Author: Laila Lalami
Date: 2025
Genre: Literary Science Fiction
Country: USA
Sara Hussein is a Moroccan American woman who, upon her return from a trip to the United Kingdom, is detained by a government agency tasked with determining citizens’ propensity to committing crimes. She is detained in what starts as a temporary arrangement but, through bureaucratic hiccups and intentional mismanagement, begins to seem more and more permanent.
Author: Hernán Díaz
Date: 2022
Genre: Metafiction
Country: USA
Set predominantly in New York City and focusing on the world of finance, the novel is a metafictional, fragmentary look at a secretive financier and his wife.
The book is composed of four fictional texts: a novel (Bonds), an incomplete autobiography (My Life), a completed memoir (A Memoir, Remembered), and a diary (Futures). While each book focuses on many of the same characters, the information included in each is often mutually exclusive, with it being left up to the reader to determine the truth.
Author: Will Self
Date: 2026
Genre: Satire
Country: UK
Self’s middle-English characters appear trapped in a timeless go-round of polite chitchat in dinner parties that refract like a hall of mirrors, until one day someone says something to the effect of, “This way to the gas chamber, please, ladies and gentlemen.”
Author: Douglas Stuart
Date: 2020
Genre: Bildungsroman, LGBTQ+
Country: USA
It tells the story of the youngest of three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother Agnes in 1980s post-industrial working-class Glasgow, Scotland.
Author: Anthony Doerr
Date: 2021
Genre: Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy
Country: USA
The story of five characters spanning eight centuries, told in anachronic order. Their stories are bound by an Ancient Greek codex entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land that each of the five characters discover and find solace in. It is a fictional book written by real Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes in the second century, and tells the story of Aethon, a shepherd on a quest to find the fabled paradise in the sky. In his travels, he is transformed into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow, which allows him to fly to the gates of the city in the clouds.
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Date: 2022
Genre: Historical Fiction, Family Saga, Mystery
Country: USA
Kingsolver was inspired by the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield. While Kingsolver’s novel is similarly about a boy who experiences poverty, Demon Copperhead is set in Appalachia and explores contemporary issues. The book touches on themes of the social and economic stratification in Appalachia, child poverty in rural America, and drug addiction with a focus on the opioid crisis.
Author: Brit Bennett
Date: 2020
Genre: Historical Fiction, Family Saga, Mystery
Country: USA
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Date: 2022
Genre:
Country: USA
The novel follows the relationship between two friends who begin a successful video game company together.
Author: Arundhati Roy
Date: 2025
Genre: Memoir
Country: India
A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.
Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”
Author: Kiran Desai
Date: 2025
Genre:
Country: USA
In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each becomes more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.
Back in India, Sonia and Sunny’s extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two—a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.
Author: Susanna Clarke
Date: 2020
Genre: Speculative Fiction
Country: UK
The novel is written as a journal from within a seemingly infinite, world-encompassing megastructure called the House.