clutched. If it were up to Rebekah, the book’s emotional-vampire protagonist, those pearls would also be twisted around an…

Adolescence is pervaded by a sense of waiting, its long days and longer nights blanketed in the lethargy of teenage time. In her debut novel, Alice Chadwick captures this sensation vividly and compassionately with a story set on a single sultry day near the end of the school year.  Two events erupt in the book’s…

Set somewhere between the undifferentiated everywhere of girlhood and the specificity of contemporary New York’s art world, Lonesome Ballroom is a delightfully ambitious satire of the cultural legacy of femininity. Starting with a scene that’s a caricature of domestic discontent—upended plates of duck à l’orange, accusations of infidelity—the book balloons into an exploration of one…