So glad to be back in Star Harbor for another visit with the 'Bad Boy' Grayson brothers. In books one and two of this series by Elisabeth Barrett, Deep Autumn Heat and Blaze of Winter, Theo and Seb settle into very loving relationships. Now, Long Simmering Spring introduces Cole in a way we’ve never seen him before. A highly decorated military hero now employed as Star Harbor's small-town sheriff, Cole is beginning to settle into his life once again. As he adjusts to civilian life, working hard to keep his hometown safe, PTSD begins to plague him once again with heart-stopping nightmares. Upon his military discharge, Army psychiatrists helped him work through his demons, keeping the anxiety temporarily at bay. But as his sleepless nights continue, his brothers urge him to get the support he needs --- Cole agrees but where will he find the time?

Julia (Julie) Kensington, M.D., calls Star Harbor her hometown. She knew the Grayson brothers growing up, and even slapped Cole for trying to steal a kiss when she was fourteen. Having lost her parents in a car accident when she was attending medical school, she has since wanted to return home and become Star Harbor’s small-town doc. Finally getting into the groove with her new practice, she’s ready to find some time for herself. Friends constantly tell her she works too hard and it is time to get out and have some fun. A chance meeting with Sheriff Grayson convinces her that maybe the time is now.

Cole has been my favorite Grayson brother since the first visit to Star Harbor. I think Julie's description says it all. "He had a hardness to him that hadn't been there when he was younger. My God, the man was sizzling! And dangerous. Very, very dangerous." Long Simmering Spring offers the reader a full story with suspense and a lot of sweet love. The mystery of the Siren Lorelei is revisited with the discovery of another key. I guess we’ll have to wait for book four, Slow Summer Burn, to tie up this mystery.

I find this series wonderful to read. There is always humor, strong characters, and the Grayson brothers. What more do you need? Val, the DEA agent, is up next in the final book, Slow Summer Burn, on sale in August. I would highly recommend this novel to lovers of small-town stories that have both suspense and wonderful characters. Robyn Carr fans would adore this book.

The authors of most novels operate under the assumption that their readers -- if they have picked up the book, understood the jacket copy, and gone as far as the first several pages -- understand the transient nature of happiness. Protagonists are not people with simple lives, and plots do not describe a plateau of happiness. In The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, Jonathan Evison gives us Benjamin Benjamin, a somewhat unremarkable character whose career (if you can call it that) as a caregiver to a young man with muscular dystrophy belies a dark past and its rippling effect on his misery and self-regard. In fact, the ongoing hints of what has happened to Ben are so horrific as to leave a continual bitter taste in the reader’s mouth. Still, the Homeric odyssey of its characters -- and the book's ultimate destination -- make The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving a poignant (if less-than-uplifting) read.

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving begins with Ben’s interview to serve as caregiver to Trey, the aforementioned MD patient. Evison portrays Trey with enough heart and stereotypical male and teenaged affects that his illness seems secondary; this is essential to keeping the novel from descending into a tedious tale of self-pity. Trey’s father left him as an infant after his diagnosis, and Trey spends his life in a cycle of what Ben would describe as tedium, watching The Weather Channel, eating in the mall food court, and anxiously attempting to ignore the effects of his disease. When Ben -- who himself suffers from seemingly innumerable social blunders and miserable moments alone in his apartment, desperately evading his wife’s subpoena for a divorce -- suggests to Trey that they go on a road trip, they embark on a journey that enables the reader to finally see some hope for both characters.

Along the way Ben and Trey pick up a few other lost souls -- a girl named Dot whose own father is following her down the highway in an attempt to repair their long-severed familial relationship, as well as a young woman who is expecting her first child any day now, and the unreliable father to her unborn son -- and veer off-schedule and off-track, regaining their belief in family and self along the way. Trey loses some of his claustrophobic anxieties about the world and his limitations therein, and Ben regains some of his faith in fatherhood and the future. But when the full realization of what has happened in Ben’s life hits the reader, it is hard to entirely see a way forward for him. Evison ends with the faintest glimmer of repair and upward movement, which maintains the sense of reality in the book. Any larger or happier kind of ending would have seemed disingenuous, and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving is, at its core, a novel for realists.

Max Brooks' World War Z is the “Patient Zero” of zombie literature: a contagious classic that went “viral” in a way that few horror novels do. Readers everywhere caught the zombie bug, and when they did, the shelves of nearby bookshelves began to fill with with zombie horror (along with zombie crime, zombie sci-fi, and even zombie romance). Although a number of great zombie novels have come along since World War Z, none have been able to match Brooks’s legendary telling.

One of the things that sets World War Z apart from its competitors is its format. Brooks eschewed a traditional narrative format, choosing instead to present his globe-spanning story in the form of an oral history. Every chapter is an individual survivor’s tale, all of them transcribed and arranged in chronological order by an anonymous United Nations employee. By doing so, Brooks dazzles readers with dozens of perspectives on the horror of the zombie apocalypse, beginning with the first case in a rural Chinese village and ending in the near-complete collapse of global civilization.

World War Z’s survivors are a diverse bunch: soldiers, housewives, scientists, and more are on hand to offer their stories of horror and desperation. Not all of them are “good guys,” either: Zombies don’t care who is good or bad, and the greedy, venal, and violent are among those lucky enough to have escaped their grasping hands and gnashing teeth. Every story needs its villains, and in World War Z, there are plenty. The zombies are horrifying, but there’s no true volition behind what they do: They’re automatons -- eating machines. The human criminals of World War Z have no excuse.

The stories fit together like the pieces of a mosaic: Individually, each survivor's tale is interesting enough, but when all of them are put together they form a great work of art -- in this case, a panoramic perspective on an apocalyptic event.

Fans of World War Z have been clamoring for a movie adaptation since the first day the book hit shelves, and clearly Hollywood saw the same thing readers did: a riveting tale that begged to be resurrected on the silver screen. The buzz about the book only got louder when a bidding war for the movie rights broke out between Appian Way and Plan B Entertainment, production companies owned by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, respectively, and then the buzz became a deafening roar when Max Brooks revealed that Brad Pitt would star in the film during a panel discussion at San Diego Comic Con 2010.

It remains to be seen whether the film will meet the high expectations of readers, but the brilliance of Max Brooks’s novel will remain undiminished. World War Z is a reading experience that isn't easily forgotten: It infects the imagination like a virus, leaving the reader -- and his or her expectations of what horror fiction can be -- forever changed.

I dislike deadlines. The only thing I hate more than a deadline is missing a deadline, and I have now missed the deadline for writing the review of Jojo Moyes's Me Before You three times. It's not because I don't want to write the review. As a matter of fact, I asked to write it. So why am I paralyzed? Because I adored the book and am terrified I will not do it justice. But I am now jumping in with both feet because I want you to read and love this novel, too.

Me Before You is that rare and wonderful, firefly-in-a-jar kind of love story -- the unconventional romance between two people who appear to have nothing in common. Will Traynor and Louisa Clark meet when Louisa, an ordinary girl in desperate need of a job, is hired by Will's mother to be his companion following the horrific accident that leaves Will a quadriplegic. Before the accident, Will had it all -- the job, the girlfriend, money. He was an athlete who lived for an adrenaline rush. Now, injured and disillusioned, he has a plan and he knows what he wants. When Louisa uncovers Will's plan, she sets out to change it by showing him that life is worth living, even when it isn't the one you planned for yourself. What happens next will surprise you.

Will and Louisa's relationship is complicated and challenges both of them in new ways. While it is marked with immense pain, it also brims with humor that will make you laugh and want to read lines out loud. But make no mistake: This is no fairy tale. It is an achingly real tearjerker that leaves readers questioning just how far they would go to make someone they love happy.

Me Before You is that rare book that is as good as everyone says it is. Moyes has written a twenty-first-century love story that never becomes sentimental or dramatic. It is at the top of my recommendation list whenever anyone asks me what they should read. It may only be May, but I already know beyond a doubt that Moyes' poignant, compassionate novel will make the cut for my top ten favorite books of 2013.

In Peter Clines’ Ex-Heroes, he introduced a world crackling with pop culture resonance: a post-apocalyptic, zombified Earth where a ragtag team of superheroes is all that stands between humanity and the hungry, chattering teeth of the “ex-human” undead horde. It was a tricky balancing act, but one that Clines deftly handled. Ex-Heroes’ sequel, Ex-Patriots, expands on that novel’s characteristic mix of horror, action, and irreverence, pulling readers into Clines’ world with the irresistible strength of a thousand zombie hands.

Months after the epic zombie vs. gangbanger vs. superhero brawl that nearly spelled the end for human colony The Mount, its residents are resuming a somewhat normal life -- or at least what passes for normal in the zombie-blighted streets of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. Fighting zombies and scavenging supplies are still a necessity of everyday living, but the colony is stronger. A Fourth of July celebration reminds residents that as long as The Mount survives, so does the United States. But whose United States?

Following a chance encounter with surviving elements of the US Army, the heroes and citizens of The Mount learn that the country is now officially under martial law, and that includes them. Thanks to a top secret program called Project Krypton, the Army now has their own super-soldiers -- heavily muscled titans equipped with high-caliber weaponry led by a man known as Captain Freedom. Further scientific experimentation has also given them a horde of Exes drafted into service by way of electronic brain implants. This ghoulish new army has plans for The Mount and its heroes -- whether they want to be a part of them or not.

One could say that Ex-Patriots is every bit as good as Ex-Heroes, but that’s not true: This is one case of the sequel being better than the original. The stakes are higher and the action is more explosive. That’s not just a metaphor, either! Captain Freedom and his friends carry massive weaponry and aren’t afraid to use it. These guys make the gangbangers from Ex-Heroes look like a bunch of kids with pellet rifles.

Clines' sense of humor and deep genre knowledge are in top form in his second novel. This is the kind of book where the heroes keep a running tally on the number of celebrities-turned-zombies that they’ve managed to dispatch (an argument about whether the long-dead Vincent Price had somehow reanimated had me laughing loud enough to disturb the other customers at my local coffee shop), and drop one-liners from fan-favorite films like "Ghostbusters." The heroes of Ex-Patriots are all too aware of the the same superhero and zombie movie tropes that readers are: They know that Project Krypton is a Superman reference, and that the surviving elements of the Army are likely to be insane, based on their knowledge of zombie movies like "Day of the Dead." Meta-fictional gags keep the novel rooted squarely in the genre universe, celebrating and subverting it simultaneously.

Ex-Patriots is highly recommended for the horror and comic fan looking for a fresh new take on both.

Elizabeth Strout is one of the keenest chroniclers of daily life and family interactions writing today. In The Burgess Boys, the excellent follow-up to her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, she splits her screen between small small-town Maine and New York City, particularly Park Slope, Brooklyn, to brilliant effect.

