Another voice-driven young woman’s story—Fatima Daas’s The Last One (2021)—held me rapt throughout. At first, I wondered if the repetitive variations on “My name is Fatima” that open each segment of the story would grate on me but, perhaps because the prose is arranged so that it’s almost-verse-like, it soon felt reassuring and familiar. Before long, I felt like I was developing a friendship with her, the more pages I turned, slowly gathering an understanding of her values and beliefs—on religion and sexuality, philosophy and family, cake and romance. (The love story also cozies up with the love stories in both novels below.) “My name is Fatima Daas. I write stories so I don’t have to live my own.”

Fatima’s story circles the idea of whether or not a lesbian can be a “good Muslim” and Nawaaz Ahmed’s Radiant Fugitives (2021) presents three generations of an Indian-Muslim family; it’s a debut novel too, but stylistically it’s wholly different. “What cosmic irony that I, who am birthed at my mother’s darkest hour, am to be named for the day’s rosiest light”: this is Ishraaq, whose name translates as ‘sunrise’ or ‘radiance’, but in terms of syntax and vocabulary, this tone is consistent throughout the novel. “I take it all in, hungrily, greedily: Nafeesa’s remorse, Tahera’s fears, Bill’s disillusionment. Arshad’s anguish, Seema’s optimism. America’s turmoil.” Okay, maybe not hungrily: this prose demands patience (love for poetry would be helpful too). It’s the kind of story that takes time to chronicle the journey of a single page from a woman’s eye to the page she’s not-quite-reading below. Like the ornate and stylized writing of Rabih Alameddine and Alaa al-Aswany, Radiant Fugitives takes time but rewards willing readers.

Nawaaz Ahmed’s debut is set in the Obama era and next we have Obama recently elected president in The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon. If you heard Ann Patchett’s interview on Late Night Lit (Seth Meyers), you’ll remember that she recommended this slim novel. Just a couple of chapters in, I knew that I wanted to read her short story collection and her debut novel as well. There are more than forty chapters, short and honed: her prose is polished and her characters attuned. She’s funny: “That is a lot of figurative language. Like a pileup of metaphors. Shit. I just added to it.” And the descriptions of her party guests and other secondary characters are vivid and recognizable: “Now here were Liza and Gary Appleton, a two-headed unit of unfashionable prescription lenses, new fleece, and wiry salt-and-pepper hair.” This story is inspired by Mrs. Dalloway and Sula and Zami, which is ambitious, in under 200 pages, but the echoes of these familiar stories make for a very satisfying read.

Shashi Bhat’s The Most Precious Substance on Earth (2021) opens with a literary reference; Nina is fourteen years old and reading Beowulf (or, trying to) because her English teacher admires it. So much about Nina’s high-school years rings true for me (like the band practices, the awkwardness of school trips) in the first half of the novel (which is how it’s marketed, though it reads more like linked short stories): “A month ago, during March Break, Amy got a boyfriend. Now I worry she might drop me, like gym clothes turned pink in the wash, or a hair elastic that’s lost its stretch.” In the second half, Nina herself is a high-school teacher. The abundant pop culture and historical detail thrilled me but she shifts these details to suit her timeline and, because it’s an era I inhabited, these alterations diluted the credibility for me. Nonetheless, I love the story’s mood and intention—its twinned paths of knowing and seeking.

A schoolteacher from Montreal is at the heart of Pineapple Kisses in Iqaluit by Felicia Mihali (2021) too. A job teaching in the far North “blew a kind of excitement” into Irina’s life on the shore of Baffin Island, where everything is brown “except for when a hunter’s gaudy parka disrupted the dull hues of the landscape.” Teaching grades three and four, she discovers that one of her students who hasn’t seemed to respond to instruction doesn’t speak any French, only Inuktitut and a little English; the girl’s mother died two years earlier and her uncle meets with Irina to offer some explanations. “History books rarely mention the North. There is a different Canada here, difficult to map, a state of its own with its own resentments and apprehensions.” Irina has her own reasons for moving to Iqaluit, outlined in an earlier and shorter novel, The Darling of Kandahar (2012), which also considers how we belong and how we might find and lose ourselves in “the polar night’s darkness.” This is Mihali’s ninth book, her second written in English.

Tiphanie Yanique’s Monster in the Middle (2021), like Mihali’s novel, is preoccupied with a love story—Fly’s and Stela’s. She landed on my TBR with her debut story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (which I’ve still not read—who can explain the ebb and flow of one’s reading selection process) and I enjoyed her poetry collection, Wife. This bit from “Fly’s First Love Story”, set in 2009, gives a hint of Yanique’s skillz. “Yes, it was good to leave his folks at the door. This is what college was for. Fly walked into the dorm like he was from the place. Never looked back.” There’s nothing fancy about her prose—it seems effortless. That’s how you know she’s worked it. Here we see a character establishing boundaries, shrugging on a new identity (and shrugging one off, simultaneously). It’s a short passage, about nothing and about everything. That’s just how she does it.

Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk (2021) also has that sense of effortlessness. I fell into it straight away with the opening scene, which so cleverly exhibits the undercurrent of prejudice in an ordinary conversation between neighbours. There are such powerful emotions beneath the surface of their conversation and interactions, but the author’s control is remarkable, and the narrative voice is mesmerizing. We don’t learn a lot about these characters in the opening pages; we learn just enough to know that we want to learn more. I was reminded of Ingrid Persaud’s Love after Love, as Mendez easily shifts timelines and perspectives and, also, I was sorry when it was over.

Amitava Kumar’s A Time Outside This Time (2021) landed on my stack because I enjoyed his book about writing (Every Day I Write the Book). His essays on craft are often funny and always detailed; he seems equally motivated by whimsy and scholarship, fuelled by curiosity. There are book references and reading recommendations; there’s also a painting, a tweet from the 45th president of the United States, and some newspaper clippings. Satya is a professor and a writer—a ruminative, bookish character, who spends arguably too much time thinking about the blurry between-space that’s neither fact nor fiction. Me too.

Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich (2021) is equally enchanting: engaging voice, engaging story. Even the backstory is slick—“A perfect start for a life of intermittent torture”— the brash and knowing tone consistently urgent and energized. “But this isn’t a story about poverty. This is a story about wealth.” Raina’s priority, however, with this story of a young man who gets rich by taking tests for the sons of wealthy families is aligned; he examines and exposes people’s motivations and obsessions. “You want to know who a man truly is? Watch him drive. Watch how he reacts, how he responds to people who cut in, who break rules. Watch his speed, how often he checks his mirrors.” Even when—especially when—Raina is entertaining readers, he’s posing questions about identity and fulfillment, about success and corruption, about redemption and resilience. He’s got all the charm of Kevin Kwan mixed with the acuity of Aravind Adiga and he writes as good a “self-help novel” as Mohsin Hamid.

Tomorrow, another way of looking at “dirty” money, this time non-fiction, in a book that made the NYT critics’ list of year’s best. Any guesses?