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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been walking around with this book in me since I finished reading it in manuscript form, months ago. Pressing it on friends who ask what to read next, who send stunned e-mails in return; they can’t stop thinking about this story either – the unwinding of the deeply intimate, the un-scrolling of personal history. As beautifully written as it is raw, Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave is an impossible book to forget because it exists on the razor’s edge between before and after.

I thought nothing of it at first. The ocean looked a little closer to our hotel than usual.

Sonali Deraniyagala survived the unthinkable – her husband, sons, and parents were killed in the 2004  Indian Ocean tsunami – and spares nothing, including herself, as she conjures who and what she’s lost with indelible imagery. Wave could easily be labeled “a brave book” – and yet, the label, brave, feels somehow soft and lacking. There’s a weight and a gravitas to her admissions, her catalogue of injuries and memories, pain and primordial choices (grabbing her children and husband, leaving her parents), and her shame – shame that will not, as she says, “dislodge.” It’s precisely because Deraniyagala holds nothing back that she succeeds in creating a world of universal, emotional truths that’s more than a memorial to a single shocking moment.

This is an impolite, aggressive book, punctuated by rage, disbelief, and dislocation, which is why it’s such a relief when we see Deraniyagala starting to heal, or as she says at one point, “loitering on the outskirts of the life we had.” It’s a poetic portrait of a family that’s all the clearer because we’ve experienced the deeply unsentimental (brutal, even) recollection of her survivor’s guilt and deep-seated desire to die, and her hallucinations fueled by booze and pills. By the last page, there’s no doubt who her young sons were, why she fell for her husband, and how they made a life together.

When I returned previously, I could endure only cautious glances at my family. I looked now and again but mostly wanted to keep them a blur. Now I can hardly take my eyes off them, quite unlike when they were alive. So I investigate, constantly. I am rediscovering them, almost. I amass details of them, and us.

But in the end, this deceptively slim book is hopeful, but never saccharine, ferocious, but not gratuitous. It’s the story of lives lived in a string of befores-and-afters, where, over time, thrashing mutates into pulsing, which gives way to quiet breathing.

Everyone has that one book that instantly becomes a favorite from the first page, the one that makes them feel every emotion, from laughter to tears, intensely, and that leaves them with the urge to reread from the minute the last page is finished. For me, this book was The Joy Luck Club. I could, and have, read that book over and over, and never fail to be moved by the story of mothers and daughters, of cultural identity, and of fate and faith. Given my worship of the book and subsequent devouring of Amy Tan’s other titles, I was surprised to discover recently that there was one book I had not yet read: The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life.

This collection of lyrical, thought-provoking and humorous essays chronicles Tan’s life, but not in chronological order. Rather, the essays are arranged artfully to reveal Tan’s life through its influence on her writing. For someone like me – someone in love with her plots as well as her prose – the book is a goldmine. Throughout the essays Tan reveals the themes from her own life that so strongly shaped her work, particularly the mother-daughter relationship. In one essay, someone points out to Tan that almost all her work centers around mothers and daughters, something she hadn’t realized up until that point, and an unsurprising fact, given the emotionally fraught relationship she had with her own (probably bipolar) mother. Some essays, which reveal the manic-depressive and violent aspects of her mother, are visceral and hard to read. Because of this, when you come to an essay like “last week,” and “confessions,” in which Tan reveals the last few weeks of her mother’s life and the healing and love of those days, you might weep involuntarily, keenly feeling Tan’s emotions and the achingly beautiful closure she receives.

Weaved throughout these plot points of Tan’s life are musings on reading and writing. She writes a lot about the therapeutic and exploratory nature of writing. She particularly seems troubled by those who dissect her works in an attempt to extract meanings and symbols. She writes, she says, because she has questions, not because she has some clever answers that she wants to hide in layers of words. Any writer or lover of words will find themselves nodding along to many of her statements throughout the collection. Toward the end of the book was one that particularly struck me: “Reading [is] an act of faith, a hope I will discover something remarkable about extraordinary life, about myself. And if the writer and reader discover the same thing … the act of faith has resulted in an act of magic.” Finally, I understand why Amy Tan has always left me spellbound.

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.

Writing a book about the history of one of the greatest cities on earth would have been a daunting task for any writer, but author Edward Rutherfurd succeeds in creating a very pleasurable read of history -- both real and imagined -- in New York: The Novel. Rutherfurd's telling begins with the arrival of Dutch settlers in Manhattan in 1664 and ends in 2001 with the attack on the World Trade Center. During time in between, readers are taken along with Rutherfurd as he follows the fictional Master family, those with whom they come in contact in New York society, and the events that alter history around them.

For those who are not familiar with the history of New York City, New York: The Novel is a great first read. Through the Master family, we are given a window into how the fabric of society changes with each event in the growing metropolis. For example, during the Revolutionary War the Master family struggles with British allegiance and American patriotism, reflecting the changing colonial attitudes and shifting loyalties. Before the Civil War, the Masters are an example of how divisive the issue of slavery could be within a household. They show how choosing a side can divide a family, and ultimately a nation. Beyond the Masters, with Rutherfurd's guidance we are privy to various accounts of the great booms and busts of New York City from the newly arrived to old-money Americans throughout the early twentieth century.

There are other tales woven within the Masters’ experience that provide a stark contrast to their life of wealth and privilege, but they aren't nearly as fully formed as our main characters. For example: Whatever happens to the family of slaves employed by the Masters? Does the estranged British wife ever see her young son again? Who does the Italian immigrant eventually marry? These questions leave the reader looking for a deeper dive into New York history. Perhaps it is written this way intentionally, in an effort to plant the seeds within a curious reader to continue his or her own research. New York: The Novel does not always provide the answers, but it certainly provokes the questions. Ultimately, Rutherfurd creates a fascinating read of the Big Apple that is hard to put down. For all of its hundreds of pages, it moves at a sweeping pace and is an intriguing read.

One of my favorite quotes from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was featured in a review by the Wall Street Journal: "People who live in difficult circumstances need to know that happy endings are possible." This is a sentiment that emanates from every page of Sonia Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World.

We first learn about Sonia's parents, who were Puerto Rican immigrants. Her mother, Celia, grew up poor, but made her journey to America by joining the First Women's Army Corps in Puerto Rico. Once in the States, she became a nurse. Juan, Sonia's father, never finished school, but was clearly talented and smart. Young Sonia grows up looking up to her Abuelita, (her father's mother), mesmerized by her vivacity, but most especially by her Sunday gatherings, filled with food, dominoes, music, and talks about the old country. Unfortunately she also grows up watching her parents fight; both parents united by love and culture, but also divided by their motivations and ambitions, and her father's alcoholism. At the age of eight, Sonia is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and recalls an argument between her parents regarding her insulin shots. If she is going to need this shot for the rest of her life, young Sonia reflects, then she best learn how to do it herself, and she does so, with the careful instruction of her mother. Abuelita aptly nicknames young Sonia aji (meaning hot sauce in Spanish), due to her restless and strong nature.

Along the way, Sonia learns about hardships, death, gender bias, and racism. Growing up in the projects of the Bronx, she learns about the "safe" parts of the projects, and where to walk and not walk. Her father dies when she is nine, and she watches her vivacious Abuelita succumb to the pain of losing a son -- the Sunday gatherings end -- and her family is never the same. When she graduates eighth grade, almost the entire female class is sent off with best wishes for marriage and children in the future. Sonia is sent off with best wishes for becoming a lawyer.

At Princeton and Yale, the young woman is confronted with the issue of affirmative action. Though Sonia's mother made enormous efforts to provide the best education for Sonia, once at Princeton she quickly has to "catch up" to her Ivy League peers. Affirmative action got her to Princeton, but it was Sonia's determination and intelligence that earned her a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduation.

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor delivers an unprecedented memoir that is equal parts earnest, humbling, and instantly inspiring. The book ends as she assumes the part of federal district judge in New York; what we take away is her contagious aji-like spirit, and a better understanding of one of the most powerful women in the world.

As children, most of us grow up in a household that unintentionally defines to us what is normal. Our day-to-day activities, the food we eat, the way we interact with our parents and siblings, all seem to establish the norm, a comfortable existence in which we learn how to operate. We learn what is expected and adjust accordingly. We essentially become experts in our own sense of normalcy. As we grow and learn and experience and travel, however, we come to discover there are, actually, many versions of normal. Still, it is the earlier experience that we inwardly carry with us into our expanded lives, providing a frame of reference for our later days. In Canada by Richard Ford, Del Parsons and his sister, Berner, discover that their parents are planning a bank robbery in North Dakota. This is their normal.

