Teddy Wayne’s noir bromance Apartment is set in 1996, back when successful authors enjoyed god-like status and the young men who dreamed of joining the pantheon had no social media platforms where they could act out their fantasies. In his creative writing program the unnamed protagonist is surrounded by self-regarding professors and students who find no favor with his submissions. The one exception is Billy, a charismatic Midwesterner who sees promise in his classmate’s pages. Billy sleeps in the basement of the dive bar where he works—until the narrator invites Billy to live with him in his two-bedroom apartment in exchange for cleaning and companionship. What follows is an amusing, increasingly uneasy account of an odd couple and their unstable power dynamic as Billy’s star rises and his host, whose heart is “clamped shut like the shell of a stubborn pistachio,” comes to accept that their bond is not all it’s cracked up to be. – Lauren Mechling
In the opening pages of Douglas Stuart’s debut novel, Shuggie Bain, we meet our protagonist at the age of 16. His home is an underheated room in a dank bedsit somewhere in the suburbs of Glasgow, where he works at a supermarket deli counter while dreaming of a future as a hairdresser. Stuart, who won the Booker Prize for his debut novel, paints a picture of a young man on society’s margins with the eagle-eyed precision of someone who has not just lived it but truly absorbed it. Released to strong reviews in February, the book gained momentum as a word-of-mouth hit during lockdown, attracting praise not only for Stuart’s window into the plague of unemployment and working-class disillusionment wrought by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government but also, perhaps more importantly, for the empathy that radiates from every page. – Liam Hess
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