Susan Burgess Olson is divorced and still living in Shirley Falls, where she grew up,  but her twin brother, Bob, and older brother and the family star, Jim, both lawyers, have moved on to big city life, one more successfully than the other. The incident that initiates the novel – a crime or a prank, and we’re never quite sure which, by Susan’s son Zach – brings the siblings together. Of course, “together” is a word with multiple meanings, as many and as varied as the frictions among these siblings. Bob and Susan are in contact again after a long hiatus and we get to see some of what underlies the chilliness between them. Jim, set apart by age and celebrity, is supposed to be the shining light and assumes center stage. Yet he is not quite able to live up to expectations, either his own or those of others.

But Strout takes on more than the family’s issues and hidden secrets. The town of Shirley Falls has recently become home to many immigrant Somalis, and Zach has rolled the head of a frozen pig into their mosque during Ramadan, defiling the prayer rugs and putting himself into the precarious position of being accused of a hate crime. It’s a good thing that he has two uncles who are lawyers. Or is it? The novel uncovers not only family dynamics but the ways in which a history of betrayals and reversals affects individuals on a daily basis.

Strout’s characters are so richly drawn that the reader would easily recognize Bob sitting at his favorite Park Slope bar and acknowledge him as a fond acquaintance. Jim and his wife, Helen, may be more recognizable as types, but types we know intimately. Ultimately, there is an underlying and undeniable sadness about these people, the key to which threads through the novel and makes them all the more plausible and memorable.

Bob’s ex-wife Pam, when she first met the siblings, was moved to bake cookies and cakes for the Burgesses because she was always touched by the idea that “these kids had been starved all their lives for sweetness.” In the course of this novel, Strout offers the reader a taste of what sweetness is for each of the characters, at least for the ones who are willing to open their hearts to change. And once you’ve gotten to know them, the characters in The Burgess Boys will stay with you for a long time.

It may be impossible to summarize Edward Rutherfurd’s new book, Paris. Part history, part novel, it falls into the aptly named, yet ever tricky genre called the historical novel.

At 800-plus pages, Rutherfurd’s new book captures some of Paris’s biggest moments — from the building of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, to the reign of King Louis IX and King Louis XIII, to the Black Plague and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, to the French Revolution and WWII Nazi occupation; it, too, shows some of the Paris’s biggest figures, from Coco Chanel, to Gustave Eiffel, to Monet, to Hemingway; some of its biggest neighborhoods, from Montmartre, to the Latin Quarter, to Montparnasse; and some of its biggest landmarks, from Père Lachaise, to the Arc de Triomphe, to the Louvre.

Yet among all this Parisian history, Rutherfurd does not forget that the real heart of any good novel is its characters, and here, in fact, he gives us quite a few: There is Thomas Gascon from Montmartre, an iron worker and Nazi resistance agent, and his corrupt, street-smart brother, Luc; there is Roland de Cynge, an aristocrat with a seemingly proud family name, and his rival Jacques Le Sourd, who vows to avenge his father’s death; there is the prostitute-turned-brothel madam, Louise, and her child’s father, Charlie, who spends most of WWII hiding Allied fighter pilots. Each of these characters (and many more) is unique in design. They all have different backgrounds, personalities, and circumstances, so that as Rutherfurd weaves one character’s storyline with another’s, and yet another’s, he plays them against each other for maximum irony and tension.

As mentioned before, the historical novel is tricky, and Rutherfurd’s Paris is no exception. With so much history and so many characters, left to an amateur writer you’d get lost within the first couple chapters. You’d drown in the history or, alternately, you wouldn’t get enough; you’d forget a character or, worse, get bored by one. But luckily, Rutherfurd is anything but an amateur writer. Rather, as he has shown in previous books (such as Sarum, London, and New York), and shows again in Paris, Rutherfurd is a very gifted writer and a great history teacher — one of the best in the genre.

Anthony Marra’s powerful debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, is the story of the fallout following a father’s disappearance during the Second Chechen War. Though the action takes place over five days in 2004, Marra includes entire chapters of back story about his main characters, often stories they don’t – and will never – know about each other. In other moments, Marra leaps forward in time, giving readers a glimpse of the future. The setting of Chechnya, a war-ravaged republic on the edge of the Caucasus Mountains, is exotic and somewhat intimidating. The consequences and realities of Chechnya in 2004 serve to heighten and shape the story, but it is Marra’s unforgettable and beautifully realized characters that shine brightest in Constellation.

We meet eight-year-old Havaa as her neighbor Akhmed collects her from the burnt remains of the house she shared with her widowed father, Dokka, who was “disappeared” by the Feds in the night. Now the Feds are searching for the girl. Akhmed takes Havaa to the city hospital because he has heard of a Russian doctor there and believes that she will protect Havaa. The brilliant and brusque doctor, Sonja, reluctantly allows  the girl to stay in exchange for Akhmed’s help at the hospital. As the story unfolds, Marra skips between the present and back to the preceding decade as the surprising connections binding these people through blood, obligation, and love are revealed.

One of the most wonderful things about the book is Marra’s inclusion of a few sentences here and there revealing the future of major and minor characters alike. We might know someone for only a page, but we learn that “in three years, when the hospital issued paychecks again, beginning with a whopping nine years of back pay, the guard would frame his in glass and hang it on his wall without ever depositing it.” A land-mine victim who comes to the hospital will lose his leg but finally receive his first architectural commission seven years later. In a book about people so haunted by the past and trapped by the present, so able to hurt each other in visceral and lasting ways, the hope in these small glimpses of the future buoys the story throughout the despair.

As the chain of events that provoked Dokka’s disappearance is revealed, we understand that not everyone will come out of the five days alive. But amid betrayal, loss, and pain, some hope for a future survives. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is about unexpected bonds during a war between neighbors and family, the senseless tragedy and unspeakable crimes of that war, and what remains in devastation. Refreshingly, it never devolves into the twee or magical; the dogs in Chechnya don’t talk, the ghosts of the forest are only faded portraits of the dead, and the demons live next door. Marra’s impressive debut is a beautiful and heartbreaking novel about sacrifice and rescue, about unforgettable people in a forgotten place. It will haunt you in the best ways long after the last page.

Imagine all the horror of "The Walking Dead" injected with the flash and action of "The Avengers" and you’ve got something that might approximate the sustained, pop culture sugar high that is Peter Clines’ novel Ex-Heroes.

Just because the world has been overwhelmed with the living dead doesn’t mean that a superhero gets to hang up the spandex and wait it all out at the Fortress of Solitude: Lives still need saving and bad guys aren’t going to let a few walking corpses get in the way of their evil schemes. When the zombie apocalypse arrives in Los Angeles, heroes Gorgon, The Mighty Dragon, Stealth, Zzzap, and Cerberus step up to the challenge by serving as the protectors of the Mount: a film studio that has been converted into a fortified shelter.

Keeping peace inside the Mount is a challenge: close quarters, short supplies, and boredom have all taken a toll and patience is wearing thin among heroes and civilians alike. Meanwhile, things on the streets are getting weird -- even for a world taken over by the living dead. Some of the heroes’ super-powered allies have fallen prey to the zombies, and now they’ve resurrected ... with their powers intact. (Fighting a zombie is one thing, but having to go toe-to-toe with a zombie that has the power to manipulate electricity is almost too much, even for a superhero.) To make things worse, a former street gang has formed an army and somehow they’ve managed to enlist the aid of what appears to be “smart” zombies that can talk and think for themselves. A threat unlike anything the Mount has ever faced is just around the corner, and it will take every resource the heroes can muster to defeat it.

Juggling zombies and comic book superheroes is a tall order, but Clines proves himself more than up to the task. Action and humor both abound in Ex-Heroes, but so does real terror: Grueling scenes of bloodshed and gut-munching share equal billing with high-flying super-powered antics. Clines’ heroes embody some of the same broad archetypes famous characters like Iron Man, Batman, and their ilk do, but they’re not carbon copy knock-offs with the serial numbers filed off. Stealth, Gorgon, and the rest of the gang are authentic-feeling protagonists that will be readily embraced by any fan of comic book heroes.

Readers are going to want a lot more of Clines’ zombies-and-spandex universe when they’re done with Ex-Heroes. Happily, there’s a sequel, Ex-Patriots.

By now, all the literary fiction fans and book club members have been thoroughly alerted: Life After Life by English novelist Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. And rightfully so. Atkinson’s exquisite novel about the lives of Ursula Todd, born and died and born again on February 11, 1910, is a bit like A Wrinkle in Time for grown-ups. It’s got story, style, and staying-power to spare. Only time (hah!) will tell if Life After Life will be a modern classic, but like L’Engle’s novel, there are passages and chapters that you will never forget once you read them.

It won’t surprise longtime Atkinson devotees that many of those unforgettable pages concern crimes, some devastatingly personal and one a catastrophic blot upon the world. More indelible pages still examine mothers, daughters, and delicate girlhood so perfectly and achingly. But it’s crime that I want to talk about. Because Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, which began with the excellent Case Histories in 2004, has made her something of a goddess to us crime fiction fans out there. I doubt I was the only one who pretty much refused to believe, right up until the book was in my hands, that Life After Life wasn’t a detective novel despite every sign to the contrary. Now, I love me my Interesting-Family-in-the-English-Countryside-Novels like nobody’s business, especially when there’s a brilliant dollop of weird like a little girl with an infinite number of lives in the mix. But I wanted another Kate Atkinson crime novel, dammit!

Almost immediately, though, Life After Life pulled me in -- and I forgot that I’d wanted something different from this author and fell totally in love with the story and wondered if I could phone the Man Booker Prize office and tell them to save a spot on the shortlist. Kate Atkinson really is a literary goddess. And then as I read further on, I saw that I’d had no reason at all to fear that Atkinson had abandoned some of the subjects that have justifiably made her famous. Into an early-ish chapter of this genre-defying novel Atkinson weaves the first unsettling thread: As a young child, Ursula attempts to murder a house maid, and the game is inimitably on.

Notice to any Kate Atkinson crime fiction fans out there who have not picked up Life After Life because you think it won’t be your beloved cup of tea: reconsider. Life After Life is one of those rare novels with the power to delight a wide swath of readers, crime fiction fans most definitely among them.

Julie Wu’s debut novel, The Third Son, picks up in the heat of World War II Taiwan. A Japanese colony since 1895, Taiwan is very much a target for American bomb raids, and it is during one of these raids that Saburo meets Yoshiko. Saburo, a neglected eight-year-old boy, is enamored by this young girl. While waiting out the bombs, she manages to show him more attention and care than either of his parents ever have.

