In her debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, Marcom explored the traumatic aftermath of the Armenian genocide through the imagined thoughts and feelings of those left behind. Here, she pens a poetic reflection on deportation, immigration, and the abstract notion of home. The story follows Emilio, a young Guatemalan American college student who is deported and must make his way back to his family in California. Written in the third person, the narrative unfolds through Emilio’s inner thoughts as he moves with bands of immigrants across the landscape of Mexico. Enduring the endless brutality of the terrain, as well as a recurring cycle of violence at multiple stops along the journey, Emilio finds solidarity with his fellow travelers and begins to dissociate from his long-understood identity as an American. Interwoven into each section of the narrative are his memories of the past and his dreams for the future, which slowly evolve into the singular present. Marcom has penned a lyrical mediation on being and becoming, identity and anonymity, and the ambiguity of place.

Powers’s debut novel, The Yellow Birds, a National Book Award finalist, offered a poignant rumination on America’s reverence for patriotism but simultaneous amnesia regarding the lives of deployed soldiers in a story drawn from the author’s own experience as an Iraq War veteran. This second novel, set in Powers’s hometown of Richmond, VA, probes the grip of traumatic memory in the aftermath of the Civil War. While former Confederate soldiers roam the backdrop of this work with conflicting convictions dictating their actions in a newly liberated South, former slaves are navigating the concept of freedom within the lingering structures of oppression. Meanwhile, a former plantation owner tries to harness Reconstruction to his advantage only to discover that redemption will not be his fate. Returning to this land, almost 100 years later, a man born shortly after the end of the war struggles to claim his memories of home. VERDICT A masterly meditation on our unbreakable connection to a world predicated on cyclical violence.

In his debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, Gessen penned a passing nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald with an autobiographical tale of three writers struggling to turn their literary ambitions into a lasting legacy. Similar themes from Gessen’s life emerge here, as the author ruminates on the complexities of his homeland from the perspective of floundering academic and Russian expat Andrei Kaplan. With few job prospects and the high cost of living in New York City, Andrei returns to Moscow, his birthplace, to care for his grandmother, improve his hockey skills, and decide whether the academic life is worth the trouble. Navigating Russian culture as he moves between his grandmother’s recollections of the USSR and his newfound revolutionary friends, he is caught between the ideologies of Putin’s Russia and the Western liberalism that underpinned both his upbringing and his education. When the possibility of a romantic relationship presents itself, Andrei discovers his own narrative paralleling that of Mother Russia: cling to a past that is gone or strive for a future that may never materialize? VERDICT With wit and humor, Gessen delivers a heartwarming novel about the multitudinous winding roads that lead us home.

Standing as silent witnesses to our interweaving genealogies, cyclical wars, and collapsing empires, trees contain our collective history in addition to our climate record. Here, the acclaimed Powers (Orfeo; The Time of Our Singing) employs literary dendrochronology to weave the stories of nine strangers connected through their collective action in preventing a forest from falling to industrial harvesting and ruination. From a chestnut in Iowa to a banyan in Vietnam, trees function as a central theme for each character’s backstory. As a corollary, foliage becomes a multivalent symbol of family struggle, divine intervention, and community. Just as Douglas firs connect their underground root structures to provide mutual support and protection, each character moves across disparate landscapes to find him- or herself joined in solidarity against an unstoppable force of environmental destruction. VERDICT Whereas Powers dissected the human brain’s mysterious capacity to prescind subject from object in his National Book Award—winning The Echo Makers, here he pens a deep meditation on the irreparable psychic damage that manifests in our unmitigated separation from nature.

In his first story collection, Hall of Small Animals, Pierce penned a phenomenological meditation on the ephemeral and recurrent experiences that form the core of human existence. Here, in his debut novel, he reflects on life after death through the prism of quantum physics. A paranormal event on a staircase in town leads Jim Byrd on a journey to uncover the history of the home’s residents and the probability of supernatural phenomena. In this quest, he dabbles in New Age religion, falls in love, loses his father, and stumbles upon the ideas of discredited physicist Sally Zinker, who claims to have built a machine that can access the afterlife. Jim, along with his wife, Annie, eventually tracks down both Sally and the mythic Reunion Machine. Not sure who or what to trust, they both must ultimately weigh the possibility of a multiverse against the risk of vanquishing their accumulated experiences and memories in this one. VERDICT Pierce has a gift for probing the limits of the psychic realm to uncover the benevolence that manifests from metaphysical insight. Truly remarkable.

Perhaps best known for the Booker Prize-winning Schindler’s Ark, released here as Schindler’s List and later adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, Australian novelist Keneally’s literary career spans six prolific decades and more than 30 novels. This book harkens back to both a theme in his first novel, The Place at Whitton, and to his career path before becoming a writer: the Catholic priesthood. The novel opens with Father Frank Docherty in a cab, returning to his hometown of Sydney, Australia, to visit his elderly mother after being sent to Canada for his outspoken views. A terse and confrontational conversation with the cab driver uncovers a sexual abuse scandal centered on the church’s revered defender, Monsignor Leo Shannon. As Docherty identifies the victims and reveals the truth, he begins challenging a hierarchy and power structure that has sanctified and defined his own existence. VERDICT Through the mind of his aggrieved and conflicted protagonist, Keneally pens an unflinching meditation on the ways in which canonical scripture, sacred tradition, and human conscience often coalesce to distort basic moral truths.