Michael Schaub

Pajtim Statovci's debut novel follows a Kosovar immigrant to Finland who meets a singularly unpleasant anthropomorphic cat in a Finnish gay bar. But while the story is imaginative, it lacks polish.

Lesley Nneka Arimah's remarkable debut collection is both cohesive and varied at the same time. Grounded both in the U.S. and Nigeria, it's full of sly humor, genuine emotion and occasional horror.

Erika Carter's intelligent, unpretentious debut follows an aimless group of friends in their 20s, whose lives spin out of control during a supposedly detoxifying trip to a remote house in the country.

Rockabilly singer J.D. Wilkes hints at supernatural happenings in his novel about an unbelievable adventure through a kudzu-infested forest in western Kentucky.

Suspense is the driving force in Hari Kunzru's thriller about two young white men who invent a fictional blues singer.

Mohsin Hamid's new novel imagines a country, never specified, swollen with refugees from an ongoing conflict — and a series of mysterious doors that appear, offering escape, but also displacement.

David Grossman's unsettling new novel takes place over the course of a two-hour comedy set, as what seems like just a bad performance evolves into something truly strange, painful and urgent.

Margaret Drabble's new novel follows a 70-something woman as she travels around England for her job — working with old age homes — and grumbling about how sad, funny and genuinely absurd aging is.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's new collection looks at how it feels and what it means to be a refugee. It's a wonderful group of stories that prove fiction can do more than tell stories, it can bear witness.

Paul Auster's new novel is a departure for the author — 880 pages of flowing prose about four versions of one character, living four mostly-parallel lives. It's sometimes confusing, but never boring.

Kevin Wilson's new novel follows a pregnant teen who joins an experimental commune — but the characters in Perfect Little World never come alive, and the book suffers from an overdose of whimsy.

The characters in Ottessa Moshfegh's new collection are cold, unfiltered, frequently pathetic — all suffering from unease and nameless longing, made understandable by each perfectly-built story.

Noy Holland's new collection brings together several decades worth of difficult-to-describe stories — some only a few paragraphs long, and all of them hallucinatory and maddening in the best way.

Emily Fridlund's electrifying debut novel History of Wolves is a contemporary coming-of-age story about a young woman — but it avoids the familiar story arc so common to other novels in that genre.

Claudia Salazar Jiménez's new novel is short and brutally effective. It's the story of three women from different walks of life, all caught up in the violence that convulsed Peru in the 1980s.

Rabih Alameddine's new novel begins with Satan and Death arguing, in the mind of a poet on the verge of a breakdown. Satan wants him to remember those lost to AIDS; Death preaches forgetfulness.

Maria Semple's new novel centers on erratic, overworked mother Eleanor, who makes a promise before the book begins: Today will be different. And it is, but not the way she expected or hoped for.

Emma Donoghue's latest follows a nurse in 19th century Ireland who agrees to monitor a famed fasting girl. But both the unsympathetic nurse and the credulous villagers are hard to like or understand.

Peter Ho Davies' new novel tells four separate stories, from a 19th-century tycoon and his Chinese valet to the murder of a Chinese American man in 1982. It's a revelatory, deftly structured read.

Gleefully obscene, violent and shockingly funny, Razor Girl follows an ex-cop turned restaurant inspector on the tail of a car-crash con artist, a kidnapped TV agent and a loud-mouthed reality star.