SIX PACK

Family woes, 1980s New York City, more new fiction

AFTERLIVES

2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah depicts four residents of German-occupied Zanzibar in the lead-up to and fallout from WW I—the scale is both epic and poignantly personal. (Riverhead)

MY GOVERNMENT MEANS TO KILL METhe Chi writer and producer Rasheed Newson's debut novel presents as the memoir of a gay Black man looking back on life in 1980s NYC; even the footnotes are gripping. (Flatiron)

THE UNFOLDING Following the 2008 election, one white American man is desperate to maintain control—of his family, his money, the country—in A.M. Homes's sharply honed novel. (Viking)

IF I SURVIVE YOU Weaving in patois and varying points of view, these novelistic linked short stories by Jonathan Escoffery follow a Jamaican family from Kingston to the beaches and urban sprawl of Miami. (MOD)

MY PHANTOMS British novelist Gwendoline Riley's trenchant story of an estranged mother and daughter is bleak and hilarious: One character declines a funeral invite with "I don't do 'family' these days." (NYRB Books)

TOUCH Olaf Olafsson's tale of love rekindled finds 70-something Reykjavik restaurant owner Kristofer reeling after shuttering his shop at the start of the pandemic, when a former lover gets in touch. (Ecco)

KEZIAH WEIR

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