Lydia Kiesling is the editor of The Millions. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Slate, and the New Yorker online, and have been recognized in The Best American Essays 2016. She lives in San Francisco with her family.
Blue Light Hours (2024) Bruna Dantas Lobato "Blue Light Hours is a melancholy, strange, and love-suffused book, exploring a relationship through a medium that connected families around the world long before the Zoom era. Through Skype, a mother and daughter a continent apart create a dreamlike, almost womblike space, wrestling an uncanny closeness from a distance of thousands of miles. A quietly beautiful coming-of-age story that never loses sight of the people who come along--or don't--for the transformation wrought by time and distance."
Acts of Forgiveness (2024) Maura Cheeks "Acts of Forgiveness is the rare novel that lays out a hypothetical public policy and its attendant bureaucracy, weaving a story with an imaginative yet realistic exploration of what reparations might look like - what might be missed and what might be achieved. But above all, it is a story about family, with all the challenge, ambiguity, interconnection, obligation, and love the term carries. . . . A generous, thoughtful, and thought-provoking novel about inheritance in all its forms."
Here in Avalon (2024) Tara Isabella Burton "Here in Avalon is a fascinating trip to a demimonde of Burton's prodigious imagination. In its mysterious bacchanal, we find a unique story about the seductions of art and beauty, and the temptation to leave the stultifying mainstream behind."
The Prospectors (2023) Ariel Djanikian "With The Prospectors, Djanikian brings the novelist's microscope to the archives, taking the real history of the Berry family of California and exploring the motivations and personal dynamics and parallel lives that are so often left out of triumphalist histories of the west. The result is an illuminating exploration of the greed and human mess that lies beneath settler histories--and a truly gripping family story."
The Neighbors We Want (2023) Tim Lane "How did Tim Lane somehow manage to make a dark, delicious, twisty thriller out of strands as disparate as postpartum misery, early parenthood, marital tension, neighbor drama, and performative Portland politics? The Neighbors We Want is both a tense, compelling mystery and an astute, unflinching, realistic look at the dark side of domestic bliss - a true pageturner unlike any other I can remember."
Excavations (2023) Hannah Michell "Excavations builds a deeply moving mystery between two real-life catastrophes rooted in political malfeasance, illuminating events that stole lives, galvanized the public, and changed the future of a nation. Michell deftly extends the metaphors of this history to her interconnected fictional families built on lies, omissions, and structural error. The result is a poignant and sinuous story about loss, love, and repair."
The Nursery (2023) Szilvia Molnar "I was blown away by this book... At once somber and joyful, sly and earnest, nimble and painstaking, perverse and profoundly invigorating."
Your Driver is Waiting (2023) Priya Guns "A retelling of the movie Taxi Driver featuring a ride-share driver? An incredible premise for a novel that explores work, class, and solidarity (or the lack thereof)."
Vintage Contemporaries (2023) Dan Kois "What a warm and delightful novel about friendship, responsibility, ambition, and legacy. Poignant without being treacly, Vintage Contemporaries is a time capsule of the recent past, and a wry and tender work of art."
Toad (2022) Katherine Dunn "Toad is, plainly, a masterpiece--a nimble, wry, innovative, and devastating novel. It is painful to know that this novel might have gone unpublished, that Katherine Dunn's brilliant language and her sly commentary about gender, desire, power, and self-direction might never have reached readers. Toad should join the canon of postwar literature, as well as the literature of counterculture, the literature of women's inner lives, the literature of the Pacific Northwest, the literature of America itself. It is a gift."
Mother Ocean Father Nation (2022) Nishant Batsha "A gorgeous and finely-wrought family story, and a meditation on migration, homeland and belonging in the long shadow of Empire. Batsha's characters live on the page, and he gives as much care to the fault lines of family as he does to those of race and class engineered by the colonial order. His novel is an act of testimony to the ways that societies fracture along those lines, and how families break apart and put themselves back together. This is at once a probing look at events of the not-so-distant past, and a beautiful work of fiction."
The Shore (2022) Katie Runde "How can a novel be simultaneously a delicious page turner that transports the reader to warm seaside days while also being a deft, deep meditation on illness, grief, and loss? The Shore is both, and I wept over this tender family story of mother, father, daughters, interwoven with fine renderings of a summer town, a summer economy, and the people who make it go and who still call it home when the tourists leave. This is a lovely, expansive look at the hard work of caregiving, saying goodbye, and keeping on."
Unlikely Animals (2022) Annie Hartnett "Unlikely Animals is a wonderful love song to a place and the people who live there, past and present. It is a warm, joyful, generous novel about families and human frailty--an homage to the dead and a celebration of the living."
New Animal (2022) Ella Baxter "I loved this macabre, mordant, and very moving book. New Animal surprised and comforted me with its deft investigations of grief, power, and self, and with its beautiful prose. This is an economical novel that packs a major emotional punch."
The Shimmering State (2021) Meredith Westgate "The Shimmering State gives readers what its title promises: a shimmering, dreamlike experience of multiple lives that collide and repel through fate and coincidence. In this hypnotic novel, Westgate offers her characters, and her readers, a beautifully dystopian shot at redemption, and shows the lengths people will go to remember and to forget."
