Call it the Age of Apology: politicians, sports stars and entertainers have all had to choke out reluctant mea culpas to save a career or an endorsement contract. In his sixth novel, A Thousand Pardons, Jonathan Dee (a Pulitzer finalist for The Privileges) cleverly explores this phenomenon, mostly through the eyes of a victim whose life has been blown apart by her husband's misbehavior and who must find her way to forgiveness.

In a single misbegotten evening whose highlights include a clumsy sexual advance on a summer associate at his New York law firm and an arrest for drunk driving, Ben Armstead spectacularly applies a torch to both his legal career and his foundering marriage. His wife, Helen, takes a position at a nondescript public relations firm, where her knack for getting miscreants to offer sincere apologies for their wrongdoing brings a parade of clients through the door. But Helen's skill at "apology wrangling" doesn't translate into an ability to connect with her sullen teenage daughter or to understand her husband's attempts to salvage their relationship. Helen's biggest challenge arrives when she's thrust into a PR disaster created by Hamilton Barth, a controversial actor with serious self-esteem problems.

In this fast-moving, consistently entertaining story, Dee's depictions of his characters--all of whom are possessed of intelligence and wit, if not always the best judgment--never fall back on condescension. If you read A Thousand Pardons, the next time you watch a disgraced public figure shuffle up to a bank of microphones, there's a good chance this coolly intelligent novel will spring to mind and you'll see with fresh eyes as that well-rehearsed scene plays out. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

In The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, Kristopher Jansma takes a common subject for debut novelists--the sentimental education of a writer of slender means--and renders it uncommonly entertaining through two literary devices. The first is to catapult the protagonist out of a gently funny and duplicitous bildungsroman into a globe-scorching picaresque tale. The narrator's madcap mendacities escalate across adventures in the Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Iceland and Luxembourg, yet he remains sympathetic in his pursuit of literary achievement and the only two people who truly matter to him. It's a refreshingly swashbuckling approach, full of energy and surprises, not the least of which is the way the leopard of the title finally bounds into view.

Jansma's second, more complicated cleverness is to abdicate all authorial control to his unreliable narrator. It begins innocently enough as the narrator, sitting in the same airport where he used to wait for his flight attendant mother, tells the story of losing his first "book" at the age of six. He has since lost "a novel, a novella, and a biography," he continues, and is arranging their fictional and nonfictional remnants next to each other "to try to get them to add up to something true." Thus begins a metafictional puzzle in which the narrator's texts mingle with quotations from literary greats to construct an elegant argument about the truth-telling power of fiction.

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards' intricate narrative game and its carbon-burning escapades add up to a novel that is wise about identity and aspiration, competitive storytelling, romantic obsession and the assertion that "all these stories are true, only somewhere else." --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

As Lucy Clarke's Swimming at Night begins, Katie Greene opens the door to two policemen late one night to be told that her sister, Mia, is dead in Bali. According to two eyewitnesses, it was definitely a suicide: she jumped off a cliff into the sea.

The sisters could not be more different, they've had their difficulties, especially when their mum was dying. Katie, three years older than Mia, is the structured, make-a-list type. She's dependable, holds a good job, is engaged to a suitable man; Mia is the wild child, fearless, irresponsible, with nary a thought for tomorrow. Six months before her death, she set out on an open-ended trip with Finn, her best friend since childhood.

Mia's belongings are returned to Katie. Among them, she finds a journal that records everything about the trip--until Mia left Finn and traveled to Bali alone. Why? Katie leaves her home, her job and her fiancé to travel in Mia's footsteps, following the journal, looking for answers. Clarke takes the reader through Mia's interior journey, alternating between her revelatory journal passages and Katie's discoveries. The journal provides a window into Mia's psyche, her low self-esteem and her reasons for acting out. Its entries form the heart of Clarke's narrative, leading us to an understanding of who Mia was--and how she got that way.

