Rebecca Makkai is a Chicago-based writer whose second novel, The Hundred-Year House, will be available from Viking/Penguin in summer, 2014. Her first novel, The Borrower, is a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, an O Magazine selection, and one of Chicago Magazine's choices for best fiction of 2011. Her short fiction has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008), and appears regularly in journals like Harper's, Tin House, Ploughshares, and New England Review.
The Felons' Ball (2025) Polly Stewart "The Felons' Ball is full of secrets - ones that refuse to reveal themselves and ones that refuse to stay buried. It's also full of wit and empathy and characters as real as your own family members. This novel is assured, propulsive, and thrilling, and I tore through it."
Fox (2025) Joyce Carol Oates "I can't remember the last time I read something so (darkly, disconcertingly) addictive that yet bears so much realism and nuance and depth. Oates is a genius in the truest sense of the word - fearing nothing, including radical reinvention - and Fox is, to my mind, her most compelling book in her remarkable career."
Casualties of Truth (2025) Lauren Francis-Sharma "With laser-sharp prose and a keen eye for psychology, Casualties of Truth gives us a story of vengeance, justice, and the mutations of memory . . . This is a world in which no one is perfect, no one is at peace, and nothing can truly be forgotten. As riveting as it is important."
Too Soon (2025) Betty Shamieh "Too Soon is about what it means to leave home, what it means to return home, and what happens when home is an elusive concept. Sharp, propulsive, and irreverent, this story is profound without ever becoming ponderous - and I haven't been this excited about a debut novel in a long time."
Sweet Fury (2025) Sash Bischoff "Cunningly ambitious, twisty, and immersive, it seduces you into a story so compelling that you aren't ready for the sucker-punch of its deeper truths. This is a hell of a debut."
The God of the Woods (2024) Liz Moore "Riveting from page one to the last breathless word, The God of the Woods is about the many ways we find and lose both ourselves and others. This book flew by at lightning speed, but will stick with me for a very long time."
The Divorcees (2024) Rowan Beaird "This is the novel I've always wanted to read about divorce in midcentury America: the glamour and underbelly of Reno's divorce ranches, the support of female friendship, and the impossibility (and glorious possibilities) of starting over as a single woman. The Divorcees is a delicious literary page-turner from a fierce new voice."
The Road from Belhaven (2024) Margot Livesey "Margot Livesey shines bright, as always - giving us both the beauty of the world and the roiling tumult of the souls within it. Bewitching and seductive, The Road from Belhaven is a vision."
A Very Inconvenient Scandal (2023) Jacquelyn Mitchard "To write about those oldest of subjects-families, their secrets, their betrayals...it takes an absolute master of storytelling. This book is scandalous delight."
Loot (2023) Tania James "Loot is the most transporting and absorbing novel I've read in ages - a rich tapestry of an epic, thrilling at every turn. This isn't just brilliant writing: It's storytelling of the highest order."
The Archivists (2023) Daphne Kalotay "The Archivists coheres around both loss and its flip side, survival--and the willful acts of remembering and forgetting that stir those forces into our lives. These twelve stories are revelatory, unsettling, and yet somehow deeply familiar. As I began each piece, I had the feeling of sinking into something rich and real, a world that became more urgent than the one I was sitting in. That urgency always led me somewhere vital--and what more can we ask of great fiction?"
Thrust (2022) Lidia Yuknavitch "Thrust is alarmingly trenchant - and a hell of a wild ride. Daring, dazzling, and earth-splitting, this is a book to take in wide-eyed."
All the Secrets of the World (2022) Steve Almond "Almond, a master of the short form, has now set himself loose on a vast canvas, giving us a rollicking, wide-ranging, unpredictable novel--part crime story, part coming-of-age, part satire, part deadly serious. This book is sharp, fast-moving, juicy . . . a wild ride and a great deal of fun."
Sleepwalk (2022) Dan Chaon "Dan Chaon has given us one of the most intriguing, original, and fully-realized characters in recent memory; that he's the center of an absolute page-turner is the icing on the cake. Sleepwalk is riveting, propulsive, chilling, and (no shocker) pure genius."