You see, Saburo is the third son. This means he gets less of everything than his brothers: less than the second son, Jiro, and certainly less than the first son, Kazuo. Saburo is thought to be the dumb one, the insubordinate one, and when asked by Kazuo and Jiro’s tutor why he (Saburo) is left out, his mother says, “Some sons are more deserving than others.” From this favoritism two wishes are born in Saburo: one, to better Kazuo, the most favored brother, in everything; and two, to win the pride and respect of his parents. After the war, these wishes will motivate Saburo – from doing well in school, to professing his love to Yoshiko, to reaching America before Kazuo – and, ultimately, define his entire life.

The Third Son takes place in one of the most tumultuous and anxious times in Taiwan’s history. In a country that seems to have no past of its own, Taiwan struggles after the war to realize its identity. It is taken away from Japan by America (as a punishment for the war) and placed under the control of China – a country, itself, in political conflict – and while the Chinese are welcomed with a great parade, the enthusiasm quickly disappears. The Taiwanese are expected to change everything – their names, their language, their way of life – all the while, fearing government corruption. And so they, the people of Taiwan, are left with old leaders they do not miss and new leaders they do not want. Or as Saburo’s father angrily puts it, “The dogs go and the pigs come.”

In a clear prose, Wu mirrors Taiwan’s struggle for freedom and identity with Saburo’s own, presenting world history alongside personal emotion. Such a macro-micro structure benefits the narrative greatly, adding layers upon layers, perspectives upon perspectives. And while a writer can run into trouble with such a technique – mostly in weighing down the personal, human story with the historical – Wu has no problems here. Instead, Wu gives Saburo the room he demands and deserves, the room the reader wants him to have, so he develops into one of the more likable and inspiring protagonists – leading one of the more likable and inspiring journeys – in contemporary fiction.

As a novelist, Nadeem Aslam possesses a unique talent for bringing a sense of compassion and hope to stories that often deal with the darker themes of our existence – specifically war and the displacement of people and families it engenders. The author of three acclaimed works  (Season of the Rainbirds, Maps for Lost Lovers, and The Wasted Vigil) has a new novel, The Blind Man’s Garden, and spoke with Everyday eBook recently about the inspiration behind this new work, his experience as a citizen of multiple countries (and speaker of multiple languages), and his writing process.

EVERYDAY EBOOK: What inspired you to write The Blind Man’s Garden?

NADEEM ASLAM: We have lived through an extraordinary decade, beginning with 9/11 and ending with the Arab Spring – and between that we have the war on terror, the call to jihad, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the murder of Benazir Bhutto, the killing of Osama bin Laden. A clash seems to have occurred between an incomplete understanding of the East and an incomplete understanding of the West. Not long ago on Google, I typed in the words ‘Pakistan is’ and the four autofill choices I was given were: Evil, Stupid, Dangerous, A terrorist country. I typed in ‘America is’ and the choices given were: Not the World, Evil, Not a country but a business. So when I began writing The Blind Man’s Garden I wanted to find a story that could hold as many of these elements as possible, without losing shape as fiction. A novelist doesn’t tell you what to think, he tells you what to think about.

EE: You were born in Pakistan and moved to England at the age of fourteen. How did your experience inform your writing?

NA: I am grateful for my knowledge of Urdu, Pakistan’s national language. I don’t just have the twenty-six letters of English – I have the thirty-eight letters of Urdu too. My alphabet is bigger. Readers often speak of the melancholy lyricism of my books and wonder about the influence of Urdu poetry. But I don’t sit down to write in any particular way. It’s not as though one writes a non-lyrical page and then decides to add twenty grams of lyricism to it, or thirty ounces of political thought and five drops of emotional intensity. Language is a deeply private thing – it comes as it comes. I get as much pleasure from looking at an apple as from eating it, so my books are visual. One of the things I remember about The Divine Comedy is that Beatrice has emerald eyes. This is my sensibility. One must not examine these things too much. John Banville said about Nabokov that he did not write in English: “He wrote in a private secret language that was mysteriously comprehensible to English-speaking readers.” That I think is true to all writers to an extent.

EE: Tell us about your writing process.

NA: I often write in isolation, avoiding all contact for weeks and months, and even blacking out my windows. It is a habit I developed when I was younger and had no money. In order to make the best use of the time I had, I wished to eradicate distractions as much as possible. I was quite a dreamy adolescent and I think part of it still survives – I can get lost in the movements of an insect or watch the falling rain. So I would black out the windows and stay in and write. Once I was writing an episode set in summer in Maps for Lost Lovers – I went out into the garden for the first time in about a week and couldn’t understand why it was snowing, how it could be cold.

Bonus: See the author's photos here.

You know a Woman Upstairs; maybe you are one. As the narrator of Claire Messud’s startling new novel, The Woman Upstairs, Nora Eldridge -- her name undoubtedly a nod to Ibsen -- defines her, she is “the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway whose trash is always tidy, who smiles rightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound.” Nora is “a good girl”: She stayed by her dying mother’s bedside, she visits her widower father weekly, she is an elementary school teacher and a weekend artist. Nora is also angry; her anger is an acidic, seething volatility that colors the events she recounts as the story simmers, culminating in a sudden burn of betrayal.

Nora aspires/aspired to be an artist, but decidedly settles down to a steady, uneventful life; until the Shahids enter her world. Reza Shahid is the new boy in her third-grade class, a beautiful, “perfect” child, brought to the States by his Iranian father’s position at Harvard as a professor of the ethics of history. When Reza is bullied by his classmates, Nora meets his mother, Sirena -- whom Nora’s best friend tellingly calls “Siren” -- and is immediately infatuated with her, agreeing to share an artists’ studio. Nora finds herself suddenly engaged with her own art again, beginning a series of dioramas of female artists -- Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alice Neel, and Edie Sedgwick -- in their spaces, and becoming an integral part of the creation of Sirena’s new installation, an interpretation of Alice’s Wonderland.

Nora admits that she falls in love with the Shahids, individually and collectively: “I wanted a full and independent engagement with each of them, unrelated to the others. I needed their family-ness.” Nora is obsessed, and she is transformed by her obsession with the Shahids. She wants to be Sirena in many ways, a successful and talented artist with a family; she has sexual fantasies about Skandar; and she wishes Reza were her child. As she puts it, she “longs” for the Shahids, and her life becomes almost wholly about them and their role in it, and less about her work, her own family. They have inspired in her wild hope and surprising possibility, but she is still the Woman Upstairs, at the edge of success: assistant, not artist; babysitter, not mother.

This is not a simple story of a sidekick woman thwarted by her own fear, and the betrayal that haunts the “Shahid years” explodes in a sudden, cruel flash, forcing Nora’s long-simmering anger to boil over into a justified rage. Messud is an immensely talented writer, and in Nora she gives us a compelling, complex, and unforgettable narrator. The Woman Upstairs is a brilliantly paced story of fearsome love and obsessive longing, and the boundaries and sacrifices of what is to be a woman and to be an artist in the world.

Dance Dance Dance is a prime example of what makes Haruki Murakami such a wonderful and unique author. The story and the writing sparkle, blurring the line between the dream and waking worlds, before obliterating it altogether. The plot drives forward even as the characters remain adrift; part science fiction, part mystery, all Murakami.

I wasn’t even sure it was her own voice. My memories of her weren’t very clear, nor were the movie theater speakers too sharp on audio fidelity. I could remember her body though.

Dance follows a nameless narrator, self-employed and living a solitary life. His work requires little contact with the outside world or other humans. A sudden vision at the movies rattles him, however, and sends him on a wild quest to track down an old girlfriend, Kiki. His search takes him to the Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, where he’d last seen Kiki. While there he stumbles into another world, where he meets the Sheep Man, a mysterious figure in the bowels of the hotel, who propels him forward.

As he scours Japan and his memories for Kiki, he encounters other people adrift: an old classmate, a loopy teenager willfully ignored by her beat parents, and a striking hotel clerk who seems to know more than she says. The narrator connects with his fellow lonely souls through food, music, and often sex, as he struggles to determine the role they played in Kiki’s life and if they somehow relate to the Sheep Man.

Each character along the way is removed from the social experience of life; the child lost between two parents, the divorced actor who trudges from work to home and back again, the mother who drops everything, including her daughter, to travel around the world.

Murakami’s usual trappings are delightfully present. There is the usual undertow of music – jazz, classical and rock and roll litter the paper soundtrack. The characters drink and eat and cook as Murakami derives meaning and magic from these everyday activities. The author set the bar incredibly high with A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, and while Dance doesn’t quite reach those heights it is a fun and compelling read reminiscent of his greater achievements. It’s evocative and even derivative of some of his earlier work, particularly A Wild Sheep Chase.

Dance Dance Dance is a good appetizer to the works of Murakami. It’s an energetic story and introduces the dreamworld qualities that will bring you back to his writing again and again. It’s a delightful and transporting read that will leave you wondering where you are when you look up from the page.

Even before Ghana Must Go was released this March, the publishing industry was abuzz about the prospects for Taiye Selasi’s debut novel. Selasi’s tale, about the complicated dynamics in an immigrant family, covers territory that will be both familiar and completely foreign to many readers. Over the past decade, authors such as Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz, and Jhumpa Lahiri have given readers views into the experience of characters straddling the old and new worlds. The African continent has remained largely off the literary map until now, but Selasi’s novel is likely to change that.

Ghana Must Go tells the story of Folasadé Savage, a Nigerian woman sent to study in America; her Ghanaian husband, Kweku Sai, who began his medical studies at the same university; and their four children. The book takes its name from a 1983 incident in which Ghanaians, fleeing a drought at home, were forced to leave Nigeria where they had been seeking respite. The novel skirts much of the political history of West Africa, though, focusing instead on the complex expectations, longings, and misunderstandings that percolate among the family members, across both generations and continents.

Selasi’s debut opens with Kweku’s death, a heart attack unfolding in slow motion as the surgeon stands “barefoot and breathless, alone in his garden, no strength left to shout.” At the same time, it crisscrosses time and space with a vision reminiscent of magical realism. From the difficult birth of Kweku’s youngest daughter, to his wrongful termination from a Boston hospital, and finally to his decision to leave his family in shame over his “failure to provide,” this is literally a man seeing his life flash before his eyes.

This is only one of many broken hearts in the novel. Despite her abandonment, Kweku’s ex-wife, Folasadé, finds a way to move on. But the decisions she makes in doing so, and the desperate attempts of her children to make things right by overachieving in anything they pursue, lead to a striking accumulation of sadness and anger. Whether in Lagos, New York, Boston, or Ghana, the characters all act out in ways that are painful, humiliating, and completely real. Selasi ambitiously addresses the common stereotypes of Africa by showing us humans in all their anguish and eagerness to find love. It works.

As the four children join their mother in Ghana for Kweku’s funeral, there is a measure of relief to be had. But Selasi doesn’t rely on any particular dramatic “reveal” to release the emotional tension. Rather, she lets her characters do the heavy lifting, unwinding lifetimes of doing what they were supposed to do at the expense of personal authenticity. Selasi writes with a poetic grace that manages to make the concerns of these “Afropolitans” universal. It’s an impressive feat, and one that signals the arrival of an important new writer.

