The unnamed heroine of July’s gaspingly explicit comic novel plans a cross-country road trip, only to stop 30 minutes from home. There she lavishly redecorates a motel room and begins an odd but passionate affair with a younger man who works at a rental-car agency.

In 1970s Philadelphia, an alien girl sent to Earth before she’s born communicates with her fellow life-forms via fax as she helps gather intel about whether our planet is habitable. This funny-sad novel follows the girl and her single mother as they find the means to persevere.

This brilliant, brutal and utterly affecting novel, about the murder of an 8-year-old child in rural India, uses the trappings of the mystery to examine deeper ills in the entire country.

Smith’s poetry balances a delight in the possibilities of language with an innate skepticism about its use in the world; here is a poet who nurses the tension between art and action and exhorts readers to acknowledge injustice while appreciating the chaotic nature of human existence.

After three teenagers are brought back from the dead, the magic-wielding band teacher who revived them gives them a series of tasks to stay alive. This is the first novel from a master of the short story, and it pushes our understanding of what fantasy can be.

Grossman, who is best known for his Magicians series, is at the top of his game with this take on the myth of King Arthur, which resoundingly earns its place among the best of Arthurian tales. The novel follows a knight who helps lead a ragtag band to rebuild Camelot in the wake of the king’s death.

The narrator of this smart and sneering novel of capital and its consequences is an unnamed Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City who becomes involved in a scheme to buy Hermès Birkin bags and scalp them to “trashy and unworthy” buyers. In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, the narrator seesaws between jaded American consumerism and the sadness and guilt of displacement.

The eternal conflict between making art and selling out gets a fresh take in Senna’s funny, foxy and fleet new novel about a struggling mixed-race couple — she’s a writer, he’s a painter — in Los Angeles. The jokes are good, the punches land, and the dialogue is tart: You often feel you’re listening in on a three-bottles-into-it dinner party.

An American agent infiltrates a commune of French environmentalists in Kushner’s philosophical rendition of the spy novel, which blends pointed comic observation with earnestness in vinaigrette harmony. You know from this book’s opening paragraphs that you’re in the hands of a major writer, one with a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration.

Blackburn’s first novel (after two inventive short story collections) is an experimental and disarmingly funny look at death and loss. Narrated by dystopian artificial intelligence machines, the story follows a woman who impersonates her brother by texting from his phone after his suicide.

In 1913, at a health resort in what is now Poland, a shy and sickly student discovers a terrible secret: Every year around the first full moon in November, a man, sometimes two, is torn to pieces in the nearby forest. This novel by the 2018 Nobel laureate, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, pits nature against the state and the social world, with a particular emphasis on gender.

A lowly servant girl in 16th-century Spain has a secret: There’s magic in her fingertips, perhaps the kind that anxious kings and other assorted schemers would kill for. The best-selling fantasist Bardugo infuses this new standalone novel with both rich historical detail and a heady sense of place and romance.