For me, the great discovery of 2014 was the work of Elizabeth Harrower, an eighty-six-year-old Australian novelist who lives quietly in Sydney, and who has not published a novel since the nineteen-sixties. Her Australian publishers, Text, have been magnificently persistent in their advocacy of her work—chiefly, persuading Harrower to allow them to publish her fifth and last novel, “In Certain Circles” (Text), which she abruptly withdrew on the eve of its publication in 1971. “In Certain Circles,” which appeared this year in the U.S., is a polished, funny, bleak novel about the subject that has continuously obsessed Harrower: the relations between men and women, specifically the dynamics of power at play in those relations in an era of sanctioned sexism.

“In Certain Circles” tells the story of a failed marriage—between a spirited, privileged young Sydney socialite, and her bitter, much less privileged husband. Around this sad, quarrelling couple move a group of friends and siblings, all of whom are struggling, in their various ways, to answer the question made proverbial by a much younger contemporary writer: How should a person be? In fact, Harrower may be a little darker than this; her version of Sheila Heti’s question is closer to: How might I go on living? What are the sources of happiness? Her characters (usually female) are frequently assailed by daunting forces—horrible men, all too often; but also self-doubt, faint-heartedness, conventionality, and the limitations of bourgeois Australian society during the fifties and sixties. If Harrower’s heroines never quite grasp power, they do at least glimpse the truth. And that truth is fierce and uncompromising: “We never understand how little time there is. This is what you want to say to people—that there’s no time for lies.”

I can’t recommend this brilliant, austere writer strongly enough; reading her work was like discovering some long lost sister of Muriel Spark’s. Like Spark, Harrower is funny and elegant and devastating. How can you not like a novelist whose sentences are on the order of these? “She was like a park that had never once removed its Don’t Walk on the Grass signs.” Or: “Yet really, apart from the sense of irretrievable loss, there was nothing wrong at all.” But she is more passionate than Spark, more anguished, less cool. Her best novel is probably “The Watch Tower” (1966), but “The Long Prospect” (1958) is also superb, and very moving. And no one should miss “In Certain Circles”—the novel, were it not for Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston, at Text, we might never have had the chance to read.

I also admired Jenny Offill’s slim, teasingly discontinuous monologue, “Dept. of Speculation” (Knopf). Offill enjoys eccentricity, whimsy, opacities, jokes, and a possibly unreliable narrator (think of David Markson’s “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” or Lydia Davis’s stories for parallel texts), but her field of inquiry, and her undertow of anguish, are not so far from the world of Elizabeth Harrower. “Dept. of Speculation” is a powerful novel about the difficulties of reconciling creativity and parenthood: the narrator is a married writer whose plan was to write and never to get married. (And whose marriage is now breaking up.) “I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” She hasn’t written much since getting married, because life (especially a child) got in the way: no allowable art monstrosity, it would seem, for the young mother. But even as Offill logs the frequent tedium and daily frustration of parenthood, she also writes lovingly about motherhood and marriage; if her novel is a cry of rage, it is also a funny and fortifying book about the difficult compromises of adulthood.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s memoir-cum-novel, “My Struggle” (Archipelago, translated by Don Bartlett), can be seen as a very long examination of the various compromises of adulthood—among them learning how to live with someone else, knowing what to do with one’s masculinity in the liberal Scandinavian welfare state, dealing with dying or dead parents, struggling to balance the demands of creative work with the demands of looking after children. Of all these negotiations, one in particular is beginning to seem closest to Knausgaard’s soul: the sadness that attends growing older, as we drift farther and farther away from childhood, with its fierce childish pungencies of meaning. For Knausgaard, who seems increasingly Wordsworthian as he writes himself into his long memoir, childhood is the truth of life, the source and heat of everything; to have to travel away from it, as we all must do, is something akin to moving away from the sun. Volume Three of “My Struggle” returns the reader to childhood (specifically, to Knausgaard’s nineteen-seventies Norwegian childhood): it immerses us in those now-distant pungencies (cornflakes, being afraid of dad’s bad moods, running around freely all day with friends, the feel of a cool new bag or some new swimming trunks, the horrors and bliss of days at school) as if to say to the reader: “See this, feel this, remember every single second of it, so as to reclaim it as it disappears from your grasp.” The intensely romantic proposition of “My Struggle” is that childhood is precious because when we were young we did not think about life, we simply lived. We did not think about how much we liked, say, trees; we simply liked trees, and became the tree we liked looking at. You may find this proposition debatable, at best haplessly and touchingly sentimental. But how beautifully Knausgaard analyses and enacts the sentiment! Here he is, for instance, on trees (this is from Volume 3): “It was strange how all large trees had their own personalities, expressed through their unique forms and the aura created by the combined effects of the trunk and roots, the bark and branches, the light and shadow. It was as if they could speak. Not with voices, of course, but with what they were, they seemed to stretch out to whoever looked at them. And that was all they spoke about, what they were, and nothing else. Wherever I went on the estate or in the surrounding forest, I heard these voices, or felt the impact these extremely slow-growing organisms had.”