Three apparently separate family tragedies — a child's disappearance, a domestic killing, and an inexplicable murder — form the puzzle around a private investigator who reconstructs lives through interviews, documents, and visits.

Six distinct narratives, each written in a different voice and set in a different time and place, are arranged so that echoes between them imply moral and causal connections across eras.

An elderly Congregational minister composes an extended letter to his young son late in life, recounting his own family history, the tensions between pacifism and militant abolitionism in his forebears, and the spiritual convictions that shape his sense of duty and affection.

Set in Laos in the 1970s, an elderly physician with little formal forensic experience is appointed state coroner. He confronts suspicious deaths amid political upheaval and scarce institutional support, and must piece together causes and motives while navigating party politics and local customs.

A multigenerational family story tracking a Bengali couple who relocate to the United States and the next generation raised between two cultures.

A collection of reflective natural-history essays focused on mosses and their place in forest ecosystems. The book links careful field observation of bryophytes to explanations of their biology and roles in plant ecology, while connecting those details to cultural and life-history perspectives about plants.

A U.S. Marshal travels to a remote island hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient who is also a serial killer.

Angela Toussaint returns to her late grandmother’s home in a small Washington town and confronts a legacy of grief, violent history, and supernatural threat tied to that house.

Set in antebellum Virginia, the novel tracks interconnected lives in a county shaped by slavery and unexpected ownership dynamics, including Black Americans who themselves become slaveholders.

Set in a Regency-era social world, the novel follows an adult romantic pairing over a pivotal summer that tests affection, propriety, and personal change.

Set in Victorian-era Britain, the novel follows characters entangled in theft, deception, and social constraint in London. The central pressure revolves around trust and betrayal among people on different rungs of the social ladder, where schemes and personal desires collide and reshape relationships.

Light stages several linked strands: high-tech spacefaring and scientific work, characters wrestling with gender and identity, and a persistent thread involving serial violence. The novel frames these pressures against questions about consciousness, causality, and human meaning across near-future and cosmic contexts.

A multigenerational family saga that traces a Greek-American family's migration, domestic life, and inherited biology which shapes one child's unusual development.

A 15-year-old math-minded narrator who describes his world through exact observations decides to investigate the mystery of a neighbor's dead dog. The investigatory quest exposes family tensions and forces the narrator to navigate social rules and sources of fear while trying to hold to his own systems of logic.

An upper-class girl makes a misjudgment with far-reaching consequences; the novel follows the fallout across pre-war, wartime, and later life, and includes a self-aware reflection on writing and responsibility.

A biographical memoir by Paula Fox that collects memories and impressions from her early life and career as an American novelist. The book orients around formative childhood experiences and episodes from a writer’s life, using anecdote and recollection to sketch how personal history shaped a literary trajectory.

An Indian boy named Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel survives a long sea voyage after a shipwreck and is forced to share a lifeboat with zoo animals, most notably a Bengal tiger.

An aging Midwestern couple prepares for a final family Christmas while their three adult children, each entangled in personal and professional crises, converge around longstanding resentments and private failures.

A nested, epistolary metafiction: an editor-like narrator assembles and annotates a manuscript about a documentary called The Navidson Record, which recounts a family's discovery that their house contains impossible interior spaces.

Set in a near-future, economically collapsed Toronto, the novel follows characters navigating a city left to decay after officials abandon it.

Set around 1959 and the Congo's decolonization era, the novel follows an American missionary household transplanted into a rural African village.

Set across expansive technological futures, the novel follows the emergence and journeys of intelligences—biological, engineered, and fully virtual—grappling with identity, survival, and exploration.

A contemporary marriage is strained when one partner harbors a secret tied to unnatural longevity. The setup places trust, love, and the ethical cost of living beyond normal limits against everyday domestic pressures, with a central tension anchored in secrecy and its consequences for a family and a community.

A nonlinear novel centered on fraternal twins whose childhood in a small Kerala town is shaped by family tensions, the arrival of an outsider cousin, and a social order marked by caste and colonial legacies.