As 2022 comes to a close, I’d like to celebrate some of the new voices we met this year. Let’s begin with Arinze Ifeakandu, who was a Kirkus Prize finalist for his stunning debut, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things (A Public Space Books, June 7), a collection of “nine blazing stories about the joys and tribulations of queer love in contemporary Nigeria,” as our review said. Ifeakandu begins each story in the middle of the action: “It was past ten when Obum finally called back.” “Obinna did not expect this sort of generosity from Adanna.” He asks you to trust him, to plunge into the lives of his characters even if it takes a few pages to orient yourself, and then you realize that your experience echoes that of the characters themselves, who are engaged in what our review called “relationships that hurl them into the unknown and dangerous depths of their desires.”

Tess Gunty made a splash with her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch (Knopf, Aug. 2), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. Set in a run-down affordable housing complex in a Midwestern city, the book checks in on a variety of residents. Our review said, “With sharp prose and startling imagery, the novel touches on subjects from environmental trauma to rampant consumerism to sexual power dynamics to mysticism to mental illness, all with an astonishing wisdom and imaginativeness.”

Sidik Fofana also sets his debut in an apartment building. Stories From the Tenants Downstairs (Scribner, Aug. 16) consists of eight interconnected stories about the residents of the (fictional) Banneker Terrace housing complex in Harlem. Our review said the characters’ voices contain “a rich, ribald, and engagingly funny vein of verbal music, as up-to-the-minute as hip-hop, but as rooted in human verities as Elizabethan dialogue.”

There are three debuts by Native American writers on our list of the Best Fiction of 2022. In A Calm and Normal Heart (Unnamed Press, June 21), Chelsea T. Hicks—a member of the Osage Nation—has created “dark and darkly comic stories” about women searching for home, according to our review. Oscar Hokeah’s first novel, Calling for a Blanket Dance (Algonquin, July 26), follows the life of a boy named Ever Geimausaddle after he sees his father being beaten by corrupt cops. Told from the perspectives of 11 members of Ever’s clan, the story watches him grow up while those around him wonder if his spirit was altered by the injustice. And in Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez (Tin House, July 5), 12 linked stories about a man named David “provide an unsparing perspective on the harsh reality of life in the Panawahpskek (Penobscot) Nation of Maine,” according to our review.

Moving across the Atlantic to Bristol, England, we find Moses McKenzie’s debut novel, An Olive Grove in Ends (Little, Brown, May 31). Ends is the neighborhood of Caribbean and Somali immigrants where Sayon Hughes lives. Getting caught up in the drug trade does nothing to help his relationship with Shona Jennings, whose father, a Baptist preacher, makes him a dark deal. Our review said, “Recalling Zadie Smith’s masterpiece White Teeth…this is the most exciting U.K. debut in years.”

And finally, in All This Could Be Different (Viking, Aug. 2), Sarah Thankam Mathews “achieves what so often seems to be impossible,” according to our review, “a deeply felt ‘novel of ideas.’ ” In telling the story of Sneha, a young woman trying to make it in the world after her immigrant parents have been deported to their native India, “Mathews somehow tackles the big abstractions—capitalism, gender, sexuality, Western individualism, etc.—while at the same time imbuing her characters with such real, flawed humanity that they seem ready to walk right off the page.” What more could you want?

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.