This bracing satire of clashing worldviews in Australia begins with a toxic haze settling over an Aboriginal town, where one resident believes he can fight climate change by replacing conventional transport with hordes of donkeys. The novel only gets stranger and funnier from there.

A book in 10 parts, “Rakesfall” shifts wildly in structure and narration. Uniting all the threads is a kind of oscillating theme: Souls return over time, sometimes as two people, sometimes four or more, engaged with each other over the thorny question of how to endure fascism and kill kings.

This satire of modern media and pop culture follows a former child actor who is trying to revive the TV show that made him famous. Taylor delves into the worlds of online fandom while exploring the inner life of a man seeking redemption — and something meaningful to do.

This collection of linked stories tracks the losers in the great American popularity contest: shoe gazers who are mostly short and unattractive, and cut from the herd. Tulathimutte is writing about alienation and skin starvation, a longing for the nonexistent touches of friends and the embraces of lovers.

In this taut, remarkable novel set in 1960s Amsterdam, Isabel clings to her childhood home after the death of her mother, fixating on a broken china plate. When her brother brings his girlfriend into the house, Isabel is rude to the point of cruelty — until the novel’s psychological drama gives way to a love story of such intensity that it is easy to forget about the broken china.

This delicious follow-up to “The Plot” finds Anna Williams-Bonner basking in literary acclaim (and moola from her husband’s estate) — until pesky excerpts from a manuscript resurface and put questions of authorship, and the publishing world’s values, under the microscope.

This coming-of-age novel, overcast with the inconstant cloud of mental illness, maps the effect of a daughter’s volatility on her parents and younger sister — and probes what exactly it means for love to be unconditional.

Seventy-two migrants settle in a small Sicilian town in this polyphonic novel, translated into English by Alison Anderson. Sarr — who won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, in 2021 — not only follows the newcomers, but also considers the inner lives of the villagers, whose reactions vary considerably.

Can there ever be restitution for the harm done to generations of Black people in America? Mayfield takes the question to a provocative extreme in this thriller, which follows a group of four friends as they kidnap descendants of people who long ago committed racially motivated hate crimes.

Mengestu’s brilliantly slippery novel centers on a journalist who is supposed to spend Christmas with his wife and young son in the Virginia suburb where his Ethiopian immigrant mother lives; instead, he ends up in Chicago investigating the criminal record of the man he assumes is his father.

This follow-up to Orange’s debut, “There There,” is part prequel and part sequel; it trails the young survivor of a 19th-century massacre of Native Americans, chronicling not just his harsh fate but also those of his descendants. In its second half, the novel enters 21st-century Oakland, following the family in the aftermath of a shooting.

Brief, blunt and exquisite, O’Connor’s debut is set in the fall of 1938 on a Welsh island with a population of 47, including the bright, restless 18-year-old Manod. Unsettling disruptions to the landscape include a whale corpse washed up on the beach and English ethnographers who enlist Manod’s help but woefully distort island life in their work.