Twins Del and Berner at age fifteen are not at all alike. Berner is assertive, moody, and outspoken, itchy to escape the family household. Del is more compliant, content, and doesn't think things are so bad. But when their parents' carefully planned bank robbery leads to capture and imprisonment, Del and Berner are immediately catapulted into boundless yet unfamiliar territory. At the risk of becoming wards of the state, Berner takes the opportunity to strike out on her own. Del, on the other hand, is quickly ushered across the northern border to Saskatchewan, where he is left among strangers. And from there, the story is his to tell.

Taken in by a strange cast of dangerous characters with shady pasts and mysteries of their own, Del is purposely vague when questioned about his arrival and reasons for being there. With no opportunity for further education, his new existence on the desolate prairies is limited to the odd chores assigned him and the broken-down shack in which he dwells. Nevertheless, each new experience is exciting in itself, relative to his prior life.

While the story is told in clear, concise, and sparse manner and dialogue, it is not simplistic. At times it is truly heartbreaking, balanced with moments of gentle humor, all equally understated but no less affecting. Underlying themes of family, maturity, relationships, and secrecy swim just below the surface of the story. And perhaps it is there we learn the deeper values of our ongoing but ever-adjusting sense of "normal" in our lives.

Richard Ford previously won the Pulitzer Prize for his earlier novel, Independence Day. Other notable works by the author are The Sportswriter and Rock Springs.

From the first sentence of John Banville's Ancient Light, we are placed in uneasy territory: "Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother." The narrator, an aging actor who is looking back on an illicit affair he conducted when he was a mere fifteen years old, is clearly going to give us too much information. As the information piles up, though, the meaning of it recedes. Soon enough, we realize just how little we truly know: about Alexander Cleave, the actor, and about our own pasts.

First, to what we do know: The young Cleave had a sexual relationship with Celia Gray, those many years ago. Cleave has been hired to act in a film about a literary theorist named, anagrammatically, Axel Vander. His co-star is a troubled actress, vaguely reminiscent of Cleave's daughter, who committed suicide ten years earlier. Beyond that, things get murky, beginning with the idea that Vander appears to have been an impostor. This kind of recursive plotting is Paul Auster territory, but the style is anything but.

Banville's writing is dense and poetic, even as it is elliptical and wordy. When he turns his eye on anything -- the way the dust falls through a shaft of sunlight in a deserted house, for example -- we see it, we feel it. Except that the narrator catches himself repeatedly, questioning details of his own story. How can reminiscences, vague or precise, get so much right and wrong at the same time? Gradually, almost imperceptibly, we are lifted out and up above the story of a foolish, self-centered boy from a long lost summer, into a meditation on memory and writing.

Authors, like other artists, perennially struggle with the truth. Their characters present a subjective view, even as we are asked to trust that it is the correct viewpoint. Actors, of course, have a similar problem: They actually say someone else's words, and they try to become that character, making their own self disappear. As Cleave, Banville recognizes this, and he ruminates on how hard it is to discover truth. "But what was I doing there in her living room, in my scratchy suit, on a Sunday, in the dying days of summer -- what? So often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing."

As Ancient Light inches toward its resolution, it is difficult to ignore the various parallels to Oedipus Rex, twisted though they are. We want to warn all of these characters: Be careful! You shouldn't know this! You can't know this! We can't stop them, of course, because we are only readers. We are left to find our own meanings, clicking through the electronic pages of a story that John Banville wrote based on ideas that began far, far away, like ancient light from a dim, distant star.

What if your only child, your pride and joy, did something truly despicable? What if you and your spouse weren’t both aware of the full extent of his misdoings? What if there were another child involved, the child of your own brother? What if your brother also happened to be your nemesis, and one night, you, him, and your respective spouses sit down to dinner in a public place and begin to hash out the repercussions and how to deal with them? What if? Join us for Herman Koch’s The Dinner.

Paul Lohman is a complicated man. He’s anxious, untrusting, and bitter about living in the shadow of his big-shot politician brother, Serge. Luckily, he has the love of a strong woman, Claire, to help keep him balanced. Still, tension seeps from his pores on a regular basis – and when his teen son Michel partakes in a brutal act of violence, Paul’s anxiety skyrockets. Michel wasn’t alone, though; he was joined in the act by Serge and Babette’s son Rick. And now, the two couples come together at dinner at a pretentious restaurant in Amsterdam under the guise of simply catching up, though all members of this party of four know what they’re really there to address.

Herman Koch lays down each twist and turn and revelation over a five-course dinner. Through each moment of awkwardness or tension, suspense or horror among these four, there are also other factors to consider: the watchful eyes of the other diners, many of whom are aware of the political celebrity in their company; the snooty waiter whose laughably elaborate descriptions of each dish in each course become more irritating as the evening progresses; the slowly surfacing truth about Claire and her son. Paul flashes back over the course of dinner, and through this device the reader is brought up to speed on the full extent of the horror of Michel and Rick's senseless act. Were they just boys being boys? Or is there something more sinister at play here? And now comes the biggest question of all: How should the parents of these teenagers handle the situation? Do they turn their children in? Or try to bury the entire thing? And will they ever agree on what to do next? This all adds up to a torturous dining experience – and a thrilling read.

Herman Koch’s The Dinner is about relationships and family, the human psyche and sibling rivalry. Ultimately, though, Koch’s novel is about the lengths to which one will go in order to protect their loved ones – and how those measures taken are often near impossible to swallow.

You're invited to The Dinner -- read an excerpt here.

In a time when depression and mental illness are still taboo, meet Pat Peoples, the protagonist of Matthew Quick's novel-turned-hit-film, The Silver Linings Playbook. Pat is eager to inform you: He's messed up, but he's getting better.

Fresh out of the psych hospital, Pat moves in with his parents, attends therapy sessions, and spends Sunday afternoons watching football with his family, all in an attempt at normalcy. His wife, Nikki, has left him. But unlike his situation, Pat isn't so gloomy. He's adopted a "silver lining" philosophy -- suppress the negative, emphasize the positive -- and works to always be "kind instead of right." He's even begun a routine of physical and mental betterment: aerobics by day, reading by night. All of this, he hopes, will somehow restore his marriage.

Pat isn't alone, however. In fact, he is surrounded by unhelpful characters, all rushing him toward recovery. There's Cliff, his Philadelphia Eagles-obsessed therapist; his neurotic mother and distant father; his clueless best friend. But there is one exception, and her name is Tiffany. Recently widowed, she too is unstable and struggles to recover, to move past her mistakes, and keep from making new ones. Unlike Pat, however, Tiffany does not believe in silver linings, and she doesn't worry about being kind. Instead, she tells the full truth -- no apologies. Despite his blind optimism and her harsh frankness, Pat and Tiffany come together and form a strange bond: Tiffany becomes a go-between for Pat and Nikki, and Pat becomes Tiffany's dance partner.

Silver Linings is at its best when it examines relationships and people -- why we lose or keep them, how they both hurt and heal us. Quick fleshes out his story with characters that are flawed, quirky, and real. Whether it be Pat (who rages at the sound of Kenny G's "Songbird") or Tiffany (who, in her grieving, dresses like Morticia Addams) or anyone else, Quick's characters -- sad and funny -- are always unique.

Published in 2008, The Silver Linings Playbook was Matthew Quick's debut novel. Since then, it's become an award-winning movie, and its author an established name in young adult fiction.

While inspiration often comes from within, Eddie Huang's new memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, reminds us that it also comes in the form of a chubby Taiwanese high schooler from Florida, hell-bent on proving his mettle. Before the famed restaurateur and vocal vlogger for VICE magazine made it big, he was a "midget Chinaman" standing five-foot-four on a football field, facing down a hulking defensive end named Kwame.

Whenever "hike!" was called, young Eddie got pummeled. But Huang explains how each day during practice he would dig his heels in deeper, working so hard he'd vomit by whistle's end. Only a few months later, Eddie's name was being chanted by his teammates like a Taiwanese remake of "Rudy," the scene climaxing when Coach Rock put him into a game, one in which he helped lead his team to victory.

Today, Eddie Huang's name is still being chanted, this time by restaurant critics dying to get their hands on his gua bao at New York City's Baohaus. He's also still digging his heels into the ground, transferring his grit on the grass to his professional demeanor. But while his style defies a simple explanation, what is gleaned from his memoir is the fire of resilience that simmers within. Fresh Off the Boat is riddled with real-life roadblocks built to hamper the strongest of men -- a manic mother, an abusive ex-gangster father, and minority status taped like a "kick me" sign to his back. Yet at each turn Eddie emerges hardened and resolved. Huang's memoir reveals both heart and hood as he refashions every conventional setback in his life into a step forward.

