The Nimbus, by Robert P. Baird (Holt). In this wry début novel, which reflects on modern parenting and campus politics, a community is upended when a two-year-old boy begins to glow. The boy’s mother wants to hide the child from the public and the wolfish press; meanwhile, her husband, a professor of religious studies, accepts the public’s curiosity, and even steers his floundering Ph.D. advisee toward writing a dissertation on the meaning of his son’s radiance. Baird’s quasi-satirical story emphasizes the tussle between high-mindedness and baser instincts. As a university librarian who has a consequential encounter with the glowing boy observes, “Even in the Divinity School . . . the dictates of reason and good taste were no match for the flash of celebrity.”

Rosa Mistika, by Euphrase Kezilahabi, translated from the Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin (Yale). Originally written in 1971, Kezilahabi’s novel of changing cultural attitudes in Tanzania, particularly toward female sexuality, was at first banned, before becoming a classic. Rosa, the eldest of six children, is beaten by her drunken father after he discovers that a boy she walks to school with has written her a love letter. She is determined to focus on her studies and ignore boys, until a conflict at school spurs her to live life more recklessly. Love, disillusion, independence, and disgrace follow. Playing in the space between social realism and fabulist storytelling, Kezilahabi’s novel asks moral questions about parents’ responsibilities and the effects of women’s liberation, sparing no one but withholding final judgment.