Considering that most people spend a large part of their time working, jobs (whether paid or volunteer) play a disproportionately small role in fiction—unless the main character is a detective, a baker who investigates crime on the side, or a writer. I remember the thrill, 25 years ago, of reading Martha Baer’s novel, As Francesca, about a woman who spends her days in an anonymous corporate office and her nights submitting to an online dominatrix—which only makes her better at her job. She writes reports, plays office politics, ducks into the stairwell to talk to her friends: all the things that rarely show up in fiction.

Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao (Norton, Feb. 1) takes the reader deep into the weeds of running a restaurant: We learn about ordering food, planning menus, waiting on regular customers. Our review calls it “a disruptive, sardonic take on the assimilation story.” We meet another restaurant family in Jennifer Close’s Marrying the Ketchups (Knopf, April 26), which revolves around JP Sullivan’s, a homey Chicago spot that sells a $20 hamburger.

In Grant Ginder’s Let’s Not Do That Again (Holt, April 5), the family business is politics. Nancy Harrison is running for U.S. Senate from New York, while her son, Nick, who used to be her fixer, is now teaching at NYU. The problem is her daughter, Greta, who’s somehow gotten involved with a Frenchman from the far right. Our review says that “Ginder aces the small stuff…[and] he also aces the big stuff.” Lots of fun for fans of Veep and funny family stories like Jonathan Topper’s This Is Where I Leave You (2009).

There are two interesting jobs at the center of Xochitl Gonzalez’s Brooklyn-based Olga Dies Dreaming (Flatiron, Jan. 11): Olga is a wedding planner who teaches us how to tell the difference between a regular wedding and a rich person’s wedding (it’s the napkins), while her brother, Prieto, is a U.S. representative running for reelection. “Vivid portraits of various friends and relatives capture the richness of Nuyorican culture, and sharp-eyed observations of the Brooklyn social and political landscape underpin a busy plot,” according to our review.

Michelle Huneven’s 2009 novel, Blame, has a memorable section describing the time the protagonist—who’s in jail for running over her neighbors—spent fighting forest fires. Dana Potowski, the narrator of her new novel, Search (Penguin Press, April 26), is a food writer, but the book is primarily about her work on a search committee hiring a new minister for her church—which she’s secretly planning to write a book about. Serving on a committee is something that so many people do but rarely read about. Our review says “Huneven makes this deep dive into the workings of the modern committee process and the politics of Unitarianism engaging and thought-provoking.”

Joe Mungo Reed is another author who’s focused on work in more than one book. His first novel, We Begin Our Ascent (2018), treats riding the Tour de France as the job it is for professional cyclists. His new book, Hammer (Simon & Schuster, March 22), focuses on Martin, a young auction-house employee in London, as he becomes reacquainted with a friend from college who’s now married to an art-collecting Russian oligarch. We get a lot of behind-the-scenes glimpses of the art world, and the book takes on a timely aspect when the oligarch decides to run for president against Putin. “Richly textured, compulsively readable, and brilliant throughout,” according to our review.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.