Maureen Corrigan

Tóibín's latest, a sequel to his 2009 novel, Brooklyn, is a devastating portrait of an Irish immigrant whose Italian American husband is expecting a baby with another woman.

Shriver's new novel is one of her best. It takes place in an alternative America, where the last acceptable bias — discrimination against people considered not so smart — is being stamped out.

Percival Everett's retelling of Mark Twain's 1885 classic focuses on Huck's enslaved companion. James is a tale so inspired, you won't be able to imagine reading the original without it.

Sloane Crosley's memoir about a friend who died by suicide takes the form of a "traditional" elegy, but there's nothing traditional about Crosley's arresting observations on being engulfed by grief.

Francis Spufford's novel imagines a 1920s city in which Native Americans still hold territory and political power, and the "color line" doesn't exist — until a grisly murder disrupts everything.

Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! is very much its own creation, but you might think of it as an Iranian American spin on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces — wedded to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.

Most of the characters in Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel don't want to believe that tyranny is taking shape before their eyes, even as power is cut off and democratic freedoms evaporate.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan says her only frustration with Keegan's work is that she wants more of it. So she was happy to read her nuanced, three-story collection, So Late in the Day.

McDermott's latest novel, which centers on two American women who meet in Saigon in 1963, explores themes of religion, humility and insistent charitable intervention.

More than a decade after his debut, We the Animals, Justin Torres returns with a novel that centers on a deathbed conversation between two friends about the distortions and erasures of queer history.

Set in the near future, C Pam Zhang's atmospheric novel centers on a chef who takes a job at a tech entrepreneur's isolated compound after smog kills most of Earth's plant and animal species.

An impoverished servant girl escapes the fledgling Jamestown colony during the winter of 1609–1610 in a historical saga that takes its inspiration from Robinson Crusoe.

An acclaimed Irish poet deserts his sick wife and two young daughters. Anne Enright's new novel centers on the way that betrayal reverberates throughout the next generations.

Set in a neighborhood where Blacks and immigrant Jews have lived next to each other for decades, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels critic Maureen Corrigan has read this year.

Maureen Corrigan recalls playing with the iconic doll on the sidewalk in Queens in the 1960s. She says Barbie didn't teach girls to be of service; she taught the giddy pleasures of a seeming autonomy.

Lindsay Lynch's luscious debut, Do Tell, is set in Hollywood's Golden Age. Dwyer Murphy's The Stolen Coast is a moody tale of a lawyer who makes his money ferrying people on the run into new lives.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull grew up in the rural interior of Central Florida during the 1960s and '70s. Her memoir evokes a land of perfect citrus, and the cruel costs of its harvest.

Ford brings his Frank Bascombe saga to an end in Be Mine, while Moore weaves together a fragmentary Civil War plot with an off-kilter vision of the afterlife in I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans is a sexually-explicit, cynical novel about young people striving. Such Kindness, by Andre Dubus III, grapples with injury, addiction, masculinity and loneliness.

Megan Abbott's Beware the Woman centers on a pregnant newlywed who finds herself isolated in her husband's family cottage. Katie Williams' My Murder is told from the perspective of a murdered woman.