A federal police agent comes back to his drought-hit hometown for a friend's funeral and must investigate a family death that the community assumes was a murder-suicide.

A critique of prevailing mid-20th-century urban planning that argues neighborhoods thrive when everyday street life, local commerce, and diverse uses are preserved.

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.

Two adults who already have a shared history confront a choice about whether to become a committed couple while juggling careers and family expectations.

A contemporary romantic story about two strangers who link up for a wedding-related encounter and then contend to whether attraction can turn into an actual relationship amid busy professional lives.

An espionage thriller centered on a woman trained by Russian intelligence to use seduction and deception as tools of recruitment and infiltration.

A first-person memoir recounting the author's migration from El Salvador to the United States as a child. The narrative follows the physical and emotional journey, the dangers and practical hurdles of traveling undocumented, and the ongoing effects of displacement on family and identity.

A midcareer novelist-turned-MFA-teacher recognizes a student’s apparently brilliant plot idea and later faces a career- and conscience-shaped crisis tied to that idea. The setup focuses on intellectual ownership, ambition, and how one striking idea can change a writer’s fortunes and ethical choices.

An orphaned young woman receives sponsorship from an unseen benefactor who sends her to college; she writes regular letters to him detailing her life, opinions, and small rebellions. The letters track her education, friendships, and social adjustments as she negotiates gratitude, independence, and self-definition.

A memoir of a childhood spent in unstable, often impoverished circumstances, told from the author's adult vantage. The account focuses on a family marked by vivid highs and dangerous lows: parental idealism and promises alongside episodes of neglect and homelessness.

Set around a lotus-named pleasure house in historical China, the novel follows women and patrons inside a confined social sphere where personal desire, duty, and power collide.

A government research zone has been sealed off after decades of strange phenomena. A team of four unnamed female specialists enters as the twelfth expedition to survey the area and record observations.

Set in a future ruined city overrun by biotechnology, the story follows a scavenger named Rachel who collects genetic experiments and discarded engineered organisms. The city is dominated by a massive engineered grizzly, and Rachel discovers an unusual sea-anemone–like creature she names Borne.

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

An anonymous group of neighborhood boys recall and try to explain the lives and deaths of five Lisbon sisters in a 1970s Midwestern suburb. The account pieces together small scenes, neighborhood detail, and collective memory to track how ordinary suburban rhythms intersect with profound loss.

A troubled fashion model moves into a large New York brownstone divided into apartments and encounters strange disturbances centered on the building and its top-floor, blind Catholic priest.

This nonfiction work surveys evidence for complex learning, problem-solving, and memory in birds by following field observations and laboratory studies across species.

Thirteen interrelated stories trace a network of people connected to a record executive and his assistant across several decades. The pieces jump in time and viewpoint, following mostly self-destructive characters whose lives turn in unforeseen directions as they age.

A linked memoir of personal and communal loss: the author recounts the deaths of five Black men connected to her across roughly four years and situates those deaths within family history, local conditions, and systemic forces.

A tightly focused, first-person account centered on a Black working-class family in Mississippi as they prepare for and endure Hurricane Katrina.

Mackenzie, a Cree woman, copes with the aftermath of family deaths while her nightmares begin to leave physical traces in waking life.

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

Jill Ker Conway recounts her childhood on a vast sheep station in western New South Wales and the disruptions—most notably drought and her father's death—that forced her family to leave for Sydney.

A first-person account of the year after Joan Didion's husband died, recording the small, persistent thoughts and rituals that accompany sudden bereavement. The narrative tracks how memory, habit, and formal thinking shape a surviving spouse’s attempt to understand loss and the quotidian aftermath of grief.

Set in a farming community, the novel follows how the arrival or actions of a persuasive auctioneer alters local social bonds and everyday life. The central pressure comes from interpersonal influence, suspicion, and the erosion of trust among neighbors.

Four women from parallel worlds — each living under different social rules and gender expectations — come into contact and confront one another's lives. Their meetings force personal reevaluation and stage a sustained feminist interrogation of what 'being a woman' can mean across differing social systems.

