Notable recent fiction where the automobile is central (as plot engine, setting, or symbol), mostly from the last ~10–15 years

 Notable recent fiction where the automobile is central (as plot engine, setting, or symbol), mostly from the last ~10–15 years:

Road-trip / driving as the story

• Hernan Diaz — Trust (2022): includes memorable driving/automobility motifs tied to wealth, control, and modernity. Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022) is a novel told in four linked texts, each offering a different version of the same people and events, so the “plot” is also an argument about who gets to write history and how wealth controls narrative.

  In broad strokes:

  1. A novel-within-the-novel (“Bonds”) depicts a legendary Wall Street tycoon and his enigmatic wife during the early 20th century. It reads like a dramatized exposé of how money, ambition, and a marriage intertwine with the rise of modern finance.

  2. A memoir by the tycoon responds to that portrayal, insisting the earlier book distorted the truth. He tries to reclaim his reputation and explain his success on his own terms—while still keeping key parts of his private life carefully managed.

  3. A ghostwriter’s account follows the woman hired to shape that memoir. Through her perspective you see how the tycoon’s “truth” is manufactured—what he wants emphasized, what he refuses to say, and how the act of writing becomes a power struggle.

  4. A final document (connected to the wife) reframes everything again, revealing what earlier versions obscured about her inner life, her agency, and the costs of being turned into a symbol in other people’s stories.

  The forward motion comes from the reader assembling these pieces—spotting contradictions, understanding motivations, and realizing how each narrator’s incentives distort what “really” happened.

• Lauren Groff — Florida (2018, stories): several pieces use cars and driving as pressure-cookers for intimacy, threat, and escape.

Lauren Groff’s Florida (2018) isn’t a single continuous plot—it’s a collection of short stories. What ties them together is the setting (Florida in many forms: swamps, suburbs, coasts, heat, storms) and recurring concerns: marriage and parenting, vulnerability, class, desire, violence, and the thin line between safety and threat.

A few of the best-known story through-lines:

• In “Ghosts and Empties,” a mother slips out at night and walks through her town, cataloging homes and strangers with a mix of exhaustion, longing, and sharp social observation.
• In “The Midnight Zone,” a woman on a family trip experiences a sudden, intense attraction that unsettles her sense of self and stability.
• In “Eyewall,” a married couple rides out a hurricane while their relationship strains under fear, boredom, and resentment.
• In “Above and Below,” a woman repeatedly escapes into the wilderness, pushing herself into hunger and danger as a kind of self-erasure and rebirth.

So the “plot” of Florida is cumulative rather than linear: across the stories, Florida’s climate and wildness become a pressure system that exposes what the characters can’t easily admit about their lives.

Crime / noir where cars matter

• S.A. Cosby — Blacktop Wasteland (2020): a heist novel rooted in car culture—mechanics, fast driving, and the emotional pull of “one last job.”

• S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland (2020) is a crime novel about a talented former getaway driver who’s pulled back into the life he tried to leave.

  Beauregard “Bug” Montage runs an auto-repair shop in rural Virginia. He’s skilled, proud, and determined to provide for his family, but money is tight—his business is failing, bills are mounting, and he’s carrying the weight of a criminal past tied to his late father’s reputation.

  A friend comes to him with an offer to drive for a big score. Bug refuses at first, but financial pressure and pride box him in, and he agrees. Once he’s back behind the wheel, the job—and the violence around it—starts to spiral. Bug has to balance loyalty and survival while fighting the fear that the part of him that was “made” for fast, illegal work is the truest part of him.

  The plot builds toward the heist and its fallout, with the car culture/getaway driving not just as action, but as the novel’s emotional core: speed as temptation, escape, and destiny.

• Attica Locke — Bluebird, Bluebird (2017): Texas highways and car travel as the connective tissue of investigation and place.
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• Attica Locke’s Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) is a crime novel set in East Texas that follows a Black Texas Ranger investigating two murders in a small town where racial history and local loyalties shape what can be said out loud.

