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Quichotte, an ageing traveling salesman obsessed with the “unreal real” of TV, falls in impossible love with a queen of the screen and sets off to drive across America on a picaresque quest to prove himself worthy of her hand; accompanied, in the passenger seat, by the son he has imagined into being. In Rushdie’s masterpiece, Quichotte’s story is also the story of a deranged time, the “Age of Anything Can Happen,” and deals, along the way, with father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, unforgivable things, racism, the opioid crisis, cyber-spies, science fiction, the story of the Author who created Quichotte, and the end of the world.

Serpell’s novel is a multigenerational exploration of Zambia’s past, present and even its near future; another recent debut, “Harmattan Rain,” by Ayesha Harruna Attah, looks at the story of Ghana through the lives of three generations of women. The Old Drift,” too, incorporates elements of fabulism into the history of Zambia, and, again, sees that history mostly through women’s eyes. In addition, two of the patriarchs of her fictional dynasties are real people: the hotelier Pierre or Pietro Gavuzzi, who ran the Victoria Falls Hotel at the early settlement near the waterfall known as the Old Drift, and the colonial-era traveler Percy M. Clark, the author of a guidebook to the Falls written circa 1910. Percy is allowed to tell his story and the story of the Old Drift’s founding in the first person; after that, the third person, and fiction, take over.

The Golden House is a modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture—a hurtling, page-turning mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Along with his improbable name, untraceable accent, and unmistakable whiff of danger, Nero Golden has brought along his three adult sons: agoraphobic, alcoholic Petya, whose rambling soliloquies are the curse of a tortured mind; Apu, the flamboyant artist, sexually and spiritually omnivorous, famous on twenty blocks; and D, at twenty-two the baby of the family, harboring an explosive secret even from himself. The result is a modern epic of love and terrorism, loss and reinvention—a powerful, timely story told with the daring and panache that make Salman Rushdie the standard-bearer of our dark new age. There is a scorching immediacy and provocation to Rushdie’s commanding tragedy of the self-destruction of a family of ill-gotten wealth and sinister power, of ambition and revenge, and the rise of a mad, vulgar, avaricious demigod hawking ‘radical untruth’ and seeding chaos.

There are days when it’s Kafka, in whose world we all live; others when it’s Dickens, for the sheer fecundity of his imagination and the beauty of his prose. So, Mailer’s “Armies of the Night,” Keneally’s “Schindler’s List Voltaire’s “Candide,” Diderot’s The Facts” and not much liking Kurt Vonnegut’s “Hocus Pocus,” for which he never forgave me, which saddened me because I admired so many of his other books —