Real Life, the debut novel by Electric Literature's Recommended Reading senior editor Brandon Taylor, has all the notes of a classic "campus novel." It's got academic in-fighting; it's got complex hierarchies--and an associated web of alliances and betrayals--that link friends, lovers and rivals. And, most importantly to qualify for the genre, it's got a vaguely threatening undercurrent roiling beneath a placid collegiate surface. But Real Life tells a story that the others don't, and thus is starkly more "real" than its peers.

Wallace is black, gay and Southern at a large (and largely white) Midwestern university. He is in the trenches of a graduate program in biochemistry--far enough into the program that he's become brutally disillusioned by academia, but not far enough for graduation to be in sight. Reserved and self-protective, he is both completely consumed by the insular universe of his graduate program and apart from it, which only intensifies his sense of seclusion. On the last weekend of summer, minor disaster strikes in his lab, he is chastised and shamed by his colleagues, and he begins a precipitous, tense affair with an ostensibly straight friend. These events, and their implications, threaten to annihilate Wallace's careful defenses, another wound from which he may never recover.

But if there is joy in Real Life, it is in Taylor's elegant, thoughtful prose. The novel ends on a note of hope in reverse. With shattering elegance, Taylor suggests that the tolls of abuse and institutional subjugation are malignant and inescapable. --Hannah Calkins, writer and editor

In a 2010 e-mail conversation in The Believer with Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon, Colum McCann observed, "I happen to think that an ounce of empathy is worth a boatload of judgment." That's the principle animating his magnificent novel Apeirogon, an unforgettable encounter with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from both sides of the chasm separating the antagonists, that's audacious in both substance and form.

McCann (Thirteen Ways of Looking; Let the Great World Spin) anchors Apeirogon in the true stories of Palestinian Bassam Aramin and Israeli Rami Elhanan. In 1997, Rami's 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, was one of eight victims of a terrorist bombing on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street. Ten years later, Bassam's 10-year-old daughter, Abir, was killed by a rubber bullet fired by an 18-year-old Israeli border guard. Already acquainted with each other through the organization Combatants for Peace, and now linked by these twin tragedies, Bassam and Rami eventually unite as passionate advocates for a peaceful end to the conflict.

Apeirogon is a word describing a geometric shape with a countably infinite number of sides. McCann tells these stories in numbered sections, some of them as short as a few words, others several pages in length. At the precise center of the novel, Rami and Bassam are allowed to speak in their own eloquent voices about the devastating event that set each one's life on a radically different, desperately unwanted, course.

McCann's daring storytelling technique must be experienced to be understood fully. On a subject where beliefs are often etched in stone, Apeirogon's skillful blend of fact and fiction presents readers with a distinct challenge--to think for themselves. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

"A man without rights in this world is not freed from his responsibilities." So thinks Danny, an undocumented worker in Sydney, Australia, upon realizing that he has information about a murder that by all rights should be reported to the police. Amnesty by Aravind Adiga (Last Man in Tower; The White Tiger) follows Danny, a Sri Lankan national, over the course of a day as he bargains with himself and conducts imaginary negotiations for asylum in exchange for helping the police with their investigation. As the minutes tick by--readers see each timestamp--the tension builds toward a resolution that seems anything but preordained.

Danny entered Australia legally as a student four years ago but dropped out of college and overstayed his visa. Almost immediately he realized the gravity of his mistake, and "from the day he had become an illegal, he had been trying to reverse things. To find some way around his decision." After four years, Danny has convinced himself that he can live in Sydney indefinitely. So, the news of a body discovered at a nearby riverbed barely registers until Danny realizes it's Radha, one of Danny's former employers. Radha, along with her lover Prakash, discovered Danny's undocumented status without turning him in. When Danny hears details of Radha's murder, he suspects her lover is responsible.

