Jennifer Egan, Manhattan BeachEgan, whose A Visit from the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle award, has outdone herself with Manhattan Beach. It’s an astonishing noir-tinged novel set in 1940s Brooklyn. With intimate focus, she follows Eddie Kerrigan, a tough Irishman who survives the Depression by taking a job as a bagman to mobster Dexter Styles, and his daughter Anna. Five years after Eddie disappears, Anna becomes the first woman diver in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, repairing warships and offering acute assessments of the “naked prejudice” of her supervisor and the eerie pleasures of underwater work. Egan crafts unforgettable scenes and builds to an explosive ending that blends submarine attacks on a US warship off the African coast with a domestic crisis that threatens Anna’s future. (Credit: Scribner)

Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh ComplaintThis wide-ranging first collection from Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Eugenides is a delight. In the opening story, Cathy brings a book – “a kind of medicine” – to her 88-year-old friend Della, who is sliding into dementia, and finds a way to replace clinical treatment with loving care. In the title story, Matthew, an English-born cosmologist, watches his life implode after a US teenager accuses him of rape. A research mission among the Dawat in West Papua frays the nerves of an expert in “human intersexuality”. A middle-aged poet, once a promising Iowa Writers Workshop graduate, turns to larceny to supplement his salary at a Chicago billionaire’s small press. Ten stories dense with sensuality and ironic detail. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Cristina Garcia, Here in BerlinThe Visitor, the Cuban-American narrator of Garcia’s new novel, returns to Berlin in 2013 to find the city “post-apocalyptic” and herself invisible in late middle age. She comes in search of stories. And she finds them in unexpected places – parks, museums, outdoor cafes, the aquarium, along the Spree River. She learns of the fate of the 3,715 animals in the Berlin Zoo during World War Two from the zookeeper’s son. She listens to a child born of the Nazi breeding program, a lifelong Berliner whose only time outside the country was to study “the oratorical styles of black preachers in the South” for Nazi propaganda purposes, and a Cuban held as a POW on a German submarine. Ingeniously structured, veering from poignant to shocking, Here in Berlin couldn’t be more relevant. (Credit: Counterpoint Press)

Isabel Allende, In the Midst of WinterOver three days in early 2016, as a blizzard lashes Brooklyn, Lucia, Richard and Evelyn become linked after a car accident on icy streets. Snowbound in Richard’s brownstone, they share personal secrets. Evelyn, an undocumented teenager who has fled violence in Guatemala, is so traumatised she rarely speaks. And she’s terrified because she was driving her employers’ car without permission when Richard crashed into her. Chilean-born Lucia is a visiting professor at New York University whose research into the disappeared after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup mirrors her own losses. Richard, the NYU academic who hired Lucia, is haunted by tragedies spun out of his long research stay in Brazil beginning in 1985. Isabel Allende’s masterful blend of history, suspense, and rising passion, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson, makes for yet another riveting novel. (Credit: Atria Books)

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: StoriesThis first collection, longlisted for the National Book Award and Kirkus Prize, introduces an original genre-blending voice. In the fable-like The Husband Stitch, a woman falls in love, marries and raises a child with a man who she cautions to never touch the ribbon around her throat. In Mothers, after a woman’s lover hands her an infant girl to raise, she recalls flashes from the dawning of their love to “the last night of us” and moments in the future. In another story, strange viruses creep