Soar cross-country with delicious novels set from sea to shining sea, where the beauty is bizarre, reality bends, and the rich are not all right.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner presents the Fletchers: In the 1980s, kidnappers ransom a Long Island Styrofoam baron under a false guise; decades later, he and his family struggle with the rippling trauma.

Yasmin Zaher’s hypnotic debut finds a young Palestinian trust funder with money troubles teaching at a Manhattan public school, attempting to scrub her pain away with expensive skin-care routines and becoming embroiled in a Birkin bag resell scheme.

At Harvard, titular Catalina wrestles with university rituals, a nascent flirtation, and the looming threat of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in this funny, wrenching novel by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

Little Women meets Keeping Up With the Kardashians in Porochista Khakpour’s biting interpersonal dramedy: A snack titan, his wife, and their four daughters clamor for reality show stardom, and then face the fallout.

In Laura van den Berg’s swampy, beguiling book, a ghostwriter in Florida receives a mysterious request from her shadowy employer, her sister falls into a virtual world, feral cats congregate—and everywhere, everything is not as it seems!

Kevin Barry’s lyrical Western zeroes in on 1891 Butte, Montana, where a boozy poet and a runaway bride—“Hoodlums of Love!”—are setting out through wolf country on a stolen horse to seek their fortunes.