Literary Fiction

Signal Fires is Dani Shapiro’s first novel in fifteen years, published by Knopf in October 2022. Shapiro spent the intervening decade writing memoir, most notably Inheritance (2019), the book about her discovery through DNA testing that the man who raised her was not her biological father. That memoir made her one of the most discussed…

David Szalay’s All That Man Is, published in 2016 by Graywolf Press, is a novel built from nine interconnected stories that follow nine men across Europe, each one older than the last. The youngest is seventeen, backpacking on a shoestring with a friend through the hostels and train stations of Central Europe. The oldest is…

Stephen King published Holly on September 5, 2023, through Scribner, and it marks the first full-length novel devoted entirely to Holly Gibney, one of King’s most enduring characters. Holly first appeared as a supporting player in Mr. Mercedes back in 2014, then returned in Finders Keepers, End of Watch, The Outsider, and the novella If…

The Reactive, published in South Africa in 2014 by Umuzi and brought to North American readers by Two Dollar Radio in June 2016, is Masande Ntshanga’s debut novel and one of the most arresting literary debuts to emerge from the continent in years. Ntshanga, born in East London in 1986 and trained as a writer…

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s debut novel, All the Little Bird-Hearts, is set in England’s Lake District in 1988 and narrated by Sunday Forrester, an autistic single mother whose carefully structured world begins to unravel when a glamorous couple moves in next door. Published in 2023 and longlisted for the Booker Prize that same year, the novel is…

Summary Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There, published in 2018, is one of the most significant works of American fiction of the past decade. Set in Oakland, California, it follows twelve Native American characters across a wide span of circumstances and histories, all converging on a single catastrophic event: a mass shooting at the Big…

Summary Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, published in 2021, is a novel about the persistence of stories across time. It weaves together five separate narrative strands spanning fifteen hundred years: Anna, a young seamstress in fifteenth-century Constantinople as the city falls to the Ottomans; Omeir, a Bulgarian farm boy conscripted into the Ottoman siege army;…

Summary Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, published in 2014 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015, is a World War Two novel told through two alternating perspectives: Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl who flees Paris with her father as the Germans advance, and Werner Pfennig, a German orphan whose…

Summary Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, published in 2020, is a novel about grief, love, and the plague, set in Stratford-upon-Avon in the late sixteenth century. It tells the story of Agnes (as William Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway was known locally) and the death of her son Hamnet at age eleven in 1596, the year before Shakespeare…

Summary R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, published in 2023, is a satirical novel about race, cultural appropriation, and the publishing industry, written with a sharpness and speed that makes it genuinely uncomfortable to read. The narrator is Juniper “June” Hayward, a white American author who has published one novel to modest sales and has spent years watching…