What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad is a tender drama for our times, featuring two children on the run from authorities on the serene Greek island of Kos. Written with a fluid beauty that captures nature's ferocious power and glory, El Akkad's exquisite second novel (after American War) offers readers a glimpse of the struggles of migration through the prism of childhood innocence.

The story opens with a boat and bodies, including a child, washed onto shore close to a luxury hotel, a horrific scene. Tourists gawk while police and soldiers inspect the wreckage, searching for survivors to take to the island's migrant prison encampments. The child, an eight-year-old Syrian boy named Amir, awakens. Fearful and disoriented by his surroundings, he flees into a nearby forest.

Colonel Dimitri Kethros is in charge of "rounding up the illegals" on the island, and he is determined to track down the boy. Fortunately for Amir, he meets a local teenage girl named Vänna who offers to help him. As they grow to understand and respect each other despite language and cultural barriers, the sweetest of friendships forms.

What Strange Paradise glides back and forth in time, from Amir's earlier escape to Egypt with his family to his present-day predicament, crafting a poignant narrative of a young person constantly on the move, with forces beyond his family's control driving him farther and farther from home.

An Egyptian American journalist, El Akkad is a writer of global sensibilities, deploying his formidable craft to speak to the crisis of humanity at political borders. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer

Discover: In this captivating drama set on a tranquil Greek island, a refugee Syrian boy and a Greek teenager overcome language and cultural barriers to form a bond that will transform both their lives.

Set during the months leading up to and including the 1913 march for women's voting rights, Jennifer Chiaverini's historical novel is a colorful biography of three suffragists, and a reminder of history's relevance.

The courageous women's stories merge in Washington, D.C., on March 3, 1913, the day before anti-suffrage president-elect Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. Maud Malone, "militant suffragist librarian and notorious heckler," as a Wilson aide called her, arrives with the Army of the Hudson--53 women who publicized the march by hiking 250 miles from New York to attend. New Jersey Quaker and activist Alice Paul, leader of the movement for a constitutional amendment, proposed the march. As the event organizer, Paul faced southern white women demanding segregation of marchers, police refusing to control crowds and attacks by jeering, groping men along the route. Born into enslavement, journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett fled Memphis when her newspaper was destroyed, settled in Chicago, co-founded the NAACP and became a respected writer and speaker. A member of the Illinois delegation to the march, Wells-Barnett persevered in representing women of color for suffrage. Along with the three women, nearly 5,000 marchers and tens of thousands of onlookers thronged to Pennsylvania Avenue. While hooligans tainted the glorious spectacle, citizen response worked in the suffragists' favor, drawing attention to the cause. They persisted, and Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in August of 1920.

With voter suppression, racism and violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators appearing in this richly detailed novel, Chiaverini (Resistance Women; Enchantress of Numbers) strikes a timely chord in The Women's March. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, NY

Discover: Three women who led the fight for women's voting rights persevered in staging a dramatic march on Washington preceding anti-suffrage president Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.

Virtue, Hermione Hoby's achingly acute and ultimately shattering second novel, covers a painfully consequential year in the life of 23-year-old narrator Luca Lewis. Luca's unrest stems from the 2016 presidential election, which has just delivered a surprise winner, as well as from his shaky grasp on how to live honorably: "I wanted badly to be good; I wanted desperately to be liked. It was easy to confuse the two."

As the novel begins, Luca, a white Dartmouth graduate from Colorado, has landed a nine-month internship at a storied New York literary magazine. At a work gathering, he meets artist Paula Summers, who has done some of the magazine's covers, and her filmmaker husband, Jason Frank. Soon Luca is enjoying regular Sunday dinners with a retinue of lefty artists at Paula and Jason's Brooklyn brownstone. By the time Paula invites him to spend the summer in Maine with her, Jason and their kids, Luca is in her Gatsby-like thrall. Likewise exerting a pull is Luca's fellow intern Zara McKing, a Black graduate of Brown University who laments the paucity of minority voices in the magazine and calls Luca's summer plans "white nonsense."

Who would have guessed that one of literature's best vivisectionists of the Trump era's white woke-noscente would be a London-raised Coloradan author? Virtue is light on story--Luca's revelations often play like plot points--but Hoby (Neon in Daylight) seems to be betting on her sparkling sentences and indelible characterizations to hold readers rapt. It's a bet she will likely win, and deservedly. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Discover: Hermione Hoby's perceptive and withering second novel takes the measure of a white liberal young man's values following Trump's surprise electoral win in 2016.

Nickolas Butler's suspenseful, character-driven fourth novel, Godspeed, tells of the lengths three friends will go to in the quest to better their lives.

