It sometimes felt like there was little time for Books I Loved this year, what with staying on top of the all-consuming Twitter Feed I Hated. But some of the reading that I did (in actual books, on real paper—what a relief) took me away from the appalling questions that the news was raising, questions like “So is this what American fascism looks like?,” or “Wait, what happened to my E.U. citizenship?,” or, simply, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Instead, these books brought me face to face with more elemental concerns: birth and bereavement. In her deceptively slim third novel, “Eleven Hours,” Pamela Erens presents a woman who has just entered the maternity wing of a hospital, and, in the course of the hours between her arrival and that of her child, unfolds her story. The retrospective narrative—who is this woman, and why is she there, alone?—is interwoven with a propulsive, often harrowing account of the physical demands of labor in all its irresistible, unimaginable inevitability. For those of us who have been there, Erens skillfully evokes that wild, supra-political condition. And she reminds all readers, those who have experienced labor or not, of the dangerous trespass along the margin of life which every childbirth entails.

My friend Katherine Barrett Swett is one of the best-read people I know; her students at the Brearley School, where she teaches English, are fortunate beneficiaries of her careful, analytical, sensitive affinity for literature. This year saw the publication of Swett’s own book of poems, “Twenty-One.” It is a collection born of tragic circumstance: the poems, most of them only three lines long, were written after the death of Swett’s daughter, at the age of twenty-one, and together they chart the terrible cycle of the first year spent in that aftermath. They are spare, resonant, sometimes drawing upon or alluding to the writers and works of literature that have sustained Swett: Robert Frost, Sappho, “King Lear.” They are shattering—tiny containers filled with boundless pain. I have one poem, “Ornery,” written out by hand in its entirety on a Post-it above my desk: “I hope that some god can forgive all / us parents who will never forgive ourselves / every meanness in a short life.” It reminds me on whose behalf I’m most despairing about the turn the world has taken, and for whom that despair must, nonetheless, daily be dispelled.

—Rebecca Mead

It’s not surprising, in retrospect, that, in a year of deadlocked ideologies, I was drawn to novels of friendship. Mauro Javier Cardenas’s début, “The Revolutionaries Try Again,” tells the tale of three Ecuadorian friends—one living in exile in San Francisco, the other two still in Guayaquil—who come together in a quixotic attempt to take the country’s Presidency. “Everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones,” one character reminds another, and Cardenas’s gift is to show, through long, brilliant sentences, the charm of inaction and delinquency. The book was published by the small and savvy Coffee House Press, and deserves a much wider audience—it is funny and honest and packed with playful modernist tricks.

Another début, Tony Tulathimutte’s “Private Citizens,” takes a different set of friends—so-called millennials in mid-aughts San Francisco—and turns them into a soufflé of disappointments and depressions. His characters are plugged-in, hard-partying, drug-taking, Webcam-abusing Stanford graduates, who are frequently sharp and self-aware in the course of their self-destruction. As is the case with “Revolutionaries,” the brilliance of “Private Citizens” resides in its sentences, but where Cardenas’s sentences billow Tulathimutte’s are knowing and precise, as if someone had given David Foster Wallace a verbal haircut.

Both books operate on a high degree of intelligence, much like the other two books I especially admired this year: Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s début collection, “Inherited Disorders,” a brutal, comic, and exhaustive take on father-son relationships, and Vivek Shanbhag’s “Ghachar Ghochar,” a novel translated from Kannada and set in Bangalore, which features an exceedingly passive protagonist who allows his bourgeois family to turn almost criminal in their greed and clannishness. Which is, perhaps, a sadly appropriate note on which to end a recollection of 2016.

—Karan Mahajan

In 2016, while America was imploding, I happened to read three excellent books about romantic love: one magnificently cringe-inducing, one delightfully swoony, and one a bit of both. “Willful Disregard,” by Lena Andersson, which was a big best-seller in its author’s home country of Sweden, describes a female writer’s new friendship with and eventual fixation on an older and more successful male artist. Hugo and Ester have an intense intellectual connection, which makes her feel like she’s in love with him and makes him feel, well, like they have an intense intellectual connection (though he’s willing to dabble in sex with her). Like Rachel Cusk’s “Outline,” “Wilful Disregard” is lacerating in its intelligence and honesty; it makes you waver between loathing and compassion for basically all humans.

On the other side of the romantic spectrum, “Eleanor & Park,” by Rainbow Rowell, follows two high-school misfits in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1986, as they meet on the school bus, repel each other, and eventually fall madly in love. Rowell’s humor, tenderness, and sense of detail are extraordinary. And her pacing is perfect, which is a clinical way of saying that she escalates Eleanor and Park’s intensifying attraction with such wondrous control that when they do things like make eye contact or brush fingers it’s thrilling. Rowell also depicts the poverty that Eleanor’s family lives in with deftness and subtlety.

I loved “Eleanor & Park” so much that I then moved on to “Landline,” also by Rowell, about a successful, burned-out TV writer named Georgie, whose marriage to a stay-at-home dad is foundering. While Georgie is, for work reasons, separated from her husband and children over Christmas, she finds a rotary phone at her mother’s house that allows her to call her husband in the year 1998—that is, before he was her husband. Rowell pulls off this impossible premise with great charm, and her depictions of the couple’s sweet courtship and their later compromise-filled marriage are equally unsentimental and knowing.

—Curtis Sittenfeld

While my bias is clear on this one, since I penned the introduction, the long-awaited English-language release, from Verso, of Nanni Balestrini’s “We Want Everything”** **was, for me, a highlight of 2016, as a reader. The figure of the worker, the absurdity of work, the violence of rebellion: we would do well to study how it was that Balestrini made politics and fiction and art, all in once place. It’s one of the most compelling pieces of literature of the entire second half of the twentieth century. Also, it’s incredibly funny.

But possibly nothing, for me, topped an incredible nonfiction novel written by Catherine Leahy Scott, Inspector General of New York State, along with a staff of twenty-nine investigators. The book is titled “Investigation of the June 5, 2015 Escape of Inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt from Clinton Correctional Facility,” and, at a hundred and fifty-four pages, it is a stunning and absorbing, rollicking, tragic, unbelievable but true account of the lives of Americans in America.

—Rachel Kushner