Amnesty moves quickly and presents each character as fully formed and complex. Danny represents asylum-seekers around the globe who, unsafe in their own country and unwanted in others, wonder, "Where does it end, then, and who is responsible for what has been done to us?" --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

In this poignant story, Rachel is in love with a dead man. He was dead when they met. Maybe it's the strange glow that Thomas seems to have about him, or the otherworldly heat of his skin, but Rachel believes him when he shares some of his story. Due to an error when he died, Thomas must wait another three months on Earth before crossing over, following instructions meant to avoid incurring any additional regrets. Starting relationships in this condition is not recommended, but after several weeks of noticing each other in the café or at the bus stop, he disregards the guidelines.

The Regrets, the debut novel from Amy Bonnaffons, demonstrates that the author is as skillful at probing subjects such as desire and mortality in the long form as she is in her short stories (The Wrong Heaven). The intensity with which Rachel and Thomas leap into their romance and the isolated world that they occupy--he because of his state of limbo, she because of the impossibility of explaining her new boyfriend--vividly evoke the obsessive fever of a new love affair. In a dreamlike tale, switching in long sections between the perspectives of Thomas, Rachel and Rachel's former boyfriend, Bonnaffons movingly conveys the haunting power of grief, whether for the end of a relationship or the end of a life. In this surreal yet satisfying version of the world, the ultimate challenge is still to find a way to carry on. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

Little Constructions by Man Booker Prize-winner Anna Burns tells the frenetic story of a family on the brink of annihilation. Jetty Doe enters a gun shop one day, blindly determined to buy a weapon with which to seek revenge. From there, an enigmatic, first-person narrator takes readers on speeding taxi rides, through abuse-strewn homes, and across generations as the Doe family sows a legacy of violence, betrayal and hatred. The female members of the Doe clan rage and combust around their brutal patriarch, John Doe, while onlookers struggle, often futilely, to steer clear of their destructive, gravitational pull.

As in her novels Milkman and No Bones, Burns displays her lyrical skill with complex and affecting prose. Every sentence is a knot of emotional heft that Burns progressively tightens, only to unwind and start again. The narrator of Little Constructions, in particular, tells this catastrophic story in a wonderfully distinctive voice that is as colloquial as it is opaque. Despite the brilliantly complex network of characters and relationships Burns's narrator spins, the story's central tragedy and themes remain clear and always in focus. In fact, it is the very chaos and insatiability of the novel's structure that illustrate the impossibility and futility of assigning singular blame or seeking perfect justice in a world built upon such interwoven networks of causation. Like the rhythm of Burns's prose, which follows each labyrinthine, intricate sentence with a simple bullet, Burns is able, at a key moment in the text, to condense the entirety of her elaborate assemblage into one image: "Beautiful women, with blood on their hands." --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

The Unspoken Name, the debut novel from A.K. Larkwood, is a satisfying epic fantasy with several interesting wrinkles. Csorwe is an orc priestess who spends her life preparing to be sacrificed to a god known as the "Unspoken One." She decides to abandon her fate to serve a mysterious wizard who arrives and offers her another path. Much of Csorwe's story is about the weight of obligation and debts that can never be paid--the wizard Belthandros Sethennai helps convince her to abandon one form of servitude only to enter another.

The novel proceeds in a somewhat episodic fashion. After helping Sethennai secure the city from which he was exiled, Csorwe becomes his agent in a hunt for the Reliquary, a powerful item and a fairly standard fantasy McGuffin. The Unspoken Name sets itself apart, however, with its worldbuilding: Csorwe navigates a kind of fantasy multiverse in her travels, one filled with airships, giant snakes, gods and many dead worlds. There is a Lovecraftian unknowability to Larkwood's gods that adds to the gothic, doomy mood.

Against this backdrop, Csorwe's quest begins to be derailed by her increasing affection for a powerful magic user, Shuthmili, an Adept in a strict order that has dark designs on her future. As the relationship develops between the two, Larkwood takes as her theme the painful process of unlearning orthodoxy. Both Csorwe and Shuthmili were "raised for death"--the most challenging part of their journey is learning how to choose a more hopeful fate. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine

Big Black: Stand at Attica is an unflinching graphic memoir from Frank "Big Black" Smith, providing a firsthand account of the 1971 Attica State Prison uprising in New York. Big Black's nickname derives from his impressive physical stature, which, along with the respect he earned as the prison's football coach, inspired his position in charge of security among the rebelling prisoners. Big Black is clear about what the prisoners wanted--broadly speaking, improvements to the dehumanizing living conditions--but for a much more detailed breakdown of what led to the events at Attica, Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water makes an ideal companion.

