Maureen Corrigan

The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die, by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, centers on an Indian family haunted by a jealous ghost. And S. A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland is a noir thriller — with muscle cars.

Set in a Dublin maternity ward in 1918, the novel captures a city devastated by a pandemic. By diving into the terrors of the past, Emma Donoghue presciently anticipates the miseries of our present.

A young woman tries to free her cousin from a dangerous living situation in a crumbling family mansion in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's new novel. Mexican Gothic injects fresh blood into a classic genre.

The family at the center of Lynn Steger Strong's novel is on the brink of bankruptcy. Want is a portrait of how close to the edge people are — despite the seeming safeguard of middle-class jobs.

Known for her meditative travel memoirs, Mary Morris' wanderings were nearly curtailed by a serious ankle injury. All the Way to the Tigers is a passage deep into the broken places that shaped her.

Brit Bennett's new novel centers on two light-skinned African American sisters — one of whom "passes" for white. The Vanishing Half is compelling — if somewhat melodramatic.

Nancy McKinley mixes screwball humor with social criticism in a collection of interlocking stories about two women who work at a mall in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Benjamin Taylor, one of Roth's closest friends during the last decades of his life, has written a memoir that rekindles Roth's voice: brilliant, profane, and so very funny.

Phuc Tran was a toddler in 1975 when his family fled Vietnam and landed in a small town in Pennsylvania. His memoir is a scrambled story of great books and punk rock.

With much of the world on lockdown due to the pandemic, critic Maureen Corrigan turns to books for companionship. Her recommended reads span fiction, nonfiction and poetry — some old, some new.

The author of Station Eleven weaves together stories of a hotel worker and an ultra-wealthy con man in a novel that captures how precarious life is — in a way that feels particularly resonant now.

Lily King's new novel centers on a woman who's spent six years working on her own novel. It's a story of ambition — and what happens when the markers of adult achievement are slow to materialize.

Elizabeth Tallent's profound memoir explores writer's block and the allure of perfectionism. After her third short story collection came out in 1993, she didn't publish another book for 22 years.

Gish Jen weaves baseball into her inspired vision of how Americans bought into the fantasy of less stress and more free time. As speculative fiction goes, The Resisters hits close to the bone.

Deepa Anappara's debut novel defies characterization. Set in a sprawling Indian slum, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line centers on a trio of kids who venture out to look for a missing classmate.

Emma Copley Eisenberg's new book, which centers on the murders of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero, tells a haunting story of two restless women and the un-nameable desire to travel a different path.

Jeanine Cummins' new novel opens in Mexico, where a drug cartel has massacred 16 members of a family. A tense on-the-road ordeal follows, as a desperate mother struggles to save herself and her son.

Stafford is often remembered as wife No. 1 in the many biographies and studies of poet Robert Lowell. But a new Library of America edition of her three novels showcases her masterful writing.

Bernardine Evaristo's nuanced and entertaining Booker Prize-winning novel is told from the point of view of 12 British women of color — all just a few degrees of separation apart from each other.

This year's list is a mix of literary fiction, true crime, memoirs and essays, from acclaimed authors as well as some brand new voices — and you won't be able to put any of them down.