‘THE ANSWERS’ By Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Lacey writes sentences that are long and clean and unstanchable. They glow like the artist Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light tubes. In this, her second novel, she sweeps you up in the formidable current of her thought and then drops you down the rabbit hole. On a certain level, this is a dystopian project; it borders on science fiction. It’s about a young, underemployed and ill young woman, and how she is slowly drawn into an experiment that involves facial recognition software and electromagnetic pulses that can make a person weep or flush. It’s a warm-blooded yet brooding novel about the neurobiology of love. It casts a spell. (Read the review.)

‘CLASS’ By Francesco Pacifico (Melville House). Pacifico’s second novel is as bitter and strange as a glass of Fernet Branca. It’s about young, wealthy, amoral Italian hipsters in Manhattan and Brooklyn circa 2010, and it is the work of a forceful and ambitious writer. The novel is a manifesto of contempt and its deformed twin, self-loathing. It’s about young people who flicker across the globe, tucked under blankets and Beats headphones in first-class airplane seats, coasting on the dwindling remains of their trust funds. This book both attracted and appalled me when I first read it, and those feelings still hold true. But I find this novel has stuck with me in ways that ostensibly “better” ones have not. (Read the review.)

‘HOME FIRE’ By Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead). Shamsie’s new novel, which was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, is a bold retelling of Sophocles’ “Antigone.” It begins with the airport interrogation of a young Muslim woman who has come to the United States to study, and Shamsie dilates throughout on Sophocles’ themes: civil disobedience, fidelity and the law, especially as regards burial rights. The author is shrewd and funny, but this novel pushes past tragicomedy into darker areas, including the appeal of ISIS for some young men. Hold tight for its final scene, which is the most memorable of any novel I read this year. (Read the review.)

‘AUTUMN’ By Ali Smith (Pantheon). Smith has a beautiful mind. Her new book, the first of an anticipated four novels in a seasonal cycle, is ostensibly about the friendship between a young woman and a very old man. But it’s really about everything: poverty and bureaucracy and sex and mortality and music. Perhaps the most moving thing about it is that it plays out against a certain sense that the world is heading into darker times. Post-Brexit, and with an election looming in the United States, people watch the evening news with their hearts tucked up under their ears. I found this book to be almost unbearably moving in its awareness of what the author praises as the “array of colors of even the pulverized world.” (Read the review.)

Jennifer Senior

How else to put it? This was a corkscrew of a year. Its exceptionalness — the sheer blinding drama of it all — seems to have determined my reading preferences, repeatedly guiding me toward topical subjects. Not on this list, but worth mentioning: Joe Biden’s “Promise Me, Dad” and Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened,” two strong political memoirs, a true rarity (the genre’s generally a dud, an excuse to peddle bromides dipped in chloroform). Not everything on this list is political, of course, and neither are some of my honorable mentions. I particularly enjoyed the thriller “Fierce Kingdom,” by Gin Phillips, and the lively true-crime procedural “American Fire,” by Monica Hesse.

Because this is my final month on the job, I ask one minor indulgence: While my fellow staff critics have done the customary list of 10, I’ve added one more for the road. It’s “Cork Dork.” We can always use a good glass of wine, perhaps especially this year.