EDITOR’S NOTE

FICTION | Laurie Muchnick

the best books of 2022

Every November, when I look back at the year’s fiction, I try to discern trends: Was this the year of books with ghosts or the year of books about unhappy young people talking about relationships? The first thing that pops out at me looking at our list of the best fiction of 2022 is a tiny but distinctive microtrend: Books about families titled with the name of that family. And to make the trend even more specific, both books that fit into it are published by Norton: There’s Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao (Feb. 1), an update of The Brothers Karamazov about a Chinese American family running a restaurant in Wisconsin—our review calls it “a disruptive, sardonic take on the assimilation story”—and Rubén Degollado’s The Family Izquierdo (Sept. 6), a novel about three generations of a Texas family that believes they’re living under a curse, which our review calls “a gloriously rich epic.”

Some of the year’s most striking fiction was exceptionally long; consider The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead, Feb. 1), which follows the historical figure Jacob Frank, who in parts of 18th-century Ukraine was thought to be the Messiah. “A massive achievement,” says our review, and the book isn’t made any less massive by the fact that it starts on Page 961 and counts down to 1. At 592 pages, Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point (MarySue Rucci Books/Scribner, July 5) also makes a large impression with its story of two friends from Philadelphia Quaker families who grow old, sometimes gracefully and sometimes not, and consider the best way to preserve the nearly untouched land where they’ve spent summer vacations in Maine for their entire lives.

But some of the shortest novels on our best books list have just as much impact. Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers (Knopf, Feb. 22) and Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of This Book (Ecco, Oct. 4) have something else in common besides their brevity: They’re both possibly autobiographical stories of a mother-daughter pair, and both make adventurous experiments with form. Our verdict on Otsuka: “The combination of social satire with an intimate portrait of loss and grief is stylistically ambitious and deeply moving.” McCracken: “Novel? Memoir? Who cares. It’s a great story, beautifully told.”

As always, there are striking debuts. Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Sept. 6) is a collection of linked stories about a Miami family with roots in Jamaica. Escoffery’s voice is vivid and engaging whether he’s writing in the first or second person, in standard English or Jamaican patois. Luke Dani Blue’s Pretend It’s My Body (Feminist Press, Oct. 18) is a “collection of stories about characters on the brink of claiming new genders, sexualities, lifestyles, and even forms….Blue writes with nuance, empathy, and wit,” according to our review. And let’s not forget second novels! Douglas Stuart follows up his Booker Prize–winning Shuggie Bain with Young Mungo (Grove, April 5), about two Glasgow boys—one Catholic and one Protestant—who fall in love in the 1990s. Our review calls it “romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful.” And some great books are the second in a series: If you want to read Marlon James’ Moon Witch, Spider King (Riverhead, Feb. 15) or N.K. Jemisin’s The World We Make (Orbit, Nov. 1), you should probably go back and read their predecessors, but you’ll be glad you did.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

company was a fireable offense. Apparently, she had hanged herself in the building. At home, Devine has interesting roommates, including a pizza-loving, Russia-born male computer hacker; a woman who’s building a dating website with phenomenal potential; and another woman who has recently graduated from law school. The Russian tries and fails to track the source of the text for Devine. More people die at the company, naturally freaking everyone out. Devine is a suspect, but a retired Army general protects him—for a price. Devine must help them unravel a secret at the company, and if he refuses, they will “send my ass right to USDB” (United States Disciplinary Barracks) for an act he had committed while in the Army. Readers will suspect nearly everyone in this fast-moving whodunit. Clues abound, like the color of a bathing suit and mysterious references to Waiting for Godot. A great line states that diversity in the high finance world looks like “a jar of Miracle Whip all the way to the bottom.”

What fun! This is a winner from a pro.

