I would like to choose Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, but I already chose it for something in this Month of Faves. However, I want you to, when you picture me reading Funny Girl for the first time (a thing I am sure you are all constantly imagining), imagine that I spend the entire time saying, “REALLY. REALLY.” Because that is what happened.

Instead of that, I choose two debut novels that were so remarkably assured and thoughtful that it seemed unlikely these were, in fact, debut novels. These are the wonderfully-titled Make Your Home among Strangers and the awarded-and-accoladed The Turner House. I got both these recommendations from Stacia Brown, who writes on the Act Four blog for the Washington Post, and I will now take sweetly like a lamb any further book recommendations she may want to issue.

And I also choose Elizabeth Eldredge’s book Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960. I know you are thinking that a history book with discourse in the title sounds unbearably dry and tedious, and I am sympathetic to your position. However, in actuality, that book was great, and Lesotho is a baller nation. Perhaps as a function of my low expectations for a history book with discourse in the title, I loved it maybe the best of my four Africa reading project books so far this year.

(Nah. The Congo book was better. But I knew the Congo book was going to be good. That one got rave reviews in the academic journals, and it was highly recommended by another of the writers for the Washington Post‘s Act Four blog, Alyssa Rosenberg.)

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Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl is one for me! I’ve never liked Nick Hornby before, but Funny Girl made me feel happy all way through.

The Turner House, Angela Flournoy. So, so assured for a debut novel, and it managed to make me love it despite being constantly compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom I do not care for. Way to go, Angela Flournoy.

The Wicked + the Divine, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. Shitdamn with this series from Image Comics. It’s about celebrity and myths and family, and it’s a murder mystery where you know whodunnit, and I’ve never read anything like this comic before.

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates. I’m stealing this one from Andi, and I hope she won’t mind! It’s as beautifully written and devastatingly honest as you’ve heard from everyone.

What books have you read this year that deserved all the hype they’re getting?

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If you were wondering, it’s not really anything like Gabriel García Márquez.

It’s impossible to write a synopsis of this book that actually conveys what it’s about, so I’ll just say that it is about family dynamics, Detroit, mortgages, homes, ghosts, and addiction, and that it wears all of these things lightly, with an assurance that would be impressive in a veteran author.

This is Flournoy’s debut novel. I love the phrase “debut novel.” I like the image of a book as the herald of a person in the writing scene. Here is a person who writes! Pay attention to her! And you should definitely pay attention to Angela Flournoy. The Turner House is damn good.

Flournoy doesn’t fall into the trap that catches many writers dealing with an ensemble cast, of trying and failing to make all the siblings equally interesting. For most of the book, we’re with three of the siblings (Cha-Cha, Troy, and Lelah) in the present day, or with Francis and Viola, the mother and father of these thirteen grown siblings, back in the 1940s when they first began their family. The other siblings are floating around, though, and the glimpses we get of them are vivid and precise. Flournoy captures the logistical details of having a huge family — I have a preposterously huge family myself — perfectly:

“Can we talk about this at the party [at your place] next weekend?”

“What party? There’s not gonna be no parties around here.”

“Tina just left me a voicemail about five minutes ago. Talkin about a party for the spring birthdays next Saturday and does Bobbie eat chocolate.”

“I just talked to everybody else and didn’t nobody mention a party.”

“I don’t know, Cha-Cha. . . . I’ll see you there though. Tell her Bobbie eats chocolate but he can’t have any peanuts. They make his skin act weird.”

Bahahaha it’s so good, I swear I have been a participant in this exact conversation.

Whiskey Jenny and I were just talking about the dynamics between adult siblings, and that more than anything is what I loved about The Turner House. Flournoy has the knack of reminding the reader that encounters between people can look unrecognizably different depending on where you’re standing, and nowhere is that more true than in the resentments, alliances, and mess of a family full of siblings. Towards the end of the book, she says “Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do.” Humans haunt each other more than ghosts do, too.

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