Hidden River, a memorable novel-in-flash by Sara Lippmann, opens with 35-year-old Cassie, the narrator, receiving an overseas wedding invitation from Sally Sellers, with whom she’s been out of touch for many years. The Sellers family once offered Cassie the illusion of stability; it is unclear what they may offer her now. Though it is written…

In a remote Australian mountain forest there is a black orchid. It is the last of its species: an endling. As Keely Jobe’s debut novel The Endling begins, the orchid decides that “for the sake of its kind, it will hold on a little longer. It won’t flounder. It will remember the way the orchids…

At the start of Nice Places, Vincent Chu’s debut novel, twenty-something Georgie loses his job at a soulless corporation. Instead of coming clean about his lack of future plans, and despite having never gone anywhere on his own, Georgie tells his colleagues he is quitting to travel the world—and promptly starts an Instagram account to…

Winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize, Halldór Laxness wrote novels, essays, plays, and translations, and was a champion of Iceland, its history, and its people. In this novel, published in Icelandic in 1970, Laxness takes readers on a stroll through Icelandic history, a history with few documents and populated by invisible men and women.