Brian Hart’s debut novel, Then Came the Evening, begins with a calamitous misunderstanding. Bandy Dorner, hungover and in trouble with two police officers, is told that his cabin burned down the night before. Bandy assumes his wife, Iona, was inside, and in a confused fury he shoots one of the cops, killing him. But Iona, we soon learn, did not die in the fire. She took off with her new man earlier that night—just after she burned down the cabin.

An adult character in Normal People Don’t Live like This, Dylan Landis’s lean, beguiling novel in stories, is a synesthete. “It means the senses work in pairs,” she explains to Leah Levinson, the teenager at the center of the book. “It’s a gift.” Leah can appreciate this—for her, objects and words have their own dreamy weight—but her sensitivity is a product of adolescence, not neurology.

Jean Echenoz’s twelfth book, his second historical novel, throws into relief the difficult and remarkable life of Emil Zátopek, a Czech long-distance runner. The story might be merely inspirational if Echenoz did not tell it so truthfully: Though Zátopek is regarded as one of the greatest runners of the twentieth century, his famously brutal training techniques and graceless form suggested an expertise almost wrenched from his body: “He knows he can rely on himself and on his love of pain,” Echenoz writes.

Hilary Mantel is the finest underappreciated writer working in Britain. While her better-known contemporaries (Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan—make your own list) garner fame and fortune, she quietly produces one excellent novel after another. Each is different: They range from a portrait of a sheltered twentieth-century woman misreading a Muslim culture (Eight Months on Ghazzah Street [1988]) to a hilariously dark send- up of the psychic profession in all its guises (Beyond Black [2005]) to the best novel I have ever read about the French Revolution (A Place of Greater Safety [1992]). Yet they all contain the

Perhaps the chief draw of any postapocalyptic spectacle is the vast opportunity for plunder; Chris Adrian’s medical millenarianism, however, envisions a band of survivors rather indisposed to such distraction. The Children’s Hospital imagines a genre-exploding eschaton where the chief residual vice is less indulgence than blinkered intensity: Its legatees are doctors, and come hell or high water—or, in this case, both—nothing will delay their rounds. Adrian’s epic opens with a flood that drowns the planet under seven miles of water, and the only postdiluvial buoy is a floating pediatric hospital with its thousand-odd inhabitants.