12 Incredible Fiction Books From 2018

In Tara Isabella Burton's haunting debut, Social Creature, a chance encounter between a socialite and a social climber spirals into an intense, obsessive, and eventually lethal friendship.

From Rebecca Makkai, author of The Hundred-Year House, comes The Great Believers, a novel weaving together the stories of a Chicago art gallery assistant who loses his friend (and soon everything he knows) to the 1980s AIDS epidemic, and his friend's sister, who grapples with her own loss 30 years later in Paris.

In the legendary Anne Tyler's 21st novel, Clock Dance, a woman yearning to be a grandmother impulsively flies across the country to Baltimore after receiving a mysterious phone call, and it is there that she discovers the community she wanted but was never expecting to find.

Lexi Freiman's wildly funny and satirical debut, Inappropriation, tells the story of 15-year-old Ziggy Klein, who begins school at prestigious Australian girls' academy and — finding herself ostracized and utterly out of her league — turns to feminist texts and the internet to try and understand her dark sexual fantasies and ever-changing sense of self.

In The Line of Beauty author Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, The Sparsholt Affair, a relationship blossoms between a handsome engineering student and the son of a celebrated novelist at Oxford in 1940, affecting both of their lives for decades to come.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez tells the story of a woman who, in the wake of her best friend's suicide, finds herself burdened — and eventually bonded — with the unwanted Great Dane he left behind.

In the first novel from award-winning Irish novelist Caoilinn Hughes, Orchid & the Wasp, a young, savvy opportunist hustles her way through Dublin, London, and New York trying to save her family from economic collapse, but she ends up losing herself in the process.

In The Gunners, Rebecca Kauffman, author of Another Place You've Never Been, tells the story of a man suffering from macular degeneration who reconnects with his childhood friends after one of them commits suicide.

Told in three distinct sections, Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry is about a young editor and her relationship with a famous older writer, an Iraqi-American man detained by immigration officers, and the thread that ties these two seemingly disparate stories together.

In her debut, The Wild Birds, Emily Strelow weaves together the stories of a young girl disguised as a boy to work as a lighthouse keeper's assistant in 1870s San Francisco, a nomad scouring the Sierras for refuge in 1941, and a precocious 15-year-old trying to find a place for herself in present-day Burning Hills, OR.

Exploring the minutiae of a woman's everyday life over a period of decades, Jana Casale's The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is a collage of one woman's small attempts to carve meaning out of the ordinary.

Still Lives by Maria Hummel is the story of avant-garde artist Kim Lord, whose new exhibition — comprised of self-portraits depicting herself as famous murdered women — is set to debut, but when opening night comes, Kim is nowhere to be found.