Mercy Street (2022) Jennifer Haigh "Mercy Street is propulsive, urgent, and essential. Haigh writes with uncommon insight and compassion (and, yes, mercy) about people whose ideals are so strikingly at odds that we can only wait for their lives to collide. I was riveted and transported, and want to hand this book to everyone I know."
A Previous Life (2022) Edmund White "White's project, as always, is to show us the human: the human body as defined by its urges and needs, and the human heart as it evolves through time and experience. In A Previous Life, he also gives us daring experiments of form, of autofiction, and of storytelling. Fresh and inventive and wise."
Honor (2022) Thrity Umrigar "Honor is a novel of profound depths--cultural, personal, romantic, spiritual. It's also a story of tremendous grace, both in the understanding it shows its characters and in the ways they navigate a brutal but stunning life."
The Pessimists (2021) Bethany Ball "The Pessimists is honest and hilarious-- treating suburban angst, marriage, and private school life both seriously and with the humor they're due. Ball writes with the sharpened pen of writers like Meg Wolitzer and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, but with a dangerous edge and a pathos all her own."
The Every (2021) (Circle , book 2) Dave Eggers "The Every follows through not only on the world Dave Eggers created in The Circle, but on the absurd and alarming world we've created for ourselves. With oracular precision, he takes us on a journey equal parts terrifying and human and hilarious. This is Eggers at the top of his game."
The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021) Rabih Alameddine "Rabih Alameddine is a master of both the intimate and the global — and The Wrong End of the Telescope finds him at the top of his craft. A story of rescue, identity, deracination, and connection, this novel is timely and urgent and a lot of fun."
Her Here (2021) Amanda Dennis "Dennis is in possession of hypnotic narrative gifts and a ferocious intellect. With Her Here, she has claimed her place in the literary world."
The Talented Miss Farwell (2020) Emily Gray Tedrowe "Wickedly compelling...a Machiavellian marvel, a modern Becky Sharp, a character to root for despite your better judgment."
Impersonation (2020) Heidi Pitlor "By turns revealing, hilarious, dishy, and razor-sharp, Impersonation lives in that rarest of sweet spots: the propulsive page-turner for people with high literary standards."
Hieroglyphics (2020) Jill McCorkle "Jill McCorkle has long been one of our wryest, warmest, wisest storytellers. In Hieroglyphics, she takes us on through decades, through loss, through redemption, and lands in revelation and grace. As always with McCorkle, the story feels so effortless and true that we might well miss what a high-wire act she’s performing. But make no mistake: She’s up there without a net, she never misses a step, and it’s spectacular."
Florence Adler Swims Forever (2020) Rachel Beanland "Rachel Beanland is a writer of uncommon wit and wisdom, with a sharp and empathetic eye for character. She'll win you over in the most old fashioned of ways: She simply tells a hell of a story."
The Second Home (2020) Christina Clancy "Christina Clancy writes with warmth, wit, and wisdom about fantastically human characters. A novel of family and place and belonging for fans of Ann Packer and J. Courtney Sullivan."
Man of My Time (2020) Dalia Sofer "With Sofer's considerable talents, the betrayals (of both self and others) that leave Hamid a brittle shell of a man are fully worthy of our intense gaze . . . [Man of My Time is] finely wrought, a master class in the layering of time and contradiction that gives us a deeply imagined, and deeply human, soul."
The Beauty of Your Face (2020) Sahar Mustafah "The Beauty of Your Face is a striking and stirring debut, one that reaches its hands straight into the fire. Sahar Mustafah writes with wisdom and grace about the unthinkable, the unspeakable, and the unspoken."
The Caregiver (2018) Samuel Park "The Caregiver is a triumph, a clear-eyed novel full of humanity and compassion and life. The threats of the world are ever-present, but so is a brave and defiant endurance, a sense that the heart can survive the worst defeats, the worst losses, the worst regimes. Samuel Park was a treasure, and he has left us with one."
The Air You Breathe (2018) Frances de Pontes Peebles "Sweeps you up like a fairytale, and although the characters are deep and real, the story keeps its breathless magic to the end, with transformations and journeys and bonds as entrancing as Graça and Dores themselves. An ambitious and consuming novel."
A Word for Love (2017) Emily Robbins "With lyrical precision and sharp psychology, A Word for Love asks us to consider the ways one household might become a world, one love might become a universe."