A small, stranded community faces a dire survival problem and must decide how to preserve life when resources and choices are scarce. The book stages debates, factions, and a mounting moral pressure as the group confronts whether and how to continue as a social unit under extreme conditions.

A conscripted young soldier joins an elite force fighting an alien species in an interstellar war; relativistic travel stretches years into decades for those on Earth.

A compact nonfiction work that analyzes how images are seen and understood, arguing that social context and ideology shape visual meaning. It presents short, illustrated meditations and concrete image readings to show how advertising, reproduction, and historical habits influence perception and value judgments in art.

A near-future world strained by extreme population growth and dense social systems, presented through interconnected vignettes, reportage-like inserts, and character strands.

Set across the span of a single year, the novel follows multiple interlinked characters and institutions as environmental degradation and pollution escalate in the United States.

Set in a near-future dystopia, the novel follows a skilled programmer pursued after years on the run; his escape relies on creating and deploying computer programs to confuse trackers and undermine the systems that control society.

An ostensibly ordinary man becomes entangled in international intrigue and must flee to survive after learning of a conspiracy. The setup focuses on pursuit, mistaken identity (or forced suspicion), and a race to uncover key information before hostile agents can stop him.

Two grieving men find solace in fishing and become drawn to a local, haunted fishing spot whose history links to deeper, primordial forces. Their attempt to escape loss becomes entangled with an older, supernatural presence that tests what they will risk to reclaim what is gone.

A British intelligence officer is sent into East Germany as a fake defector as part of a controlled operation intended to mislead the enemy.

Three extended nonfiction essays look closely at distinct episodes where people tried to redirect, constrain, or rebuild around powerful natural forces: efforts on a major river system, responses to a volcanic eruption, and work against mountain debris flows.

Set mainly in California's Salinas Valley, the novel follows interwoven lives across two families as sons, fathers, and neighbors grapple with choices that echo biblical themes of sibling rivalry and moral responsibility.

A restrained literary novel tracing the life and career of William Stoner, an English professor who discovers a devotion to literature and then navigates classroom politics, a troubled marriage, and a consequential affair.

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 father with a criminal past confronts an urgent family crisis involving his daughter and choices that threaten to undo both their lives. The setup focuses on parental responsibility, the consequences of past crimes, and a high-stakes situation that forces the protagonist to weigh loyalty, protection, and legal peril.

Set in the Arctic and rooted in Inuit experience, the novel follows an individual and their community as they face personal and collective pressures tied to survival, spiritual practice, and contact with outsiders.

Set in late-19th-century London, the novel follows an agent involved in espionage for an unnamed foreign power amid a small circle touched by anarchist agitation. The book traces the effects of political plotting and covert operations on ordinary lives, especially relationships marked by dependency and vulnerability.

Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, laid up with a broken leg, occupies himself by researching a centuries-old royal mystery: whether King Richard III was truly guilty of the crimes long attributed to him.

A country solicitor is drawn into defending a mother and daughter accused of abducting and assaulting a visiting young woman. The plot hinges on assembling testimony, scrutinizing inconsistent claims, and testing how community suspicion and newspaper pressure shape culpability.

A married lesbian couple becomes emotionally distant after one partner returns from a disastrous deep-sea dive. The novel tracks the aftermath: attempts at reconnection, the survivor’s altered presence, and the slow accumulation of dread tied to the sea and loss.

Two women’s lives intersect around a risky decision to assume another identity, and that choice sets off a chain of deception, pursuit, and moral reckoning. The immediate pressure is whether the protagonist can keep the assumed life intact while past secrets close in, with consequences for friendship and survival.

Set chiefly in New Jersey with ties to the Dominican Republic, the novel follows Oscar de León — a lonely, pop-culture–obsessed young man — and his family across generations as they live under the shadow of a transatlantic curse linked to historical brutality.

A contemporary novel shaped like a folktale in which a young woman and those around her navigate consequences after a theft and encounters with trickster spirits. The setup focuses on moral complications inside domestic relationships and the social effects of magic on everyday life.

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.