Big Black's distinctive contributions to the story of Attica lie in its focus on a single figure, Big Black, and in the illustrations. Améziane's art is capable of cinematic sweep--the opening panels show a helicopter ominously descending on the prisoners' makeshift camp--and of precise, almost documentary detail. The artwork portrays Big Black as a peacekeeper: he does his best to mediate between numerous factions among the prisoners and makes sure that the prison guards held hostage are treated humanely, despite how they treated the inmates.

Big Black positions the Attica uprising as part of a larger history of racist oppression. Only a few generations removed from slavery, the author finds himself working for insignificant wages at a prison that the warden runs "like his personal plantation." After the shocking state violence that ends the rebellion, the narrative turns to how Big Black survives the aftermath, placing his story in the context of a long struggle for human dignity. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine

The title originates in poet Jamila Osman's essay, "A Map of Lost Things": "A map is only one story," writes the Canadian-born daughter of Somali immigrants who now lives in Portland, Ore. "It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves." Osman is one of 20 writers--some already award-winning, others just beginning their careers--whose intimate essays share distinctive, diasporic stories traversing borders and cultures. Curated by Catapult magazine editor-in-chief and memoirist Nicole Chung (All You Can Ever Know) and Catapult founding editor Mensah Demary, A Map Is Only One Story marks the magazine's debut anthology.

Born in Malaysia, Los Angeles artist Shing Yin Khor's "Say It with Noodles" stands out for its graphic format, in which they learn from their grandmother to speak the language of love through food. Toronto BASHY magazine publisher Sharine Taylor also channels her grandmother's language in "My Grandmother's Patois and Other Keys to Survival," revealing the power and comfort of private and public speech. Indian Australian lawyer and activist Kamna Muddagouni learns "How to Stop Saying Sorry When Things Aren't Your Fault." As a Finnish transplant to Florida, poet Niina Pollari discovers an exceptional "normal" in "Dead-Guy Shirts and Motel Kids." Escaping Lagos's "have-beens and once-weres," MFA student/writing teacher Kenechi Uzor (the lone male voice) escapes "one hell for another" in Utah in "This Hell Not Mine."

Perhaps unsurprising with collections, quality isn't quite consistent here. As contributors "reveal and explore the human side of immigration," the compilation stands out for the voices that shout loudest, linger longest--and exhort readers to confront their own journeys toward that elusive destination called home. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

In Hood Feminism, Mikki Kendall persuasively argues that, given the ways in which race and class, disability and sexual orientation are interwoven with gender, feminists must reckon with oppression within their ranks and focus on the needs of the many, rather than a privileged few: "Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met."

Kendall breaks the book into highly digestible chapters, covering subjects like unachievable beauty standards, respectability, media coverage of missing girls and reproductive freedom. But rather than focusing only on issues that mainstream white feminists speak about regularly--if not inclusively--Kendall points to much-ignored issues millions of women and girls in the United States face every day. Drawing from research and her experience, she describes long-term hunger, poverty and gun violence as obstacles women must navigate even as they fight against sexual violence and patriarchal expectations.

This book addresses more than one audience. In turns, Kendall speaks directly to allies, to the Black community, to disabled and LGBTQ+ communities. In her closing chapter, Kendall explains the difference between being an ally and an accomplice--talking about the problems versus doing the work while letting marginalized feminists lead. Hood Feminism intentionally makes readers uncomfortable as it asks them to take that discomfort and turn it into growth and action for the benefit of all. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels

In this enthralling true story, a man enters the shower at the Emirates Lounge at Britain's Birmingham International Airport with several bags and stays for 20 minutes. After he leaves, a suspicious janitor discovers the shower is dry, virtually untouched save for a discarded egg carton holding a single egg. Unsure of what to make of this, police are called and interview the man. He's ordered to strip, and they discover 14 eggs wrapped in socks and tied around his abdomen.

