A Real Animal by Emiline AtwoodA Real Animal is Emiline Atwood’s first novel. Lucy is finishing university when she’s sexually assaulted. Soon after, she wakes in her dorm room with the disorientating sense that she’s transformed into a leopard. She’s uncertain whether this is real or the result of trauma, but this strange incident changes her in a way she can’t explain. Over the next 10 years, that moment sets the direction her life takes.Across the cities, jobs and relationships that follow, Lucy keeps trying to work out what the moment meant and whether it actually explains the decisions she keeps making, or whether she’s just using it to justify them. She ends a long-term relationship, stops speaking to her mother and moves to Indianapolis, convinced the city will return her transformed, healthier, more settled, finally free of who she used to be. Instead, her new life is as flat as the one she left. She meets an older, violent and controlling man in Indianapolis, and is drawn to him partly because he’s dangerous. She finds a sense of calm deep-sea diving in Hawaii, and eventually settles in Austin, where she meets someone she believes might finally understand her.Lucy is pulled in two contradictory directions at once. She doesn’t want to settle into an ordinary life, but she longs for the things that come with that — family, stability, real intimacy, and someone with whom she can be honest and real. Atwood’s take is that self-knowledge doesn’t always lead to change. She resists the comforting assumption that surviving hardship makes a person wiser.False Prophet by Afsheen FarhadiAfsheen Farhadi has spent years writing short fiction and essays about grief and the stories people invent about those they never fully knew, themes he explores more fully in his debut novel False Prophet.Jal Persad is a working actor whose mother, Rita, has just died, and her death leaves him grieving someone he barely knew. Rita grew up in Guyana during the rise and fall of the Jonestown cult, but she never spoke to Jal about that part of her life, keeping him at a distance. After months avoiding work, a misunderstanding at lunch with his manager sets off a chain of lies: Jal implies his mother knew Jim Jones, then writes a memoir to support the claim, inventing a version of Rita who has a direct encounter with the cult leader. The book goes viral. His career takes off. The further he commits to the fabrication, the more convincing he becomes, and the higher the cost of being found out.The novel alternates between Jal’s rise, the invented version of Rita at its centre, and a study of what it costs to turn someone else’s life into raw material for a memoir he will sell and build a career on.Should the Waters Take Us by Stephanie SoileauShort story writer Stephanie Soileau’s debut spans four centuries, tracing one family’s line from French settlers in Acadia, a region in what’s now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, through their forced expulsion by the British in 1755, to their descendants in present-day coastal Louisiana, where most of the novel is set. There, it follows the Cajun community — as Acadian descendants came to be known — in Pelerin Parish, already worn down by hurricanes, the oil boom, industrial pollution, and a shrinking coastline.Boy Broussard, who works land he doesn’t own, learns he has a 12-year-old daughter, Lee, when she turns up unannounced. Her mother, Mandy, has just taken an offshore job on a rig that explodes soon after. Boy is left raising a daughter he barely knows while an oil spill spreads across the water he depends on for a living.His dying aunt wants to make amends for old wrongs, but her husband, a former landman for the oil industry, won’t give up his claim to the land Boy depends on. A priest from the Niger Delta tries to help Lee, though locals treat him with suspicion. As the spill spreads and a hurricane closes in, fights over land and family that have simmered for years come to a head.Soileau is less interested in the disaster itself than in how people end up complicit in the industries destroying their home and how one generation’s compromise becomes the next generation’s burden.Make Nice by Ryan EffgenShort story writer Ryan Effgen takes on family dysfunction in his debut novel Make Nice. Three generations of the Pickford family converge on a hotel on a Lake Michigan island, the same place they spent childhood summers, months after their mother’s death. Each adult child arrives with a crisis of their own. Pete, a malacologist, is hoping to track down a rare snail species and is waiting to hear if he’s landed a major job at his university. Viv has just learnt her husband is gay and is trying to hold it together for her teenage daughter before word gets out. Corey, their charming but reckless brother, is broke after squandering the money he earned as a child actor. He arrives with five pounds of cocaine he found in a dead neighbour’s apartment and a plan to sell it to a wealthy hotel guest.What unfolds is pure comedy. Pete falls for a local woman just as his job offer falls through. Viv runs into the man she lost her virginity to as a teenager, while trying to manage her teenage daughter, who’s causing trouble of her own. Corey can’t find a buyer in a resort town more interested in golf than drugs, all while the coke’s actual owner comes looking for it.Underneath the farce is the real question of why their father called everyone together and what he isn’t telling them. Avoidance is the family’s default setting, a habit they’ve all learnt from him without realising it. Effgen’s skill lies in rendering the surface chaos while taking the reader along to see how long it will be before something gives.The Past Pursues Us Like Detectives, Debt Collectors, Thieves by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Daniel Hahn)The Past Pursues Us is Juan Pablo Villalobos’s seventh novel and sixth to appear in English, following his Guardian First Book Award-shortlisted debut, Down the Rabbit Hole, in 2011. JP, a Mexican man in his fifties who’s spent years living abroad with his second wife and kids, comes home to Lagos, Morelos, to help look after his ageing mother and pay for the medical treatment she needs.One night at a bar, an old acquaintance named Everardo provokes him into throwing his first punch, a bad one. He runs home. The next morning Everardo turns up dead, and JP becomes the obvious suspect. The story then draws him back into the world he thought he had left behind, with its drugs, extortion, money troubles and a mother whose care he may no longer be able to afford.It’s structured like a whodunit, but it’s really about how people see you as who you used to be and how unreliable your own memory of home can be. The book is darkly funny, though guilt drives JP’s return to Mexico and his reckoning with the family, history, and the former self he thought he had left behind. JP, at one point, admits he came back not just to look after his mother, but to settle an old debt with himself. At the heart of the novel is JP’s recognition that he never put as much distance between himself and Mexico as he believed.Business Day