SIX-PACK

Satire to rival Animal Farm, dark escapades of youth, and more new fiction

GLORY

With imaginative roots in the 2017 Zimbabwe coup, NoViolet Bulawayo's vigorous satire takes place in a fictional African country peopled by phone-wielding, clothed, and revolution-minded animals after the fall of their leader, Old Horse. (An old horse.) (Viking)

THE SWIMMERS

In what begins as a comedy, a mysterious crack appears in a community pool, a longtime swimmer's dementia progresses, and the swimmer's daughter (a writer) recalls her relationship with her ailing mother in Julie Otsuka's polyphonic, zigzagging narrative. (Knopf)

PEACH BLOSSOM SPRING

A daughter searches for answers from a father unwilling to revisit his painful past in this reimagination of author Melissa Fu's own family history, which spans such disparate locales as Hunan Province in 1938 to Texas in 1990. (Little, Brown)

OCEAN STATE

STATE In the first pages of this reversed psychological thriller, we learn that teenage Angel has killed a girl; soon there's little question as to whom and why. ("Love.") In flashbacks, the suspense comes from peeling back the layers in Stewart O'Nan's immersive character studies. (Grove Press)

CHECKOUT 19

"We read in order to come to life," as Claire-Louise Bennett's narrator tweaks Didion in this love letter to books. She discovers Sylvia Plath and Angela Carter, visits Lake Como because of E.M. Forster, and learns narrative can overcome some, but not all, violations. (Riverhead)

THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE

Tara Isabella Burton harnesses the fresh desire of teenage-dom in this story of a boarding school on the coast of Maine: A charismatic, devout, and sexually ambiguous young choir member manipulates her acolytes— to fatal ends. (Simon & Schuster)

KEZIAH WEIR

FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.