Dinaw Mengestu’s novels, layered with crisis and heartbreak, show a different side of the nation’s capital.

A far-from-exhaustive guide to the books that our critics recommend this fall

“Intermezzo” is Rooney’s most somber novel, more attentive to loss and irreversible change.

Fury not only drives the embittered wife at the heart of “Liars,” it influences the novel’s very form.

Adelle Waldman’s “Help Wanted” makes the case for retail warehouse work as a subject worthy of serious fiction.

Lexi Freiman’s novel about a canceled writer skewers pieties left and right.

Climate change made Lydia Davis rethink our relationships to each other, close and distant.

“The Fraud” is a courtroom drama about an impostor, set against the backdrop of British imperialism. But the most suspect characters of all are the writers.

Nicole Flattery’s “Nothing Special” offers a glimpse of the fracturing experience of fame.

Brennan rarely wrote of her parents’ part in the struggle for an independent Ireland, but this early experience runs through her stories of marriage and home life.

“Shy” starts out like a story about how trauma begets dysfunction. It’s much more complicated than that.

“I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home” blends the historical and the present, the real world and the spiritual.

What do politicos turned authors know that we don’t?

Jess Row’s novel explores the aftermath of a young activist’s death.

What makes a mother stay and her estranged daughter leave Appalachia?

“Nights of Plague” is the story of an epidemic entwined with nationalism, unrest, and reaction.

“Biography of X” is a search for a woman so powerful and prominent that no one really knew her.

A lifelong striver who wrote about lifelong strivers, Hazzard was perpetually dissatisfied with the world she grew up in.

In Ryan Lee Wong’s novel, a young activist gets caught up in his own idealism.

Her novels First Love and My Phantoms work a kind of magic, making stuck relationships at once believably maddening and oddly addictive.