Lasdun

“It’s a rare novel that leaves you reeling simultaneously with admiration, exhaustion, amazement at its author’s reach and skill, and desolation at the world it spreads out before you,” James Lasdun writes in his review.

From there, she taught herself about Denys Lasdun, the Brutalist English architect who in the 1960s designed the iconic, tiered postwar structures that surrounded their apartment.

“It would be hard to think of a living novelist whose books encompass more history, more settings, more professions, more varieties of individual fate, than William Boyd — at least with anything like his assurance,” James Lasdun writes in his review.

Two salty old Irish drug smugglers reminisce via “scabrously witty dialogue,” in our reviewer James Lasdun’s words, while waiting for one man’s long-vanished daughter.

The list also includes British poet Fiona Benson’s “Vertigo & Ghost”; British author James Lasdun’s pair of novellas, “Victory”; Irish writer Sinead Gleeson’s collection of essays about women’s bodies, “Constellations”; and Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s American road-trip novel “Lost Children Archive.”