Last year, I heard Celeste Ng read from her novel, “Everything I Never Told You.” After the reading, a man in the audience asked Ng about the “spooky voice” of her book’s narrator, who knows things before the characters do.

The narrator in Ng’s novel is an omniscient one, the sort that was common in fiction throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Gustave Flaubert believed that the ideal author should be “present everywhere and visible nowhere,” but in stressing invisibility, Flaubert was ahead of his time. Most 19th-­century novelists didn’t try to hide their authorial presence. With modernism’s emphasis on the self and the rendering of individual consciousness, omniscience became unfashionable. ­Twentieth-century realists moved closer to their characters and wrote in the first person or limited third.

The fact that Ng’s narrator seems “spooky” suggests that omniscience is a novelty to some contemporary readers. In the past 20 years or so, some literary writers have used it (Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Known World” springs to mind), but a slew of recent novels suggest that omniscience is making a comeback.

When I talk about omniscience, I don’t mean Nabokov’s “sifting agent,” that roving third person who alternately inhabits the perspective of one character at a time and “sifts the story through his-her own emotions and notions.” I’m talking about narrators who intrude to remind the reader how little the characters know. The omniscient narrator is conscious of everything and isn’t afraid to say so. Consider the opening lines of Ng’s novel: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” Or this omniscient swerve in Nell Zink’s novel “Mislaid”: “He was tempted to take the gun, but was unsure whether it might not be loaded. He recalled that Mrs. Fleming was crazy. Two hours later, he was dead. He had greatly misjudged the speed of an oncoming dump truck as he made a left turn from a stop sign. The other driver also died. Even the drugs and baggies burned, leaving no trace.”