Genre Guide – Autofiction

A young medic returns from deployment in Iraq to two things: the woman he loves, and the opioid crisis sweeping across the Midwest. After finding himself deep in the thrall of heroin addiction, the soldier arrives at what seems like the only logical solution: robbing banks.

Visiting Lagos after many years away, Teju Cole’s unnamed narrator rediscovers his hometown as both a foreigner and a local. A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world.

Freshwater tells the story of Ada, an unusual child who is a source of deep concern to her southern Nigerian family. Written with stylistic brilliance and based in the author’s realities, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace.

The story of the friendship between two women, Sheila and Margaux, who find each other after Sheila’s divorce.

The furious, hilarious, soul-rending story of one woman’s reckoning with marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.

The first in a series of six books, this nerve-striking, addictive piece of hyper-realism has created a phenomenon throughout Scandinavia.

Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens.

A dark lament reflecting the macabre aspects of today’s world follows the experiences of a man who navigates Manhattan’s art and literary scenes before touring Taipei, where he confronts family origins, suffers a breakup and pursues an internet affair that culminates in a gaudy Vegas wedding.

In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, the narrator of 10:04 must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

Set in a disturbingly transfigured Montreal in the year 2050, Valid is a monologue delivered over the span of eight hours by Christelle, a seventy-year-old trans woman forced to live as a man in order to survive.

A stylistically complex novel about the impending end of the world, as worried about by university librarian Lizzie, who’s taken a second job for a podcaster who focuses on futurism.

The author describes her life in France from 1941 to 2006, mixing personal history and memory with descriptions of the popular culture of each decade.