Muldoon’s latest poetry collection continues his longtime trick of marshaling obscure references into fluent, fun and rollicking lyrics that lull you in with their musicality, then punch you in the gut with their full force once you decipher their meanings.

Based on a true story, this novel follows a dysfunctional suburban family decades after the father, a prominent businessman, is kidnapped from his driveway. His adult children lay out the ways they are screwed up by latent trauma, their father’s repression and the wealth that insulates them.

A young Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering addict grieves his parents’ deaths while fantasizing about his own in Akbar’s remarkable first novel, which, haunted by death, also teems with life — in the inventive beauty of its sentences, the vividness of its characters and the surprising twists of its plot.

A love triangle is at the heart of this novel, which is set against the backdrop of a North Dakota beet farm during the economic meltdown of 2008-9. It’s as much about the financial crash and environmental destruction as it is about the people most impacted by these devastations.

The grandiose title is tongue in cheek — mostly. These witty, sexy, sometimes heartbreakingly personal lyrics demonstrate how ordinary life can be the stuff of poetry, and also, thrillingly, how poetry can be a vital part of modern life.

If you read Ferris’s original 2017 graphic novel, you can’t forget it: a beguiling, haunted hybrid of personal memoir, murder mystery and 20th-century time portal. This surreal and densely referential follow-up, drawn in Ferris’s signature cross-hatched style, continues to follow 10-year-old Karen Reyes in circa-1968 Chicago as she wrestles with loss, sexual identity and a host of secrets.

A modern take on the epistolary novel, this riveting mystery lets readers sift through texts, emails and WhatsApp messages alongside a true-crime journalist in an effort to discover the real story behind a series of occult deaths.

This deceptively powerful posthumous collection by a writer who died at 22 follows the everyday routines of Black families as they negotiate separate but equal Jim Crow strictures, only to discover uglier truths.

Hollinghurst’s latest brings readers deep into the trials and tribulations of Dave Win, an English Burmese actor confronting confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate over the course of his life, all tied together by Hollinghurst’s keen eye and affecting prose.

In the latest queer romance from the author of “Red, White & Royal Blue,” Theo and Kit, two exes who haven’t seen each other since their disastrous breakup four years ago, find themselves on the same European food tour. The book is a sexy, sensory feast, weaving together luscious descriptions of petal-pink pastries, salted Negronis and lavender-strewn countrysides amid the inferno of their rekindled passion.

Two weeks before her wedding, a cookbook editor at a London publishing house discovers that her fiancé is cheating on her. Determined to meet her family’s ridiculously high expectations, and hungry (in every sense of the word) for perfection, she forges ahead with plans for the wedding of everyone else’s dreams.

Written with sly and slicing grace, this far-future fable is set on spaceships stratified into rigid social hierarchies. A professor plucks a boy from the lowest level, called the Hold, to be equal parts educated by and exhibited to the faculty and other students. But what the boy and professor learn from each other changes them both, and could transform their worlds.