The death of a Korean liquor store owner powers this riveting 1994 series featuring Black private investigator Ivan Monk. The hard-boiled debut launched the career of Phillips, 68, who grew up in South Central. L.A., and is now considered one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. Taking place a year after the city’s Rodney King riots, it’s a critique of politics, class inequality and race relations, and a love letter to the city. It’s the first instalment of Soho Crime’s ongoing reissue of the Monk series. (Only the Wicked is just out.) “A lot has changed … and a lot, it seems, not,” Phillips reflected in a recent interview.

MIT Press’s splendid Radium Age imprint of science fiction spotlights yet another eerily resonant title. The British author was married to the biologist who co-founded neo-Darwinism, and this 1926 chiller was thought to be a response to her husband’s eugenics theories. In this future society run by a male scientific elite, women are groomed to be vocational mothers because humanity is controlled through in vitro fertilization. Individual wants are sacrificed for the communal good. As usual, that means women (like heroine Nicolette) who are singled out as vessels for propagation must submit to being a breeder or be sterilized. The influence on Brave New World and, more recently, The Handmaid’s Tale, is palpable, and the new foreword is essential context for the dystopian racism, homophobia and antisemitism of the novel’s social order.

Before his 1973 murder in Trinidad, at the age of 28, Ladoo chronicled the challenges of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago in two books of a planned trilogy. The first, No Pain Like this Body, was reissued in 2003 with an introduction by Canadian poet Dionne Brand. The second, Yesterdays – a broad satire of white Christian missionaries –  appeared posthumously, and is being reissued by Coach House Books to mark the 50th anniversary. In the late 1960s, the Caribbean novelist studied at University of Toronto Mississauga (where a creative writing prize was established in his name), and this rediscovered story features a protagonist who attempts to launch a Hindu mission to Canada, turning colonialism on its head with verve and raw uproarious humour.

This “fragile” 1980 historical novel by Schlee, now 89, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in its day. Literary journalist Lucy Scholes describes it as “the seemingly modest story of a middle-aged spinster’s Damascene moment while accompanying her brother and his family on a European pleasure cruise.” Don’t let the seemingly meek protagonist Charlotte fool you: the book is quiet but glowing, and a deeply affecting read that has much to say about feminism and the repressed lives of women in 1851. In her foreword to the new edition, novelist Lauren Groff praises Schlee’s immersive details and echoes of thematic elements in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

Woolrich’s noir greats include The Bride Wore Black and Phantom Lady as well as “It Had to be Murder,” the suspenseful 1942 short story that became Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. At some point, the popular mid-century American crime writer set aside Into the Night. In 1989, iconic crime novelist Lawrence Block (now 86) filled in the blanks as an experiment. Newly republished by Hard Case Crime, the result is a grimly implausible yet somehow pitch-perfect and compelling yarn about Madeline, a lonely woman whose clumsy attempt at suicide by gun accidentally kills a woman down the street; she atones by setting things “right.” 

After her death in 1912, the heir to a florid Victorian romance “author” contends with her secret papers. Niece Pamela, who is a New Woman suffragette, believes she has discovered proof of torrid intrigue, both in her aunt’s youthful diaries and the manuscript of her naive first novel, written at age 16 and wisely abandoned. This 1941 gem by Farjeon, the British poet, playwright and broadcaster better known for her children’s literature, heralds the return of the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint at U.K.-based Dean Street Press, and I couldn’t be more pleased. The light read is ridiculously good fun and welcome escapism.

Thanks to last summer’s reprinting and reappraisal of Plunket’s 1983 novel My Search for Warren Harding, a biting comic masterpiece beloved by Larry David and Amy Sedaris that had long been out of print, the 79-year-old Florida-based novelist is experiencing something of a revival. New Directions has  reissued his only other novel, a cult comedy of mostly gay manners following Mimi, a sexually frustrated, middle-aged Bronxville housewife (in the vein of Madame Bovary), as she falls in with Manhattan’s gay demimonde and Fire Island set. And finances a dirty movie. Following its 1992 publication, Madonna bought the film rights.

Canny literary scholar Kate Macdonald, the publisher of HandHeld Press in England, is, alas, winding down operations this year, but not before reissuing this elegiac 1941 novel about romantic passion. First published in the midst of the Second World War, this wonderful book unfurls the emotional devastation around an unmarried French woman’s love affair with an American in the interwar years. Her story is served in diary-style reminiscences about her life and upbringing, written while taking refuge in southern England. (For more on HandHeld and its cohort of unjustly forgotten books, I spoke with Macdonald for a Big Read about unjustly neglected writers.) 

Following Stewart’s pioneering 1941 ecological novel Storm (which originated the practice of naming tropical cyclones), this 1948 sequel by the American historian, sociologist and UC Berkeley English professor is a sweeping and intense narrative that features the same junior meteorologist (now a Second World War veteran) dealing with a wildfire as it tears through California’s Sierra Nevada. The story follows several characters (like the fire chief who takes the loss of each tree personally), but the drama is the progression of the fire itself, as Jasper, Alta., and other regions in Western Canada sadly know too well. Read this alongside Canadian writer and journalist John Vaillant’s award-winning Fire Weather. (Aug. 27)