Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

In a compelling debut novel that combines the traditional English novel form with the Nigerian oral storytelling tradition, Obioma writes about four brothers who find out that the local prophesier has predicted that the eldest brother will be killed by one of his siblings. The political history of Nigeria provides the backdrop for this mix between family narrative and Bildungsroman. As Helon Habila writes in The Guardian, “The Fishermen is an elegy to lost promise, to a golden age squandered, and yet it remains hopeful about the redemptive possibilities of a new generation.”

Andrew O’Hagan, The Illuminations

The British writer’s fifth novel explores the close connection between the platoon leader of British infantry in Afghanistan and his grandmother, an elderly woman in Britain who is losing her mind to dementia. In The New York Times, Dani Shapiro describes the novel as “both a howl against the war in Afghanistan and the societies that have blindly abetted it, and a multilayered, deeply felt tale of family, loss, memory, art, loyalty, secrecy and forgiveness.” Rather than the rhetoric-spouting characters that often occupy war novels, O’Hagan gives his reader an intimate and precise portrait of mental disintegration and the desire to forget.

Marilynne Robinson, Lila

Lila occupies the same small-town world of Robinson’s previous novels Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), and details the life of a minister’s second wife, from her neglected childhood to the love, marriage, and pregnancy that unexpectedly come her way. With the theme of loneliness at its heart, Robinson’s novel “resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain,” writes Leslie Jamison in The Atlantic of the book. “Robinson’s determination to shed light on these complexities—the solitude that endures inside intimacy, the sorrow that persists beside joy—marks her as one of those rare writers genuinely committed to contradiction as an abiding state of consciousness.”

Anuradha Roy, Sleeping on Jupiter

The story of a young woman’s return to the temple town where she was abused and traumatized as a child, the Indian writer’s novel exposes “the endless, treacherous hypocrisies of Indian society” through viscerally evoked images and haunting atmosphere. Meen Kandasamy writes for The Guardian, “Roy has used the most potent weapon in a writer’s arsenal—the form of the novel, with its ability to simultaneously be universal and particular—to boldly unmask the hidden face of Indian spirituality and the rampant sexual abuse in its unholy confines.”

Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways

The British writer’s second novel centers around three young Indian migrant workers whose lives are constrained by Indian society, which despite its modern aspirations, is still weighed down by bigotry. “Sahota is a writer who knows how to turn a phrase, how to light up a scene, how to make you stay up late at night to learn what happens next,” writes Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian. “This is a novel that takes on the largest questions and still shines in its smallest details,” successfully humanizing some of India’s most urgent political problems.