Robert Stone’s gripping 1975 novel, Dog Soldiers, follows a trio of amateur heroin smugglers as they traffic the drug from a military base in Vietnam through the sleazy underbelly of Los Angeles. Their ineptitude is charming enough at first, but their attempt at easy money quickly exposes their callous, cowardly desperation and underlines Stone’s narrative with bold greed, as the would-be drug dealers stumble through a haze of sex, drugs, alcohol and violence against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.

Heading home on leave from Vietnam, Hicks is convinced by his friend and fellow soldier, John Converse, to smuggle a package of heroin to California. Converse offers fast cash; all Hicks has to do is drop the package off with Converse’s wife, Marge, at their house in California. Hicks agrees – and soon learns that the tense return from the war is nothing compared to the stress surrounding the disastrous events that transpire when Hicks reaches Marge, setting off a drug-fueled chase for money in the jungle surrounding Los Angeles that incorporates pimps, addicts, hoods, and scam artists.

Hicks is driven by self-interest and is undeniably reprehensible – but he is relatable in this sea of filth. His time in the Vietnam War has desensitized him and he returns home hoping to find solace – instead only finding the conditions equally vile. He breaks the law and ethical code but struggles to do the right thing within the criminal context, and in the end wants only to escape the druggy, violent cycle.

In the end there were not many things worth wanting – for the serious man, the samurai. But there were some. In the end, if the serious man is still bound to illusion, he selects the worthiest illusion and takes a stand.

The constancy of drugs and booze seeps out of Stone’s prose and imparts a drunken high. Even without an abundance of cultural references or scenic descriptions, the climate of the ‘70s is evident, laying bare an ugly counterculture and disaffectation of the era.

Stone’s artful storytelling and evocative language elevate a potential pulp thriller to this disturbing, compulsive, literary romp, which earned the author the National Book Award for fiction in 1975. Stone’s Dog Soldiers is told in the kind of cold prose that reflects its subjects’ takes on meaning naturally as it progresses, one drunken foot in front of the other.

My freshman year of college, I was assigned Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in a mandatory first-year literature course. Though I was an avid reader and had always been fond of English class, I didn’t approach the book with much excitement. Most of the books I cherished up until that point had been discovered on my own – assigned literature had a tendency to leave me cold. So it was with a sort of disengagement and hurry that I started reading the book one night.

I jolted into focus at the seventh sentence: “Oh spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.” Sure, the theme of the sentence piqued my interest – as an Indian-American, I am always particularly drawn to stories on identity and nationalism, especially when they involve India. But it was that “oh spell it out” that brought me back to my senses, and struck something inside me. It evoked the same sort of rush I had been feeling through the first (purposefully) stumbling sentences – a tumbling of words, mirroring the tumbling of the protagonist into the world. “This book,” I thought, “this book is special. I feel the words inside me.”

With each page I grew more absorbed and more in love with Midnight’s Children. Not just for the plot, which masterfully reveals reality through absurdity, but for Rushdie’s precise and visceral prose, which manages to evoke complex feelings and themes through unique phrasing. A common complaint I’ve heard about Midnight’s Children, and Rushdie in general, is the sheer volume of prose he employs. Couldn’t he convey the story and themes without half of these descriptions and narratives? But, as the protagonist of Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, says, “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” Rushdie’s style and language allows the protagonist’s world to seep into the reader so thoroughly, that the reader understands the life of Saleem Sinai in her bones. How better to explore themes of identity and belonging?

Please, assign yourself Midnight’s Children.

Fans of the 2006 animated film “Paprika” who begin to wade into the re-issue of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s novel -- which has assumed nearly as many forms since 1993 as its shape-shifting titular heroine -- will quickly find themselves in the Uncanny Valley. Any novel translated into (British) English from Japanese will present special challenges to American readers, and Paprika starts off at a dead run through character introductions and complex scientific ideas, many of which were skimmed over or completely omitted in the movie.

However, perseverance will be rewarded. As the tangled plot strings begin to quiver and pull taut, the book itself begins to feel like a living dream for the reader, swollen with emotional urgency and quotidian fears about life, death, and consciousness. The novel imagines an all-too-near future, in which psychotherapists are routinely able to view and even participate in the dreams of their patients thanks to a new device. When an exponentially more powerful prototype is invented that also organically bonds with its human host, the beautiful Dr. Atsuko Chiba struggles to contain the discovery and prevent it from being abused. Naturally, it falls into the wrong hands almost instantly, becoming a deadly weapon in an already tense game of corporate chess. Along the way Dr. Chiba is both helped and hindered by her past as Paprika, a girlish alter-ego especially designed to provide discreet mental healthcare to Japan’s wealthiest and most prominent figures.

One shock for lovers of the film is that the novel’s timeline begins way earlier. The movie’s story picks up when the DC-Mini devices have already been stolen, and plays out as a detective story to find out who’s to blame, whereas the novel makes almost no attempt to conceal the culprits’ identities, instead offering the reader a voyeuristic inner-space view all characters, both good and evil, as their dreamworlds begin to collide and overlap. When vestiges of those dreams begin to manifest in the “real” world, all these personal and political schemes risk overwhelming the reality of the entire planet.

If you demand an American comparison, Tsutsui’s mastery of plausible pop-scientific rhetoric and his ability to raise the stakes chapter after chapter are reminiscent of Michael Crichton’s glory days, but it’s all achieved with an easy eroticism and gleefully perverse sense of humor that few sci-fi writers (Crichton especially included) would ever dare attempt. Anyhow, the book’s allure is as inseparable from its inherent Japanese-ness, in the same way that the charms of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series seem so reliant upon the author’s identity as a Brit.

Upon finishing the novel, one has to marvel at the “Paprika” film for having achieved the seemingly impossible, pulling an endearing and (mostly) coherent ninety-minute film out of this potent brew of ideas. And yet, afterward you will never be able to rewatch it quite the same way. What once seemed rich and thoughtful will now inevitably seem superficial and hasty -- just as notes jotted down from a dream never manage to capture the power and immediacy you felt while asleep. It’s valuable to have the record, but it never replaces the experience. Fortunately the new edition of Paprika ensures that Tsutsui’s dream will continue to be widely and vividly available for the foreseeable future.

If you read mysteries – and who doesn’t? – you know that there are literally dozens of subgenres. From Sherlock to Stieg Larsson, Matlock to Millhone, each style offers its own approach to detection and its own depiction of human depravity. So, fair notice: Paul Cleave’s The Killing Hour probably won’t appeal to the cats-and-tea-cosies set. Everyone else: Keep reading.

The thriller sets us off balance from the first page. It is early evening in late summer. Charlie, the narrator, wakes up with a splitting headache, covered in blood and scratches. He turns on the television to see lurid coverage of two horrific murders, but the reporters aren’t telling him anything he doesn’t know. After all, he was at the crime scene when it happened. But his New Zealand suburb is quiet, with no sirens or media. For now.

Charlie is a nice guy, without any obvious issues. Well, perhaps it could be said that he has violent tendencies – he once beat up a drunken idiot in bar pretty badly after the idiot groped Charlie’s wife – but one also could argue that this was justified. His wife thought he overreacted, and this made her very unhappy. Still, though they separated, they remain on good terms. For now.

Charlie insists that he did not commit the murders, and that they were committed by a madman named Cyris. Charlie’s wife doesn’t know what to think, but she has her doubts. Kathy and Luciana know what happened, of course, but they're dead. Then there is Landry, the detective with a cancer diagnosis and a desperate desire to see justice done; he wants to wrap up this case, and he doesn’t care if he “goes rogue” to do it. Finally, there is Cyris, a personification of pure evil, whose only problem is that he doesn’t exist. For now.

Civilization and its citizens have a dark side. Mystery writers play on this contrast between law and disorder, and they remind us that the evil lurking in the hearts of men often comes out when the sun goes down. The Killing Hour has its share of blood, and some of the details can be rather grisly, but this is no mere splatterfest. Paul Cleave is interested in the psychological dimensions of his characters, and he explores their motives in ways that make everyone surprisingly sympathetic.

Whoever committed the murders isn’t done, and there are a number of twists to keep readers guessing. I won’t spoil the fun, but I will offer one bit of helpful advice: This evening, before you download this book and kick back in your comfortable chair for some escapist reading? Lock your doors and windows.

One might argue (and this writer does) that episodic writing is more precarious an endeavor than the short story, the memoir, the epic novel, the screenplay. How does one, via the vehicle of the slice-of-life snapshot, engage the reader, capturing him or her and pulling them into the heart of the story, luring readers into that sacred place where one comes to care about a fictional protagonist? This reader doesn’t know how – but does know where. And that is within the pages of Renata Adler’s groundbreaking 1976 novel, Speedboat.

Meet Jen Fain: mid-thirties, journalist, girl-about-town, observer, joiner. Jen’s mind is the one in which readers travel as she makes her way through her life, watching those around her interact and function at parties, in cabs, on sidewalks, in conversation, or in solitude. Men hit on her, she accepts or declines, let’s some upstairs, avoids others altogether. She shares her take on dogs and summer homes, society and flight school, in no immediately discernible order, with no obvious context. But still, the reader comes to know Jen, to start inadvertently dissecting her personality, to like her or not like her. It’s an interesting way to present the content and characters of a novel, without a framework with which to support the meat of the book, with no real commitment to explaining or outlining. It is interesting – and poignant, as our narrator ponders:

“What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. … The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lost the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.”

In Adler’s Speedboat, the point seems to constantly shift – not abruptly or haphazardly, but consistently and quietly. As Jen moves throughout the urban landscape that is her world, her experience – clouded by a prevalent liquor-coated haze – resonates still, today. Speedboat is a reminder of the fleetingness of life and the relativity of experience. It is a hazy journey through the life of a woman who could be Any Of Us, but what sets it apart from All Of Us is the beauty of the writing, the ability to narrate both episodically and comprehensively. Speedboat was out of print for years, and has, thankfully, returned to circulation, just in time to inspire all of us to remember that we sometimes just need to forget the point and go with it.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Dave Barry. Dave is a funny Florida newspaper columnist who also writes funny books. Many of his books bear his name in the title, such as Dave Barry’s Guide to Marriage and/or Sex, which is about exactly what you think it’s about. Over the past decade, though, he has concentrated on writing fiction, which is the best strategy if you want to write about a police chase down Biscayne Boulevard involving a Cadillac Escalade driven by a frantic groom on his wedding day, sitting next a woman who is neither his bride nor a stripper but keeps getting mistaken for both. And an angry orangutan. Actually, the orangutan is in the back seat. And there it is, Dave Barry’s newest creation: Insane City.

Let’s go back to the beginning -- to the start of the book, in fact, where our hero is on the way to the airport, off to get married in Miami.

