Renowned surgeon, failed husband and father Kweku Sai stumbles out of his home in Ghana one morning and dies. Years earlier, he had walked out of his family home in America and never returned. His estranged wife and now grown children have each dealt with his abandonment in their own private way and it has taken a toll on their lives.

A baby is abandoned on the doorstep of the YMCA. She becomes Shannon as she passes through foster homes where she is sometimes abused or neglected. Her life turns for the better when she is adopted by Miranda, a single mother raising another daughter. But she still never quite feels as if she fits in.

In Carlene Bauer’s debut novel, Frances and Bernard meet at an artists’ colony. Though very different in temperament, they continue their friendship through letters and occasional visits. They discuss their faith, their families and their feelings. As the intensity of their relationship grows, from 1957 to 1968, and their writing careers develop, so does the difficulty in maintaining their lives and their sanity.

In Michael Dahlie’s second novel, The Best of Youth, Henry Lang is trying to find his way in life after his parents die and leave him 15 million dollars. Henry is not quite sure how to handle much of anything including his fourth cousin Abby, a million-dollar herd of heirloom goats and some inherited pistols.

Ben Schrank’s third novel, Love Is a Canoe, taps into his knowledge of the publishing world. At age 23, Peter Herman wrote a book on marriage based on what he learned during the summer he spent with his grandparents when he was 13. On the fiftieth anniversary of that summer, Stella Petrovic conceives a contest to promote the book by giving the winning couple a visit with Peter.

Sigrid Schröder has an office job in World War II Berlin, a live-in mother-in-law and a husband on the eastern front. She also has a Jewish lover and a secretive young neighbor who needs help evading police inquiry. Daily life with rationing and British bombing raids is hard enough before Sigrid gets dangerously drawn into the lives of people who rarely are quite what they seem to be.

Ling (later named “Cassandra”) sees ghosts. As a child, she moves from Shanghai to The Black Isle, where she grows up through colonialism, war and independence, all the while aware of the haunted souls that share the island with the living. Her struggles take her from poverty to comfort to the horrors of wartime occupation in this debut novel by Sandi Tan.

In Gregory Hill’s award-winning debut novel, Shakespeare Williams returns to his family farm to bury a dead cat. He finds his father’s mental state and the farm have deteriorated alarmingly so he stays on and tries to rebuild. He hooks up with former schoolmates whose lives have stagnated and together they bungle their way toward a get-rich and get-revenge plan.