Creative writing professor Kirstin Valdez Quade’s novel The Five Wounds (Norton) follows a New Mexican family’s year of love and sacrifice. Thirty-three-year-old Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession, and while he is preparing, his 15-year-old daughter shows up pregnant, disrupting his plans for personal redemption.

In Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea (Columbia University Press), Ksenia Chizhova, assistant professor of East Asian studies and comparative literature, discusses a popular genre in Korea during the 17th through the 20th centuries: novels that unfold over generations of one family. Her exploration covers how these books fit within Korean society, history, and modernity.