In Jackson, Wyo., a haven for hipster tourists and ski bums, it's the have-nots who build the area's multimillion-dollar houses and the haves who inhabit them for just part of the year. The three longtime buddies behind True Triangle Construction--family man Teddy; Bart, a former metal band drummer; and Cole, going through a divorce--struggle to make ends meet. When Gretchen hires them to finish building her massive eco-home, offering $175,000 bonuses if it's done by Christmas (just four months away), they leap at the chance. Teddy longs to get on the property ladder; with a luxury wristwatch, Cole will feel like he's made it.

From the start, though, the project seems cursed. Under the previous contractor, a laborer died in an accident on site. Heavy rains destroy the access bridge and winter snows could bring work to a halt. Bart turns to meth for the energy to put in long hours. Butler (Little Faith; The Hearts of Men) charts his worsening addiction in convincing hallucinogenic descriptions. A sense of foreboding explodes into dramatic events that will require luck--and deception--to resolve.

As in his debut, Shotgun Lovesongs, Butler insightfully explores his protagonists' psyches and the dynamics of male friendship. He also patiently reveals why Gretchen, a workaholic lawyer, is desperate to have her house ready. In this poignant story, time and life are precious yet so easily wasted. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck

Discover: In this gripping parable of the American dream gone awry, the dictum "money can't buy happiness" rings true for a wealthy homeowner and her hard-working construction crew.

In The Second Season, Emily Adrian (Everything Here Is Under Control) has created an ironically funny, high-stakes novel about a woman trying to become the first-ever female announcer in the NBA. Ruth Devon was a college basketball star until her knee blew out, after which she married her coach, Lester, and planned to settle down as a stay-at-home mom. But, unable to resist the game, Ruth becomes a college basketball announcer and then a reporter on the sidelines of NBA games, while Lester, now her ex-husband, has moved from coaching to announcing from the box. Ruth has some guilt about how much time she's spent away from her 18-year-old daughter, Ariana, as her career advanced, but she absolutely loves her work. When Lester announces he's retiring, 42-year-old Ruth is determined to get his job.

The problems in Ruth's way: her sweet, younger boyfriend wants to spend more time with her, not less. No woman has ever been an NBA announcer. And she may be pregnant, which might ruin everything.

With wit and verve, Adrian traces a dilemma familiar to many women: work or parenthood? As she juggles her reporting and her relationships with Lester, her boyfriend and Ariana, Ruth's unsure if she's handling any of it correctly. Absolutely irresistible, The Second Season is a fast-paced, fascinating character study. Readers of Emily Henry or Taylor Jenkins Reid are sure to love Emily Adrian. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Flagstaff

Discover: In Emily Adrian's lively novel, a tenacious woman attempts to become the first female announcer in the NBA.

Lindsay Cameron's psychological thriller Just One Look features the sort of narrator who is more than just unreliable--she's terrifying. Cassie Woodman is a temp lawyer assigned to sort through e-mail messages and mark them as pertinent to a case or not. Tedious as this job is, Cassie finds a bit of happiness in a six-month-old exchange between Forest and Annabelle, a partner and his wife, and starts stalking them on the Internet. Cassie, aided by misuse of alcohol and over-the-counter medications, combs through search results and social media and soon finds out that they've split up, news that ratchets up her obsession.

Determined to replace Annabelle, Cassie orchestrates meetings with Forest using information that technology makes alarmingly easy to access. Cassie isn't a tech mastermind--just a disturbed young woman--but with a little online digging she knows where he'll be and all of his preferences.

Cameron (Biglaw) reveals bits of Cassie's sinister past throughout, leading readers to wonder how it's possible Cassie's managed to go this long with only a restraining order against her. Out of control and repulsive as Cassie is, however, Cameron sometimes softens her just enough to make empathetic readers think she might be redeemable. Then Cassie stares at a knife on her table and imagines slicing her ex-boyfriend's throat with it before instead calmly cutting a bit of cheese.

The draw of Just One Look is not that the main character should win the day, but that readers will be breathlessly following the twists as they wait for her to do just the opposite. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels

Discover: With Just One Look, Lindsay Cameron suspensefully pulls readers into the web spun by a young female stalker with technology and a bit of access to the object of her obsession.

Singaporean creator Weng Pixin's vibrant Let's Not Talk Anymore began with a "big 'f*ck this, f*ck you!' kind of attitude" after one of her "many disputes and disagreements with [her] Mom." The work made her think more deeply about not just her mother, but her matrilineal ancestry. In sharing the genesis on her website, Weng explains how "comics became a place for me to imagine" their lives.