  Darren Mathews, the Ranger, is sent to Lark, Texas after:

  • a Black man from Chicago is found dead, and
  • soon after, a white woman is also killed.

  As Mathews starts asking questions, he runs into a wall of silence and competing power centers—especially around a local bar that functions as the town’s social hub. The investigation forces him to navigate tense dynamics between the Black community and white authorities, and it also intersects with his own personal troubles: he’s trying to hold onto his career while dealing with a failing marriage and risky choices that could ruin him.

  The plot moves as Mathews uncovers how the two killings connect to long-standing grudges and present-day corruption, pushing him toward a dangerous truth that many people in Lark would rather keep buried.

• Don Winslow — The Cartel (2015) / ** The Border (2019)**: cross-border movement, surveillance, convoys—automobility as infrastructure of power.
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• Don Winslow’s The Cartel (2015) is a crime epic about the escalation of Mexico’s drug war, told through a long, violent struggle between two men on opposite sides.

  After the events of The Power of the Dog, Adán Barrera—a major cartel boss—escapes prison and reasserts control, using terror, corruption, and alliances to expand his organization. On the other side is Art Keller, the U.S. DEA agent who has spent his life pursuing Barrera. Keller is pulled back into the fight as the conflict grows into a multi-front war involving rival cartels, Mexican politicians and police, U.S. agencies, and the media.

  The novel tracks:

  • the cartel’s strategy (bribery, assassinations, propaganda, internecine warfare),
  • Keller’s increasingly personal, morally compromised pursuit,
  • and the broader human cost—mass killings, disappeared people, journalists targeted, and communities hollowed out.

  Rather than a single heist-style plot, it’s structured as an interlocking series of campaigns and crises that show how the war feeds on itself and how “winning” becomes ambiguous when the system is soaked in money and fear.

Speculative / near-future automobility

• Cory Doctorow — Walkaway (2017): not strictly “car fiction,” but transportation systems and mobility politics are central.
• Ling Ma — Severance (2018): features long drives and highway drift that capture late-capitalist emptiness. 

• Severance (2018) by Ling Ma follows Candace Chen, a young woman in New York City, as a global plague called Shen Fever spreads.

  Candace keeps going to her office job for a Bible-publishing company long after most people have fled, partly for the paycheck and partly out of inertia. As the city empties, she documents her days on a blog, moving through an eerie, half-abandoned Manhattan.

  When Candace eventually leaves the city, she joins a small group of survivors led by a controlling man named Bob, and they travel to a suburban “safe” location called the Facility. The group tries to build a new routine, but Candace grows uneasy as Bob’s authority hardens and the group’s sense of purpose starts to resemble the same mindless patterns the fever victims repeat.

  Interwoven flashbacks show Candace’s earlier life—her immigrant family background, relationships, and the numbing rhythms of work—so the “severance” in the title is both the pandemic rupture and the longer, quieter severance of modern life from meaning.

  
  
  
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Literary fiction where cars are symbolic, not just props

• Colson Whitehead — The Nickel Boys (2019): cars appear as instruments of authority/escape in a historically grounded narrative.
• Tommy Orange — There There (2018): cars and transit underpin movement, precarity, and urban geography.
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  There There (2018) by Tommy Orange follows a large cast of Native characters in and around Oakland, California, whose lives and pasts gradually converge on a single event: the Big Oakland Powwow.

  The novel moves between perspectives—young people, older relatives, adoptees, people reconnecting with Native identity, and people carrying trauma, addiction, or anger. Several characters are trying to build or repair a sense of belonging; others are caught in cycles of violence and poverty.

  As the powwow approaches, a few of the characters become involved in a planned robbery of the event, believing they can steal prize money and other takings. Their plan draws multiple storylines into the same place at the same time, and the book builds tension as you see how each person’s motives, wounds, and hopes are about to collide.

  The result is less a single-protagonist plot than an ensemble narrative about urban Native life, inheritance, and the ways history presses into the present.