Two days before his wedding, Seth was in a cab with his best man, Marty, who was advising him on the responsibilities of the groom.
“Your job,” Marty said, "is to get hammered.”
“I’ve seen the movies,” said Seth. “It never ends well.”

At the airport, Marty carries the bags from the car, and soon Seth is explaining to the TSA that he has NO IDEA how that ... thing ... got into his luggage.

Agent Pittowski was peering at the object. “That’s a male sex aid,” he said.
“A what?” said Agent Williams.
“Artificial vagina,” said Agent Pittowski.
Agent Williams dropped the thing. It bounced off the table and rolled, jiggling, across the floor, trailing its cord, like a badly deformed pig having a seizure.

There’s an old saying that plot design involves getting a hero up a tree, throwing rocks him, and then getting him back down. In that regard, Insane City is over the top. Aside from said orangutan and sex aid, there’s a real stripper and her "business manager," some illegal immigrants, lost luggage, a lost ring, a pirate ship, pot brownies, a python, a tycoon with two helicopters, two scowling ex-cops … wait. A pirate ship? Exactly, and much more. Barry clearly had a lot of fun writing this. It’s as if he saw a movie like “The Hangover” and said, “Oh, you guys are amateurs. I’ll show you what ‘throwing rocks’ looks like.” Presto! Groom’s party, cowering behind a tree, naked.

It winds up being a lot of fun, and relentlessly cheerful in a way that will appeal to a broad variety of people.  Dave Barry’s south Florida landscape is rich with weird characters, and he skillfully winds them up and sets them loose. You may find yourself both cringing and laughing as the hero gets farther out on a limb. You'll also wonder how Barry will get him back down, and I won't tell.  As we get toward the season of escapist novels, it’s time to ready the pitcher of margaritas and put Insane City on your list.

Song of Solomon is a moving, at times upsetting, novel of incredible passion, exploring life’s balances. Toni Morrison’s skills are out in full force; she imparts effortless gravity through honest dialogue and simple language, setting Song of Solomon astir.

Morrison’s book tells the story of Macon “Milkman” Dead and the struggles of his family, dating back to the murder of his eponymous grandfather. Through Milkman’s eyes and ears the stories of his parents, aunt, and grandparents are woven together, from the South to the North and back again, from the first years of freedom to the early part of the twentieth century. As a child he is bewildered by his parents’ resentment of one another and intrigued by the mystery of his ostracized aunt and her daughter and granddaughter. Even the basis (and shame) of his own nickname eludes him.

My name’s Macon; I’m already Dead.

This refrain echoes through the pages and the lives of the characters of the story. Milkman’s father looks ever forward, building a small business and network of rental properties. Though an indifferent and sometimes cruel husband and father, he is well known in the community and the recipient of reserved respect – if not affection. Milkman indifferently joins his father’s business as his errand boy before a failed caper leads him on a journey through the South and back into his past. Along the way he meets locals with fond memories of his family and learns firsthand the danger of jealousy and resentment.

Milkman is the protagonist but the family Dead is the main character. As they learn more about their collective and individual pasts, the family’s relationships are strengthened and strained. In the background are a collection of local characters, friendly and hostile, who add color, humor, and horror to the family lives. The titular song is woven throughout the book and filial narratives, connecting the modern Deads to their ancestral home and fractured past. As the family struggles with the meaning and implications of progress, they’re drawn back to their heritage again and again.

An atmosphere of wonder pervades the book, both curious and terrible. The central struggle for and against progress is the backdrop, but Morrison’s prose, with its usual biblical underpinnings, draws the story forward with the perfect dose of narrative greed and emotional weight. Song of Solomon is a prime example of Toni Morrison at her best. The writing is brilliant but accessible, the story is compelling, and her characters leave the strongest impression.

At first glance, you might think you know what’s going to happen in Gone, a literary page-turner about a middle-aged nutritionist, Eve Adams, and her husband Eric, who drives the hot babysitter home one night and doesn’t return. But novelist Cathi Hanauer avoids cliché and digs deep into the truths behind so many seemingly perfect modern marriages. Gone is funny, infuriating, heartbreaking, and ultimately, beautifully written. Cathi was kind enough to answer a few pressing questions for this reader.

EVERYDAY EBOOK: Let’s discuss Eric Adams, rogue artsy husband who seems almost comically a loser at the beginning of Gone. And yet the Eric who ends the book is a surprise that showcases your amazing capacity to live a story from all sides. Did anyone we know inspire Eric? Ben Affleck, in the years before he did "Argo" and seemed to be … floundering about came to my mind.

CATHI HANAUER: Ha -- love the comparison to Affleck. But the truth is, both Eric and Eve, the husband-and-wife "stars" of Gone, are parts of myself. Eric is the more depressive, artist side of me, the side that flounders in between books, unable to produce anything, questioning everything -- and also the side that occasionally just wants to flee my responsibilities and the constricts of family life, which can conflict with the space one needs to write (or, in his case, produce sculptures). Writing a male lead was so much fun -- you can swear, be slutty and narcissistic, all those things women characters are much more judged for. Eric's artwork is loosely based on the work of Massachusetts artist Andrew DeVries.

EE: Eve is a working mom who feels responsible for everything but in control of nothing. What was it like to write her? How have readers responded?

CH: Eve was harder to write than Eric. She started out very ditzy -- I was worried about her being boring, so I overcompensated -- and with each draft she both calmed down and deepened, until she ended up maternal, domestic (but not too), a little sexy, a little wry, a little angry, a little naive. Predictably, some readers relate to her and sympathize, while others feel she was not supportive enough of her husband at the beginning. It's been interesting with Gone to watch some people side vehemently with Eric and others just as strongly with Eve. People project their own baggage on to a novel's characters. But that's okay. It's part of why we read.

EE: Do you think if you’d written Gone at the beginning of your own marriage (to, we must say, a terrific man), it would have been a different book?

CH: It's funny, the second novel I wrote, which wasn't published, was about a young, pregnant, depressed woman fleeing New York -- where I lived at that time (and, yes, was pregnant!) -- and her marriage for Arizona. Back then, I had too much going on and was too self-absorbed to be able to see both sides of a marriage, and also I didn't really understand depression. By the time I wrote Gone, some fifteen years later, I had a much better understanding of marriage and motherhood, not to mention art and depression. Also, I realized that it was better to put my flee fantasy into a male character, since, as I said, readers cut male characters a lot more slack. A female protagonist who leaves her family can only be punished at the end, it seems to me, while a male can be forgiven, even sympathetic. Though plenty of readers did get angry at Eric at the beginning.

EE: Because you’re responsible for the groundbreaking and mega-bestselling anthology The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage and Gone touches upon so many similar issues, I’ve got to ask: What’s your take on the whole Sheryl Sandberg/Anne-Marie Slaughter/Marissa Mayer debate?

CH: I love Anne-Marie Slaughter. I find her arguments so right-on that I actually get chills reading them sometimes, especially her point that the whole idea of cramming full our lives, every single second, from a very young age on, in order to "be successful" -- whether it's getting into a "good" college or having an enormous career alongside a family -- is not a good way to live, at least not for everyone. Some people love that mania, but for many people, something really important is lost by living that way. As for Sandberg and Mayer, Sandberg is compelling to listen to but I think she misses something, namely that not every woman -- or man, for that matter -- can or wants to live as she does, wants to have a family and at the same time "lean in." Mayer, well, I can't relate to a woman who returns to work two weeks after giving birth and builds a nursery for her own baby next to her office while telling other women they can't telecommute even when their babies are infants. More power to her for her accomplishments, but -- she's a different breed from me.

What is the “truth” in fiction? If the narrator of a story never tells you his name, does it make him a liar? He is, after all, not real. Kristopher Jansma’s inventive first novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, sets out to deliberately bend and break the understood rules of fiction. Leopards features perhaps the most unreliable narrator ever, it contains meta-fictions, including at one point a novel within a short story within a novel, and it is – blasphemy! – about writers and writing. It’s also a fun read; the book is riddled with playful homages and allusions to writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway – every single chapter begins with an epigraph – and you get caught up in the game of figuring out what’s “real” with a narrator who admits that he is a liar. Amid this trickery, Leopards is a complex novel about storytelling itself. The guiding principle of the book is paraphrased from Dickinson: “Tell the Truth but tell it slant.”

The story centers on a trio of friends made, lost, and found. Our unnamed narrator goes by several nicknames and false identities, and has wanted his whole life to be a writer. His friend Julian is, probably, a more brilliant artist but is often stifled by his social and physical neuroses. Leopards both laments and celebrates the act of being a writer. At one point, our narrator comments that, "The real thing – the true thing – takes more time and effort than most people would ever imagine. Whole productive lifetimes for a few hundred pages that most assuredly won't outlive us." Julian’s childhood friend Evelyn, a stunningly beautiful actress, plays a Daisy Buchanan-like role in the narrator’s life. From the college where the trio meet, Leopards spans the globe from New York City to Iceland, to Africa and Dubai. The narrator steals a friend’s identity and fakes his way into a passport and professorship, Julian becomes Jeffrey, Evelyn’s Indian prince becomes a Luxembourgish prince; details shift, and the “real” story blurs.

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards exposes and manipulates the very idea of fiction and reality; it’s never clear what is true even within the world of the novel. It reads as a sort-of mystery because of this, but you never expect it to be solved. Jansma has given us a book in large part about what fiction is, and what it is to be a storyteller. As our narrator points out in the “author’s note,” “These stories are all true, but only somewhere else.” What do we want from fiction, after all? A good story, a reflection of our own thoughts and anxieties. At its best, a glimpse of the Truth, capital-T, something universal and theretofore unarticulated. To get that Truth, sometimes you need some slant.

Megan Frampton's Hero of My Heart is the story of two heroes, one woman, one man, each taking turns being heroic while the other falls apart.

Mary Smith is a beautiful young woman who found herself in disgrace after her father’s recent death. Torn from life as she knew it, her half brother arranges to sell her to the highest bidder at a local tavern, a scheme he created in order to cover his debts. The attraction to the bidders? She is an innocent vicar's daughter.

Alasdair Thornham, Marquess of Datchworth, is in this same tavern in a drug- and alcohol-induced stupor, drowning his pain and sorrows. Fortunately he is not in such a state that he doesn't see something very wrong with what is happening. A dazed young woman is being leered at by various low lifes who want to “buy" her innocence. He rouses himself to become the highest bidder to protect her from these raucous men, and fairly quickly she becomes his. After spiriting her off to his room, he sees how frightened she is, but she doesn't appear terrified of him. He starts to feel a growing sense of admiration for her courage. Alasdair decides the only way to solve this dilemma is to marry her, and set her on a road to a productive life. When that’s accomplished he'll descend back into his own self-imposed misery.

