Edinburgh

In the two decades since this debut novel came out, Chee has been ever-present as an essayist, a teacher, and a general literary citizen, but he's only published one other novel (2016's The Queen of Night), and reading this book, with its almost impossibly elegant density of language and its searing emotional content, you can understand why his novels might take time to come into being. Beauty is in many ways its subject (it's the story, at least at first, of Fee, a boy who finds his voice as a choir singer), and also its style, but it also enacts a cycle of trauma, in which abuse, and the anguish it causes, is both repeated and escaped (though not without consequences), in a story that seems both intensely personal and thrillingly mythical.