If you’re going to write a novel, why not do as the title of Isa Arsén’s debut suggests?

“Shoot the Moon” refers to the actual act of getting astronauts to the lunar surface, but this work of fiction also attempts to shoot the moon like a player in a Hearts card game — thematically, there’s bisexuality, loss, Daddy issues and a wormhole that allows for some very specific time travel.

The bulk of the novel takes place in the late 1960s, as NASA is indeed trying to beat the Soviets to the moon. Annie Fisk is the lead character, a recent physics graduate whose father played a role developing the atomic bomb before dying young. By page five, Annie is in love with an Apollo 11 astronaut named Norm. And by page seven, we’ve gone backward 18 years and an 8-year-old Annie is meeting a like-aged stranger named Diana in the back garden of her childhood home in New Mexico.

The plot only gets trippier from there. In 1968, Annie discovers a wormhole behind a bunch of computer power units at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. To say much more about where it leads and how she and Norm test it and what ultimately happens is to spoil the book. The best parts are when things click into place as Arsén connects earlier scenes to later ones. There are times when the achronological nature of the story gets confusing, and you may have to flip back to orient yourself.

As for time, it’s Annie’s obsession. She either doesn’t have enough of it or regrets what she has already spent or worries about the future. The wormhole makes her question the future because it repudiates everything she knows to be scientifically true, but it also helps her learn about her past.

This is a weird book, yes, but also a bold and unconventional love story. Arsén writes with real heart and certainly demonstrates talent as a storyteller. — Rob Merrill, Associated Press

Justin Torres swings for the bleachers in “Blackouts,” a transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love. Longlisted for the National Book Award, it’s easily 2023’s sexiest novel.

In a western desert town, an unnamed 20-something hustler looks after an older, dying gay man, Juan Gay, whom he’d befriended when both were hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. The unnamed narrator, whom Juan calls “nene” (“sweetheart”), also is prepared to unburden himself. Each night, the two confess torturous histories, weaving fact and invention, tales within tales — formal flourishes Torres deploys to astonishing effect.

At the center of “Blackouts” is “Sex Variants,” an actual 1941 study that compiled the experiences and insights of 80 gay people, fastidiously researched by Jan Gay, whose name was all but omitted from the record.

As a child, the fictitious Juan knew Jan and her partner, the artist Zhenya, who used him as a model. His copy of “Sex Variants” is heavily redacted, but the occasional word or phrase slips past censors. As he reads, we glimpse a rich, recondite society, pre-Stonewall, teeming with its own codes, hierarchies and imagery.

Against a backdrop of police arrests and physical harm, many real-life people, including Harlem Renaissance actor Edna Thomas, voluntarily stepped forward, profiles in courage.

“Blackouts” steers clear of contrivance, thanks to edgy illustrations, an origami structure and the author’s exquisite eye and ear. This is a novel of ideas, too, brimming with queer history, racial defiance and the injustices of the Freudian era, reminding us that homosexuality was only removed from the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” in 1974.

“Blackouts” does so much in a tight space that it’s difficult to convey the many reasons it’s a tour de force. Run, don’t walk, to buy it. — Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune