Set on a future Mars, the story follows a lowborn miner who infiltrates the ranks of the ruling elite by assuming a false identity.

Janet Mock recounts her path to womanhood from childhood through young adulthood, focusing on the realities of growing up transgender and multiracial in Hawaii and negotiating family, community, and medical systems.

Set before and after a fictional, devastating influenza pandemic, the book traces several connected people — including actors who tour small settlements — as they navigate loss, survival, and the persistence of art.

A small, remote English setting hosts a tightly observed family story in which religious rites, interpersonal strain, and mysterious occurrences create sustained unease.

A fictional first-person memoir presenting the life and travels of Estebanico (Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori), a Moroccan enslaved man who survives the Narváez expedition and recounts his experience in the New World.

Journalistic nonfiction that documents a contemporary, human-caused mass extinction by surveying past mass die-offs, profiling particular species losses, and reporting from scientific sites and researchers.

A nonfiction letter from Ta‑Nehisi Coates to his teenage son that explains what it feels like to be Black in the United States.

Two narrative strands span deep time: one traces an artificial-intelligence–guided project to terraform a world where Portia labiata spiders evolve into a complex civilization; the other follows humans aboard an interstellar ark leaving an ecologically collapsed Earth in search of a home.

A literary mystery shaped by old films and the archival traces they leave behind: a narrator follows production records, stills, and fragments of silent cinema to reconstruct a troubling past and the people connected to it.

A 2015 collection of short stories in which ghosts and the supernatural intersect with everyday lives. Each tale stages encounters—personal, domestic, or communal—where lingering grief, past wrongs, or unresolved ties create eerie, unsettling situations that reshape characters' present decisions.

A first-person, essayistic account that traces an author's experiences around pregnancy, partnership, and family while weaving in philosophical and theoretical reflections. The work observes intimate domestic moments alongside questions about gender, identity, and what it means to make a family in contemporary life.

On a world made dangerous by recurring, civilization-shattering climate events called "Fifth Seasons," communities live under constant threat of seismic and social collapse.

A detailed biography of Alexander von Humboldt that follows his formative years, major expeditions—especially in Latin America—and his intellectual effort to present nature as an interconnected system.

An ordinary-seeming encounter between strangers escalates into a plotted decision about murder and consequence. The setup focuses on characters who trade confidences and proposals that test ethics and self-interest, then follow the fallout as allegiances and truth become unreliable.

A ragged group raised inside a mysterious library that holds strange powers must confront secrets about their teacher, the library’s rules, and the wider world beyond.

An ethnographic study of matsutake mushrooms and the people and places shaped by their global trade. The author follows harvesters, middlemen, buyers, and landscapes to show how a single wild commodity links local ecological disturbance, precarious livelihoods, and transnational markets.

A first-person narrator from a small Black community near Los Angeles stands before the Supreme Court and reflects on the chain of incidents that led him there, including provocative attempts to respond to historic racial injustice in his hometown.

A firsthand account of encounters with octopuses that uses field observation and scientific context to investigate octopus behavior and signs of consciousness. The book links specific animal interactions to accessible explanations from marine biology to consider how octopuses think, sense, and relate to humans.

An anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole embedded in the South Vietnamese army, recounts life after the fall of Saigon while living among a South Vietnamese exile community in the United States.

Set in a near-future American Southwest devastated by prolonged drought, the novel follows characters entangled in fights over scarce water and the policies, mercenaries, and markets that secure it.

A compact English-set tale shaped by a disappearance and the effort to reconstruct what happened. The narrative assembles documents, testimony, and close third-person focus to press on how absence reshapes memory, suspicion, and local rumor.

Set in British-ruled Kolkata, the novel focuses on a detective-style investigation that unfolds within the political and social complexities of colonial India. A central inquiry—criminal in nature—pressures characters to confront local power structures, cultural differences, and the legal realities of the period.

An illicit kiss at a 1960s christening fractures two marriages and eventually results in a blended family. Over roughly fifty years the novel follows six children whose summers and lives intersect, tracing how one adult mistake reshapes relationships, loyalties, and personal trajectories across decades.

A multi-generational family saga tracing the legacies of slavery and migration across several branches of one extended lineage. Each short chapter follows a descendant in a different time and place, showing how historical violence and displacement shape personal lives across generations.