55 books
Amy Taylor
Amy Taylor is a Melbourne novelist whose first book, Search History, made The Guardian’s best-of-the-year list. Ruins, her second, drops a couple into an Athens summer. Emma and Julian are house-sitting for a friend and quietly falling apart — she…
David Szalay
István is fifteen, new in town, living with his mother in a flat on a Hungarian housing estate, and he doesn’t know how to talk to anybody. The married woman across the hall, closer to his mother’s age than his,…
Maggie Stiefvater
June Hudson runs the Avallon, a grand hotel built over mineral springs in the West Virginia mountains, and she came up from the hollers to do it. In 1942 the State Department requisitions the place to intern Axis diplomats and…
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:…
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…
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…
Megha Majumdar
It’s set in Kolkata, India, a few decades out, under flood and heat and a food shortage that has markets selling seaweed and synthetic fish. Ma runs a shelter, cares for her elderly father and her two-year-old daughter, and has…
Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith is a hired spy — ex-federal, now freelance, working for clients she never meets. Her job is to get inside a commune of radical farmers in southwest France and push them into doing something illegal enough to jail…
