Aguda, ‘Pemi. Ghostroots: Stories. Norton. ISBN 9781324065852.

Winner of the O. Henry Prize for short fiction and shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing, Aguda’s debut collection resonates, with strong craft and an uncanny sensibility, mining a thread of lurking menace through 12 speculative stories that brilliantly inhabit her home city of Lagos.

Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr! Knopf. ISBN 9780593537619.

Poet Akbar (Calling a Wolf a Wolf; Pilgrim Bell) debuts with a novel abundant in vibrancy. The story traces the existential philosophy of Cyrus, a young Iranian American poet who considers life and his contribution to the world—the abacus of which balances tenderness and bleakness in turn.

Croft, Jennifer. The Extinction of Irena Rey. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781639731701. 

Croft, a prize-winning translator, pens her own debut, a metatextual extravaganza that follows eight translators as they gather to work on a novel. The story is one of translation and narration, text and footnotes, climate change, community, nationalism—and wonderfully, reading.

Everett, Percival. James. Doubleday. ISBN 9780385550369.

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides Everett with the raw materials to craft a novel of history, character, performance, and retrospection. As Jim writes his story, and that of Huck and the world they both inhabit, he conjures both mirror and foil.

Jones, Mary. The Goodbye Process: Stories. Zibby Bks. ISBN 9781958506622. 

This debut collection from the prolific short story author Jones gathers 28 of her works in a wide-ranging volume. Some of the stories are brief, just a paragraph long, others offer pages of finely delineated dialogue and characterization—all limn some aspect of loss.

Kushner, Rachel. Creation Lake. Scribner. ISBN 9781982116521.

Blending genres and subjects (noir, espionage, politics, philosophy), Kushner deftly traces the work of undercover agent “Sadie Smith” as she infiltrates a leftist group in France, only to be herself ensnared by another’s manifesto—which is another way of coming in from the cold.

Lodato, Victor. Honey. Harper. ISBN 9780063309616.

In the last chapters of her life, Honey, the child of a violent man, a survivor of rape, and a witness to murder many times over, comes back home, looking for some kind of resolution. What she finds at 82 are fresh complications and new loves.

Ogawa, Yoko. Mina’s Matchbox. Pantheon. tr. from Japanese by Stephen B. Snyder. ISBN 9780593316085.

A delicately structured and detailed coming-of-age story unfolds in brushstrokes as clear and resonant as a haiku. The prismatic tale is filtered through the lens of 12-year-old Tomoko, who spends a year with her cousin Mina, who lives in a tightly bound household and rides a pygmy hippo to school.

Vardiashvili, Leo. Hard by a Great Forest. Riverhead. ISBN 9780593545034.

Vardiashvili sets his debut, part picaresque, part bildungsroman, in Georgia, right after the Russian occupation, as Saba searches for his family across a war-ravaged landscape. Violence and history frost the pages, as do magic and mystery.

Zaher, Yasmin. The Coin. Catapult. ISBN 9781646222100.

Zaher debuts with a deft and quick-moving story narrated by an unnamed Palestinian immigrant who lives in NYC and teaches middle school. She is also the delighted owner of an Hermès Birkin bag—an object that will come to alter her existence in this finely tuned novel that touches on commercialism, capitalism, friendship, desire, and more.