Geri Lipschultz’s Grace Before the Fall is a book of madness and wonders. The foreword, by John Irving, invites the reader to think of the book as “magical realism meets Alice in Wonderland.” But magical realism is grounded in realism in ways that Grace Before the Fall is not and doesn’t aspire to be. This…

In this era of bite-sized attention spans, certain novels remind you that it’s worth appreciating, from time to time, the distinctive power of the form. Along with the television series, where writers have resources to probe extended storylines and complex characters, the novel is well suited to negotiating our stickiest quandaries. The Nights are Quiet…

Tidal Lock, Lindsay Hill’s second novel, might just as easily be called a commonplace book or a work of long-form  prose poetry. Essay, story, case study, character sketch, or something in between, what Tidal Lock offers is undeniably beautiful and haunting. The novel is at once an elegy to consciousness overwhelmed by grief and a…

Simone in Pieces tells the story of Simone Lerrante, a Belgian war orphan and child refugee. Her story unfolds through multiple points of view, shifting between the Simone and those whose lives intersect with hers. These shifting perspectives invite the reader to build their own understanding of her, piece by piece, in a process that…

Hailed in 1983 by Italo Calvino as “a classic of contemporary Italian literature,” Daniele del Giudici’s A Fictional Inquiry, recently published for the first time in English, consists of a mundane plot blanketed in dreamlike haze. Illustrating the inexplicable strangeness of living in an uncertain political landscape, del Giudice transforms a straightforward story into a…

In 1999, as Macau teeters on the edge of its handover from Portugal to China, an assassin named Kotter interrogates Breughel, a failed novelist, in a grimy room tucked away in a dingy alley. Kotter is looking for Gloria Vancouver, Breughel’s lover, who has embezzled a large sum of money from a shadowy international syndicate.…

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…