The best emotionally gripping novels about conflicted recent history and coming dystopia

This book made me feel as if I were on a Coney Island ride that was part roller coaster, part Tilt-a-Whirl, and part chamber of horrors—followed by a tranquil stroll in Central Park to catch my breath. That's just the mix of wild stimulus and stately calm I loved when I lived in New York City myself.

The story—really, multiple interlocking character portraits set in the maybe 1980s—is totally believable even though it moves around in time, including into the future. The city itself is not one of those characters. But the city is made real and rich through their multiplicity. Some of them are wildly idiosyncratic people. But hey, they're New Yorkers! Reading it, I kept asking myself why I ever left.

I was captivated by the central relationship, a love affair between two grunt soldiers in World War I. That's quite unlikely, but it hints at a positive outcome or dangles a thread of something hopeful. And that kept me hooked through the decades-long saga of war, displacement, exile, and loss from Europe across the Middle East to China—in a refugee caravan, on foot!—ending in the present, in Israel.

Hemon, an immigrant to the U.S. from Sarajevo, writes in English, his second language, which, for me as a writer, makes this kaleidoscopic story an even more dazzling achievement. He's playful with language, too, not unlike Joyce. And playful with the possible; there's magic realism, but with a light touch. An all-time fave. I'm going to read it again.

Set in Dublin in what could be the present—though it could be any city in a liberal democracy and any time in the coming years—this is a frighteningly believable story of the arrival and imposition of fascism. The focus is on one normal suburban family whose first response is to shrug. They think, "It doesn't concern us," but slowly, and then sometimes in quick shocks, it does.

The writing is understated. But the description of an incremental, daily drip-drip of tightening repression almost made me feel short of breath. There is no happy ending. It's not escape reading—more a cautionary tale.

This quiet, unsettling book was written over a decade ago but still feels so topical and urgent that it might have been published today. In a German city, dozens of African migrants living on the street stage a hunger strike for the right to work. Richard, a widowed academic in bored retirement goes to meet them, and gets involved.

I recalled my own impulses to activism and charity as a kid and now— my curiosity to understand other people's plight, compulsion to help, and perhaps guilt that, in comparison, my own problems are negligible.

Richard is motivated by morality, a search for meaning, and a desire for connection and shared action. I've been there, too, and like him, I've learned that friendships can sour and good intentions go wrong.

A timely story of migration, global in scale. It's told intimately through the travels and love affair of one young man and one young woman. (Still, it introduces us, in the vignette, to what seems like scores of other refugees coming from and bound in all directions—picture an airline's route map.)

I was drawn in by the couple's normal quality; country of origin and ethnicity aside, they could be anybody I know, any two kids at a coffee bar. There's a magical device: doors that painlessly transport people elsewhere without the terrifying refugee experiences of ocean crossings in leaking boats or slogs on foot through treacherous jungles. Their relationship frays anyway—there's enough stress just having to navigate new environments multiple times—and it changes but doesn't break.