Is there anything more wonderful than immersing one’s self in a novel that honors the power of story and creates characters whose company we do not want to leave? When we reluctantly read the last page of such novels, we return slightly dazed to our “real” lives, yet more awake through a deepened compassion and heightened sensitivity to the complexity of the world around us.

This summer I have been enriched by The Painter by Peter Heller, Lucky Us by Amy Bloom, Life Drawing: A Novel by Robin Black, and We Are Called To Rise by Laura McBride. It is difficult to believe that McBride’s novel is a first book or Black’s a first novel.

Earlier this year I felt gifted by Frances and Bernard: A Novel by Carlene Bauer (written entirely through letters), The Gravity of Birds by Tracy Guzeman (first book), The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (also a first book and a marvelous mix of fantasy and evocation of historical New York and the immigrant experience–and one of my Random Review nominations this year). I await eagerly, and rather impatiently, their next novels, as I do Julie Orringer’s work based on the life of Varian Fry following her masterful The Invisible Bridge.

And for anyone teaching a class on fiction or fiction writing, I highly recommend Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The first page and a half of this novel accomplish two things novelists lust after–a beginning that takes the reader by the throat and the establishment of the main character’s unique voice, a woman fueled and wounded by anger and loneliness. Brilliant.