Six More Contemporary Novels I Loved in the Past Year
- The Bossy Bookworm
- 9 minutes ago
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Six More Favorite Contemporary Fiction Reads
This is the second of three contemporary fiction lists I'll have for you as I mine my recent-past reading for the best of the best--you can find my first list of contemporary fiction favorite reads from last year here.
You can explore the twelve titles on My Very Favorite Bossy 2025 Reads to find out about my overall favorite reads from last year, or you can read about past Bossy contemporary fiction favorites here.
If you've read any of these titles, I'd love to hear what you think!
What are some of your favorite contemporary fiction reads, whether from the past year or beyond?
01 The Favorites by Layne Fargo
I loved the behind-the-scenes peeks at the drama, punishing hard work, sequins, and mind games of competitive figure skating. The backdrop for Kat and Heath's tumultuous mutual obsession was a series of destructive forces trying to tear them apart. The interview format and multiple perspectives add to the layers of the story.
Young Katarina Shaw always felt that she was meant to become an Olympic champion. Heath Rocha was stuck in the foster care system. When he and Kat met, they made a connection that first built into a best-friendship between two lost young people, then love.
Their mutual obsession ultimately translated into a powerful partnership on the ice, and when they eventually advanced to the Olympics, a dramatic event stopped their journey to the gold medal--and broke them up for good.
Ten years later, we join the voyeuristic public and the insider news bursts in exploring what really happened years earlier. The delving into the past draws Kat and Heath back into each others' orbits--and reveals secrets they never could have imagined.
The Favorites is heavy on the skating--which I loved. (The prominent sports element reminded me of the tennis-focused novel Carrie Soto Is Back.) I love a peek behind the scenes, and I loved the politics, rivalries, determination, mind games, and sabotage in the story.
The relentless pacing, romantic obsession, twists and turns, dramatic setbacks, exhilarating success, and sometimes over-the-top sabotage within The Favorites is immersive and irresistible.
Johnny Weir is a standout audiobook narrator in the role of Ellis Dean, a mischievous rival of Kat and Heath's and an attention-grabbing behind-the-scenes reporter with redemptive, golden moments of loyalty.
For my full review please check out The Favorites.
02 Black Woods Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey
Eowyn Ivey offers elements familiar from her other two novels--a cold, unforgiving setting; magical realism; attempts to overcome seemingly insurmountable complications; chosen family; and the healing power of love--in this atmospheric, strange, beautiful, and tragic story.
Birdie's a single mother to Emaleen and a waitress in a small Alaskan town. She's not perfect, but she's getting by. Yet she often yearns for her more carefree youth and connection to nature.
Arthur, a recluse who only comes into town at the change of seasons--and who others avoid as actively as he avoids them--saves Emaleen from being lost in the wilderness. Birdie is drawn to his capable outdoorsmanship, and against the advice of everyone she knows, she and Emaleen move out to his remote home to live off the grid.
But Arthur is mysterious, and he's not who Birdie thought he was. Has she traded her safety and Emaleen's for the false promise of an idyllic life immersed in the natural world?
Black Woods, Blue Sky is a cold-setting story--one of my favorites--in which the unforgiving weather, rough terrain, and remote location combine with the danger from wild animals to test Ivey's characters' mettle.
A late portion of the story takes places in a time period years later than Birdie and Emaleen's foray into the wild; there are resolutions here, but the momentum of the earlier story felt lost to me.
Eowyn Ivey is also the author of To the Bright Edge of the World, which I listed in the Greedy Reading List Six Chilly Books to Read in the Heat of Summer, and The Snow Child, which I included in the list Six Magical Fairy Tales Grown-Ups Will Love.
For my full review, please check out this link.
03 There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
There Are Rivers in the Sky weaves together three stories set in three timelines, featuring disparate characters, to explore interconnectedness, the power of water, echoing tragedies, and the timelessness of the written word.
Water remembers. It is humans who forget.
In 1840 in London, young Arthur lives near the sewage-filled River Thames, desperate to escape poverty and his abusive household.
In 2014 Turkey, ten-year-old Narin is living near the Tigris and is affected by a disorder that will cause her to go permanently deaf.
And in 2018 London, Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames when she and her husband break up, but she can't shake her thoughts of suicide.
