1. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In The Corrections, his popular Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 novel, Franzen created a suburban, Midwestern nuclear family with parents and children whom readers should love but end up detesting. He has returned to that rich terrain, illuminating midcentury America through two generations of the Hildebrandt family, with the father a pastor at the local church and his younger children involved with its youth organization, “Crossroads,” while the mother is a complex story of her own. The first in a trilogy, this capacious, engrossing drama is a heartland bounty bursting with psychological and social insight and a new generosity.

2. Matrix by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)

After winning fans for Fates and Furies, her brilliant literary excavation of a contemporary marriage, Groff time travels to the 12th century and imagines the life of Marie de France, a bastardess of royal blood who was banished by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine at age 17 to a disease-ridden, poverty-stricken abbey. Eventually forming a sisterhood with prickly and temperamental nuns, they create a lake and supply of clean water, as they deal with the Crusades, apparitions, and challenge the Catholic church. With rich imagery, dramatic pacing and her distinctive light touch, Groff brings not only the world of the abbey to life but she magically reveals the alchemy and transformation of Marie and the women around her.

3.The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers (Harper)

In an intimate coming-of-age story and a powerful historical saga spanning centuries, poet Jeffers tells the story of Ailey Pearl Garfield and her deep roots in Chicasetta, the Georgia town where she and her sisters return to her mother’s family each summer. Jeffers neatly weaves Ailey’s life story with those of her enslaved ancestors who had been brutalized and degraded by a “White Man with Strange Eyes,” who fathered many children before the Civil War. Jeffers creates an identity for Ailey as a historian, the daughter of a light-skinned Washington, D.C., doctor and a Southern schoolteacher, as well as the niece of a retired professor who had been acquainted with DuBois, whose wisdom informs the musicality of Jeffers’ prose.

4. My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson (Henry Holt)

Johnson’s assured, richly rewarding short stories and novella are so rare in a work of debut fiction The brilliant titular piece is set in near-future Charlottesville, Virginia, where right-wing supremacists pillage the city, narrated by a descendent of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings who had an internship on the Monticello grounds where those in fear decamp for safety. Identity, race, legacy, and power are entwined in this powerful collection that form a mosaic portrait of American society.

5. Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King (Grove)

King is known for her ambitious novels – ranging from Euphoria, involving anthropologists in New Guinea in the 1930s in a passionate love triangle, to an aspiring novelist frustrated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1997, in Writers and Lovers – and this entrancing collection reflects her talent for creating intimate portraits of people and evoking the landscapes they inhabit. The 10 stories feature vulnerable, keenly observant protagonists – such as a 14-year-old mother’s helper for an affluent family who reads Jane Eyre and imagines a newlywed husband as “Rochester” – and King scales rocky mountains of human emotion through generations scarred by alcoholism, mental instability, and unhappiness to build this richly rewarding vivarium of stories.

6. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)

In Kitamura’s brilliant new novel, her keenly perceptive narrator is a temporary translator at an international court like The Hague, where an unidentified West African head of state – think Charles Taylor – who is on trial for war crimes (“ethnic cleansing”) asks her to be his interpreter. Kitamura has a gift for working in multiple registers, with her narrator, a young woman who is global and untethered, hearing and not hearing horrifying details of atrocities as she works with his defense team, and then in court. The claustrophobic Hague opens up as the narrator navigates the delicate balances in her vexed personal relationships, with Kitamura keyed into spoken and mnemonic language and the chasms in between.

7. The War for Gloria by Atticus Lish (Knopf)

When this engrossing novel opens, wise beyond his years 16-year-old Corey and his mother, artistic, literary college dropout Gloria, are bleakly eking out a life together when she’s diagnosed with ALS. Corey comes under the influence of his unreliable, absent father, Leonard, a self-described genius, and an MIT security guard. Lish evokes the nuances of this tender mother-son relationship with care and enlarges his novel with a constellation of characters in a propulsive story of suspense and the dynamics between men in blue-collar New England in the 1980s.

8. I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart (Two Dollar Radio)

Protests that sparked the 2014 revolution in Ukraine provide the context for Pickhart’s dazzling debut novel. Drawing from the folkloric oral history of Ukraine and fusing it with the reporting from journalists, Pickhart focuses on a quartet of characters at the center of a Kyiv protest against the president in which more than 100 people were massacred. Pickhart fully develops these intersecting characters, from an American doctor to a former KGB spy, deftly changing points of view, all of which is enhanced by a chorus of past Ukrainian singers killed by a Russian czar.

9. Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

With Oh William!, Strout returns to the bestseller list and, for the third time, to Lucy Barton in her Amgash series (following Anything Is Possible and I Am Lucy Barton) and to the Maine of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge. Lucy, a successful writer, is recruited by her first husband, William, to meet his recently discovered half-sister, living in Maine. Strout has a magical way of creating characters who sustain a narrative, as Lucy, who lived through an anguished childhood and vexed marriage to unfaithful William, considers the mysteries of their marriage and his patronizing mother. Since her debut novel, Amy and Isabelle, which won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize in 1999, Strout has plumbed the corners of the human heart without sentimentality, finding the loneliness and isolation separating everyday people from one another.

10. Afterparties: Stories by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco)

This debut story collection was published after So’s death in December. Hotly anticipated with headlines praising So 1992–2020) as a young writer on the brink of stardom, Afterparties hits the bestseller lists with boosts from supporters like Roxane Gay, who selected it for her monthly Audacious Book Club, and  n+1, the magazine to which he was a contributor and which established the Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize in his honor. The powerful, imaginative stories are rooted in California’s Central Valley among generations of Cambodian American immigrants, haunted by the Khmer Rouge and genocide, and hit a dizzyingly wide range of emotional notes that seem to burst beyond the pages of this short volume.