YEARS AGO I had my palm read on the streets of Paris. I was tired from walking around the city and I did it for the opportunity to sit and get a hand massage. The palm reader, wearing a scarf with bells sewn into the hem, guessed I was a summer baby. True! Then she predicted that I had come to Paris “to escape.” Also true! (Though this comment more or less applies to every person who does not already live in Paris.) And then? She was out of guesses. I frowned, asking her, “Shouldn’t you be grossly misinterpreting my love life and longevity?” But she insisted that it was not for her to say. She could tell from the lines on my palm that I would have “many loves” and “be chosen for certain things.” (Oh, great?) But after that? My future was up to me. It’s jarring to hear honesty from a fortune teller, a grift and a gift at the same time.

Books columnists face a similar conundrum, just with fewer bells. What will be the most impactful books going forward? We know enough to glimpse into the future, but we don’t know it all. We can let our tastes lead the way, but your reading future for this month, this year, is up to you. Still, it’s not so bad to guess at the unguessable. Worse comes to worst? You’ll get a nice opportunity to find a chair and take a load off.

Hewing closely to the facts of Jean Chen Ho’s own life story (she was born in Taiwan and raised in Southern California), “Fiona and Jane” (Viking) is told via the alternating perspectives of two temperamentally different Taiwanese best friends who navigate romance and ambition in Los Angeles. Ho’s stories have a kind of streamlined beauty in that the language never trips on or celebrates itself. This gives them elegance while lending texture to her characters. For example: “By the time she woke up, the premonition had gone, like sand through a sieve.” And onward we go. The story of Fiona’s and Jane’s friendship is chockablock with slyness and heart as it slides back and forth between tales of law school, strip malls, and struggles with both their individual and inherited pasts. It’s also very knowing about men. In one story, “Korean Boys I’ve Loved,” Ho writes that “Men, Korean and otherwise, were always asking What do you write? and then forgetting to wait for the answer.”

Sometimes it feels like we can alter the course of the future; sometimes it feels like our fate to simply wait for it. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in airports. This is the setting of Antoine Wilson’s propulsive, slim, and inventive “Mouth to Mouth” (Avid Reader), a novel about destiny. An unnamed man runs into an acquaintance from college, someone he hasn’t seen in decades, during a layover at an airport gate. It is in this muted and transient space that something very definite occurs. The acquaintance, a wealthy art dealer, suggests they adjourn to the first-class lounge to wait out the time. There, he immediately launches into the story of a lifetime, made comfortable by the fact that our hero was unwittingly “there at the beginning,” during a film class in college. It’s the acquaintance’s morality play — a tale of a questionable death — that propels the reader through this Russian doll of a novel. What will the future hold for both of these men? Well that depends, as always, on the past.

To Infinity and Beyond

“A Little Life” author Hanya Yanagihara’s much-anticipated third novel, “To Paradise” (Doubleday), is an epic historical and emotional showstopper — 720 pages that reimagine a New York of the past (the late nineteenth century), the recent past (the 1990s), and the future (2093), exploring the idea of a utopia.