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Straight's writing is both illuminous and sharp and bold. This Southern California is filled with desert highways and strip malls and small suburban houses where everyday people are sometimes faced with choices that are anything but. They're connected to each other by their love for the land, by their jobs, for each other, for all of those things. 'Mecca' is a fine set of interwoven tales of these people. And some come from communities who've even lived in the state for thousands of years. They came west to escape racial violence and poverty from places like Texas, Mississippi and Oaxaca. The people she writes about are working-class refugees. Straight writes a lot about the California we don't often see or hear about. I selected 'Mecca,' a novel by Susan Straight.

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I'm the senior correspondent for Code Switch, NPR's podcast about race and identity. KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: I'm Karen Grigsby Bates. In 'Vladimir,' Jonas carefully builds a house of matchsticks where our protagonist's desires safely live until she reaches a flash point that left me squirming and desperate to discover, how exactly is this going to end? But she isn't terribly concerned with his fate or the other women because she herself is infatuated with a new junior professor.

She's married to a disgraced professor about to be drummed off campus due to a parade of former students coming forward with sexual misconduct allegations. The book follows a nameless narrator, a 50-something tenured professor at a liberal arts college. I'm recommending the book 'Vladimir,' a novel by Julia May Jonas because when was the last time a book made you sit up from your couch and yell, what? Where is this going? This happened to me about three-quarters of the way into her debut novel. ROMMEL WOOD, BYLINE: My name is Rommel Wood, and I'm an associate producer in programming at NPR. Though the world they're inhabiting is undeniably weak, Nagamatsu's characters maintain a sense of cosmic hope and humanity. But what I love most about this book is that despite all the doom and gloom, these stories are endlessly imaginative and rich with meaning. Sound familiar? From the earliest days of a pandemic to the impacts that linger centuries into the future, the plague forces humans to reckon with immeasurable grief and loss. It's about a world reeling from a climate catastrophe-driven plague. SUMMER THOMAD, BYLINE: The book I'm recommending is 'How High We Go In The Dark' by Sequoia Nagamatsu. We start with Code Switch producer Summer Thomad and a spellbinding fantasy novel about death. Today, some of the best fiction of 2022 so far. But why wait? We have some suggestions right now. And that's because it's a great resource for what new books to read as recommended by our staff and contributors. A lot of you look forward to NPR's Books We Love at the end of each year.

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