All of this is put forth without pretense. The memoir demands at the outset that you either accept his flaws or clear out of the kitchen. The slang and irreverent style of writing Eddie employs is at first disarming. But chewing through his chummy vernacular, the "yo!'s," "bro!'s," and "shit son!'s" begin to take on a charm of their own. So comfortably conversational are the opening pages you might as well be kicking it with Huang in the flesh, jamming to Tupac tapes and claiming some urban turf of your own.

To the foodies out there, pay heed. Eddie's references to food are spontaneous, not forced. Don't expect a recipe on every page. Instead, the savory morsels of this memoir are masterfully interlaced with his stories of immigration and upbringing. And let's be frank: Does the genre "food memoir" even exist?

This is a tale of immigration. It's a blueprint of American entrepreneurialism. It's a coming-of-age saga and a family narrative drenched in dysfunction. By writing about all that, Huang proves that food, instead of being showmanship, is a social expression; it's something that assists -- rather than consumes -- our everyday lives. He understands the implicit nature of food better than almost any chef today. "Food at its best uplifts the whole community," he writes. It "makes everyone rise to its standard." Inspiration doesn't get any iller than that.

Strange things happen when a book becomes a film. Readers sometimes think they know a work after seeing someone else's interpretation of it. In the case of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, this would be a mistake. While there's nothing wrong with the film version, which starred Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore, it doesn't convey the dark humor or the magic of the original. Proulx's version, about the awakening of an unhappy newspaperman, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The novel includes unforgettable characters in a savage landscape and a slow-blooming romance that seems more real than anything Hollywood could conjure up.

The plot is loosely about the attempts of the middle-aged Quoyle to discover what it means to live a meaningful life. Quoyle has neither confidence nor many marketable skills, an unfortunate side effect of living with an unfaithful wife and loveless parents. After their deaths, he moves with his two daughters, along with a maiden aunt, to Newfoundland, a lonely and frigid island in the North Atlantic. There, he gets a job covering car wrecks and shipping news for a small local paper. Though Quoyle knows nothing about boats, Newfoundland is his ancestral home, and he and the aunt set about to restore the old family abode out on Quoyle Point.

As Quoyle settles in, a whole world opens up to us: the crusty old men who work at the paper; the sailors and boat makers and fishermen who call the island home; the superstitions that come from living in a place that is so dependent upon natural forces; and even the knots that tie things and people together. In this place, where alcoholism and sexual abuse and drowning are all too common, we also watch Quoyle gradually come to terms with his long-buried family history.

This all sounds somber, and to some extent, it is. But Proulx clearly finds the place and its accents and its people fascinating, funny, and very human. It doesn't give much away to say that Quoyle begins to connect with Wavey, a woman who has her own baggage and a quiet dignity that helps her to transcend it.

Some places, some people, and even some novels are easy to love. Others require time to appreciate their subtleties and their wisdom. The Shipping News reminds us about resilience and grace with a clarity of language that is as bracing as any blast of arctic air in November. Quoyle gradually becomes a heroic character, but not because he leaps tall buildings in a single bound. Rather, he learns to open his heart to love and pain. This, and Proulx's writing, is worthy of our applause.

An exquisite cache exists of 264 Japanese netsuke -- tiny extraordinarily detailed figures, hand-carved in ivory, boxwood, or bone: a tiger on a bamboo pole, a monk asleep over his alms bowl, a hare with amber eyes. It is their mystery, their hiddenness, what they reveal about the people who collect them, who touch them and treasure them, that seduces. For nearly a century, the fabulously wealthy Ephrussi family of secular Jews rivaled the Rothschilds as bankers, shippers of grain, builders of chateaux, collectors of art. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal, the distinguished English potter and great-grandson of Viktor Ephrussi, takes us on a picaresque journey, back in time and across continents, to uncover the history of his family and the secrets of their fabled netsuke collection.

From the pogroms of Odessa to fin-de-siècle Paris, from occupied Vienna to postwar Tokyo, Edmund follows the trail of his extraordinary family. Charles Ephrussi, connoisseur and patron of Manet, Degas, and Renoir, acquires the netsuke in the late nineteenth-century, when Japan's borders open and vast amounts of Japoniserie flood Paris. Later, the netsuke pass to Viktor Ephrussi, Charles' cousin, friend of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler, in Vienna. In 1937, when the Nazis invade, they are quick to decimate the Ephrussi empire; De Waal's account of this historical nightmare, about which we may think we already know everything, is powerful and deeply affecting. It is, ultimately, Anna, the Ephrussi's devoted maid, who squirrels away the netsuke in her mattress, carrying them off one by one, in her apron pocket, under the eyes of the Nazis for whom she is forced to catalogue and pack every stick of furniture and article of clothing, every carpet and book and work of art, in the Ephrussi palace.

At the heart of de Waal's memoir sits his eighty-four-year-old great-uncle, Ignace "Iggie" Ephrussi, Viktor's son, dapper, sophisticated, and rootless, who flees Vienna for New York, and finally Tokyo. It is Iggie, with his beautiful herringbone jackets, pale shirts, and stylish cravats, who welcomes seventeen-year-old Edmund when he arrives to study pottery with the Japanese masters. It is Iggie who serves him his first whiskey sour, introduces him to opera, reveals to him the magical perfection of the netsuke, and in the end leaves him the entire collection about which he has been so curious and which represents perhaps the essence of his family's tumultuous history.

"Netsuke are small and hard," de Waal writes. "They hold themselves inward: a deer tucking his legs beneath his body; the barrel-maker crouching inside his half-finished barrel … a monk asleep over his alms bowl, one continuous line of back." As well as the drama of an illustrious family devastated by the convulsions of history, de Waal gives us a story of hiddenness. Who discovered and bought these "tiny tough explosions of exactitude" that sit in the palm of your hand, he asks? Who held and touched them? What does it mean, that they were saved, treasured, passed along? Why is it that these most humble of objects are so important to our sense of ourselves?

The answers lie in both this sensitive and unsentimental portrait of an amazing family, and in de Waal's own small porcelain vessels, as precise and elegant as the netsuke, glazed in white, cream, and celadon, now in museums and galleries the world over.

There are few cultures more extrinsically opposite in nature than those belonging to Americans and Arabs. Sophia Al-Maria knows this firsthand, as her formative years were spent making the leap back and forth between the two. In her brilliant coming-of-age memoir, The Girl Who Fell to Earth, Al-Maria recounts these near-surreal experiences.

The Girl Who Fell to Earth begins as a love story: A Middle Eastern man, Matar, makes a pilgrimage to America from his home in Qatar. Alone and clueless as to how to go about finding his way in the foreign landscape of the Pacific-Northwest United States, he is taken under the wing of Gale Valo, a quirky, Washington-born, farm-bred young woman. The two fall in an unlikely sort of love, start a family (enter the author), and get married. Matar finds work driving a big rig and enjoys his life. Yet, three years after arriving in Seattle, he hears the call of home and heads back to the Arabian Gulf. And when our narrator is five, she and her mother and younger sister finally hear from him, when he calls for them to join him overseas.

In spite of the size of Matar’s family, Gale is lonely in Qatar and it isn’t too long before she returns to the states, daughters in tow. All goes well until Sophia is well into the fifth grade. The preadolescent's preoccupation with sex – and her creative way of displaying this preoccupation – cause her mother to lose patience, call her husband, and arrange to have Sophia sent to live with him. Sophia arrives in her new home – a home packed with cousins, the multiple wives of uncles, and more, and moves into her room with her Aunt Falak. And so begins her new life, surrounded by gender divides, abayas, and the unfamiliar dynamics of her new family. For every piece of Sophia’s new world that is different, however, there is another that is the same. There are still adolescent crushes, an inherent desire to compete with the boys, a longing to be accepted, and a bending of the rules.

Coming of age is a universal fact of life, and in Al-Maria’s memoir, she demonstrates this with the keen observations of an anthropologist, the beautiful language of a writer, and the truth and passion of a storyteller. From her first period to her first love, and later to her rebellions and her own pilgrimage of self-discovery, there is one theme that will doubtless ring familiar with all readers: the quest for independence, the independence that comes from knowing who you are and where you are going, no matter where you come from.

