Edwidge Danticat’s first work of fiction since 2004’s THE DEW BREAKER is comprised of eight interlocking stories set in early 21st-century Haiti. The tales revolve around a seven-year-old girl named Claire, whose mother died in childbirth and whose father, a fisherman, now wants to give her away so that she will have a better life. CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT is a riveting portrait of Haitian villagers and is told in Danticat’s lyrical prose.

María Dolz eats breakfast every morning in the same café as an elegant husband and wife with whom she has never spoken. She knows nothing about them, not even their names. When they fail to show up one morning, she reads in the newspaper later that day that the man has been murdered, the victim of an apparently random attack. THE INFATUATIONS is a brilliant meditation on fate and the vagaries of desire.

Native Californian Ray Walker was studying to become a securities representative at Merrill Lynch but found the work unfulfilling. He had a wife and, soon, a baby daughter, and felt he needed to be responsible and live the corporate life. But Ray had a dream: to make Burgundy wine in France. THE ROAD TO BURGUNDY is Walker’s charming account of the stumbles and serendipity that led to his transformation from corporate drone to vigneron.

At age 19, Rob Carrey, the son of a cabinetmaker, spent his senior year at Connecticut’s prestigious Fenton boarding school to help the rowing team known as the God Four break its losing streak in the annual Tuesday race against rival Warwick. Fifteen years later, Rob is a documentary filmmaker for National Geographic. When he receives an unexpected letter from a troubled Fenton classmate, Rob is forced to revisit memories he had hoped to forget.

Three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, TRANSATLANTIC follows her daughter and granddaughter, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on.

Ifemelu is a young Nigerian woman who has left her country’s military dictatorship to pursue her studies in the United States. There, she starts a popular blog known for its snarky but insightful posts about the experiences of “Non-American Blacks” in America. Now she has decided to return to Nigeria, where Obinze, the boyfriend she left behind, has become a wealthy property magnate. AMERICANAH is a perceptive commentary on race relations in America.

Now in her late 30s, Nora Eldridge, a childless, unmarried third-grade teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has given up her dream of becoming a great artist. But when videomaker Sirena Shahid and her husband and eight-year-old son arrive from Paris for a year abroad, they rekindle Nora’s long-dormant passions and instill hope that her fantasy is still attainable. THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS is a quiet novel of resentment and of the perils of fast friendship.

A writer named Ruth discovers on a British Columbia beach a bag that contains the diary of Nao, a 16-year-old Japanese girl. The diary begins as Nao’s attempt to tell the story of her 104-year-old great-grandmother becomes instead a chronicle of Nao’s feelings of ostracism among family and schoolmates. This challenging novel combines Japanese mythology, quantum physics and the 2011 tsunami into a meditation on the vagaries of fate.

Sam Lipsyte’s second collection of short stories features the characters you would expect to see in a Lipsyte book: wise-cracking slackers from New York and New Jersey, most of them male, with drug and commitment problems. But you also get well-rounded female characters, touching moments between dying parents and their adult progeny, and surprisingly poetic writing. THE FUN PARTS fulfills the promise of VENUS DRIVE, Lipsyte’s vivid first collection.

Jamaica Kincaid’s beautiful, painful new book, her first novel in a decade, chronicles the dissolution of a marriage. Mr. Sweet is a composer of difficult works of modern music. He resents Mrs. Sweet, his Caribbean-born wife, for taking him from his beloved Manhattan and making him move to Vermont with their children, the daughter he adores and the son he detests. Kincaid uses Virginia Woolf-style repetition to create a hypnotic portrait of a dying love.