Alasdair and Mary’s journey is amusing at times, will bring tears to your eyes at others, and occasionally will incite quite a lot of anger in you. Circumstances beyond their control work to tear the two apart, but somehow they muster the courage and strength to help each other. Mary, to a life she never dreamed, and Alasdair to a love he never thought possible.

I enjoyed this historical romance and the healing of two broken hearts.  I would recommend this novel for its humor, bravery, and love.

Editor's Note: George Saunders' editor, Andy Ward, stopped by Everyday eBook to share a few important things about Saunders. Here's what he said.

He loves music
George Saunders plays guitar. Electric guitar. In his basement. He has played guitar for many years, and I strongly urge you to visit NYTimes.com right now and find the profile of him that ran in January and ponder that old photo of him -- from the '70s, Fender guitar slung across his chest, ginormous collar hanging open, Boogie Nights ‘stache -- looking an awful lot like Gregg Allman. Seriously, it’s worth looking. George and I are always sending each other YouTube videos of face-melting guitar solos songs we love. George is also a big Wilco fan. In fact, the song he associates with the title story to Tenth of December is “One Sunday Morning,” from Wilco’s last album, which he listened to over and over on his commute to Syracuse -- and if you know that song, it totally makes sense. Kind of an amazing blend of happy-sad-jaunty-mournfulness.

He loves the Russians
Chekhov, obviously -- he’s always quoting Chekhov. Tolstoy: yup. But the one he loves most of all? Gogol. Here’s why: “Mostly because I haven't figured out yet why I like him. I don't find him (ha-ha) funny. I'm never emotionally moved by his writing. But somehow his version of life on earth seems the most true and complex of anyone's. Especially in ‘The Overcoat’ (well, I am emotionally moved by that one, actually) and ‘The Nose’ and the novel ‘Dead Souls.’ It's something about his weird take on people -- loves and hates them and finds them funny and scary all at once, and also the high level of weird and evocative physical detail -- I'm interested in how he does that last thing, just technically. His worlds feel very physically real but also strange -- like a highly realized pen on a desk, but the pen is bigger than the desk. His yards are real yards, his pigs are real pigs, his towns are real towns, but it's like they've been made real by the quality and (high) quantity of exaggeration. I'd like to apply that kind of largesse to our American landscape.”

He loves children’s books.
George wrote one once, too -- called The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, illustrated by the great Lane Smith -- and if you have kids and you haven’t read it to them, or if you don’t have kids and you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a strange, wise, funny fable about kindness and community that has the added benefit of a main character named Capable. I love that. And then, a few years ago, George wrote another (sort-of) kid story, Fox 8, which we’re publishing this week as an e-single. I won’t ruin it by attempting to describe it here, except to say: The narrator is a book-loving fox who can’t spell. I read it, and then I read it to my eleven-year-old because, as George says, “a minute spent reading to your kids now will repay itself a million-fold later. Not only because they love you for reading to them, but also because, years later, when they’re miles away, those quiet evenings, when you were tucked in with them, everything quiet but the sound of the page-turns, will seem to you, I promise, sacred.”

He loves to be unconventional.
After Tenth of December came out, I heard from a lot of smart people and devoted readers who said, “I really tried, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on -- where I was, who was talking, etc.” Totally valid reaction and I understand why people feel that way. But also, that effect, the thing they’re reacting against -- it’s intentional. As George says, he likes his stories to open “fast” and to skip completely that more conventional opening-of-a-story feel. I asked him about this, and he showed me how his story, “Victory Lap,” would have sounded with a more conventional beginning:

In a small suburban house in a sprawling subdivision called Barron Estates, a fifteen-year old girl waited for her mother to arrive, to take the girl -- Alison Pope -- to her dance recital. As Alison waited, a river of thoughts flowed through her mind, and she moved about the house, periodically breaking into one of her ballet moves out of sheer joy for life. A series of imaginary situations and conversations appeared to her, first and foremost thoughts of who she might someday marry -- a boy/man she often thought of as her “special one.”

And here is the real version:

Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.

Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned. Where was {special one}? Approaching now, bowing slightly, he exclaimed, How can so much grace be contained in one small package? Oops. Had he said small package? And just stood there? Broad princelike face totally bland of expression? Poor thing! Sorry, no way, down he went, he was definitely not {special one}.

Just as no two snowflakes are purportedly identical, so do the best forgeries, not to mention the most careful clonings, fall just short of perfection. There's always the tiny telling detail, the waver in the signature, the uncertain provenance, the intrusion of an alien gene, the ethical snag, that gives the lie to the copier, no matter how fine the talent or how meticulous the work. Such is the risky business Allison Amend undertakes in her clever new novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy.

Elmira (Elm) Howells, famous in the trade as the great authenticator, is an expert in nineteenth-century art and a director at the prestigious Tinsley auction house in New York, a firm that bears her great-grandfather’s name but which now (2007) finds itself in financial difficulty. The death of Elm's young son in the Phuket tsunami three years earlier continues to be an obsession she cannot shake. Despite the fact that her husband has come to terms with his grief, and their five-year-old daughter barely remembers her brother, Elm is desperate to re-create her old life. When she learns of a cloning clinic outside Paris, she figures out a way to use her art expertise to finance her pursuit of a new (cloned) pregnancy -- without her family's knowledge. At her age, it's a risky and ethically sketchy business, becoming both the artist and the forger of her own life, but her longing for her dead son is as overpowering as the tsunami that killed him.

At the same time, in Paris, Gabriel Connois, the great-great grandson of the successful nineteenth-century Catalan painter Marcel Connois, founder of the Impressionist Hiverains School and a contemporary of Degas, is floundering. Talented but no longer young, he is tired of being a starving artist and cultural outsider while his peers are gaining recognition. His ambitious girlfriend, Colette, who works in the Paris branch of Tinsley's, introduces him to Augustus Klinman, a British dealer who supplies art to luxury hotels all over Europe, explaining the provenance of his paintings as recently recovered canvases stolen from Jews by the Nazis, the sale of which goes toward reparations for their descendants. After all, he tells Gabriel, "What's the real value of this piece? Some pulped rags, a little ink … Why should it be valueless if one person drew it and worth millions if another did? The picture didn't change." A brilliant copier, Gabriel begins turning out not only Piranesis and Canalettos, but excellent reproductions of the work of his celebrated ancestor. His career flourishes, even as he betrays everything he believes makes a true artist.

Hoping to recover what they've lost and what they believe they deserve, Elm and Gabriel become inextricably involved in a scheme that rattles the insular art world. But just as Gabriel's gift, his "cunning hand," is also his curse, so does Elm's perfect "eye," her infallible ability to tell a forgery from an original, become the ironic instrument in the ruin of everything she holds dear. Thus does Amend challenge our assumptions about originality and authenticity, the urge to verify that which is unverifiable, to recover what is unrecoverable. "Line them up, bang them out, pocket the cash," Klinman tells Gabriel, and woe to those who do.

Like most readers who love a good murder mystery, I most often read books by American authors: Janet Evanovich, Lee Child, Patricia Cornwell, David Baldacci, Michael Connelly – the usual suspects. Occasionally, though, a book from a foreign author washes up on our shore like a message in a bottle. And while murder is always murder, the story becomes all the more intriguing and mysterious when set on foreign soil in unfamiliar landscapes, cultures, and civil structures. One of the latest to arrive is Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus from Germany, with more than 3.5 million copies in print in fifteen countries.

Altenhain, a village outside of Frankfurt, is a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Shops and businesses are owned and run by locals, who often end their day over a few beers and bratwurst at the local pub. The town’s wealthy benefactor is involved one way or another in most townspeople’s lives, controlling circumstances behind the scenes and often without their knowledge. Included in the list of beneficiaries is Tobias Sartorius, a village resident who has spent the last ten years in prison, having previously been convicted of the murder of two teenage girls in the town. Tobias has now been released, returns to Altenhain, with his reappearance setting off a chain of events that soon turn deadly and with far reaching repercussions. And there the mystery begins.

Police detectives Pia and Oliver are assigned to investigate the strange and violent developments occurring around town since Tobias’ return. Are they repercussions from the murders, which curiously never yielded the two dead bodies? Has Tobias’ return opened up old wounds that never healed? Or is there something entirely unrelated going on? No one can say because the residents of Altenhain subscribe to a collective code of silence, shielding dark and deadly underpinnings of what appears to be a quaint German village. Meanwhile, as the plot and threats deepen, the private lives of the two detectives continue to grow more complicated, thereby impeding their investigation and interfering with the pursuit of the likely suspects. A young woman’s sudden disappearance intensifies the investigation with most fingers pointing to Tobias, as things begin to spiral out of control and rush toward a deadly climax.

While many popular mystery writers charge forward in their narratives at breakneck speed, Ms. Neuhaus presents a story that is more patient, allowing the reader to dive more deeply into the lives of each character, and thus more fully inhabit the world in which they operate. So engrossing is Snow White Must Die, you may temporarily forget you are safe on American shores.

At the core of the definition of the word “trap” is the idea that something is inescapable. If one is trapped, there is no way out. Someone is someplace one probably doesn’t want to be – and has no choice but to remain there. MacKenzie Bezos’ new novel, Traps, plays off of this idea as she presents four women, all trapped in their own ways, each living her life as though there is no way out.

Dana, Vivian, Jessica, and Lynn are strong women who persevere. Yet, they are all trapped by some intangible factor in their lives: Dana, trapped by her own decidedly cold image of herself; Vivian, trapped by choices she made in an attempt to escape a choice that was never hers to begin with; Jessica, trapped by her own celebrity; and Lynn, trapped by the repercussions of choices she made in the past.

When we meet these women, they are each at a crossroads in life; something has happened to upset the usual motions of their current circumstances. Over the course of four days, the lives of these women intersect, bringing those things that trap them to the forefront of both their individual and collective experiences. Love and marriage, family and history, physical and mental health: Equilibrium previously teetering on the precipice of change loses its balance and falls over the edge. And in moments this reader didn’t see coming, each woman receives the chance to confront head-on that which traps her – each fearful the entire time that what doesn’t kill her could destroy her.

In Traps, MacKenzie Bezos has succeeded in creating four empathetic women who inspire frustration as much as they inspire hope. Readers are sucked into their stories, and quickly come to care about their decisions and about their journeys to happiness. Inside all of us lies self-doubt, whether it be just the tiniest smudge or life-hinderingly huge. In addition to Traps being a great story, Bezos’ novel accomplishes the dual purpose of inciting the reader at book’s end to pause for a moment and self-reflect, to consider one’s own perception of his or her life, and his or her self, and to consider that which traps us in our own lives – and which of those traps are completely imaginary.

"Just because you live someplace, that doesn't mean you understand how it works." -- Andrew Vachss, master crime novelist

Gotta love Vachss and his inimitable (but addictive) brick-to-the-head doses of reality. Because he's right. People, even smart ones, walk around with eyes open but unseeing every day. Seeds for a thousand crimes exist in that folly, and Gods and Beasts, Denise Mina's excellent new detective novel, is one such gorgeous, dark bloom. And I read it in one gorgeous, dark gulp. Putting down a Denise Mina novel is pretty much impossible, after all.