Despite their differences and difficulties, Katie and Mia were sisters to the end, sharing bonds of love and friendship, strained but never broken. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

The Andalucian Friend, Alexander Soderberg's debut novel, begins with a chance encounter in a hospital between a nurse, Sophie Brinkmann, and her patient Hector Guzman. Sophie and Hector's relationship continues past his stay in the hospital. As Sophie finds herself drawn in by Hector's charms, she also finds herself pulled into the unfamiliar world of gang warfare--Hector is the head of a powerful international crime ring smuggling drugs and weapons out of South America.

When members of a German crime ring target Hector, intent on stealing his smuggling routes for themselves, Sophie begins to question their relationship. Then she is confronted by the police and asked to spy on Hector, becoming the center of a major investigation. Sophie, used to a quiet life with her son, is suddenly unmoored, facing a world full of uncertainty, and must choose her way carefully or risk her life--and her son's.

Soderberg has packed The Andalucian Friend with everything a thriller fan could want: deranged cops, gang warfare, gun smuggling, drugs, bribery and even secret romances. With so many characters and storylines, it can be hard to keep track of everything without taking notes--but it all comes together in the end, resulting in a satisfying thriller that is successful because of its convoluted concepts, not in spite of it. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Snake Oil delves into both personal memoir and traditional history, explaining how Becca Stevens, an Episcopal chaplain at Vanderbilt's St. Augustine, came to found both Magdalene, a network of homes for abused women, and Thistle Farms, the all-natural cosmetics company that both funds Magdalene and employs its residents.

Stevens refers to both enterprises as "snake oil selling," but she doesn't mean it in the pejorative sense. Before "snake oil" became a catchall term for shady characters hawking questionable remedies, she explains, it described concoctions--including oil blends containing real snake venom--known for centuries for their ability to heal a number of ills. Snake Oil uses this original meaning as both theme and metaphor. Not only does Thistle Farms create oil blends intended to soothe and heal, the very process of creating both the blends and the organization itself are powerfully healing to the women Magdalene serves.

In Snake Oil, Stevens introduces readers to the concept of healing work through her own stories about the creation of Magdalene and Thistle Farms, as well as through the stories of those who live and work there. She describes how her own childhood experiences with abuse and her father's untimely death equipped her to understand that, while many lives seem broken, no life is irredeemable. Snake Oil is a powerful testament to the limitless capacity of love and dignity to heal even the most wounded lives. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket

Mad Men has won several Emmys and has a loyal following of viewers that dissect the television show's every retro outfit, chauvinistic comment and sip of scotch. But you don't have to love the series to enjoy Mad Men, Mad World--although, if you don't watch it already, you may very well start after reading the essays Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing Goodman have brought together.

Every theme in the series--from infidelity to gender roles to homosexuality--is laid bare against the intense backdrop of its 1960s setting, such as the civil rights movement, the Kennedy assassinations and the discovery that smoking was in fact hazardous to one's health.

But Mad Men, Mad World's brilliance is that it analyzes storylines and characters from completely unexpected angles. In "The Homosexual and the Single Girl," for example, male feminist and queerness expert Alexander Doty takes the show to task for its shoddy treatment of show's only lesbian. One essay delves into the role of fashion as empowerment; another particularly poignant piece examines the way the show portrays its Jewish characters. Cultural scholar Lynne Joyrich offers a fascinating dissection of protagonist Don Draper and his relentless shifting from one identity to another in "Media Madness." And, of course, this collection tackles the wild sexcapades at Mad Men's fictional Manhattan ad agency. These are deeply considered pieces that truly spark intellectual discussion. It's a mad world, indeed, but this book helps to bring some order to the chaos. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Powerful, evocative imagery and prose infuse Brent Hendricks's haunting, ruminative memoir, A Long Day at the End of the World. This compact, carefully crafted book centers on the Tri-State Crematory in Nobel, Ga. The owner had stopped cremating the bodies he received and, until he was caught in 2002, dumped the corpses in sheds, vaults and in the woods around his property--339 bodies in all. One of those decaying bodies was Hendricks's father, who had lain abandoned for five years after he was supposed to have been cremated.

