Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s memoir The Body Papers is, to quote writer Mia Alvar, “an extraordinary portrait of the artist as survivor.”

At age 2, Grace moved with her family from the Philippines to a suburb of Boston, where she became adrift between two worlds. On the one hand, she was made to feel “other” in her predominantly white neighborhood and school; on the other hand, she lost touch with her native language and culture, discovering what happens when “assimilation brings erasure.” In time, Grace confronted additional, traumatizing difficulties: the realization that her family’s residency status was “illegal,” making deportation an ever-present risk; sexual abuse by her paternal grandfather; and in later years, the discovery that she has a gene that makes carriers susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer. Consequently, she had to decide whether, as a preventive measure, to have her breasts and ovaries removed.

In her affecting and fiercely honest memoir, Grace breaks the silence that long surrounded these traumas, discovering what Kirkus Reviews describes as “the healing power of speaking the unspeakable.”

In interviews with the East Coast Asian American Student Union, Fiction Advocate, and The Rumpus, Grace has answered a wide range of questions about The Body Papers, discussing how the book came about, how she connected the various threads of her story, and the care she took in integrating information about living family members. Here, she responds to questions about the process of writing and revising The Body Papers, among other topics. (Full disclosure: Grace, a dear friend, has offered invaluable advice to me as I’ve written and revised my own novels.)

In a clothing shop at a local mall, Jesse Albright turns away from her ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, for a moment. When she turns back, she finds that Sophie has vanished, as if into thin air.

Six years later, as Marlene Adelstein’s gripping and affecting début novel begins, Sophie is still nowhere to be found, and authorities have all but given up on the search for her. But Jesse hasn’t. Although almost everything about Jesse’s life has changed–she’s withdrawn from friends and neighbors, split with Sophie’s father, Cooper, and taken to drinking heavily–she continues to hold out hope that Sophie might be alive, somewhere. And in what Cooper and others see as hoarding caused by grief, Jesse fills the home she once shared with him and Sophie with found objects, seeing them as clues that Sophie has sent her to decipher.

Some of my favorite novels are those in which the setting is integral to the story. In Valerie Nieman’s thrilling, genre-bending novel To the Bones, the richly rendered setting is inseparable from characters’ fears, strengths, and weaknesses and from nearly every tragedy and triumph in the story.

The novel takes place in Redbird, West Virginia, run for generations by a coal-baron family, the Kavanaughs, whose evils run far deeper than their exploitation of the land and its people. To help achieve their ends, the Kavanaughs seem to draw dark, otherworldly powers from the coal, and from the land itself. And these powers appear unstoppable, until a few townspeople, and an outsider with some otherworldly powers of his own, try to fight back–often, with deadly consequences.

This entertaining and deeply affecting novel-in-stories, set in 1919, immerses us in the lives and travails of various members of Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth Medicine Show, a traveling ensemble of musicians, acrobats, and other performers who, depending on chemistry or circumstance, find love or discord, common cause or conflict, with their fellow show members. Allen takes us into the heart of these relationships, and into the interior lives of individual characters, creating an illuminating and satisfying experience for readers.

The title of this layered and compassionate novel echoes a question that is often asked in the wake of a tragedy: “How might things have been different if _____ hadn’t occurred?” While the novel considers such what-ifs, it is mainly concerned with real consequences–in particular, the ways in which a tragic, unexpected loss upends the plans and dreams of the people it affects, leaving them to try to reassemble their broken lives. By weaving together the stories of multiple characters who are affected by such a loss, Fox portrays this process with insight and empathy, and shows how it can deliver unanticipated gifts.

More often than we might care to admit, we enter marriage or other committed relationships with more haste than reflection; we move forward without clearly thinking things through or fully imagining what a future with this partner might look like given what we know (or sense) about them and ourselves.

In her painfully honest, witty, and perceptive new novel, And So We Die, Having First Slept, Jennifer Spiegel acknowledges this reality without judgment, and without suggesting that such relationships are necessarily doomed. Instead, through the struggles of the married couple at the center of the novel, Spiegel makes the case that it’s never too late to confront the most difficult truths about our partners and ourselves, which offers at least the hope of transformation or redemption—something denial never does.