Gods and Beasts is the third book in Mina's top-notch Detective Sergeant Alex Morrow series set in Glasgow, Scotland, and I know I was hardly alone in counting the days until its release. Because what's not to love about DS Morrow? She's absolutely aces at her job -- but fallible, too, in the most unexpected yet thoroughly believable ways. She rides the asses of coppers and criminals alike, but tries (not always successfully) never to lose sight of the power of compassion. You'd want her for a friend, if only she weren't completely unavailable. Which you understand, because keeping Glasgow's rough streets more in grace than menace is no small task.

When a brutal, seemingly random shooting of a kindly grandfather occurs at a local post office the week before Christmas, it turns out to be more convoluted and personal than Morrow could ever have imagined, and it happens at the worst possible time. Her long-awaited twins are just four months old, leaving her chronically sleep-deprived. A respected subordinate is hiding a dangerous and thoroughly dispiriting betrayal of Morrow's trust. Not even Glasgow's ubiquitous taxis or most charming local politicians and do-gooders are what they appear to be. But Morrow's got to work out why the grandfather, by all accounts a man firmly on the side of the good his entire life, handed over his very young grandson to a stranger with deeply disturbing tattoos, and then turned to the gunman and almost asked to be shot. Morrow, and the reader, must pore over this crime's intriguing cast of characters and determine who is a god and who is a beast. Longtime Mina fans will be especially pleased with a cameo appearance by a favorite character from an earlier trilogy, Ms. Paddy Meehan.

Do yourself a favor and start with the first Alex Morrow novel, Still Midnight. Not because Gods and Beasts doesn't stand alone (it does), but because Still Midnight and its sequel, The End of the Wasp Season, are so riveting that it's a crime if you don't read them.

I have the unfortunate tendency, as a reader, to exclusively associate a book’s author (and indeed entire novels) with the story’s protagonist. If you provide me with the tale of a self-involved pseudo-misogynist with little understanding that perhaps his own hyperbolic simplification of the women around him makes it excruciatingly difficult to follow his story with any sense of interest, I can tire of your entire novel fairly quickly. This is a disservice to James Salter’s All That Is; it’s a beautifully written novel whose main character unfortunately elicits memories of the tedious male naval-gazing little seen in my career as a reader since I picked up a copy of A Farewell to Arms as a sixteen-year-old and assumed it must be satire.

To distinguish Philip Bowman, Salter’s protagonist, from All That Is as a whole is an essential element of recognizing this novel for the compelling narrative it is. Salter’s writing is vivid, and the stream of consciousness that takes over much of the story is entirely unencumbered by any awkward styling or forced movement from one character to the next. Salter begins with Bowman’s navy days in World War Two, and moves easily and compellingly through his various romantic affairs and friendships. Normally, I might find it difficult to invest my interests in a man who describes a woman as “lively … like a wind-up doll, a little doll that also did sex.” But the portions of the novel told from the point of view of others – for instance, Eddins, a former co-worker from Bowman’s early days in publishing, or Enid, one of three to four (depending on how you’re counting) extraordinary loves of Bowman’s life – are melancholic and compelling in the best possible way.

My own twenty-first century prejudices were built on the groundwork of a feminism that demands compelling, fully formed female characters. If I set that aside, by the conclusion of the novel it is easy to recognize that a protagonist need not inform a novel as a whole. Empathy does not necessarily a good book make, and when Bowman remarks that “all powerful women cause anxiety” by the end of the novel, it’s clear that this is, in its own way, a period piece, a story of a man who moves from one misogynistic age to one that is slightly less so. And while Bowman may not have recognized the complexities of the women in his life entirely – the women who mark the chapters of his life and his own personal development in ways he may not even realize – Salter has. This novel may not have been written for the type of reader who found much of Hemingway entirely unpalatable, still it is easy to recognize Salter’s talent, and All That Is as a novel worth reading.

My mother read Tuesdays With Morrie not long after her father died. At one of the most difficult points of her life, she said it made her feel better. Surely the experience one's mother had with a novel is hardly the basis for an eBook recommendation, but Mitch Albom is the mother of writers, so to speak. He is the writer you come to when you need a hug, when the weight of the world is bearing down on you. And in his latest fable, The Time Keeper, Albom continues his comforting tradition.

In The Time Keeper, we are introduced to the man who first dared to measure God's greatest gift -- time. Banished to a cave for six thousand years, "Father Time" is plagued to hear every human cry begging for more days, an apt punishment for his cardinal sin. Eventually, he is released to teach a lesson about the true meaning of time to two anguished souls: Sarah, a slightly overweight, "too-smart" high school senior tortured by an obsession with the boy of her dreams; and Victor, an entrepreneurial magnate determined to outsmart the death that awaits him.

What Albom does well throughout the novel is humanize his characters, not only to his readers but to each other. And, as to be expected from Albom, we are inspired by his simple, wishful prose. On the other hand, the magical rules that dictate Father Time's actions seem a bit arbitrary and his teaching methods are reminiscent of those in A Christmas Carol. A reader may consider tenets such as, "God limits our days ... to make each one precious," to be platitudes, or instead view them as a catharsis to a source of humanity's endless angst.

These slight drawbacks make the journey a bit bumpy but do not get in the way of the story's goals. In addition to its aim of making readers feel better about the world, The Time Keeper encourages people to empathize with each other, and more specifically, to take the time to do so. Mitch Albom has a voice made for this message, and it is hard to imagine his fans closing this book and not believing a better world is one in which we slow down every once in a while to take a deep breath, see things from each other's points of view, and forget that our days our measured.

Like his two previous novels, Plainsong and Eventide, Haruf’s magnificent Benediction returns to familiar territory: the small town of Holt on the high plains of Colorado, where the sky is enormous, the vistas wide, the town flat and spare, the regular small complaint and recover of the porch swing the ambient sound. In single unaccompanied melodic lines (plainsong), short chapters, and shifting points of view, Haruf shapes the lives of people who know each other well but keep their distance, even as they unfailingly bump up against one another. Secrets surface and are tamped back down; tears appear in the town’s fabric. For Holt is vulnerable to sorrows, and to intrusion from the outside world, even if that world is only Denver, two hours to the west.

A man of few words, seventy-seven-year-old Dad Lewis, the central character, has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Calm, plain-spoken, his voice tinged with longing and just a trifle testy, Dad sets the tone for this chronicle of his decline and its effect on his family and on a cast of unforgettable supporting actors. For all his uprightness and decency, however, he harbors a streak of violence that severs ties and destroys relationships.

No one in Holt dies blameless, Dad says, and indeed there are others who suffer: a widow and her daughter Alene, a lonely unmarried schoolteacher now part of the history of the town, like wallpaper in old houses; an elderly grandmother who, after her daughter’s untimely death, takes in her nine year-old granddaughter Alice, a symbol of hope and a magnet for the childless; Lorraine, Dad’s fifty-year-old-daughter, who comes home to help care for her father, but who has been deeply scarred by the death of her sixteen-year-old daughter. And Dad’s wife Mary, who looks after him with infinite love, but who sees “all life as moving through some kind of unhappiness.”

Finally, there is Reverend Lyle, who has quit his Denver church for mysterious reasons and has come to Holt searching for the precious ordinary – but delivers provocative antiwar sermons of radical Jesus-inflamed love, even toward the terrorists of 9/11, alienating and infuriating his congregation. A complex man, he delivers one of the most beautiful passages in the novel as he prepares to marry a young couple, strangers to the town: If you love each other, he tells them, you can live in this world in a true way … you can see past everything and accept what you don’t understand and forgive what you don’t know or don’t like. Love is … patient and boundless and right-hearted and long-suffering.

Benediction illuminates, with great tenderness, the trials of parents and children: the love and betrayal, cruelty and unexpected kindness, deep flaws and best intentions. Faulknerian in cadence, it is also, as the epigraph tells us, the utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness.  Haruf walks a fine line between myth and realism, but his balance is flawless.  Fittingly, it is young Alice who evokes the ancient gesture of benediction as she rides out of Holt on her new bicycle on the day of Dad Lewis’ funeral, gets lost, and ultimately finds her way home by the streetlights of the town.

Okay guys (or should I say ladies), don’t leave me hanging. Anyone else out there love reading Fifty Shades Darker, the sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey, for the sheer drama of it all? I mean sure, the sex scenes are nice but the drama is really where it’s at.

For those of you who have somehow managed to miss the entire Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon (maybe you’re on the International Space Station? If so, I would love to hear how that’s going), the series starts with Anastasia Steele, a college senior in Vancouver, WA, who meets Christian Grey, a young, sexy billionaire with dark secrets. The two are immediately drawn to one another, for very obvious reasons. Yes, there is sex and plenty of it. But I found myself devouring the book for the plot more than anything else.

Christian Grey has secrets -- lots of them. And reading Fifty Shades Darker and uncovering those secrets made me feel like I was a young girl sneaking episodes of "Passion" and "All My Children" all over again. A mysterious woman who looks just like Ana Steele and keeps popping up in Ana’s life? I couldn’t wait to find out who she was and what crazy thing she was going to do next. Then there’s Ana’s new boss, whose presence becomes increasingly sinister as you progress through the story. Will he cross the line?

And of course, there’s the inherent drama of love. Because, yes, Christian is hot and has buckets of money, but he’s damaged and has never had a real emotional relationship with anyone. Take his relative inexperience in love plus Ana’s innocence and you have a recipe for a lot of misunderstandings. Will the two of them make it work? Can Christian have a normal relationship?

I don’t want to be a spoilsport for all three of you who haven’t read this yet, so I’ll stop here and let you get on with reading!

Editor’s Note: James M. Tabor is the bestselling author of The Deep Zone, Blind Descent, and Forever on the Mountain and a winner of the O. Henry Award for short fiction. A former Washington, D.C., police officer and a lifelong adventure enthusiast, Tabor has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Outside magazine, where he was a contributing editor. He wrote and hosted the PBS series The Great Outdoors and was co-creator and executive producer of the History Channel’s Journey to the Center of the World. His latest novel is Frozen Solid. It takes place at the South Pole’s Amundsen Scott Research Station, where winter temperatures average 100 degrees below zero; week-long hurricane-force storms rage; for eight months at a time the station is shrouded in darkness. It’s a natural fit for a thriller, and here’s why Tabor agrees.

1. It’s cold. As in, really really cold. The average temperature on the surface of Mars is -80F. At the South Pole, in winter, it’s -100F.  Any reasonable person would say, correctly, that this is a very bad place. But a setting like that makes authors swoon.

