If the prototypical novelist opens doors to the past, future, and parallel present, then short-fiction writers tend to focus on the moment, zeroing in on a specific, but cosmic, truth. A consummate story writer, Hannah Tinti certainly fits the mold. Her 2004 debut, Animal Crackers, is a collection of eleven nouveau-gothic tales about peculiar encounters with nonhuman beasts, and her economical prose is so perfectly suited to the intensity of the short form that her first foray into novel-writing could’ve been disastrous. But thankfully, Tinti has read her Dickens, delivering in The Good Thief a throwback as entertaining as it is finely tuned, and as playful as it is precise.

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—Katherine Hill