Although it may seem that every square inch of the earth has been mapped, there are still places that are mysterious. The Kamchatka Peninsula is one such place. You’ve seen it on a map, extending like a swollen appendage from the northeastern edge of Russia into the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk. Maybe you’ve wondered about the people who live there. Does anyone live there?

Of course, people do live in Kamchatka, both in real life and in Julia Phillips’ powerful debut novel. There are those from the indigenous and the white Russian population. The book opens when two little white girls are snatched from the seaside by a creep. The rest of the book concerns both the search for these two girls and the mystery of how they could have vanished on a peninsula all but cut off from the rest of Russia by a mountain range.

The book’s many characters are introduced in the preface, which calls to mind all those classic Russian novels with sprawling casts. But at the same time, Disappearing Earth is utterly contemporary. Cellphones are as inescapable in Kamchatka as they are anywhere else, even though they’re frequently out of range.

Phillips’ focus is on her female characters. There are the missing Golosovsky girls and their desperate mother; unhappy schoolgirls; a new mother going out of her mind with boredom; and a bitter vulcanologist with a missing dog. We hear from a native woman whose own daughter disappeared years before, as well as from her other daughter and her daughter’s children. Most of these women brush or bump up against each other, connected, sometimes tenuously, by the disappearance of the Golosovsky girls. The men in their lives aren’t so much useless as they are in the way. The cops give up the search, and husbands, fathers, boyfriends and brothers just don’t get it.

Besides the deep humanity of her characters, Phillips’ portrayal of Kamchatka itself is superb. Has there ever been a novel, even by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, set in such a strange, ancient, beautiful place, with its glaciers and volcanoes and endless cold? It’s a place where miracles might happen—where what is lost can once again be found—if you jump over a traditional New Year’s fire in just the right way. Phillips’ stunning novel dares to imagine the possibilities.

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Imagine waking to realize that you can’t move, you can’t speak or even blink, yet you’re fully aware of everything and everyone around you. Then imagine there is a crazed killer who will stop at nothing to extract a secret from you. For Hammel College senior Tara Beckley, she doesn’t have to imagine it. It’s real. And it’s terrifying. That’s the frightening premise of If She Wakes, the newest novel from thriller master Michael Koryta.

Events start innocently enough as Tara chauffeurs professor Amandi Oltamu across town to deliver the keynote address at her Maine liberal arts school’s conference. When Oltamu asks her to stop, she figures he simply has the jitters about his speech. But he follows up with an odd request to take a picture of her on his cellphone and then to lock the phone in the glovebox of her car. Again, she obliges. But before they can get underway again, the pair are struck by an apparently out of control driver. Oltamu is instantly killed in the collision while Tara is knocked senseless, only to “wake” in the hospital surrounded by doctors and family.

Koryta puts the reader in Tara’s shoes for some truly claustrophobic chapters in which her predicament is made all too clear. She can’t move, she can’t communicate, but she can hear everyone as they discuss her fate.

While staying in Tara’s tortured mind is harrowing enough, Koryta throws in a few other characters and a half dozen plot twists to ratchet up the tension even further. Insurance investigator Abby Kaplan discovers Oltamu’s phone, while Dax Blackwell, a young hitman out to prove himself worthy of his father’s legacy, strives to take it from her. But it won’t do either of them any good unless Tara can unlock its secrets.

Koryta keeps the action fast and furious, tempered with his characters’ determination to persevere against all odds.

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Author Bren Smith declares, “I have the heart of a fisherman and the soul of a farmer,” and in his memoir, Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer, he proves this to be true over and over again. Starting off on the Canadian island of Newfoundland, he passed through Massachusetts (and through its jails), climbed onto lobster boats, plied his way north again to Alaskan fisheries and finally landed on the Thimble Islands off the New England coast. The salty adolescent who loved the company of fishermen and could swig and swear with the best of them evolved into an expert ocean farmer, pioneering the “climate cuisine” industry and promising an innovative way of feeding our beleaguered planet. Take a new look at what’s for dinner: seaweed.

As Smith scales up from his 20-acre vertical ocean farm, he births an industry that must struggle to avoid the “sharks”—and mistakes—of globalized big business, and he hooks celebrity chefs like Mark Bittman and Rene Redzepi. Kelp noodles soon take center stage on the plates of upscale New York and Las Vegas restaurants, and Google starts serving them in innovative offerings in their employee cafeterias. For those who wonder about ingredients, Smith includes recipes like Shrimp Fra Diavolo with Kelp and Barbecue Kelp and Carrots, along with where to find the goods.

Smith is an articulate, very human ambassador for sustainable, ethical and environmentally beneficial mariculture, weaving his plea for changing the way we eat with solid proof of why it’s so necessary. He includes a global history here as well, spanning coastal cultures from China and Japan to Scotland and Atlantic Canada, all rich with best practices and viable traditions.

