Michael Ondaatje

From the Booker Award-winning author of The English Patient, Warlight is an elegiac thriller set in immediate post-WWII London. A pair of siblings, seemingly abandoned by their parents, have been left in the care of an enigmatic figure they call The Moth. They suspect that he may be a criminal and grow more convinced but less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends. This is a lyrical mystery about espionage, the afterlife of war, memory, and what it means to live a life partially in the dark.

Ross Gay

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard as places where loss is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Ross Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released this year and makes an excellent companion volume to his poems.

Aminatta Forna

Two strangers collide on Waterloo Bridge: Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist, and Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes. From this chance encounter in the midst of bustling London, connections span out and interweave, bringing disparate lives together. In this powerful novel of loves lost and new, of past griefs and the hidden side of a multicultural metropolis, Aminatta Forna asks us to consider the values of the society we live in, our relationships with each other and other living creatures, and the true nature of happiness.

Laura van den Berg

A widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death—and the truth about their marriage—after seeing him apparently alive outside a Havana theater. As she tracks his movements, the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, and she must face her own role in his death and reappearance. Laura van den Berg’s story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery won the Literary Star for Excellence, was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named a best book of 2018 by more than a dozen publications.