Zoellner walked eight hundred miles across Arizona, roughly the diagonal, and used the walk to work through the state he grew up in. Chapters alternate between the trail — heat, water, private land, dogs, the people who pick up a…
Gary Shteyngart
A near-future America where everyone wears an äppärät around their neck broadcasting their credit rating and screwability to everyone in the room, the dollar is pegged to the yuan, and the country is being run into default by a party…
Beatriz Serrano
From the very first page of Discontent, the funny and sardonic debut novel by Spanish writer Beatriz Serrano, lyrics from Portugal. The Man’s “Purple Yellow Red & Blue” lodged in my head and stayed for the duration of the book:…
W.G. Sebald
A man walks the Suffolk coast and the walk keeps opening into other things. A skull, a herring fishery, Thomas Browne’s missing remains, the silk trade, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, the Taiping rebellion, a collapsing country house, the hurricane…
Leonardo Sciascia
A man is shot dead boarding a bus in a Sicilian town square in front of forty people and by the time the carabinieri arrive nobody saw anything. Captain Bellodi, a northerner and a former partisan, investigates, which means construction…
George Saunders
A fox teaches himself human by lurking under a window while a mother reads bedtime stories, so the whole thing comes at you in his spelling — Yuman, storys, grate. Then a mall goes up over the woods. The food…
Mary Doria Russell
A radio telescope picks up singing from Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits — who have been doing astronomy and first contact for four centuries — quietly fund and crew the first mission. Eight people go. One comes back, mutilated and…
Kim Stanley Robinson
It opens with a heat wave in Uttar Pradesh that kills twenty million people in a week, and the rest of the book is the world reacting. A UN agency is set up in Zurich to represent people who aren’t…
Nathaniel Rich
Mitchell Zukor is a young math genius hired by a Manhattan firm called FutureWorld that sells corporations worst-case scenarios — for a fee, they calculate your catastrophic exposure and indemnify you against being sued for not foreseeing it. Mitchell is…
Meg Little Reilly
Ash and Pia leave Brooklyn for rural Vermont wanting a simpler life, and then the forecasts start describing a superstorm months out — big enough that the government begins issuing guidance and the town begins picking sides. Pia throws herself…
Rae Giana Rashad
Set in an America where a second civil war broke out in 1954 and the wrong side won. By 2030, a white-run government called the Order classifies Black people as Descendants of Slavery and an algorithm hands out your job,…
Quan Barry
Striker is a Black film scout on a luxury Antarctic cruise, photographing locations for a big-budget movie about Shackleton, and she’s the only Black passenger aboard among tech money and blended families she watches with a very dry eye. Then…
Richard Powers
Four lives converging on Makatea, a French Polynesian island strip-mined for phosphate decades ago and now down to eighty residents who are being asked to vote on whether a consortium can build the first floating city offshore. There’s a tech…
Chana Porter
An alien species arrives, and instead of invading it just seeps into everything — the water, the food, the bodies — and makes the world gentle. No scarcity, no illness, no death you don’t choose. Trina Goldberg-Oneka, a trans woman…
Sergio Olguín
Verónica Rosenthal, a Buenos Aires journalist on holiday in the north of Argentina, spends a few days with two young women travelers — one Italian, one Colombian. Days later, both are found raped and murdered in the hills of Tucumán.…
Haruki Murakami
Toru Okada is unemployed, boiling spaghetti, when the phone rings. Then the cat disappears. Then his wife does. What follows involves a psychic prostitute, a teenage neighbor, a politician brother-in-law with something badly wrong in him, and a man who…
Haruki Murakami
Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles song on a plane and is thrown back to 1969, to a Tokyo university, and to two women. Naoko was his dead best friend’s girlfriend, fragile and receding into a sanatorium in the hills. Midori…
Haruki Murakami
You know Murakami’s going to be weird, you just don’t know if you’re going to like that flavor of weird. Well, I loved 1Q84. What’s more romantic than one moon hanging in the sky? Two moons! The book—and it’s a…
David Mitchell
Six stories nested inside each other like a set of dolls. A lawyer crossing the Pacific in 1850. A broke young composer in Belgium in 1931 conning his way into an old master’s house. A reporter in 1970s California chasing…
Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, most of Britain is under water and reduced to an archipelago, and an academic named Thomas Metcalfe has built his career on a lost poem — read aloud once at a dinner party in 2014, never…
Charlotte McConaghy
Franny Stone talks her way onto a fishing boat in Greenland by promising the crew that the Arctic terns she has tagged will lead them to the last fish in a mostly emptied ocean. The birds are making what may…
Anthony McCarten
A tech billionaire named Cy Baxter has built FUSION, a system that stitches together every camera, phone, card swipe, and database in the country and claims it can find anybody. There’s a $90 billion CIA contract riding on whether it…
Colum McCann
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and failing novelist, gets an assignment about the undersea cables that carry the internet, and joins a repair ship off the west coast of Africa. The chief of mission is John Conway, a freediver and…
James McBride
A skeleton turns up in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in 1972, and the story goes back to Chicken Hill in the 1920s and 30s — the neighborhood where Jewish immigrants and Black families lived alongside each other on the…
Jason Matthews
Dominika Egorova is a ballerina whose career ends with an injury, and her uncle in Russian intelligence gets her into Sparrow School, where the state trains officers in seduction as tradecraft. Her assignment is a young CIA officer in Helsinki…
