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 But Jesse hasn’t. Although almost everything about Jesse’s life has changed–she’s withdrawn from friends and neighbors, split with Sophie’s father, Cooper, and taken to drinking heavily–she continues to hold out hope that Sophie might be alive,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.

From the start of this fast-paced thrill ride of a novel, the main character, Jake Halligan, is in danger. A bounty hunter, Jake has made lots of enemies among those who break the law, and even among some who enforce it. So when a body of a young woman turns up in his gun safe, it’s possible that one or more of these foes are trying to frame him, or send him a threatening message.

But as Jake soon discovers, bigger, more powerful forces are arrayed against him, for reasons that reach far back before his bounty-hunting days. And he learns that he is to become not the hunter but the hunted, in a decks-stacked-against-him challenge echoing the one at the heart of the classic short story (and movie) “The Most Dangerous Game.”

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.

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.

Timothy Gager’s captivating new collection of flash fiction, Every Day There Is Something About Elephants, immerses us in revelatory episodes or situations from a range of lives. All the stories, even the more surreal ones, capture truths about human experience, with all its darkness, absurdity, and moments of recognition.