WHEN WOMEN WERE DRAGONS

Barnhill, Kelly Doubleday (352 pp.) $28.00 | May 3, 2022 978-0-385-54822-9

As women around the world inexplicably transform into dragons, a young girl struggles to take care of her cousin in 1950s America. It’s indecent to speak about dragons, just as it would be indecent to talk about, say, menstruation or the burning, building rage that so many women feel day to day. Because it’s such a forbidden topic, to the extent that scientists who study the dragon transformations are silenced by the government, no one really understands why “dragooning” happens or how it works. When Alex’s Aunt Marla is among the thousands of women who all turn into dragons together on the same day in 1955, her beloved cousin, Beatrice, becomes her adopted sister. And when Alex is in high school and her own mother dies of cancer, her father sticks her in a cheap apartment and tells her she’s old enough to raise Beatrice on her own. Alex inherited her mother’s talent for math and science, and she struggles between her own rage at how her abilities are constantly diminished by the men around her and her resentment that her Aunt Marla became a dragon and abandoned her and Beatrice. But the older Beatrice gets, the more she longs to become a dragon herself, and Alex lives in terror that Beatrice will leave her behind. In lesser hands the dragon metaphor would feel simplistic and general, but Barnhill uses it to imagine different ways of living, loving, and caring for each other. The result is a complex, heartfelt story about following your heart and opening your mind to new possibilities.

This novel’s magic goes far beyond the dragons.

NATURAL HISTORY

Barrett, Andrea Norton (208 pp.) $26.95 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-1-324-03519-0

Henrietta Atkins and one Marburg sister return from Ship Fever (1996), Barrett’s National Book Award winner, in interlinked stories ranging across half a century. Henrietta occupies center stage in the first three stories. “Wonders of the Shore” takes her to an island off the New Hampshire coast for an 1885 summer vacation with her friend Daphne. Barrett delicately contrasts Henrietta’s life as a high school biology teacher in Crooked Lake, her central New York hometown, with Daphne’s profitable career as a science writer and pseudonymous cookbook author; she plumbs the women’s complex relationship and provides a surprise ending that reveals Henrietta making an unexpected decision about herself and her future. In “The Regimental History,” she is a bright, inquisitive 10-year-old fascinated by the letters of a Union soldier, later learning of the soldier’s sad decline from his nephew, who’s one of her students. In fewer than 50 pages, Barrett considers the cost of war, the duplicity of leaders, and the nurturing bond between a young person and an inspired teacher. “Henrietta and Her Moths” also ranges through time to trace Henrietta’s efforts to help her sister, Hester, through pregnancy and motherhood and to provide a vivid glimpse of Henrietta’s ability to convey the excitement of scientific observation to her charges, including Caroline, her tempestuous niece. Caroline has become an aviator in “The Accident,” which captures both the joy of flight and the cruelty of class privilege with Barrett’s characteristic subtlety and cleareyed compassion. In “Open House,” another of Henrietta’s students faces a conflict that underpins the entire collection: The bonds that tie people to family and community are challenged by the ambition to find a place in the larger world. That theme becomes explicit in the title story, which finds Rose Marburg in 2018 reflecting on her choice to abandon scientific work that led others to a Nobel Prize. As always, Barrett depicts the natural world and the human heart with wonder, tenderness, and deep understanding.

More superb work from an American master.

WE HAD TO REMOVE THIS POST

Bervoets, Hanna Mariner Books (144 pp.) $22.00 | March 15, 2022 978-0-358-62236-9

Scathing, darkly humorous exploration of the impact of VR, IRL. Up until 16 months ago, Kayleigh was a content moderator at Hexa, a company contracted by an unnamed social media platform to review user posts for inappropriate

content. Kayleigh and her co-workers must view hundreds of disturbing posts and videos per day and accurately categorize and flag videos for removal according to company guidelines. The guidelines are often counterintuitive, with more attention to preventing litigation than preventing harm. As Kayleigh and her co-workers begin to internalize the horrors they see each day, the line between the virtual and the physical world, truth and bot chatter, grows fuzzy. Co-workers mistake a roof repairman for a jumper, try to contact users who livestream self-harm, and join flat-earther cults. In this twist on the workplace drama, Bervoets masterfully captures our contemporary moment without devolving into national politics or soapbox rhetoric. Think Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation but with characters who have aged a few years and started full-time jobs. The psychological toll inherent to today’s workforce, big tech ethics, and viral misinformation—each are examined in turn by Kayleigh’s wonderfully snarky, unreliable narration and Bervoets’ intimate portrayals of a well-imagined and diverse cast of characters. Look out for a sucker-punch ending as Kayleigh searches for one of her flagged influencers in person. At first it’s infuriating—over-the-top, out of character, and abrupt. But on further consideration, this controversial conclusion has the reader experience Kayleigh’s emotional process after reviewing each post: shocked back into reality and left to wonder how to live with what she’s seen.

