Perhaps no novel this year was more feverishly anticipated—or more frequently stolen from my desk—than Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Europa), the third installment of the enigmatic Italian author’s Neapolitan novels, which tell a single story with the possessive force of an origin myth. Now in their 30s, the two women at its center—a writer losing her way; a defiant former classmate drawn into a revolutionary movement—face the consequences of their limited choices, raising issues of ambition and identity, creativity and desire.
An immigrant story like no other, Akhil Sharma’s memoir-like second novel,Family Life (Norton), follows a family from India to America, where tragedy soon derails their dreams. Written in the kind of prose that gets under your skin and never really leaves, it’s also the story of how a writer is made.
Based on Margaret Mead’s experience in 1930s New Guinea, Lily King’s brainy and sensuous Euphoria (Atlantic) spins a love triangle in the bush. Wearing her research lightly, King reveals a startlingly vulnerable side to Mead, suggesting an elegant parallel between novelist and archeologist: In scrutinizing the lives of others, we discover ourselves.
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