Harold Silver is an unlucky fellow. A middle-aged professor and Nixon scholar in a loveless marriage, Harold has spent his life in the shadow of his younger brother, George, a successful network executive with a perfect wife and two children. That is until the night George causes a horrific car crash and seems to have lost his mind, though he stays true to his nature as an unhinged bully. This, and chemistry between the wrong brother and wife, sparks a violent event that shatters George's family and breaks apart Harold's world, too. And all this happens in the first twenty pages. In May We Be Forgiven, A. M. Homes draws us into the darkly funny and touchingly human story of a dysfunctional family whose every member has hit rock bottom.

From here, the characters have nowhere to go but up, right? Not quite. Homes swerves sideways and diagonally, creating slightly absurd storylines, all delivered in a humdrum manner, so that we accept the oddball occurrences and enjoy the ride. Harold is left to take over his brother's life, from living in his house and wearing his clothes to parenting his precocious preteens. Our professor's job is suddenly precarious, his writer's block is in full-force keeping him from completing his life's work on Nixon, he's reduced to having bizarre sexual rendezvous with women he meets online or those who come on to him in the grocery aisles. From being kidnapped by the kids of one of his paramours to getting private access to secret fiction written by Nixon himself to one of Harold's dalliances abruptly leaving her senior parents on his couch -- forever -- Homes takes us on a wild journey that is wonderfully intriguing.

Entering the Silvers' world is an investment of both emotion and time -- and both investments are well worth it. Homes writes with an unwavering intensity. The story is dense, filled with themes of faith, loyalty, connection, and sexuality, but on each page there is much beauty or heartbreak or hilarity. We're left wondering about family; if your original clan was damaged from the start, what to do? Homes' tale would suggest you build a new one, an extended one, from people with whom you'd least expect to bond, who somehow make life worth living. Reminiscent of The Corrections but thoroughly original, May We Be Forgiven leaves one reeling and thinking that in the puzzling case of Harold Silver and his brother, there is no redemption -- but there is, at least, a peculiar sense of transformation.

Editor's Note: The history of sugar in America is among the bloodiest on record, comprising instances of greed and social disruption that made many rich and ripped many more from their native homes. In Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire, Andrea Stuart uses her own family history -- from the seventeenth century through the present -- as the pivot for an epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery, and the making of the Americas. Andrea's research process for the book took her far beyond the expected destination, and led to five discoveries she never counted on uncovering.

1) The plantation system was born in Barbados. Barbados in the seventeenth century was described as a "nursery for planting other places" -- not just because so many immigrants began their New World career there, but because it was the place where the plantation system was first pioneered and shaped. It was the planters of this small island who created the legal model that would later be adapted by many of the planters in mainland America, providing the blueprint on how to structure, manage, and police a slave society.

2) The horrors of slavery began before anyone set foot on a slave ship. The infamous "Middle Passage," which documents the horrors of the sea journey to the New World, was just one part of the ordeal for captured slaves. Most would have spent many months trekking across the African continent after their capture, only to arrive at slave forts, where they were imprisoned for a further few months before they were even put aboard a slave ship.

3) The historic cruelty of Caribbean plantation owners was nonstop. The average plantation had at least sixty punishments a day, ranging from ad hoc beatings to torture and forced amputations; the sound of screams and groans was the soundtrack of the plantation. New World planters reached their barbaric peak with the resurrection of burning "by slow fire," an ancient punishment previously confined to those accused of witchcraft.

4) The abolitionist movement began with the slaves themselves. Conventional history credits the white abolitionist movement with the end of slavery in the Atlantic world. In truth, the slaves of the region worked constantly for their own emancipation, consistently resisting their own enslavement. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, slave rebellions were so frequent that authorities considered cutting their losses. The most impressive instance of resistance was the twelve-year-long rebellion in Haiti, in which the poorly armed slaves of the island eventually defeated both British and French forces, creating the first free society in plantation-era America.

5) I was a descendant of this system. My first slave ancestor, John Stephen Ashby, was listed on a slave return as '14 years old,' 'colored,' and 'a laborer.' I was so thrilled by this discovery that I burst into spontaneous tears. By identifying him and bringing his story to life, I felt that I had managed to defy the slave system, which made it almost impossible to track and name slave ancestors. My later discovery that John Stephen was one of seventeen slave offspring born to his planter father also took me aback, as did the discovery of my own grandfather's extramarital affairs, which produced a raft of new relatives.

It's not hard to see why Oprah Winfrey chose The Twelve Tribes of Hattie as her most recent Book Club 2.0 pick. From the first sentence on, debut novelist Ayana Mathis writes vividly and sensitively of one family's journey and struggles over a lifetime, creating a stirring portrait of family, loss, and endurance in the twentieth century.

When young Hattie Shepard arrives in Philadelphia from Georgia in 1923, the first thing she notices is the absence of trees. Mathis writes vibrantly of the urban sights, sounds, and smells Hattie encounters as she gets off the train: "Automobile exhaust hung in the air alongside the tar smell of freshly laid asphalt and the sickening odor of garbage rotting. Wheels rumbled on the paving stones, engines revved, paperboys called the headlines." It's not entirely romantic, but it's accurate (much like the rest of the novel, which doesn't shy away from depicting the painful circumstances of some of the characters).

The first chapter is harrowing, as Hattie loses her infant twins to pneumonia within the early pages of the book. This loss sets the stage for the way Hattie will love and care for her surviving children (all nine of them) – that is, with grit, and what seems to be a necessary distance for her. Each chapter is devoted to a child at a different point in his or her life. Some are small and some are grown when we meet them, and the novel jumps in time from one chapter to the next. Each story comes alive in its own way and can almost stand alone apart from the novel, but together create a beautiful tapestry of a larger life, and a fascinating family tale. We meet eldest Floyd in 1948 as a young adult and talented musician, traveling the south with his trumpet and playing gigs, all the while fearful to face his true self. Another we see as a teenager a few years later, also struggling to find himself, but as a preacher with a calling.

In this way, readers view Hattie through the eyes of her children -- always a bit removed and limited in the amount of affection she can give; some call her "the general." The sisters all grow up a little bit broken inside too, perhaps taking this from their mother, despite her wish to prepare them for the difficult world outside. Hattie's husband, August, means well but is unable to provide for the family and falls far short of Hattie's hopes and expectations. Another son struggles to survive, and misses his family, as he fights the war in Vietnam.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie can be a trying read at times, as the characters face poverty, racism, and other hardships, but readers are rewarded with Hattie's strong and enduring spirit as she protects her children and raises her family the best she can.

On a spring day in 1988, a horrific crime is committed that will change the dynamics of a family forever. In Louise Erdrich's National Book Award-winning novel, The Round House, Geraldine Coutts is brutally attacked on a reservation in North Dakota, and her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe, try their best to piece together what exactly happened.

Information is slow to trickle out, as Geraldine slips into a deep depression, refusing to eat or leave her bedroom. Her husband, a tribal judge on the reservation, valiantly tries to seek justice for his wife through due process. However, her son, Joe, becomes increasingly frustrated as the official investigation stalls and offers no real answers. His decision to search for answers on his own about what really happened exposes a young man to an adult world, a world much darker than he could have ever anticipated.

As Joe's parents try to shelter him from the gruesome facts of his mother's attack, he seeks more information from his extended family of aunts, uncles, and grandfather. When he learns the meaning of rape and the complexities of the attack's location, he longs for justice. Losing faith in the local and federal police, Joe is forced to grow up fast. He transforms from a boy who loves "Star Wars" and outdoor adventures to one fixated on putting away his mother's attacker for good.

Through Joe's eyes, Erdrich exposes the reader to the sickening problem of Native American women who are raped and the lack of jurisdiction and power that allows their attackers to be prosecuted. She also shows how the Ojibwe traditions and tales told by his family provide spiritual guidance and comfort. The lively stories told by Joe's grandfather provide an alternate path to a validating revenge.

The feelings Joe has are no different than any disillusioned boy who realizes the world is not as pure as he imagined it to be, but his choice to act and instate his own sense of righteousness make his transition into manhood drastically unlike the rest. As the reader learns more about Joe, the love he has for his family and culture is clear, and his quest becomes almost endearing. It forces the question: If you could take the ultimate revenge, would you?

In the final, somewhat autobiographical story in Alice Munro’s new collection, Dear Life, the author writes about the novels she read growing up. One was The Magic Mountain, which she describes as “containing a great argument between what on one side seemed to be a genial and progressive notion of life and, on the other, a dark and somehow thrilling despair.”

The same could be said for almost any Munro story. Her stories somehow exist on two sides of a road: on one side, there’s light and beauty in simple things; and on the other, darkness is waiting for you just around the bend. They are deceptively simple, yet contain so much in each line. I’ve never read a story of Munro’s that didn’t audibly catch my breath – whether it was at something I didn’t see coming (always, in her stories) or a particularly beautiful turn of phrase.