Five girls, distinguishable mostly by hairstyles, line up to grace the first page. A who's-who spread follows, with names and lineage displayed as five portraits on the left side, further elucidated on the right with each of the teens momentarily caught as 15-year-olds: great-grandmother Kuān in 1908, grandmother Mèi in 1947, mother Bīng in 1972, "Myself" Bǐ in 1998, imaginary daughter Rita in 2032. Individualized glimpses are presented in slice-of-life chapters for each of the girls, from Kuān to Rita, and repeated for four cycles. Weng creates her history and future while thoughtfully questioning roles of womanhood and motherhood. Kuān immigrated alone to Singapore from South China for her safety. Mèi was assaulted by her exploitative, adoptive mother's lover. Bīng's artistic dreams were overshadowed by her single mother's demands to help raise her younger brothers. Bǐ is an angry adolescent but appears as a near-perfect mother for Rita, who represents an idealized culmination of all her maternal ancestors.

Weng returns with her child-like characterizations, surrounded in vividly saturated backgrounds and landscapes she introduced in her 2020 debut, Sweet Time. Her narrative structure is intriguing, her stories moving--albeit, the younger two generations less so. What makes her book a standout, however is (again), her inventive, dazzling art. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Discover: Five matrilineal generations populate Singaporean graphic artist Weng Pixin's imagined personal history--and future, too--in compelling, gorgeously saturated full-color pages.

Historians and those interested in current affairs are sure to be intrigued by Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground, in which Robin J. Hayes traces the roots of modern social-justice causes to the mid-century Black Power movement, via the connection of a Diaspora Underground. Hayes, a contributor to the Atlantic and writer and director of the award-winning documentary Black and Cuba, explains that diasporas always begin with discomfort in a homeland--even if that homeland is another region within a nation. This discomfort--whether a legacy of American slavery and the Jim Crow South or caused by brutal colonial practices in Africa--has led to a strong sense of Black community among Africans and Black Americans alike.

A diasporan mentality is also cultivated by mores that oppose mainstream ideas--such as "affirming that 'Black is Beautiful!' Or 'Black Lives Matter' [which] is radical in its challenge to racist regimes that consistently represent Blackness as ugly and inhumane." Inspired by mid-century freedom movements in Ghana, Algeria, Congo and other African nations, diasporans became motivated to improve Black political representation and Black livelihoods in the United States.

Thoughtfully researched and well-documented, Love for Liberation is a fascinating academic treatise on the ways Black Americans have created a cohesive culture, and strengthened connections with African communities. And, as Hayes clearly demonstrates, "although African independence and Black Power weren't able to fully actualize their goal of complete self-determination, today's generation of social justice activists appear to be taking cues from their limitations and the best of their examples," creating hope for the future. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Flagstaff

Discover: Love for Liberation nimbly demonstrates how colonial violence against African freedom fighters resonated with Black Power activists, creating a Diaspora Underground.

Kelli Jo Ford, a Paris Review Plimpton Prize winner, makes a magnificent #OwnVoices novel debut with Crooked Hallelujah, which was named a Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2020 and longlisted for the 2021 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Center for Fiction's 2020 First Novel Prize.

In 1974, 15-year-old Justine lives in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with her aging Granny and embittered mother, Lula. Almost seven years ago, Justine's father delivered his family to Beulah Springs Holiness Church for service and vanished: "Lula held herself together with a religion so stifling and frightening that Justine... never knew if she was fighting against her mother or God himself." Her first act of rebellion--sneaking out to meet an older boy--ends in rape. The traumatized, silenced teen gives birth to Reney, sealing their symbiotic relationship for life: "Mom was my sun and my moon," Reney later observes.

In the decades that follow, Justine works hard to break the cycle of abandonment and neglect for Reney. Despite floundering relationships with useless men, Justine eventually marries Pitch, whom she can't live without--no matter how many times they leave each other. Justine and Reney move to Texas, where Reney settles into a ready-made family, finding comfort and support in Pitch's family's farm, most especially with Pitch's debilitated mother, another forsaken woman, although she's still married to his philandering father. As Reney matures, she seems doomed to repeat her mother's mistakes but eventually finds the strength to drive far, far away.

A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Ford adroitly, affectingly weaves Indigenous history into her spellbinding narrative, exposing displacement, cultural erasure and socioeconomic disparity. The interlinked story structure allows for an intriguing, vast cast, without losing sight of Justine and Reney. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Discover: In this splendid novel-in-stories, several generations of Cherokee women work to break painful cycles in their lives.

Susie Yang's electrifying debut novel, White Ivy, earned its spot on the longlist for the Center for Fiction's 2020 First Novel Prize. It was also named a Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick and a USA Today Best Book of 2020. Part immigrant story, part elitist takedown, part contemporary novel of wicked manners, White Ivy is an unpredictable spectacle.