Shafak makes what could have been an unwieldy or disjointed-feeling set of complex situations into a tragically beautiful intertwined novel that shines a light on weighty issues at three points in space and time. I was haunted by this and fascinated as well.
Elif Shafak also wrote the lovely The Island of Missing Trees.
Click here for my full review of There Are Rivers in the Sky.
04 A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
A Guardian and a Thief is a fascinating near-future climate-change story of desperation, loyalty, and determination in Kolkata, India. A tiny bit of empathy might have unraveled the increasingly devastating whirlwind of conflict between the two main protagonists, who are each both hero and villain.
In a near-future Kolkata, India, Ma is the manager of a food pantry for those in need. She's days away from bringing her daughter and aging father to meet her husband in Michigan. But the famine is devastating in Kolkata, and Ma has been skimming food supplies for her own household. She justifies this to herself as a temporary measure before her departure.
But a desperate client of the food pantry has noticed her theft and becomes determined to strike back. And by happenstance, this revenge also threatens Ma's family's ability to travel to a land of plenty.
Majumdar twists the situation between thief and mother, continually shifting the reader's loyalties as each character makes decisions that spin off into increasingly destructive consequences. The more each digs in--bitter, resentful, greedy, desperate--the worse each of their situations become.
I can't stop thinking about this book and the mirror it holds to a reader, forcing an uncomfortable examination of excess, generosity, empathy, loyalty, but also greed, grasping, scarcity, and, in the end, encouraging a critical look at what we feel is our duty to one other in this world.
This was stressful, often claustrophobic, and fascinating.
I received a prepublication version of this title courtesy of NetGalley and Knopf.
For my full review of this book please see A Guardian and a Thief.
Megha Majumdar is also the author of A Burning.
05 Woodworking by Emily St. James
Woodworking explores interconnected transgender characters' experiences, fears, challenges, and joys as they work toward living true, fulfilling lives. Emily St. James's debut novel is poignant, funny, heartbreaking, often surprising, and heartwarming.
Emily St. James crafts a tender, funny story with zing about a secretly trans high school teacher in a small town in South Dakota who befriends the only other transgender person she is aware of, one of her students.
The novel flits between the stories of three women from disparate backgrounds, drastically different paths to becoming themselves, and poignant recognition among them of their struggles and victories, even as they diverge in their approaches to living fulfilling existences.
The book title comes from the idea of trans people blending in and fading into the woodwork. The concept is mentioned in a conversation between a frightened young trans woman and a mentor of sorts; later in the novel the young woman realizes that "woodworking" wasn't meant to be a handbook, but a warning about hiding identity.
I was most touched by the interconnectedness and love, the universal elements of the characters' experiences as well as their unique perspectives and circumstances, and the reimagined possibilities for their futures.
Click here for my full review of Woodworking.
06 Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
Culpability shapes questions regarding artificial intelligence--including societal and/or individual responsibility for it--around imperfect characters who have drifted apart and must now recognize each other's fallibility, whether through sacrificing or trying to protect each other.
The Cassidy-Shaws are riding in their family's autonomous minivan when it crashes into another vehicle. Seventeen-year-old Charlie, the twins, their father Noah, and their mother Lorelei, an AI leader, are all shaken by the accident.
But they're also all harboring secrets, and there's more to the circumstances surrounding the accident than meets the eye.
Culpability explores accountability and questions around the use of AI, making them personal, life-and-death, and far-reaching. Faulted characters reckon with their own imperfect motivations alongside the repercussions of human-created--but complicated, self-evolving--AI. Mistakes are made in life, Holsinger reminds us, and we must cope with the consequences of decisions, carelessness, overconfidence, or merely chance. But inserting a layer of artificial intelligence on top of tragedy dramatically complicates things.
I didn't care deeply about the characters in Culpability, but I was interested in the lavish setting for the tech mogul, the family's attempt to circle up at the waterfront rental, the exploration of wealth and its ability to shape a narrative, and the protagonists' sometimes misguided attempts to protect each other.
The pace of the story is swift, and Holsinger keeps the reader uncomfortable as the story draws to a close, with plenty of messy, imperfect resolutions shaped by money, politics, carefully crafted realities, and legal punch.
For my full review of this book please see Culpability. You might also be interested in my Bossy reviews of these other novels about AI.
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