Bervoets just gets it. This is, unironically, a novel for our time.

SEEKING FORTUNE ELSEWHERE

Bhanoo, Sindya Catapult (240 pp.) $26.00 | March 8, 2022 978-1-64622-087-8

Eight stories of dislocation—cultural and geographic, familial and romantic. An elderly woman parked in a “retirement-community-cum-old-age-home” in Coimbatore, India, by her well-meaning daughter, who lives in the United States, tells a lie that restores a little of her agency but also underscores how empty her life has become. A mother realizes that she has not been invited on her daughter’s buddymoon, a recent fad of newly wedded couples heading off on honeymoons with friends and family, but her exhusband’s girlfriend has. A professor is accused of taking advantage of his graduate students, all Indian immigrants like him, by asking them to do chores around his house. Bhanoo, a longtime newspaper reporter, homes in on devastating moments of loss— the results of aging, cultural misunderstanding, so-called progress, fickle hearts, and even tragedy—throughout this stunning debut collection of stories. The professor, who sees himself in his graduate students, thousands of miles from India, completing their studies in small college towns like Bozeman, Montana, can’t reconcile his sense of himself as treating them “like family, because their own families were so far away” with the charge that he took advantage of them. In “Nature Exchange,” a wrenching story about a woman whose son was killed in a school shooting, Veena returns obsessively to the nature center where children can trade found objects like sand dollars and dead insects for points to be redeemed for prizes. Before his death, her little boy was saving up for a pair of antlers. Now, as she struggles to move on with her life, Veena fixates on the antlers as though they might free her from her grief. These are psychologically astute stories—and also riveting. By carefully withholding key details, Bhanoo transforms human drama into mystery.

Graceful stories by a writer with enormous empathy for even the most flawed and forlorn among us.

PRETEND IT’S MY BODY

Blue, Luke Dani Amethyst Editions (256 pp.) $17.95 paper | Oct. 18, 2022 978-1-952177-03-3

A debut collection of stories about characters on the brink of claiming new genders, sexualities, lifestyles, and even forms. In “Certain Disasters,” a girl survives a tornado only to feel a “negative space” suddenly crack open in her that fills with masculine imagery and makes her crave a male body, while in the futuristic “Suzuki in Limbo,” the protagonist returns to see her family one final time before she plans to give up her “meatsuit” and have her consciousness uploaded as computer code into an alternate reality. Not quite magical realist yet filled with magic, these stories perform groundbreaking work in their search for apt metaphors to describe moments of revelation for trans and queer people. Mind-reading is the magic in “Other People’s Points of View,” a story about Ted, a teenager with the niche ability to sense peoples’ thoughts as they wrestle with decisions. It also perfectly conveys why it’s hard for Ted to come out as a girl. In “Crush Me,” a slightly less successful story, the sudden magical appearance of a growing number of boulders in a riverbed brings to life the narrator’s consuming crush on her best friend, another woman. Blue writes with nuance, empathy, and wit about the complexity of gender and sexual orientation. The middle-aged narrator of “My Mother’s Bottomless Hole,” who realizes too late (from her perspective) that she wants to be a man, tells the high school students she advises in the GayStraight Alliance that bodies are like tattoos: “Yours mean a lot to you now because they’re perfect, but eventually they’ll be worn out and falling apart….Every adult has dysphoria. It’s called aging.” Blue’s bigheartedness extends to all of their characters, even the mothers who struggle to understand their children’s desires. That’s the case in “Bad Things That Happen to Girls,” a sneakily devastating story.

Original work intent on creating new ways to imagine transformations.

“Dramatic, fun, thoughtful, clever, and (literally) punchy.”

the art of prophecy

THE FAMILY CHAO

Chang, Lan Samantha Norton (320 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-393-86807-4

