This year, I took a hint from the Nobel committee and picked up Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories of life in the Soviet Union. “Voices from Chernobyl” and “Boys in Zinc” were like nothing I’ve ever read, and they affected me in ways I find hard to describe. Alexievich’s interviews expanded my sense of what it’s possible to endure; they also made me feel the extreme narrowness of my own experiences and perceptions. They convinced me that I know nothing about people—that there are zones of emotion and thought as far from my mind as the moon is from the Earth. A mother from near Chernobyl, whose daughter was born with birth defects, asks, “Why won’t what happens to butterflies ever happen to her?” A man who’s gone back to live in the irradiated zone—to wander, alone, in a religious trance, as a kind of holy fool—explains his decision by saying, “The life of man is like grass: it blossoms, dries out, and then goes into the fire.”

I also found myself hypnotized by Leena Krohn, a Finnish writer whose collected stories and novels, rendered into English by many different translators, have just been published as a single volume, “Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction.” Broadly speaking, Krohn is a speculative writer; one of the novels in the collection, for example, consists of thirty letters written from an insect city. (“It is summer and one can look at the flowers face to face.”) Krohn writes like a fantastical Lydia Davis, in short chapters the length of prose poems. Her characters often have a noirish toughness; one, explaining her approach to philosophy, says that when she asks an existential question, “life answers. It is generally a long and thorough answer.”

Looking back, I realize that my favorite books this year were those that drew me away from the ordinary social world and into very different spaces. I don’t know why that was the dominant theme, but I know that these books transported me the furthest.

—Joshua Rothman

I only recently got around to reading Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption”—it was published last year—but in many ways 2015 was the right moment to pick it up. Our criminal-justice system received more attention this year than in a very long time. The number of police-violence videos ricocheting around the Internet spiked, and we learned countless names of people who’d lost their lives after encounters with law enforcement: Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald. But video footage tells only a sliver of the story of how broken our criminal-justice system is; Stevenson’s first-person account of his years representing poor people on death row in Alabama and elsewhere provides a fuller picture. I remember reading his book late at night, haunted, as Stevenson recounted what it was like to talk to a client after failing to stop his execution, knowing the man would soon be put to death. At times, I felt as if I were reading a book from another era, or at least wishing the injustices Stevenson described were a thing of the past. But Stevenson comes by his stories—and his insights—through many years spent representing the poorest and most powerless, and it’s this firsthand knowledge that makes his book so powerful, and so necessary.

—Jennifer Gonnerman

Two collections of stories mopped the floor with me this year. “A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me,” by David Gates, is brutal, viciously intelligent, and full of reckless, difficult love for its characters. These are gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing stories by the author of “Jernigan,” one of the angriest and most sorrowful novels around. “The Visiting Privilege,” by Joy Williams, is hard and bleak and somehow still bitingly funny, a kind of nihilistic long-form standup-comedy routine. Except you should sit down for it, and probably keep implements of self-harm out of reach.

Further in the category of Why Bother, Especially Since We Will All Die Soon is “The Sixth Extinction,” by the New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert, which reveals that the fate of civilization is a thin band of dust. Kolbert marshals staggering research to argue that the end isn’t nigh—it’s now.

In the category of novels unlike anything I’ve read before, satirical and moving and weird, there were three books that ambushed me and gave me faith. Miranda July’s “The First Bad Man,” Rachel B. Glaser’s “Paulina & Fran,” and Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout.”

“The Bed Moved,” a début collection of stories by Rebecca Schiff, won’t be out until April, but I’d like to watch the faces of people reading it as they shift between awe and admiration and shock. This writer is freaking good.

Finally, rumor has it that George Saunders is working on a novel. If only the N.S.A. had its priorities straight and could leak a few pages. I would give up a few personal liberties to get an early look.

—Ben Marcus

Dale Russakoff’s “The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?” (part of which ran in this magazine) is enraging, heartbreaking, galvanizing. Russakoff, a veteran Washington Post reporter, chronicles the ambitious, misbegotten effort to reinvent public education in the city of Newark, sparked by a one-hundred-million-dollar donation from one celebrated power player—Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook—into the custody of two others, Cory Booker, then the charismatic mayor of the city, and Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey. Before the Zuckerberg-funded intervention, Newark’s schools were a picture of dysfunction and despair: more than half of the city’s children were failing to meet the expected standards, some failing drastically. The hope—the prize—was that, by applying the kind of ingenuity and resources readily available in the tech world to the demoralized, dilapidated educational institutions of Newark, a radical transformation could be executed upon the lives of the city’s most vulnerable: its children. It is no spoiler to reveal that arrogance, cowardice, and politics as usual prevail: by the end of the book, with Zuckerberg’s money spent, the city’s schools are still failing their children. Newark was to serve as a model for educational reform; instead, it stands as a signal example of reform’s misapplication. Russakoff’s book is, however, a model of its own form: her reporting is thorough, clear-eyed, and always compassionate. The heroes of her book are not crusading politicians or confident philanthropists but the teachers who dedicate themselves so thoroughly to their young charges, and those children and parents who struggle so valiantly to seize that which should be their right, not a prize to be won against the odds—an education.

Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel “Submission” arrived with appalling timeliness; its publication in France, in January, coincided with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, while its American publication came less than a month before the Paris attacks, in November. Houellebecq imagines an Islamic France of the near future—the rationalist, secularist nation conquered not by radicals and their terrorist agents but by Muslim moderates. Houellebecq’s insight is to suggest how surprisingly congenial the new religious dictates prove to be for many among the Parisian intellectuals: there are comfortable salaries subsidized by the Gulf States and multiple compliant young wives for the male professors. The book is dark, and funny, moving, and vile; it should be read not for the gloss it provides on the headlines but for the light it sheds on the culture that gave rise to them.