Bernice L. McFadden’s novel Praise Song for the Butterflies is a contemporary story that offers an eye-opening account of the practice of ritual servitude, and its toll on women, in West Africa. Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ Fruit of the Drunken Tree: A Novel is a mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar’s violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both. Idra Novey’s Those Who Knew is a taut, timely novel about what a powerful politician thinks he can get away with and the woman, and group of misfits, who finally bring him down.