When it comes to unconventional heroes, this one’s a bit of a twofer, ticking both the “very normal person doing very un-normal things” box and the “nonhuman character” box. The plot, in brief: Etta is eighty three, and one day she starts walking from the Canadian prairies to the eEast cCoast, leaving her husband, Otto, to his memories, and meeting a cast of endearing characters along the way. I’m a sucker for ordinary-seeming people who make extraordinary life changes— - the kind of heroism that doesn’t always make the news— - and this book is full of that kind of heroism, from Etta to Otto, to their neighbor Russell, whose quest to join Etta, whom he’s loved from afar, constitutes the biggest decision of his life. And then there’s James, a talking fox. You really can’t go wrong with a talking fox, and the story has the distinction of being the last book to make me cry after reading it.

After accidentally killing his best friend’s mom with a baseball, Owen Meany comes to think of himself as an instrument of God. And, it turns out, the tiny Meany, who SPEAKS IN A STRANGE VOICE BECAUSE OF A SCREWY LARYNX, is in fact just that. The novel is narrated by John, son of the aforementioned mother and a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War who escapes to Canada. As the years pass, the date Owen predicted for his own death approaches, and in a climax I can only describe as rich in lunacy and sorry (words often associated with an earlier Irving novel, The World According to Garp), Owen sacrifices himself to save countless innocent lives, proving that you measure heroism by heart and courage, not physical stature.

Anne Carson’s novel-in-poems is a retelling of the myth of Geryon, a Greek monster and the grandson of Medusa. Geryon is both boy and fire-breathing creature, abused by his brother, who falls in love with a young man named Herakles. His story’s rich in romance, heartache, and a bakery that serves pastries whilst bathed in the ominous glow of a volcano. When I taught The Autobiography of Red to a class of college freshmen, they rolled their eyes at having to read a poem this long, but without fail each student came back heartbroken. Hell, some of them even wanted to read the original myth Anne Carson borrowed from—and loosely translated herself. The back cover of my Vintage Contemporaries edition describes the book as “a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is,” a description I think sums up how we all feel at certain points of our lives.

In these dark days, it seems like it’s getting easier to imagine a world of climatological and societal collapse. The Wolves of Winter has been favorably compared to The Hunger Games, and while in some ways I think that’s a fair comparison, I found Lynn McBride a far more endearing, and emotionally vulnerable, heroine. She is, to put it simply, a complete badass— you’d have to be to survive in the tundric Canadian Yukon—and as she struggles against the elements, enemies, and her own past, she proves an inspiring character. Her skill at trapping and her aptitude with a crossbow are awe-inspiring, but it’s her grit and resolve in the face of Immunity, a group out to exterminate anyone who might be carriers of “the flu” responsible for wiping out most of humanity, that make her legendary.

With a Pulitzer under his belt, Colwon Whitehead has watched his reputation explode —and justifiably so. But his criminally underrated first novel features one of the weirdest plots, and most compelling heroes, you’ll probably read. The story follows two competing factions in the VERY SERIOUS Department of Elevator Inspectors: the Empiricists, who rely on mechanistic reasoning to repair elevators, and the more mystical Intuitionists, who have a quasi-psychic capacity to understand elevation technology. Lila Mae Watson, the city’s first black inspector (and a devout Intuitionist with the highest accuracy rate in the department), finds both her life and her reputation at risk when an elevator malfunctions on her watch. As West investigates, trying to clear her name, she uncovers what appears to be a vast societal conspiracy and, in the process, becomes one of the most compelling, and strange, heroes you’ll ever read.

Chief Bromden is a gigantic mute American Indian, and war vet, who sees the psychiatric ward to which he’s been committed for what it is: a brutal, life-quashing machine designed to zombify its residents. Randle McMurphy is a boozy, charming, politically incorrect practical joker who joins Bromden when he claims to be insane to get out of a prison sentence. Their struggle to rise up against Nurse Ratched and the psychiatric industrial complex shed light on inhumane conditions at so-called mental hospitals when the novel was first published, and led to policy changes relating to involuntary commitment, electroconvulsive therapy, and state-sanctioned lobotomization.