With scope, depth, and feeling, The Book of Jeremiah, Julie Zuckerman’s debut novel in stories, examines pivotal experiences in the long life of a single character, exploring how these experiences shape him, change his perceptions of himself and others, and reverberate across time. The result is a moving, multifaceted portrait of a life, in all its dimensions.

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.

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.

With poetic and often searing language, the stories in Fayeza Hasanat’s début collection, The Bird Catcher, illuminate the struggles of Bangladeshi and Bangladeshi-American women—struggles that are often rooted in misogyny or other forms of prejudice. Throughout the stories run threads of resistance: a necessity of living with lasting, systemic oppression, and cause now and then for glimmers of hope.

The central characters in Thomas Benz’s thought-provoking, offbeat, and often hilarious story collection Home & Castle experience several varieties of alienation–from neighbors, from casual acquaintances, from co-workers, and sometimes from their own romantic partners. Not infrequently, this alienation derives at least in part from their own mistakes and disgruntlements. Yet in their resistance to this isolation, or to its consequences, the characters can’t help but earn our empathy–and, sometimes, even our cheers.