Noteworthy Titles

Irish writer Claire Louise Bennett's idiosyncratic "Pond" is a small masterpiece of cranky solitude.

Gunnhild Øyehaug's stories, first published in 2004, take the idea of entanglement to unsettling extremes.

Haruki Murakami again revels in tales of mysterious woman (and sad men) in his latest story collection.

Pajtim Statovci's novel of personal and family displacement (and odd pets) is a shining debut.

China Miéville reinvents postwar Paris in a clever but stilted homage to Surrealism.

In her latest novel, Rachel Cusk can't enough of playing disappointment's biographer.

Anuk Arudpragasam's debut is a superior work of fiction and poised rendering of unimaginable sadness.

In "Exit West," Mohsin Hamid gives global migration a magically compassionate new look.

George Saunders' ambitious journey into the world of limbo and Abraham Lincoln's grief at the death of his son is a gossip-fest.

Olivia Cerrone's evocative novella is a searing journey into turn-of-the-20th-century Sicilian mines.

Robert Schirmer invents a Wisconsin town and packs it with homophobia and its fallout.

A Flemish-Belgian writer "reinvents" his grandfather to brilliant and dramatic effect.

In 1951, Polish writer Gustaw Herling recalled his Gulag days, and entered a rare class of writers.

Roberto Bolaño's understated Rome-set novella is a posthumous example of the Chilean writer's genius.

In Jesse Ball's unsettling novel, suicide has a "cure" of sorts, but the price is profoundly surreal.