At first, I planned to carry on with my non-fiction and fiction rhythm from my booklog. While I was reading up on Lauren Groff to review her new book for The Chicago Review of Books, I came across her essay “The Ambivalent Activist, Jane Roe” in Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases.

It was perfectly timed for my reading of Aimee Wall’s We, Jane—a debut novel by a Canadian writer, who’s also known for her translation work, about the underground movement supporting reproductive choice. It’s a slim and voice-driven volume that moves from Montreal to Atlantic Canada.

But, perhaps with awards season in mind (Wall was nominated for this year’s Giller Prize in Canada), it seemed like the bulk of my reading was fiction. Was all that non-fiction an aberration? Or, was it simply how the books arrived in the library queue. Either way, the fiction was clamouring, and I had debut novels ahead of me.

Fevers and fishermen, instability and sugar cane: Xander Miller’s 2020 debut novel Zo presents an orphan boy whom others mistake for being hopeless as he grows up, but he’s actually a hopeless romantic. Flavoured with untranslated Creole, and dense with ordinary detail—right until the plot turns extraordinary in 2010—Zo is strangely addictive and wholly tender-hearted. Miller was inspired by his experiences in Haiti as an aid worker and one of those experiences was falling in love himself.

Also inspired by the stories that she heard, while touring for six months following the 2010 earthquake, Myriam J. A. Chancy wrote her debut novel What Storm What Thunder (2021). She plays with both perspective and the timeline, so that the novel is not overburdened with the tragedy. The focus remains consistently on the lives of individuals, expansive and diverse, and she deftly and confidently folds readers into the chaos. “Where there is conflict, there are also the seeds of revolution, somewhere. It’s a matter of finding them, these seeds, the spark of the possible.”

When Sabina Murray’s The Human Zoo (2021) opens, Ting (Christine) has left New York behind; her plane is landing in Manila on the edge of an early-season typhoon. In the backdrop is the destruction of much of Baguio in the 7.7 earthquake in 1990, but most pressing in Ting’s experience is her personal devastation of a fractured marriage and her struggles with a fledgling manuscript about members of native tribes who were captured and transported as specimens in centuries past. Although her personal relationships have political implications that resonate with unexpected intensity. Assured and seemingly effortless, The Human Zoo (2021) is a stealth story—it sneaks up on readers.

Like Ting’s, Nadia’s story, in Wendy Guerra’s I Was Never the First Lady, is preoccupied with questions revolving around corruption and colonialism, inheritance and identity. (It’s a 2008 novel translated by Achy Obejas in 2021, with an interesting note about the distinctions of Cuban Spanish.) These questions simmer beneath a personal quest to understand her family’s history (assembling it from details, like an unfinished manuscript and photograph marginalia) and recognise how she absorbed the Cuban revolution. When she leaves to travel to Europe, to search for people who knew her mother when she lived and wrote poetry there, she receives this advice in a letter: “You have to choose your enemies and their battles. Be a little more afraid of your head than of your surname.”

Balancing personal identity against a backdrop of political upheaval features in Jai Chakrabarti’s A Play for the End of the World (2021) too. There are even more diary excerpts, and more marginalia…but the story reaches further into the past. Jaryk lives in 1970s Amsterdam and travels to India in the wake of his oldest childhood friend’s death, becoming embroiled in a conflict about staging a controversial 1911 play by Rabindranath Tagore; Jaryk himself acted in this play when he was confined to an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, so he is uniquely positioned to understand artistry as resistance. Precise language, evocative style, and deliberate, astute characterization abundantly reward patient readers. (This was a stand-out read for me this year: so unexpected!)

“No government tolerated a brewing revolution for long,” notes Jaryk. In Mina Seçkin’s debut novel, The Four Humors, Sibel considers the historical protests and revolutionary activities in her family’s history in Turkey. (There’s also the 1957 earthquake in Bolu.) Maybe it’s lazy—but also irresistible—to compare this Istanbul story to Elif Shafak’s novels about women’s lives. “My mother has always liked to do things differently. At my age she was already organizing demonstrations in Istanbul before the 1980 coup.” Sibel convinces her boyfriend Cooper to accompany her for the summer as an “adventure” but most of her time is occupied by helping her grandmother cope with ill-health, which parallels her own health concerns. Sounds like an onerous situation, but Seçkin’s tone is direct and her chapters are concise: I was wholly immersed in her story.

Tomorrow, another 2021 novel, about revolutionary times but with multiple perspectives and families, set in Egypt. Any guesses?