Munro’s stories often unfold in the small towns of her native Ontario and are full of subtle, yet stunning revelations. Readers are often being told of something that happened long ago, from the vantage point of the present. But memories are often faulty, or unreliable. They don’t even have the benefit of hindsight as characters struggle still with some knowledge or unwanted discovery. We discover things as the narrator does, and it’s often a shock – whether a decades-long deception by a lover, a betrayal of the mind, or a grown woman trying to come to terms with the childhood death of a sibling (and her possible culpability in it). One woman still feels the heartache after a chance encounter with a former lover who had abandoned her decades earlier: “For me, it was the same as when I left Amundsen, the train dragging me still dazed and full of disbelief.

“Nothing changes really about love.”

Things have a way of coming into sharp focus when you least expect it and Munro delivers most twists with an unexpected, quiet force. The big reveals are usually halfway down a paragraph, or the final word in a sentence, so you barely see it coming. Things will seemingly be going one way and then suddenly veer in another, more dangerous direction. Small abandonments build to catastrophe. While the characters are built solidly, they don’t feel safe.

The final four stories, which are autobiographical, are quite bleak – a house servant’s death, a child’s mad fantasy of killing her little sister – but it’s all familiar terrain. Children aren’t safe, and neither is anyone else, for that matter, from the cold harshness of life and other people. Some are capable of thoughtlessly inflicting hurt, as with the character who retracts a proposal of marriage without warning. The stories often sit on a fence somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, as people (and readers, too) realize things they’d rather not know. Though it’s never easy in a Munro story, it’s not all darkness. For every difficulty or misstep, there is almost always a strong shard of humanity or light, or some unexpected mercy.

Munro’s talent leaps off the pages and will leave any reader satisfied (or, as satisfied as you can be while longing for more from this beautiful writer).

It's not often a writer can relate a painful memoir with unabashed good humor, wit, and most especially, freedom from self-pity. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls does just that, leaving us with some of the most memorable scenes and eccentric characters to come from a modern memoirist in the last decade.

Jeannette is the second of Rex and Rose Mary Walls' four children: after Lori, and before Brian and Maureen. Rex is a charismatic man, an entrepreneur of sorts, who happens to indulge in "a little bit" of drinking; his wife is a smart, free-spirited artist. We quickly realize Rex and Mary are ill-equipped to parent -- or to fend for themselves for that matter. As they continuously fail to define their own lives, they invariably define the lives of their children as a seemingly never-ending struggle to survive.

The story unfolds with a heartrending scene in which three-year-old Jeannette is trying to cook some hot dogs, and in doing so, sets herself on fire. After spending some time in the hospital, with burns requiring skin grafts, Rex decides to "rescue" Jeannette from the hospital, and the family sets off for life on the road. For a time, they live in the desert, often moving from small town to small town; the children are considered outsiders and struggle to fit in.

Christmas is a holiday they celebrate a week after everyone else, gathering tossed Christmas decorations, and taking advantage of after-holiday sales. One of the most touching passages in the book is when Rex takes his children out to the desert and lets each pick out a star to claim as their Christmas gift. Jeannette points out that stars are not tangible, and therefore can't belong to anyone and can't be gifted. Rex romanticizes her logic by pointing out that stars are the best gifts, as no one has claim to them, and stars will outlast any gift other children might receive.

Unfortunately, as time goes on, Rex's drinking only gets worse. Rose Mary resents the idea of taking a job. And as the children grow older, they realize their parents are never going to change their ways. The siblings begin to plot their escape. From here, Jeanette traces her path toward achieving success against the odds and coming to terms with her past.

It is striking and inspirational to read about someone who has lead such a turbulent life and still managed to make it out the other end, all the better.

Normally I find novels narrated by teenagers too cute or too self-consciously precocious, yet Maria Semple hits exactly the right note with her narrator Bee (Balakrishna) Branch. But what adds to the allure is that the voice of this endearing fifteen-year-old is not the only narrative mode here, for Where'd You Go, Bernadette is truly a hyper-contemporary epistolary novel. E-mails, handwritten notes, missives from the Galer Street School's principal, and snail-mail letters combine with Bee's first-person narrative to create remarkably vivid characters and a wildly entertaining and suspenseful plotline.

Bee's mother and father, Bernadette Fox and Elgin Branch, are not typical parents in any sense of the word. Elgin, or Elgie as he is affectionately known, is a Microsoft lead researcher, very high up in the hierarchy, while Bernadette was once a brilliant, MacArthur Genius-anointed architect in Los Angeles, who has left her profession and her art behind for reasons that the novel seeks to unravel.

Fittingly, the Branch/Fox family has never lived in a so-called "normal" environment. In LA they lived in the Beeber Bifocal factory, transformed by Bernadette into a very unusual home. The move to Seattle landed them in an equally unconventional home, the former Straight Gate School for Girls, a onetime Catholic school for wayward girls, "a grand but decrepit brick building" with a leaky ceiling and an unsavory history. It's easy to see these homes as working metaphors for the family's oddity and also for its uniqueness. Bee would not give up a minute of this lifestyle, even when she complains and rolls her eyes as her mother derides the locals, whom she calls "gnats." Little in Seattle is safe from Bernadette's mockery.

But sarcasm does not rule the day here, although that and a large heaping of humor help alleviate some of the core emptiness in the Branch's lives. They have been through a lot -- many miscarriages followed by Bee's premature birth with heart defects, Bernadette's feelings of professional betrayal, and Elgin's workaholic immersion. They go through even more in the pages of this novel. Highlights include the comical encounters with their neighbor Audrey Griffin and her Blackberry "abatement specialist," the clichéd and hilarious shenanigans of the parents and teachers at Bee's private school, and the Victims Against Victimhood meetings that Elgie's assistant, Soo-Lin Lee-Segal, attends. While Bernadette hides behind dark glasses and relies on a virtual assistant from India to carry out her daily activities, Elgie's assistant attempts to work her way into his heart -- clearly, the family's center cannot hold.

There is great depth of heart in the novel alongside the humor. The final section, which takes place on a long-planned family excursion to Antarctica, turns into a mythic, somewhat absurd search for the mother while offering a revelation of what family is all about, even if it is the wacky, genius variety of family. It is so easy to fall in love with this novel.

If you ask Americans to name their favorite holiday, many will answer "Thanksgiving." It's an interesting choice given how frequently it includes stressful travel and family drama, not to mention the preparation of the year's most labor-intensive meal. So why do we love it? As Sam Sifton, author of the new book Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well, says, "Thanksgiving … is a celebration of American excess and of American friendship in all its many guises."

But enough about history.

Let's talk turkey. Ready or not we are a scant few days away from the celebration, and Thanksgiving is the perfect book to guide you through the big day with the least amount of fuss and angst.

Over the past twenty-five years, Sifton has prepared many Thanksgiving celebrations, large and small. For a time, he also manned The New York Times emergency hotline on Thanksgiving day, answering every possible question from desperate cooks across the nation. The man knows Thanksgiving. Drawing on that experience, he not only provides fifty timeless and tasty recipes for every step of the meal, including what to do with leftovers, but also delves into the necessary equipment, how to set a proper table, and what drinks to serve. Sifton's Thanksgiving is the primer every home cook from beginner to expert needs to not only survive, but thrive on Thanksgiving.

Now, in the spirit of thanks and giving, we're happy to share with you eleven of Sifton's tips on how to host a wonderful, traditional Thanksgiving dinner:

1. NO appetizers. They spoil the meal. You may serve a lovely soup such as oyster bisque or butternut squash, but no amuse bouche -- or perish the thought -- chips!

2. NO salad. It has no place in a traditional Thanksgiving meal. As Sifton says, "You can have your salad tomorrow."

3. There will be turkey, and only turkey. Please no ham, roast beef, or fish. Fresh turkey is best, but frozen will suffice. It may or may not be brined, but no plastic cooking bags allowed.

4. It's best not to carve the turkey at the table. It's a messy undertaking, and no one needs to see that.

5. There will be traditional side dishes. That's four side dishes to be exact. Stick to what is in season.

6. There will be a table, even if it is constructed out of milk crates and plywood.

7. There will be proper place settings, candles, and dessert forks.

8. Which means there will be dessert. Stick to the classics: apple pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, etc.

9. There will be lots and lots and lots of butter, but no garlic.

10. Gravy is the sauce that binds the entire meal together. And how you make it is essential.

11. The bad news: You must clean up before going to bed. The good news: It's acceptable to enlist the help of the guests in the process.

