Best of 2021: Adult Fiction

"Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young--but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about...

"A transfixing novel about two unforgettable characters seeking to free themselves-one from the expectations of women in early 20th century Punjab, and the other from the weight of life in the contemporary Indian diaspora Mehar, a young bride in rural 1929 Punjab, is trying to discover the identity of her new husband. Married to three brothers in a single ceremony, she and her now-sisters spend their days hard at work in the family's "china room,"...

A semi-pro wrestler spirals downward after he's kicked out of the league, leading him to a search into the complexities of identity.

"Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily...

When Olivia Gesso skydives into a recruiting job with Kava Tech-a hip start-up where twenty-somethings binge drink, gamble, and code their way to luxury cars and fat bonuses-it's almost hard to remember how she got there. No one would have expected an eco-warrior hellbent on saving the seeds of an extinct tree to find her way into this silicon jungle, serving as high-heeled bait for geeky coders. But student debt and desperation drive Olivia farther...