Immediate Family (2021) Ashley Nelson Levy "I've never read a love story like Immediate Family before-complex, challenging, sensitively and beautifully told. This is a gorgeous, affecting novel that probes the fissures and hidden places of familial love-and all its provocations and possibilities-and in so doing gets to the heart of love itself."
Bewilderness (2021) Karen Tucker "This is a heartrending novel about addiction, love, and fragile starts, and it held me captive with its deft pacing and attention to detail. Tucker shows how the world is made up of small, unheralded stories--of great loves and senseless losses--and her novel sets out, and succeeds, to make us feel one of them."
The Fourth Child (2021) Jessica Winter "Winter elegantly delineates the circumstances that create her characters' belief systems, gently lays bare their foibles and convictions, and shows how even the most rigid ideology can chafe against the messy and tender realities of life."
Let's Get Back to the Party (2021) Zak Salih "Let's Get Back to the Party is a gorgeous, raw, tender, trenchant novel about men figuring out how to live. At once gimlet-eyed and generous to his wonderfully drawn characters--fallible, lovable, and endlessly real--Salih paints a vivid portrait of the paradoxes of queer life in contemporary America, his characters navigating love and friendship in communities shaped both by freedom and fear, and by trauma that is both collective and individual. This is a stellar debut from a huge talent."
We Can Only Save Ourselves (2021) Alison Wisdom "This is a melancholy, dreamlike book about group dynamics, power, growing up, and the choices people can't take back. Alison Wisdom gives her haunting story a quiet but inexorable forward momentum--like that of adolescence itself."
Outlawed (2021) Anna North "A moving and invigorating complication of the Western, highlighting chosen family, love, and survival among outcasts in another American timeline. As she mines the genre for vital new stories, North beautifully shines a light on our real past and conveys a warning for the future."
Out of Mesopotamia (2020) Salar Abdoh "This is a masterful, stylish novel. Through the eye of his disarming, disaffected narrator, Salar Abdoh weaves a story at once wry and aching, beautifully illustrating the paradoxes of war in the field and on the home front. Alternating moments of brutality and comradeship, Abdoh's novel shows war's pointless heroisms, its random accidents, its absurdities, and its ongoing human costs. This is at once a probing and masterful novel of the disaster in Syria and Iraq, and an affectionate yet gimlet-eyed view of masculinity, art, and cultural politics."
Leave the World Behind (2020) Rumaan Alam "This novel left me tense, overwhelmed, and bristling with admiration. Rumaan Alam is a brilliant writer, a beautiful prose stylist with an uncanny talent for drawing characters—both their individual quirks and foibles, and the subtle gradations of class and circumstance. In this novel he combines those gifts with absolutely superb pacing and atmospheric control, balancing the comic and the tragic, the real and the surreal, the cynical and the empathetic, the individual and the collective. I'm blown away by this novel."
Last Call on Decatur Street (2020) Iris Martin Cohen "Last Call on Decatur Street is an atmospheric novel that brings readers right into its world--probing, celebrating, and sometimes puncturing the mythologies that surround the French Quarter of New Orleans. In a novel about relationships, family, and place, told from the perspective of its real and messy protagonist, Iris Martin Cohen grapples thoughtfully with the rifts between people--both the ones that might be mended, and the ones that might not."
If I Had Two Wings (2020) Randall Kenan "This is a riveting collection of stories with a vibrant cast of characters, both corporeal and fantastical, and a stunning sense of place. Stories--comic, tragic, and human; with themes of faith, fury, chicanery, miracles, and weather--swirl out from Down East North Carolina, touch down gently around the world and come home to the magnetic center of Tims Creek. It was a pleasure to live in this book."
Life Events (2020) Karolina Waclawiak "Life Events is a hypnotic novel that beautifully grapples with fundamental questions about how to die and how to live. Karolina Waclawiak transports the reader into the streets of Los Angeles, the deserts of the southwest, the apartments of the dying, and a woman's life at a moment of profound change. Filled with compelling, provocative details about the work of "exit guides" for terminally ill people, Life Events is both a mid-life bildungsroman and a meditation on self-determination. I can't stop thinking about this novel."
Everything Here Is Under Control (2020) Emily Adrian "A sharp, thoughtful, poignant look at early motherhood, a small town, and the complex, challenging, and beautiful relationships that make up our families both biological and chosen."
Shiner (2020) Amy Jo Burns "Shiner is a lush, gripping novel that explores love, grief, rage, and regeneration in a small Appalachian community. A story that feels both out of time and of its time, I won't forget the haunting mood, place, and characters that Burns brings to life."
Take Me Apart (2020) Sara Sligar "Take Me Apart is such a delicious novel: perfectly plotted, atmospheric, disturbing, sad?even sexy. Sara Sligar brings both the northern California coast and the personal history of a brilliant artist to vivid life. I couldn't put it down."
Kept Animals (2020) Kate Milliken "Kept Animals is a searing, beautifully written look at a place, a time, and a community set along the fault lines of class, race, climate, and coincidence. This novel will stay with me for a long time."
The Hotel Neversink (2019) Adam O'Fallon Price "A gripping, atmospheric, heart-breaking, almost-ghost story. Not since Stephen King's Overlook has a hotel hiding a secret been brought to such vivid life."
