There is no sense that this peculiar situation will end immediately, either for good or ill. The Pets is a novel that highlights the strange, twilight life of Icelanders.

Each of the nine stories is fully developed and stands firmly on its own merits, and yet, because of the weblike interconnections between them, they have a novelistic quality.

The care with which she creates these seemingly ordinary lives is evident. She lets her characters live and insists that we care about them. And we do.

The scope of the novel is ambitious, but Hope has structured it wisely, and the storylines, nearly all taking place on a kibbutz in Israel, flow well into and alongside one another. The narratives both have a distinct sense of the past’s impingement, while also informing and affecting one another in the present.

King of the Gypsies isn’t just a story collection; it is a poignant reminder that complexity and virtue are only ever borne out of hardship.

In Becky Adnot-Haynes’s first collection of stories, The Year of Perfect Happiness, happiness is—not surprisingly—a state more imagined than experienced. Adnot-Haynes is a close observer of relationships and the human capacity for deception, especially self-deception, but happily, she’s no cynic.

It is not enough to read these stories once, which is why it will take its place on my desk next to its predecessor. I look forward to savoring these little gems again and again, long into the future, one at a time, slowly and with deliberation.

So, how does an author take this inherently rational activity and render a portrait of an unbalanced mind? That’s what Carmiel Banasky attempts—among other things—in her sparkling debut novel, The Suicide of Claire Bishop.