The unhealed ruptures of slavery, persistent as memory and rubbed raw in such an instant, course through “Homegoing,” the hypnotic debut novel by Yaa Gyasi, a stirringly gifted young writer, that contemplates the consequences of human trafficking on both sides of the Atlantic. The book tells the story of two half sisters unknown to each other and of the six generations that follow, their lineages broken by enslavement and cursed by premonitions that condemned those who were captured, those who were spared and those who sold hostages to the Europeans. — Isabel Wilkerson

Five pages into reading “The Assistants,” you know Perri has a hit on her hands. Tina Fontana is a 30-year-old assistant to a media mogul. She doesn’t dream of moving up the corporate ladder or breaking into show business. She’s proud of her job. And she should be; she’s good at it. But her salary stinks. In her dank ground-floor apartment, she drinks out of jam jars and sleeps under a leaky ceiling. So when the opportunity to embezzle from her boss’s company and pay off her college loans presents itself, she goes for it. But she gets caught by another assistant, who makes her commit the same crime to pay off her loan. And then things get dicier, and they have to do some creative thinking to avoid prison. — Helen Ellis

Elizabeth Strout’s … “novel in stories” brings to life a hardscrabble community on the coast of Maine, a quintessentially New England town where people serve baked beans and ketchup when company comes and speak in familiar Down East accents (“ay-yuh”). But “Olive Kitteridge” is provincial only in a literal sense. … She isn’t a nice person. As one of the town’s older women notes, “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology.” Olive’s son puts it more bluntly. “You can make people feel terrible,” he tells her. She dismisses others with words like “hellion” and “moron” and “flub-dub.” After swapping discontents, she says to a friend, “Always nice to hear other people’s problems.” — Louisa Thomas

Think of it this way: Marilyn French has written a collective biography of a large group of American citizens. Expectant in the 40’s, submissive in the 50’s, enraged in the 60’s, they have arrived in the 70’s independent but somehow unstrung, not yet fully composed after all they’ve been through. Like those exhausting Russian novels in which quarrelsome and demanding families quarreled with us, made demands upon us, “The Women’s Room” strains our patience, argues, wears us down. But it’s proof of Marilyn French’s abilities that we can finish this book feeling genuinely hopeful for some kind of happy ending, someday, for Mira. — Anne Tyler

Astrid Magnussen wanders the world with her mother, Ingrid, a poet who teaches her daughter that they are proud Vikings — until Ingrid murders a faithless lover and is imprisoned. At 12, Astrid falls from a graceful, art-filled world and into the California foster care system. Until she is 18, Astrid lives with an often disastrous series of surrogate mothers — a born-again recovering alcoholic, a bigoted housewife whose next-door neighbor is a call girl, a tough woman from Russia — each time rising from the ashes of disaster wounded and transformed. Astrid tries on various ways of being a woman by scrutinizing the deadly sins women commit in their relationships with men, and her growth as a painter and sculptor parallels her growth as a vulnerable yet self-aware young woman. Fitch handles this progress deftly, pulling “White Oleander” back from the brink of predictability; her startlingly apt language relates a story that is both intelligent and gripping. — Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

The conversation I’d been hearing around the book before I even received my galley was about its resonance within our current political climate, one that is so focused on issues of women’s consent, control and intersectionality. It’s all there to parse, and parsed it will be. But when all is said and done, Wolitzer is an infinitely capable creator of human identities that are as real as the type on this page, and her love of her characters shines more brightly than any agenda. People — loving them, knowing them, letting them shatter and rebuild us again — are Wolitzer’s politics, and that’s something to vote for. — Lena Dunham

The template for the hot-blooded Italian best seller “The Days of Abandonment” is familiar, in fiction and in life. But the raging, torrential voice of the author is something rare. Using the secret of her identity to elevate this book’s already high drama, the author (Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym) describes the violent rupture of a marriage with all the inner tranquillity that you might associate with Medea. When her book’s heroine has the temerity to invoke Anna Karenina approaching the railroad tracks, the analogy is actually well earned. — Janet Maslin

Readers: What titles have you read that should have made it onto our list? Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com.