The reasons behind the crematory owner's decisions seem as elusive as the closure Hendricks seeks in packing up his father's burial flag and setting off on a pilgrimage across Alabama to revisit the crematorium site. During the road trip, Hendricks, now a middle-aged man, grapples with the past. He reflects on life and death, his familial and cultural upbringing in the South, the biblical stories of Lazarus and the apocalypse and even the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto.

An ironic twist of fate leads to the identification of the remains of Hendricks's father, unearthing feelings that had been left unreconciled. Ultimately, the story of Hendricks's turbulent relationship with his father--the "dislocated son of a dislocated father"--emerges as a searing, deeply personal portrait of one man's quest to understand, love and let go. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

An American Caddie in St. Andrews opens at Oliver Horovitz's high school graduation. He's awaiting a decision from Harvard, which finally comes. He's in--but next year. So he decides it would be an adventure to spend a year at St. Andrews University, in Scotland near the historic Old Course, the most famous golf course in the world. Once established, he decides to enroll in the course's caddie trainee program--he has caddied before--and is accepted.

For golfers, this is where the story gets good. We learn what it's like to caddie at this legendary course, with all kinds of inside scoops on caddie life, great stories about the people from all over the world he caddied for and, most importantly, advice on how to get big tips--upward of £100 for one round.

After 30 rounds of looping, Oliver passes his tests, including a written exam. Can you (for example) name the small bunker on the Old Course's 17th hole? Yes, he still goes on to Harvard, but he's back at St. Andrews every summer, loving the experience of working on a piece of sacred land. (And frequently playing the course, too--lucky guy!) This is an enjoyable and hilarious tale from a young man many golfers will envy for living his dream. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

John Coy (the 4 for 4 series) here blends his proven knowledge of sports with a fascinating picture-book history of basketball.

Following in the footsteps of two failed teachers, James Naismith hopes that three's the charm. In December 1891, he takes on a "rowdy" gym class in Springfield, Mass. The first day, Naismith tries indoor football, the next day, indoor soccer, and on the third day, lacrosse. All are too rough, but Naismith will not give up. Instead, he comes up with a whole new game. Coy shows that, for Naismith, necessity is the mother of invention. Building on a game from his childhood in Canada, "Duck on a Rock" (for which "accuracy was more valuable than force"), Naismith added the idea of a goal that required "an arcing throw." On December 21, 1891, with a soccer ball, two peach baskets and a posted list of rules, he found success. Joe Morse's (Casey at the Bat) illustrations in a limited palette stay true to the era in style and detail, yet also convey the unbridled enthusiasm and kinetic energy of the players.

Readers will quickly see why the young men couldn't wait to teach their friends and neighbors the new game, and why it caught on. Naismith was also ahead of his time in permitting women to play the game (and it paid off--one of them later became his wife). Naismith's original rules of the game on the endpapers top off a terrific story to share with basketball fans of all ages. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Inspired by her mother's own experience with Katrina and its aftermath, Sherri L. Smith (Flygirl) offers dystopian realism in Orleans.

By 2025, after the storms, the fever and the quarantine, the "Delta States" have been cut off from all other society. Vestiges of the modern world still exist, but a new society has emerged as well--a primitive, violent place where blood tribes mean more than family.

Twenty years later, Fen de la Guerre aligns herself with a blood tribe. After an ambush, Fen is left with the newborn of the tribe's former leader. Fen knows that the infant's only chance of survival is for them somehow to breach the wall to the Outer States before the plague can enter the child's blood stream; they have only two weeks. Fen is helped by Daniel, a scientist from the Outer States who has entered the delta to find a cure for the disease. Daniel is protected by a bio-suit and stocked with some food, but without Fen to guide him, he'll never survive. They make a deal: Fen will help him in exchange for taking the baby to the Outer States for a chance at a normal life.

The book brims with adrenaline-pumping action, high-stakes escapes and depictions of a faded city cut off from civilization and eroding from within. The author's details take us into a chilling world that we recognize as one possible future. --Nan Shipley, literary scout for the film industry