2. It’s dark. For a long, long time each year—about six months, in fact. Our psyches have a special relationship with darkness. In a word, they loathe it. When we were a-borning as a species, the dark harbored every threat we could imagine and some we couldn’t. Dark got you killed, horribly. Fear of the dark might have been our First Fear, strong enough to become hard-wired in our brain as instinct.

3. It’s all by itself. The Amundsen Scott Research Station at the South Pole is the most remote place on earth, if you define “remote” as distance from other humans, making it a very hard place to get to. In winter, you can’t get to it.  Or out of it. For about eight months every year, it’s too cold for planes to fly in or out.  Thus the Pole is like a ship, prison, courtroom, or space station—settings where entrapment amplifies threat and impact.

4. Serious science gets done there. International competition is strong for scientific postings at the South Pole. Research is conducted in biology, astronomy, astrophysics, meteorology, human factors and performance, and other disciplines.

5. Strange things happen. One inspiration for this novel was the mysterious 2000 death of scientist Dr. Rodney Marks. To this day, U.S. agencies have stonewalled New Zealand police attempts to investigate. NZP Senior Sgt. Grant Wormald said several years ago that “I am not entirely satisfied that all relevant information and reports have been disclosed to the New Zealand police or the coroner.”  In January 2007, a U.S. State Department memo pried loose with the Freedom of Information Act stated that “diplomatic heat was brought to bear on the NZ inquiry.” The case remains open to this day, with an interesting coda: one of the few Polies in a position to know what really happened disappeared, also mysteriously, at night from a ship in polar waters not long after Marks died.

Published in 1996, Junot Diaz's Drown is a collection of stories about people at odds: with their culture, their environment, their families, and themselves. Ever conflicted is Ramon de las Casas -- better known as Yunior -- who serves as the narrator in five out of ten of Drown's stories.

Yunior is a curious, ever-watchful child who enjoys tearing apart lizards as much as he loves chasing girls. In "Ysrael" we visit the Santo Domingo of Yunior's Dominican childhood: misadventures with his brother, Rafa; his family's struggle to survive without his father; summers spent in the destitute campo. Yunior still lives in the hope of one day being whisked away to "Nueva Yol" (New York City), where his father is supposed to be establishing a better life for his family, but Rafa and his mother know better. They are burdened with the hardened cynicism of those who are left behind only to wait to be saved.

Not all of the stories center around Yunior, but Diaz weaves a common thread of not belonging throughout his characters' lives. From the Lucero, the savvy drug dealer in "Aurora" who feels trapped by the industrial New Jersey streets on which his business operates, to the deformed boy in "No Face" who invents a superhero alter-ego for himself, Diaz's characters are engaged in a furious arm wrestle with their own identities. In "How to Date a Brown Girl ..." the challenge of navigating the diasporic dating waters is addressed with step-by-step instructions on how to best achieve the getting of "some" with girls of every color (who, unsurprisingly, are equally at odds with themselves and the players who court them).

Diaz's writing reflects this struggle as well, including Spanish words and phrases mixed seamlessly with English. But non-Hispanophones need not feel excluded: The pidgin feel of his writing only helps to do exactly the opposite. His language is rich with a poetic warmth and honesty that seems to leave no need for translation. Beautiful even at their grittiest are the dark bowels of New Jersey, as perhaps Diaz, born in the Dominican Republic but raised in Parlin, knew them. The starkness of the landscape colors the characters with their struggles and their sadness and gives them purpose to escape what they never really can: their homeland, whether that's an island in the Caribbean or the Garden State.

The first chapter of David Kirk's novel Child of Vengeance opens with a boy. He is a feudal lord; he is nine years old; and now he kneels before the enemy confused. With his army defeated, he must commit seppuku -- a suicide ritual that requires the samurai to disembowel himself with a sword. But as he says, "I don't know how … I was never allowed to see. I wanted to, but Father said I was too young." It seems unbelievable to our modern sensibilities: too young to see, but old enough to do. But this is seventeenth-century Japan, a place where honor counts for everything and brutality is never ending.

Child of Vengeance tells the story of Bennosuke -- son of a premier warrior and a murdered mother; raised by two uncles (one samurai, one monk); destined to become a samurai. After eight years away his father returns home, trains Bennosuke (now thirteen) to be a great samurai, and sends him to serve in an army. What happens next starts a cycle of revenge that leaves his father dead without honor and forever defines Bennosuke, as he struggles to find out who he is and who he will become: the samurai, who continues the cycle to revenge the past; or the monk, who breaks the cycle to live in the present.

Perhaps needless to say, Child of Vengeance isn't for the faint of heart. The first chapter's seppuku is only a sample of the gore you'll find here. In fact, Kirk pulls no punches when describing the mutilation of human bodies -- decapitated heads, lopped-off limbs, spilled-out guts, it's all there -- but he does so artistically, with fresh (albeit ruthless) images and scenes, describing each sword duel or war battle with a camera-like clarity; more importantly, the gore is not repulsively gratuitous so much as regretfully appropriate. (Think of "Saving Private Ryan" without the D-Day scene.) To eliminate the gore would mean to compromise its emotional honesty and historical integrity.

I went into this book knowing little about seventeenth-century Japan. In truth, my knowledge of Japanese history, in general, was limited to school (whenever we covered WWII) and late-night documentary watching. So, I was worried. After all, it's rare when a historical novel rises to the levels of a great novel or a great history; unfortunately, when combined, one genre tends to drag down the other. But Kirk shows an exceptional ability to weave information and plot together -- always using one to propel the other, always keeping hold of the reader and the story. This fine balance, and Kirk's commitment to it, gives order and perspective to such a distant and barbarous time and, ultimately, that's the true feat of Child of Vengeance.

Okay, I'm sorry, but I'm a sucker for redemption stories. So, forgive me if I prefer my reads to have characters I root for and like. Excuse me, but I just have to tell you that Jonathan Dee's new book, A Thousand Pardons, gave me that and much more.

I think Helen, the main character, will have a strong appeal for readers. Helen is a single mom of a teenage daughter and is new to the job market after the spectacular burnout of her now ex-husband. Ben, the ex, reminded me of Updike's Rabbit for the modern age, and Dee nails the teenage character in daughter Sara, but it is Helen's story that is so appealing. She is funny, smart, and fortunately has a heart of gold.

Ben has brought down the house and family in a narcissistic display that brings charges of sexual harassment, assault, DWI, and misuse of company funds. And that's just for starters. He's off to detox and all of the family's capital is tied up in lawsuits. It has been awhile since Helen was employed out of the home and her job search will evoke sympathy from anyone returning to work. She has almost run out of options when she is hired in PR. Her only experience with public relations has been to avoid them, out of embarrassment for her ex. But as a wronged party she knows what people and the public need -- an apology -- and she makes this the core of her business plan. And it works.

The characters are real, damaged, vulnerable, and all too human, and this is a story that is equally human. Jonathan Dee is the author of The Privileges, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and with this book he has given us a more exciting follow-up. Do yourself a favor and save some time to read A Thousand Pardons; you won't be sorry.

When I was a child, I was scared to go down to the basement. With its single bare light bulb, dark corners, creaky floorboards above, and an old furnace that spewed and hissed ominous sounds, just the thought of descending the basement stairs triggered all sorts of irrational alarms and nightmarish fears. As an adult, I've since gotten over most of my childhood fears. In Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, Libby Day has yet to get over hers.

Libby was seven when her mother and two sisters were brutally murdered in their Kansas farmhouse in the middle of a frigid January night. She escaped the midnight mayhem through a window into the freezing snow, barely surviving, but at a cost of losing some digits to frostbite. Libby later testified against her older brother, Ben, who has since spent the last twenty-five years in prison for the crime. Alone, aloof, and having foolishly burned through the trust fund set up by sympathetic donors at the time of the murders, she will soon be evicted from her modest dwelling. Libby's maladjusted life is quickly closing in on her.

Enter the Kill Club, a curious group of misfits who spend their free time and money investigating the gory inside details of notorious crimes. They hope to reopen the murderous scene through Libby, who reluctantly sees the opportunity as a solution to her financial difficulties. In doing so, her previous testimony against her brother leads to her own doubts about its validity, her memories, and his conviction.

Gillian Flynn's telling of the story is an imaginative one. In flipping back and forth between Libby's present life and twenty-five years ago, we come to understand the desperate conditions under which the family lived, through the eyes and voices of the main characters in the tragedy. And while bad choices coupled with bad genes seem to permeate their downtrodden lives, it is their continuous struggle and desperate attempts to reach for a normal and socially acceptable existence that tenders heartbreak to their humanity. The bad luck of a drunkard abandoning father, the wrong choice of limited friends, and the difficulties of tending a broken-down, financially failing farm all pile up into a haystack of misery. In the present, we find a young woman struggling to understand the truth and meanings of her dysfunctional past, and how they continue to inform, infuse, and hold a tight grip on her life, even at thirty-two.

As is often the case, we sometimes have to unlock our past -- to free our future. And this usually includes dark places. Not always pretty, sometimes violent, but ever intriguing, Dark Places is a perfect follow-up read for those who enjoyed Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl.

"How I love anything by Ruthie Knox!" -- Kristan Higgins, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

The last time we visited Camelot, Ohio, a tornado swept through town causing more than just property damage in Ruthie Knox's How to Misbehave, the prequel to her latest steamy novel, Along Came Trouble. Now we are back some years later, revisiting the town and residents. The Clark family has grown, and their son Caleb is back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an MP. He is retired from the military and has started his own company, Camelot Securities.

Ellen Callahan moved to Camelot after divorcing her alcoholic, womanizing husband. She has a sweet two-year-old named Henry and is an entertainment attorney known for her tough negotiating skills. Ellen's brother Jamie is a very well-known singer who has been an entertainer since childhood. The story revolves around the ripple effect of an affair Jamie had with Ellen's next-door neighbor Carly. The relationship was short lived, but the aftereffects are not fading. The paparazzi have swarmed Camelot hoping to get hot shots of the "scandal." Jamie hires Camelot Securities to protect Ellen, Henry, and Carly from the cameras and the "tell all" tabloids. Seems like a simple, logical plan … But that's not the case with Ellen and Carly!

There is an instant attraction between Ellen and Caleb, though it's a far throw from love at first sight! I laughed out loud at some of the clashes and sighed at the tender parts. We meet a wonderful group of characters: Nana, Carly's very feisty grandmother; Richard the ex-husband from hell; and more of the Clark family. This novel has laughter, loyalty, family, and a lot of wonderful craziness. And the romance is tantalizing: "Her libido growled and started pacing back and forth across her lower belly." I also have to say this story has some of the best "make-up sex" I've read in a while.

I would highly recommend this delightful novel to readers who enjoy craziness, love, and laughter in a small-town setting. If you like Jill Shalvis, Susan Mallery, or Kristan Higgins, you'll love Ruthie Knox's contemporary romances with a dash of humor.