Calling for “all hands on deck” to achieve survival as climate change continues to alter our natural resources, Smith urges that we learn to eat what the ocean can grow instead of growing only what we are used to eating. He offers ways to help like cooking and fertilizing with seaweed and shellfish and supporting local “sea trusts.” And GreenWave, the company he helped found, provides an open-source farming manual for building your own kelp hatchery. If this new age of “climate cuisine” needs an introduction, Eat Like a Fish is surely it.

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There are a handful of novelists from the past century whom I think of as sorcerers. Like Merlin of Arthurian fame, such authors (T.H. White, A.S. Byatt and others) find a way to inhabit vast stretches of time, accounting for everything that’s happened before and what’s to come, making past and future converge with vertiginous force onto the present moment. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and both Shelleys, Blake and Byron all worked this time-dissolving magic as well, weaving into a single spell the opposite principles of ancient myth and modernity, city and countryside, nature and the supernatural, individual history and collective fate.

Still in his 30s, Max Porter has securely joined this order of poets and novelists with two short novels. In Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (2015), a widower with two little sons suffers the shattering visitation of Crow. There is no way around grief, Crow instructs; you must grind through it, all its bitter nonsense, derangement and chaos. Now, in Lanny, Porter turns this same screw of his imagination, offering the ultimate incarnation of nature and its pitiless sovereignty: a being who haunts the edges of a village, chronicling every word uttered in pub, house or street. It calls to the sweet, brilliant boy Lanny, drawing him into the woods, away from his parents’ home and from his kind old friend Mad Pete. The creature summons little Lanny to a doom we cannot know or understand, even after we’ve read this magnificent story.

This awful, awesome personage—this human-hungry thing—goes by many names, such as Dead Papa Toothwort, Pan, Oberon or the Green Man. Toothwort sings the ancient, recurrent Song of the Earth, rising above a chorus of perplexed and panicked human voices. Boy, mother, father, artist, the entire village—all must face the music. All are done for.

Lanny is one of the most beautiful novels of the past decade.

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Perhaps the greatest irony of our modern era is that in a time when we appear more connected than ever, most of us have never felt more alone. Certainly this is true for May Attaway, the protagonist of Jessica Francis Kane’s meditative second novel, Rules for Visiting.

Largely preferring the company of plants to people, May is a single, middle-aged woman who lives in her childhood home with her father and cat and works as a gardener at the local university. She is the first to admit that although her world is relatively small and uneventful, the life she has cultivated for herself is a comfortable one (albeit mundane and vaguely hermitic). When she is gifted with an unanticipated month of paid vacation, May is inspired to revise her stance on relationships and broaden her horizons. Armed with little more than an Emily Post guide to etiquette, a book of quotations on friendship and a suitcase named Grendel (after the friendless monster in Beowulf), May sets out on a transformative pilgrimage to reconnect with the four women she considers her dearest friends.

A 21st-century novel for those with old-fashioned sensibilities, Rules for Visiting is an empathetic yet enigmatic read. May’s story is not for the impatient, as the narrative perambulates through a series of discursive musings on friendship, flora, family, grief and how connections can fail or flourish in this modern age. For much of the novel, May keeps the reader at arm’s length, charming with her wry wit but using these rhetoric sleights of hand as substitutes for real understanding and intimacy. But as May becomes more comfortable with the art of connecting with the people in her life, she reveals more of her true heart to the reader as well, gradually shedding light on the trauma that led to such a closed-off life.

Rules for Visiting takes its time to fully take root, but the end result is a sturdy novel that blossoms rather beautifully.

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Because of journalist Elliott Maraniss’ close ties to the Communist Party, various government agencies and informants shadowed him throughout his life—from the late 1930s when he was a student and editorial writer at the University of Michigan, through his meritorious service in World War II, and well into his post-war civilian life. This surveillance came to a boil on March 12, 1952 in Detroit, when Maraniss appeared, as subpoenaed, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Merely being summoned to appear had cost him his job at the Detroit Times, and his refusal to answer the committee’s questions about his political affiliations and associates doomed him to being blacklisted and hounded out of work for years.

David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winner and associate editor of the Washington Post, focuses on this persecution of his father and other leftists to construct both a social and a family history, enlivened by family letters and other personal artifacts. Maraniss readily acknowledges that his father was a Communist who was slow to reject the party line dictated from Stalinist Russia. But ultimately he sees his father as a liberal idealist who never wavered from his belief in America’s essential goodness. Elliott Maraniss’ ordeal, his son asserts, failed to make him bitter or lessen his zeal for social justice. Always the objective reporter, Maraniss humanizes his father’s inquisitors by probing deeply into their backgrounds to ferret out both their virtues and flaws.

The University of Michigan bristled with leftist politics in the late 1930s. Future playwright Arthur Miller was there at the time and was one of many protesting the rise of fascism in Spain and Germany. So was Elliott’s future wife, Mary, who was possibly even more fervent in her politics than he, and her brother Bob Cummins, who would put his life and career on the line by taking up arms against the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War.

After moving from state to state and job to job, Elliott Maraniss finally found a journalistic home at the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, where, over the next quarter of a century, he would rise from reporter to executive editor. In Madison, the author concludes, his parents were at last able to shake off “the chains of the past with their idealism and optimism intact.”

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