The man, Jeffrey Lendrum, was caught smuggling peregrine falcon eggs with the intent of selling them to Middle Eastern clients, where racing raptors is a prestigious sport for the ultra-wealthy. Lendrum is interviewed by Andy McWilliam, an officer for the U.K.'s National Wildlife Crime Unit, who learns that Lendrum is an accomplished thief whose travels have taken him from his childhood in Rhodesia to the Canadian Arctic, Welsh valleys and the cliffs of Patagonia in search of rare raptor eggs. Lendrum has been arrested before, but with the lenient punishments for wildlife crime, he develops an unquenchable sense of adventure and hubris, returning to egg thievery again and again.

In The Falcon Thief, Joshua Hammer (The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu) explores the thousand-year history of falconry and the near extinction of peregrine falcons by the pesticide DDT in the 20th century, as well as conservation efforts in response to climate change. But Lendrum's drive for adventure and the conflict "between his love for animals and his need to possess them," despite the small financial reward, is the enigma at the center of this terrific account of true crime. --Frank Brasile, librarian

Based on events that took place in several southeastern French villages during World War II, this breathtaking novel follows a group of teens as they carry out covert operations to shelter and transport Jews who would otherwise be deported to internment camps.

Drawing on their individual strengths and skills, 16- and 17-year-old Gentiles and Jews join an extensive secret network of sympathizers working against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy regime. Philippe, a passionate, youthful-looking redhead, dons a boy scout uniform to help refugees flee to neutral Switzerland. Jean-Paul, a Latvian Jew with hopes of a future as a doctor, forges documents for himself and countless others. The naturally shy Celeste masters her fears to deliver messages for the maquis (guerilla resistance fighters). These brave teens hide small noisy children in the forest while police trucks and motorcycles roar through the village searching for "non-Aryans." They continually outsmart an ambivalent young French national police officer (whose name, Perdant, means "loser," much to their giggling delight). The group of friends--scoundrels all, according to Perdant--risks everything to try to address one question: "What are you supposed to do when the law is morally wrong?"

Newbery Honor author Margi Preus (Heart of a Samurai; The Bamboo Sword) delivers a deeply researched, suspenseful story that includes photos, documents, a pronunciation guide and a bibliography. She closely models her characters after real players in the Resistance, as described in the epilogue, and the heartbreakingly realistic dynamics play out among the teens as they experience first love, homesickness and absolute terror. Both thrilling and chilling, Village of Scoundrels will surely keep readers engrossed from start to finish. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

Driving Kate Hattemer's The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid is one of the best kinds of righteous indignation: the kind served with gallons of humor.

It's April of narrator Jemima Kincaid's senior year of high school, and as one-third of the Chawton School's Senior Triumvirate, she's partly responsible for organizing the prom. Not a fan of the sexist tradition of guys asking girls, Jemima comes up with the idea of the Last Chance Dance: using a match-making website set up for the purpose, students can privately submit the names of all the kids with whom they would consider attending. As Jemima explains to her Latin class, "The new prom system makes it so girls don't have to wait around for guys to ask them out. It gives girls choice. And power." But if Jemima is such a good feminist, then why, when she learns that her best friend Jiyoon Kim asked out her crush object, does Jemima find herself thinking that Jiyoon was being a little... forward? And why did she overlook Jiyoon when she was scouting around for a junior who could run against the loathsome Mack Monroe for the following school year's Senior Triumvirate? Does the fact that Jemima is sure that Jiyoon will lose, despite--make that because of--being the better candidate, make Jemima something arguably as bad as a bad feminist: a bad friend?

In her third YA novel, Hattemer covers much territory (first sexual experiences, flawed parents, white privilege), lots of it through the cheeky dialogue of precocious private school kids. If some of these kids are too smart for their own good ("I'm concerned that your ironic yo is becoming a real yo"), they are never too smart for the reader's good. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author