In his chapter titled "Setting The Table, Serving The Food, and Some Questions of Etiquette," Sifton says that every Thanksgiving meal should begin with the host offering thanks to family and friends for sharing the meal. "It is the point of the entire exercise," he writes. This year when I give thanks, I will raise a toast to Sam Sifton for his homage to Thanksgiving.

One Big Mac, one large fries, two Happy Meals, one McRib sandwich, one Diet Coke, two orange juices, one chocolate shake, one apple pie, three chocolate chip cookies. A light lunch for Edie -- whose weight will puff up to 350 pounds -- ostensibly to be shared with her two kids, but she is plotting to scarf the whole McRib herself because it is "a new sandwich, and how often did a new sandwich come along?" So the years go by, with Edie consuming sugar, fat, and salt while berating her husband, who eventually leaves to seek some senior love and sex and decency. Flash to his judgmental children, the prying friends, and always his wife's black eyes in his grandchildren's punims. Meet The Middlesteins, the dysfunctional Jewish family in Jami Attenberg's eponymous novel, which you will devour in two sittings like I did. There is no portion control with this book.

Here, Attenberg chats with Everyday eBook about the inspiration for her novel and evoking that feeling of wanting to pick up the phone and call your mom.

Everyday eBook: In a scene from Edie's childhood you write, "Food was made of love, and love was made of food." What inspired you to write about love and overeating as an overarching theme?

Jami Attenberg: In our society people often talk about "eating their emotions" as both a joke and a part of their reality. It's inescapable, and it is definitely a part of my past, present, and future. I hadn't written about it before, and it felt like it was time.

EE: Which character do you find the most sympathetic? Which was most complicated or painful to write?

JA: Oh, I love them all so much! I don't know if any of them are wholly sympathetic, though I suppose Kenneth is probably the most likeable. He was also the most complicated to write because I had to get to know him better, and the rest of the characters seemed very present in my mind. Their motivations were all very obvious to me, but Kenneth was a beautiful mystery that unfolded before me.

EE: There is so much quiet passion in this novel, for food, for second chances, within parent/child relationships. What message do you hope readers take away?

JA: It would be fantastic if this book had some sort of positive impact on family communications. I am always a fan of books, movies, TV shows, what have you, that make you want to pick up your phone and call your mom. At the very least I just hope readers enjoy the ride.

This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz's latest critically acclaimed collection of short stories, is wonderfully modest in scope and aspiration. Díaz does not aim to tell an all-encompassing story of the human heart; instead, he tells intimate accounts of the relentless disappointments of one man's heart. We revisit the “weak, full of mistakes, but basically good” Yunior from the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Drown; but, this time, Yunior narrates his own story.

Díaz provides brief snapshots of Yunior’s life, jumping in time, place, and person with every chapter. Each story provides a piece of Yunior's growing up. A younger Yunior looks at his older brother, “the hardest dude in the nabe,” and his absent, adulterous father, and thinks of himself as the smart one, the one with “an I.Q. that would have broken you in two.” A slightly older Yunior looks back at his male influences, his inescapable destiny, and says: “You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself.” And so we meet a bevy of different women, ranging from romantic loves to a more forbidden variety, knowing, if only from the book's title, none of them will last. So, like Yunior, we never fully invest ourselves, and as a result the women become less distinguishable -- and we learn Yunior’s more important struggle is the one to keep himself.

So much of what fuels each story and makes This Is How You Lose Her so compelling is the language. Díaz's voice deepens the story he is already telling, and the idiom in which he writes sets the tone not just for Yunior's character, but also for his circumstance. In Yunior's seamless transitions from English to Spanish we perceive his straddling of two cultures and two selves.

“I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.”

Above all, Yunior, like his creator, is a storyteller. By the final chapter, "The Cheater's Guide to Love," Yunior is a college professor and an author, conspicuously similar to the MIT professor who created him. Whether or not he is Díaz's thinly veiled counterpart, Yunior is certainly someone worth revisiting again and again.

One of our greatest contemporary writers, Cormac McCarthy is mostly known for his tales of the American West: No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian. All of them are modern classics. Yet McCarthy's greatest achievement does not take place in his American West universe. No, it takes place in the much different universe portrayed in his 2006 novel, The Road, where the world has "exploded" and where "there is no God and [people] are his prophets."

It is post-apocalyptic America. A father and son are trekking to the coast. What they expect to find there, they don't know. What they do know is: Food, water, and shelter are in short supply; other people can't be trusted; and, finally, that they must "keep trying." The two of them walk, eat, and sleep along the road, exposed to the rain and snow and forest fires that devastate the mountains they travel through. Familiar places, such as houses and barns, offer no more comfort, but rather display morbid still-lifes -- hanged corpses, severed heads, people stored in basements as food supply. All the while, the father struggles to find balance between raising his son a child and raising his son a man. One moment he's handing his son his first Coca-Cola and assuring him they (the father and son) are the good guys; the next he's handing him a revolver and telling him to stop crying. Complicating things is the notable, haunting absence of the mother who, we learn, has killed herself (with the same gun the father carries now), leaving just the two of them, father and son, to communicate with, and survive for, each other. Only this isn't so easy in a world where "men can't live" and "gods fare no better." Talk between father and son is a struggle, often filled with repeated phrases and differing ideologies about helping others.

McCarthy's prose is terse and rough. And although ruthlessly unsentimental and full of atrocities, his cadences and repetitions (similar to the Bible) are too beautiful to be read coldly. Rather, The Road reaches a parable-like level of authority and passion, where each detail is bigger than itself and nothing is wasted.

In the end, The Road doesn't answer the question, "What happened to the world?" It has no interest in telling a genesis story. All you get is a clue here and there, a vague word or phrase, as if overheard in a street or restaurant. But the "how" and "why" don't matter. Rather, our hearts rest with the individual struggle of the good guys in a bad world; the reaction to utter disaster; the primal, human fight to live and keep on living.

And so begins The End of Your Life Book Club, with a simple question lobbed by Will Schwalbe into the uncomfortable silence of Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s outpatient care center. “What are you reading?” he asks his mother, the spirited and remarkable Mary Anne, who has been ambushed midway in her project to build a library in Afghanistan by a rare form of advanced pancreatic cancer. As extraordinary as this mother is, her son’s anguish threatens at times to render him speechless. Hence, the idea discovered almost by accident, of their own private book club in which, despite their different journeys, “we could still share books, and while reading those books, we wouldn’t be the sick person and the well person; we would simply be a mother and a son entering new worlds together.”

Mothers and sons, let me count the ways. From Barack Obama to James McBride, Philip Roth to David Rieff, sons have plumbed the many facets of this often fraught, often tender, always complex nuclear relationship. The uniqueness of Schwalbe’s tribute to his mother, and to their mutual love, lies in this shared reading experience, which allows them to dispense with the usual bedside platitudes, the premature eulogies, the awkward and endless variations on the theme of “how are you doing,” and to talk about what is really going on, to have, many times over, that final conversation so often dreaded by patient and survivor, parent and child.

As a friend of mine once wrote, dying is a social act, a truth fully understood and embraced by both this mother and son. During the countless hours spent waiting – in hospitals, doctors’ offices, chemo rooms and medical labs – they read and talk, with honesty and humor. Fiction and poetry, history and the spiritual, mystery and fantasy: Crossing to Safety, On Chesil Beach, Appointment in Samarra, Marjorie Morningstar, The Hobbit, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Full Catastrophe Living, Olive Kitteridge, Suite Francaise, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the wide-ranging list of books the remarkable Schwalbes leave us is a testimony to the power of books to instruct, inspire, and amuse, “to give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.”

They are, of course, talking about themselves, creating as they do so a powerful bond not only between each other, but between them and us, their fortunate readers. As Mary Anne’s disease progresses, their book club inspires them to share a treasure of wonderful family stories, thus becoming a celebration not of death so much as life. “Reading isn’t the opposite of doing,” Will writes, “it’s the opposite of dying.” This unique and endearing memoir is at once a courageous personal exploration of love and loss as well as a tribute to the solace and power of the written word. As Mary Anne insists, “Books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal [and] reading all kinds of books … is how you take part in the human conversation.”

Jhumpa Lahiri has achieved literary success and even an adaptation from page-to screen for her novel, The Namesake. Still, it's worth noting that it all started with this 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. The nine stories in this volume are remarkable in the way they capture character, create tension, and reveal, in seven of the nine, the immigrant experience in America, even though the characters themselves may not be first generation immigrants, but rather members of the 1.5 generation.

