A meltdown in the "Can You Use That Word in a Sentence" lands City Coldson in Melatchie, Mississippi, the city that also happens to be the setting of a book he's reading entitled Long Division, in which the main character is also a 14-year-old named City Coldson. From there it just gets weirder.

A fusion of magical realism, Southern literature and time-travel, Kiese Laymon's Long Division is a novel like no other and one of the best you'll read this year.

_{Photo: Agate}

In Anakana Schofield's award-winning debut novel Malarky, Our Woman Philomena has seen her son in an unmentionable act with another man. Red the Twit reveals her infidelities (real or not) with Our Woman's late husband. These twin acts of "something nasty in the woodshed" reverberate throughout the novel but do not bring cold comfort to this farm wife.

Review of Malarky by Anakana Schofield

_{Photo: Biblioasis}

Anders Nilsen's The End was originally published in a staple bound format in 2007 under Fantagrpahics's Ignatz imprint and has been expanded and re-released. With only 80 pages, The End is a quick read but it is hardly fleeting: these pages come from such a raw emotional place that they'll reverberate like an echo from a well.

Review of The End by Anders Nilsen

Also read Big Questions by Anders Nilsen

_{Photo: Fantagraphics}

Anthony Marra's impressive debut novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena follows a tight network of characters in a rural, war-torn Chechen community as they grow and adapt in the face of great hardship.

Review of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

_{Photo: Hogarth}