Black Leopard, Red Wolf
by Marlon James

Jamaican-born James, winner of the Man Booker Prize, unleashes the fantasy trilogy he has dubbed an “African Game of Thrones” with a phantasmagorical volume. It stars a mercenary named Tracker, who has a prodigious nose for scents and a lot to learn. His mission is to find a missing boy. Over nine years, Tracker’s trials connect him with the Leopard, a shape-shifting hunter; Nyka, a skin-shedding mercenary; the Sangoma, a divinatory healer; a centuries-old Moon Witch, griots, and dozens more. Tracker is threatened by mad kings, knights and necromancers, by Omoluzu (roof walkers), shape-shifting hyena avengers, and blood-drinking Ipundulu, who may have kidnapped the boy. James offers a clue to his underlying theme early on in the saga: “Truth changes shape just as the crocodile eats away the moon.”

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong

“I am writing to reach you…” Little Dog, a Saigon-born refugee relocated to the US as a child, addresses his mother, who cannot read, in this incantatory first novel from the TS Eliot Prize-winning poet. Ever sensitive to subtleties of race, class, gender, and his refugee status, Little Dog examines childhood moments both tender and violent, and his teenage years, when he and co-worker Trevor share intimate discoveries. His grandmother Lan tells stories of her youth in Vietnam, the war years when her body kept her alive, her GI husband who became Little Dog’s grandfather. Vuong spins a history of memory in exquisite sensual language, shaping a spiral that encircles a mother, a son, a grandmother, a first love and the beginnings of a writing life.

Bowlaway
by Elizabeth McCracken

McCracken’s idiosyncratic comic novel about a century of small-town New England life revolves around Bertha Truitt, a plump otherworldly woman who is discovered unconscious in a Salford, Massachusetts, cemetery as if dropped from the clouds. With a single-minded passion for candlepin bowling, Bertha sets up an alley, hires two employees, and gathers the women of the town into a pioneering team. She marries Leviticus Sprague, an erudite black man from New Brunswick. Their daughter Minna’s talent ultimately spins her into the highest echelons of the New York music scene. Over time Bertha’s bowling alley draws a new sort of clientele, aimed at banning women. McCracken has conjured up a continuously unfolding riff on gender, small town divisions and aspirations, and the magical dimensions of everyday life.