Steeped in Indian, specifically Bengali, culture despite having been born in the U.S., Shoba and Shukumar, the primary characters in A Temporary Matter, are a married couple living apart in the same house until the lights go out. The electric company's enforced nightly power outage brings these characters together in the dark to reveal secrets. No need for a spoiler alert if you know this much, but be assured that by the end of the story you will have that moment where you judge one character and then the other and then have to find a middle ground as we do in our own lives.

Every story, except for the two set in India, presents the reader with sets of binaries, cultural or social contrasts that may or may not get resolved on the page but always continue to resonate in the reader's mind. In Sexy, we see the obliviousness of a young woman who is living in the midst of the same dicey circumstances that a co-worker describes daily, though she has no clue until the very end that she may be culpable. In Mr. Prizada Comes to Dine, Lahiri takes to task America's deliberate closed-mindedness about other cultures and in This Blessed House we see the conflict between free-spiritedness and deliberateness, the literature lover and the engineer, as played out against the background of a new marriage.

The title story, Interpreter of Maladies, investigates the two cultures side by side as American-born Indians return as tourists to India with their offspring. The lack of connection between the two cultures is apparent through the eyes of their tour guide, or interpreter, as is the romanticizing of "the other" on both sides.

Throughout the volume, the language is evocative and lovely, with vivid characterizations emerging through both action and dialogue. But it is in the final story, The Third and Final Continent, written in the first-person voice of a onetime Bengali bachelor who has traversed the world from India to London to Cambridge, Massachusetts, that we see the ineffably moving journey of evolving from immigrant to inhabitant. In fact, every story in this slim volume is guaranteed to resonate for long after you've turned the last page.

A past -- we all have one. It's often good, often bad. It lets us move on, holds us back. It changes us forever. Yet, for all we know about our pasts, and what they mean to us, there are certain aspects we just don't want to face. Usually, these are the painful histories, the ones we'd rather hide among mundane memories in an attempt at self-preservation. But what happens when traumas return? What happens when our pasts are abruptly forced upon us? This is what Graham Swift asks, and then answers, in his latest novel, Wish You Were Here.

Jack Luxton seems to have it all. He lives on the scenic Isle of Wight, where he and his wife, Ellie, live a cushy life, running a successful caravan business, taking annual vacations to St. Lucia. It's very different from Jack's past experience as a cattle farmer. But when a letter arrives, informing Jack of his brother's death, it all quickly unravels, and we discover a series of suppressed wounds: first the death of Jack's mother; then the death of his and Ellie's fathers; then the selling of a place he called home for twenty-eight years, a place the Luxton family called home forever -- Jebb Farm.

Swift transitions from place to place, time to time, revealing bits and pieces of the past. This structure is most impressive, as it builds and builds, replaying images and phrases, each bit and piece echoing one another like a chorus, until we -- like Jack -- are forced into the present moment to face the payoff of the past.

Wish You Were Here shows a dark, post-9/11 world of little hope. It is dominated by violence -- fires rage from roadside IEDs and diseased cattle alike -- yet no one talks about it. They're unable. The violent tragedies of their pasts and presents won't allow it and are, instead, silenced by the prospects of a future. This is most evident in his wife Ellie, who always goads Jack forward, whether it is to abandon the Luxton responsibilities and sell Jebb Farm or abandon his loyalty and forget his absentee brother. You may think this all seems cruel-hearted or selfish of Ellie. And you may be right. But Swift doesn't let us off easy. Instead, he gives us her point of view, shows us what Jack (nor anyone) could never understand, and what she could never explain. And so, it happens that Jack and Ellie's problems -- their inability to talk, their inability to face the past -- become their own dangerous form of domestic violence.

Graham Swift is the author of nine novels, including Shuttlecock, Waterland, and Last Orders. The latter received the Booker Prize in 1996.

Sunny's life is about to change. In a matter of days, she sends off her astronaut husband, Maxon; she gets into a car accident that exposes her baldness; she takes her son, Bubber, off his medicine, which is meant to curb his autism; her mother lies in a coma about to die; and she is pregnant and about to deliver. Yet the whole time, and for much of her life, Sunny just wants to be normal. But as Lydia Netzer's debut novel, Shine Shine Shine, makes most clear: Normalcy, of all things in the universe, is virtually nonexistent.

The world Netzer has created is one of seemingly contradictory peculiarities. Like a charming, quirky indie movie, these peculiarities aren't ever explained. Rather they're washed over us, and it's expected that we simply accept them. For example: Maxon -- whose mission is to help create a robot colony on the moon -- is very mechanical. Like a child, he must be instructed on how to act, how to respond in certain social situations. He works out equations to help understand human emotions. Yet, he is capable of feeling an intense love and attachment for Sunny, and Sunny for him. Speaking of Sunny, her baldness is the epitome of peculiarities in the novel. It is a mystery to even her -- just a medical anomaly. But Sunny hadn't always worn a wig to hide it. At one time, she was happily and proudly bald. But when she grows up, gets married, and starts a family, this changes. Suddenly, she is never without one of her blonde wigs, so much so that almost no one, not even her best friends, know about her baldness. And it is when this security blanket, her wig, is thrown off in a car accident for all to see, and her universe is turned upside down, that the bulk of the story begins and a series of life-changing events -- the biggest being an accident that threatens to strand Maxon in space -- tests her patience, her will, and her humanity.

Shine Shine Shine is simultaneously compressed and full, as it chronicles the few days after Maxon's launch, as well as Sunny and Maxon's respective pasts apart -- Sunny's childhood in Burma and the disappearance of her father; Maxon's wild-child loneliness and abusive father -- and together, so that by the time the rocket is damaged, we're fully invested, and through these out-of-this-world experiences we're able to gain insight not into what it means to be normal or abnormal, but instead what it means to be human.

Everyone knows family reunions are disasters -- full of tension and baggage, both personal and familial. But in his latest novel, The Red House, Mark Haddon delivers a family reunion that makes "disaster" sound like stoical understatement.

After their mother's death, Angela and Richard, siblings who've long been out of touch, agree to bring their respective families together. They hope to start anew and settle the past. Of course, nothing's ever that simple, and it seems every character carries an internal burden. Angela still grapples with the baby she lost eighteen years ago; Dominic, her husband, struggles with his infidelities. Even their children -- Alex, Daisy, and Benjy -- have strife, everything ranging from impending adulthood to sexuality to religion to death.

And then there's the other side of the family. Richard, a successful doctor, worries about a malpractice lawsuit; Louisa, his new, younger second wife, faces her regrettable promiscuous past; her daughter Melissa, too, has a past she can't escape. Together, these two families -- these two groups of individuals, really -- vacation in a house in the countryside for a week. A recipe for disaster, right? And for much of the novel, indeed the two families may as well be in the dark, as they search for answers and acceptance. But out of this darkness, some (or, to some degree, all) characters do gain a little understanding, a little clarity, to their lives.

The Red House strikes a wide range of notes in a limited amount of space. In a matter of a few pages, you read about philosophical muses, tragic hallucinations, and awkward teenage fantasies. That's one of the benefits to the book's narrative, which is broken up into small intervals, switching from character to character in a matter of paragraphs. Much to Haddon's credit, such a technique is put to good use; it increases irony and suspense, raises the familial pulse, and plays insecurities against each other. Yet, despite all the different conflicts and point of views, Haddon is able to bring it all together and deliver a tightly told story.

Mark Haddon is the author of two other novels -- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother -- as well as a book of poetry and several youth titles.

Can we quantify happiness? We all seem to want more of it. Regardless of what we already have -- money, health, relationships -- we think we could be happier "if only." We're all looking for ways to feel more fulfilled, more peaceful, happier with our everyday lives. Gretchen Rubin is an expert in this area. Following her blockbuster, The Happiness Project, she now brings us the inspiring Happier at Home, in which, through her own personal journey, she offers realistic techniques to achieve harmony and happiness on the home front, both for yourself and for your family.

Rubin's track to bliss is a result of a methodical system she creates coupled with her self-disciplined nature. Looking ahead to her daughters' school year, she breaks down the tidal wave of everyday living into manageable segments and each month behaves in a manner that will likely enhance happiness in that area. For instance, when it comes to marriage (October), Rubin takes her cue from St. Therese of Lisieux: "It isn't enough to love; we must prove it." Rubin decides to show more love overall: more kissing her husband; more little surprises for her daughters; more familial adventures. Parenting (November) is more enjoyable when she stays engaged with her kids and under-reacts to problems. Possessions (September) don't have to be overwhelming if you pare down to make room for things with emotional value.