A Chinese American family reckons with its patriarch’s murder in this modern-day reboot of The Brothers Karamazov. When James, the youngest of the three Chao brothers, returns home to Wisconsin from college for Christmas, he’s braced for drama. His imperious, abrasive father, Leo, has driven his mother to a Buddhist sanctuary. The middle brother, Ming, made his fortune in New York to escape the family’s orbit and is only grudgingly visiting. And the eldest brother, Dagou, has labored at the family restaurant for years in hopes of a stake in the business only to be publicly rebuffed by Leo. Leo is murderously frustrating, so it’s not exactly surprising when he’s found dead, trapped in the restaurant’s freezer room, its escape key suspiciously absent. Chang’s well-turned third novel neatly balances two substantial themes. One is the blast radius of family dysfunction; the novel is largely told from James’ (more innocent) perspective, but Chang deftly shows how each of the brothers, and the partners, exes, and onlookers around them, struggles to make sense of Leo and his death. (Handily, the plural of Chao is chaos.) The second is the way anti-immigrant attitudes warp the truth and place additional pressure on an overstressed family: When one of the brothers faces trial for Leo’s death, news reports and local gossip are full of crude stereotypes about the “Brothers Karamahjong” and rumors of the restaurant serving dog meat. As with Dostoevsky’s original, the story culminates in a trial that becomes a stage for broader debates over obligation, morality, and family. But Chang is excellent at exploring this at a more intimate level as well. A later plot twist deepens the tension and concludes a story that smartly offers only gray areas in response to society’s demands for simplicity and assurance.

A disruptive, sardonic take on the assimilation story.

THE ART OF PROPHECY

Chu, Wesley Del Rey (544 pp.) $28.99 | Aug. 9, 2022 978-0-593-23763-2

A prophecy is unexpectedly foiled and a chosen hero cast adrift in this first of a fantasy trilogy inspired by Chinese martial arts films. Elderly, one-armed, but still incredibly able war artist Ling Taishi is invited to view the progress of the Champion of the Five Under Heaven, prophesied to be the doom of the Eternal Khan, foe of the Zhuun Empire. Taishi discovers that the so-called hero, Wen Jian, is a poorly trained spoiled brat; nevertheless, she sees some potential in him and resolves to train the boy herself. Then a Zhuun foot patrol blunders into the naked, profoundly drunk Khan and kills him themselves, turning Jian into a political liability and forcing the new master-disciple team to go on the run. Under an assumed name, Jian toils resentfully as a novice and servant at a war artist school; Taishi dodges assassins and searches for the temple where the prophecy was made to learn how and why it failed. Meanwhile, Salminde, an elite warrior and close friend of the late Khan, looks first for her sister and then for some way of helping her people, forced into indentured servitude in the aftermath of the Khan’s death. Author Chu uses his knowledge and experience as a martial artist, stuntman, and actor to craft an exceptionally easy-to-visualize work with expertly blocked fight sequences; it’s impossible not to picture how everything would look on screen (of course, the trilogy has already been optioned for television). This novel is squarely directed at kung fu, wuxia, and wire-fu fans who adore Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; The Legend of Drunken Master; Kung Fu Hustle, and the like, providing a story with an epic sweep punctuated with dashes of humor and sharp-edged banter. Although Jian provides the initial spark for the plot, the novel is marvelously dominated by strong women, including the hot-tempered and fierce Taishi, who occasionally learns that rudeness is not always the best policy; the passionate, grieving Salminde, searching for meaning after her world has ended; and the mercurial, psychopathic shadow assassin Maza Qisami.

Dramatic, fun, thoughtful, clever, and (literally) punchy.

SAINT DEATH’S DAUGHTER

Cooney, C.S.E. Solaris (624 pp.) $27.99 | April 12, 2022 978-1-78618-470-2

In this debut novel, the first of a trilogy, a previously reclusive young necromancer ventures out into a dangerous world. Miscellaneous “Lanie” Stones is born into a family famous for its executioners and assassins; she herself has a violent allergy toward, well, violence and violent death…a sign that she is destined to have the power to reject death itself (up to a point) as a necromancer. As her abilities increase over the years, so do her responsibilities and troubles. Her ancestral home is on the verge of being lost to creditors. Her only reliable teacher in necromancy is the ghost of her great-grandfather, whom no one else can see and who absolutely cannot be trusted. Her glory- and money-seeking sociopathic sister, Amanita Muscaria, has accepted a commission from the Blood Royal for a series of assassinations that results in Nita’s own brutal murder, leaving Lanie with a (justifiably) resentful brother-in-law and a willful, vengeance-minded young niece. The murderer, the sorcerer-queen Blackbird Bride, is after Lanie’s niece (to kill her) and Lanie (to enthrall her into becoming one of her many spouses). Can Lanie keep herself and those she loves safe, trust the new friends she’s