At two, Ivy Lin was left with her maternal grandmother in China until she turned five, when her parents finally had the resources to reunite the family "in a wonderful state in America... called Ma-sa-zhu-sai." Reinventing herself as American proves arduous, with abusive parents, a thieving grandmother, a sudden move to New Jersey during high school and no friends. To survive, Ivy learns early the power of manipulation. Her first chance to escape is to college in Boston, after which she begins working as an elementary schoolteacher. A chance re-encounter grants her reentry into the Speyer family's seemingly halcyon circle--the (now-former) U.S. senator, his doyenne wife, enviously bohemian daughter Sylvia and, most importantly, perfect son Gideon, who was the object of Ivy's middle-school idolatry.

In just a few months, Ivy might grasp that happily-ever-after she's been relentlessly maneuvering to achieve. But now that she's at the edge of acceptance into society's inner circle, the alluring pull of self-sabotage grows stronger.

Yang's cast might be heavy with unlikable characters--scheming Ivy, pretentious Sylvia, bland Gideon and unrepentantly roué Roux (no spoilers!)--but the story they populate is delectably addictive and frightfully perceptive, as one surprise begets another shocking turn, leading readers far off expected paths. May the deceptions never end. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Discover: Ivy Lin proves to be the antihero readers will love to hate in debut novelist Susie Yang's assured, deft and biting novel of (manipulative) manners.

The prolific Gordon Korman (War Stories) helps young people develop ideas about tolerance while still providing his well-known lighthearted atmosphere in this earnest middle-grade novel, Linked.

When swastikas show up in a largely racially homogeneous middle school in Chokecherry, Colo., everyone is mystified. Soon after the swastikas begin appearing, Link, who is known for his practical jokes, learns that his maternal grandmother was a Jewish baby left in a WWII French orphanage and adopted by a Christian family. Though she barely identifies as Jewish, Link decides to study for his bar mitzvah. Once Link finds a rabbi and begins to learn the necessary prayers, he receives help from an unlikely source: new student Dana. She is the Jewish daughter of paleontologists working to uncover dinosaur remains and doesn't seem to like Link at all. Before long, the students are also dealing with an obnoxious YouTube star who arrives to publicize and exploit the situation.

Interwoven with the larger story is one about students creating a symbolic paper chain of six million links, which represents Holocaust victims (the author's note credits the idea to the eighth-graders of Whitwell, Tenn., who did this project with paper clips in 1998). The students themselves, including Link, Dana and Michael, a Dominican American boy who becomes the chain project's leader, narrate the story in alternating first-person chapters, giving readers an inside account of each child's emotional experience. Korman writes with skill about antisemitism, tolerance education and developing and growing relationships. Although there are a few plot twists that may stretch readers' credulity, Linked is an absorbing novel of ideas appropriate for its tween audience. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance book reviewer

Discover: In this accessible and absorbing middle-grade novel, small-town kids in Colorado become famous after someone paints a swastika in their school hallway and they plan a project to counteract the hate.

In Small Favors, a gloriously dark fairy tale that's perfectly enhanced with a romantic through line, Ellerie Downing is the "reliable one," the eldest daughter who won't let her family down. Usually she helps Mama, but with her twin brother, Samuel, "sneaking off all summer," she's begun tending the beehives with Papa.

At 18, Ellerie is ready to find her own place in the "wide and wondrous world" beyond Amity Falls. But there are "giant beasts in the woods" that are believed to have killed everyone on the recent supply train headed for the city. Soon the Falls will be cut off, with monsters and winter snows ensuring no one leaves until spring. When a charming stranger--"too attractive by half"--shows up, Ellerie thinks the future she's hoped for may be about to begin. Then tragedy strikes and Papa must get Mama through the woods to a doctor in the city. Ellerie is left behind to protect what's left of her family. With supplies dwindling and townsfolk at each other's throats, the nightmare is only beginning.

Erin A. Craig (House of Salt and Sorrows) has conjured a spellbinding tale of magic and horror. Her formidable protagonist, Ellerie, is a young woman fully capable of carrying her own troubles on her back--and then some. While it enriches the story, Ellerie's romance never derails her own sense of purpose. She's not immune to the darkness but she fights it harder than most. As the town of Amity Falls, which began full of rules and righteousness, deteriorates in the face of a powerful magic, readers may well wonder who the real monsters are in this story. --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author

Discover: When her town is threatened by monstrous creatures, 18-year-old Ellerie must defend her family in this standout blend of fantasy and horror.