Throughout her process, Rubin continually discovers how important it is to be true to oneself. In doing so, opportunities emerge, and she found you'll likely stick to doing what you enjoy. Another interesting idea gleaned from Rubin's Happier at Home is that energy creates energy, especially if you add novelty into the mix: "Completing one challenging task supplies the energy to tackle another challenging task." And when Rubin feels unsure of a decision, she falls back on her Eight Splendid Truths, which include truisms such as "The only person I can change is myself," and "One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy." Turns out these principles do work to improve your behavior, strengthen relationships, and simply make you feel better -- and happier. Her nine-month experiment worked.

While we may not be able to measure happiness with a tidy equation, Rubin imparts meaningful and practical ways to boost the joy in your home. From making your abode a special sanctuary to designing your own positive actions, she once again provides the motivation for us to find more happiness in our lives -- which we all certainly deserve.

Life is rough. Sometimes it is so rough that you just want to curl up in the corner of the couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry's and a glass of wine and cry. When that ceases to be a viable option, or is just too depressing to continue, there is always door number two: get away from it all -- far, far away. Who knows? If you're lucky, maybe your troubles won't follow. When Eloisa James was diagnosed with breast cancer just two weeks after her own mother died of cancer, she decided it was all too much and opted for said door. She, her two children, and her husband packed their things and moved to Paris, where, ultimately, she found the inspiration for her enchanting memoir, Paris in Love.

Although the circumstances that led James to this move were not optimal, the decision, itself, turned out to be an amazing idea. Deciding not to work for the year, James finds herself experiencing most people's dream -- living in one of the world's most beautiful cities with nothing but time at her disposal. She has time to explore museums at her leisure, to indulge in French pastries and chocolate, to people watch -- and time, as it turns out, to pen some notes for her chronicle of her year in the City of Light.

While living in Paris sounds idyllic, James soon finds that even if your existing troubles don't follow you, new ones will crop up. For instance, she and her children must navigate the complexities of living in a city where they don't speak the language, at a delicate time when her kids are going through puberty. But despite the challenges, she appreciates the adventure and captures the pleasures of everyday living in this magical city.

James tells her story through a series of compelling short snippets. Occasionally, she does expand on areas of personal growth and makes revealing discoveries. In doing so, she mirrors her storytelling to the way most people live their lives: We tend to go through the motions and then have brief moments of clarity about issues that have been plaguing us. James paints a picture of the brief complications or simple joys of everyday life and then offers the reader insight into the bigger picture. Overall, this memoir is quite enjoyable, and it is a fairly quick read. In fact, it would be the perfect companion on a plane ride to Paris.

We the Animals, by Justin Torres, is like a nature documentary. Its characters are wild, impulsive, and violent. Their days are marked by smashing tomatoes, near-drowning, sleeping on hard floors; swollen faces, breaking trees, roaming the cold and snowy nights; tearing up gardens, digging holes, flicking, smacking, swiping each other. But you won't see this on Animal Planet. Its subject is not a pride of lions, a pack of wolves, or a pod of whales, but rather a mixed-race family living -- surviving -- in upstate New York.

The family is led by Ma and Paps (white and Puerto Rican respectively). Ma spends her days flustered. She's in a constant state of fatigue and recovery -- the effects of graveyard shifts and her husband's abuse and affairs. Paps is a broad man who can't control his desperate temper. He regularly thrashes whatever or whomever is closest at hand: the car dashboard, his wife, his sons. Ma and Paps' marriage is, though, one of extremes; despite the abuse, they show an intense, primal attraction for each other. Still, their marriage, no matter how intense, takes a backseat to Ma's love for (bless her soul) her three boys.

The narrator and his older brothers, Manny and Joel, function as a pack with a single voice. Together, they mimic their parents; they practice their own violence. They bully one another, threaten strangers, break saplings and windows. As they grow up, their mixed-race becomes apparent to them; they're separate from other boys and, later, separate from each other, as Manny and Joel flunk classes ("Puerto Rican behavior") and the narrator becomes bookish ("white behavior"). But the narrator's sexual coming-of-age, and its discovery, becomes the greatest threat yet to their camaraderie.

Torres' prose is concise and disciplined, while sometimes reaching a charming lyricism. Such prose fits well with the episodic structure of We the Animals. It provides each vignette with both an epiphany and haunting resonance. But the novel's most obvious (and boldest) idiosyncrasy is its point of view. The story begins in the first-person plural, emphasizing the boys as one unit (much like in The Virgin Suicides), only to end in the first-person singular. This shift signals a profound change in the family's dynamic and, more importantly, in the unnamed narrator.

In the end, We the Animals is more than a simple nature documentary. Although the family is wild and animalistic, their characterizations are too personal, their emotions too profoundly human, to be labeled documentation or reportage. As for Torres, who has proven himself already bold, he certainly appears to be a writer with much to offer.

The epigraph at the beginning of John Irving's new novel quotes William Shakespeare: "Thus play I in one person many people, and none contented." I came back to this quote a number of times while making my way through In One Person, impressed that Irving was able to sum up the lives of his characters so well. These are complex individuals, playing many roles, all of them conflicting and competing to dominate. It's something that we can all relate to.

If you're a longtime reader of Irving, you learn to look for the common themes across his novels: a young boy coming of age, an absentee father, a dominating mother. Often there's focus on the sport of wrestling and the setting almost always takes place in a boarding school. All aspects are present here, but this is a very different novel for the author. Many have said John Irving doesn't know what he's doing, writing a book about a bisexual man. In many interviews the author defends himself by very poignantly stating that as an adolescent he was interested in sexuality, in whatever form it took, and that is truly what this book is about.

Each character in this novel has some sort of ambiguity around their sexuality, from the lumberjack grandfather who always insists on playing female roles in the community theater, to the very masculine librarian, Miss Frost, on whom Billy, the main character, has his first adolescent crush. It's through the eyes of Billy -- who narrates for us the lives of his family and his many lovers, both male and female -- that Irving really dives into the complexity of human sexuality. This complexity creates a psychological landscape where we play many characters throughout our lives. How appropriate, then, that Irving chooses to start the novel with a quote from Shakespeare, and that much of the story takes place around rehearsals and theatrical performance.

It's this turmoil within all of us that truly drives the narration of this story, something I think John Irving knows a little bit about.

"I was born in the month of Av, under the sign of the lion. In my dreams, I fed the lion from my hand. In return he took my whole hand into his mouth and ate me alive."

Alice Hoffman is known for her mystical novels about sisterhood, dark tragedies, love, and magic. Her latest epic, The Dovekeepers, stays true to these themes, but is somewhat more ambitious. Here, Hoffman has re-imagined a war that occurred in Israel two thousand years ago, re-creating the Jewish resistance against the Roman Empire during the siege of Masada, a mountain that was home to 900 rebels in the Judean desert. Set against the backdrop of this moment in time, Hoffman has written another exquisite story of love and loss.

The Dovekeepers is told from the points of view of four fierce women whose lives and fates intersect. The tale's vivid historic detail and beautiful -- though at times savage -- prose feels like its own character, luring the reader closer to share bewitching and dangerous secrets. These secrets lead to the truth behind four uniquely personal journeys of how each of the women came to be "dovekeepers" -- those who care for the precious birds whose droppings are used to fertilize the fields that sustain the tribe.

There is Yael, whose mother died in childbirth bringing her into this world, whose father is an assassin who won't forgive his daughter for "murdering" his beloved. Yael is plagued by dreams of lions and carries the guilt of a murderess. Revka, a baker's wife, is broken from witnessing her daughter's murder at the hands of Roman soldiers; she protects her grandsons who have lost the power to speak. Aziza was raised and disguised as a boy and taught to be a soldier. Love is not for her, for she fights beside men who do not truly see her. Shirah, known as the Witch of Moab, has an ancient knowledge of spells and amulets to capture love, to conceive, to ward off evil.

Thrust together, these women struggle to trust one another as drama unfolds among their people. Jealousy, betrayal, and forbidden love threaten to tear them apart, but their initially tenuous connections grow loyal and strong. Alongside this atmosphere of tension, there is always religion and spirituality to comfort and protect -- and magic, though Hoffman keeps it believable and true to the time and setting. Love comes in many forms in this story, but while men of good character appeal to our heroines, it is the bonds between the women, as friends and sisters, and mothers and daughters, that burn the brightest. Hoffman has said that the purpose of her novel is to bring voices to the women who actually experienced the events in her novel, and in that she has succeeded: We not only hear them, but viscerally feel their sorrows and victories.