Mary Beth Keane’pa Ask Again, Yes is a profoundly moving novel about two neighboring families in a suburban town, the friendship between their children, and a tragedy that reverberates over four decades. In Black Light, Kimberly King Parsons’s collection of short stories, she explores first love and self-loathing, addiction, marriage and more, with raw, poetic ferocity. In Julia Phillips’roman Disappearing Earth, two sisters living in the far eastern Russian peninsula of Kamchatka go mysteriously missing, and the crime has a profound impact in the community, especially among its women.