For readers feeling overwhelmed by the influx of dystopian- and apocalyptic-themed entertainment, Jean Teulé's The Suicide Shop, first published in France in 2006, will hit the spot.

Environmental and economic chaos have wrecked the Earth. In this sad new world, suicide rates soar. For proper equipment and professional advice, many of the would-be dead turn to the Suicide Shop. (Its motto: "Has your life been a failure? Let's make your death a success.") The Tuvache family has run the shop for generations, bemoaning that their commitment to helping others choose and carry out their dream deaths dooms them to living long, depressed lives.

Monsieur and Madame Tuvache assist customers in selecting nooses, poisons and seppuku trappings by day and read their children bedtime stories about doomed lovers at night. Their daughter is convinced of her own ugliness and uselessness; their oldest son bandages his head against perpetual migraines while designing a suicide-themed amusement park. They're the ideal purveyors of death, at least until Alan is born.

Alan, the third Tuvache child, exhibits a disturbing tendency toward smiling. As Alan grows up, he continues to show unmistakable signs of happiness and optimism: laughing, joking, singing silly songs and, worst of all, trying to convince customers that life is worth living.

While more sensitive readers may not find Teulé's irreverent humor appealing, those who like their comedy on the dark and ludicrous side will find much to tickle their funny bones. This snide, hilarious affirmation of life is to die for. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads

Hatteras Island is a vacation destination on the Outer Banks off the North Carolina coast. For 33-year-old Tandi Jo Reese, however, it becomes a place of refuge and healing after she and her two children flee their Dallas home to hide from a destructive, dangerous past. The three are offered dwelling in a rental home on the property of 91-year-old Iola Anne Poole. When Iola dies, the pastor of the local church enlists Tandi to clean out Iola's dilapidated Victorian house.

While sorting through Iola's cluttered personal belongings, Tandi discovers 81 beautifully crafted boxes--prayer boxes--Iola kept over the course of her lifetime. These boxes are filled with scraps of paper: heartfelt, personal notes written to a Higher Power, in which Iola shared her hopes and fears in navigating the challenges and joys of her humble, solitary life. The depth and honesty of each message paints a surprisingly fuller portrait of Iola's remarkable life, and this empowers Tandi to begin her own journey of self-discovery, assessing the hardships and mistakes of her past. She comes to embrace the idea that "some of the best things in life come out of the worst."

As in Lisa Wingate's other Christian-themed novels (Tending Roses et al.), faith and wholesomeness infuse the narrative of The Prayer Box. A warm, small-town feel and a cast of well-developed characters and subplots round out this richly woven story about the power of providence, grace and redemption. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Iosi Havilio's Open Door is a strange, elliptical little novel written in a plainspoken prose that belies its haunting core. The unnamed narrator is a young Argentinian woman working in a veterinarian's office. The novel begins as she is visiting a man and a sick horse--both named Jaime--in a small town called Open Door. Later, the woman she has been living with in the city appears to commit suicide, and the narrator floats back to Open Door. There, she moves in with Jaime, whom she finds alternately appealing and mildly repulsive. She also meets a wild, charismatic girl named Eloisa who might be 15--or maybe 30.

She is called back to the city several times to determine whether the body of her roommate has been found. She thinks the officer in charge of the case may have fallen in love with her, but very little comes of it. A wheelchair-bound librarian helps her research the history of the "Open Door" psychiatric institutions that gave the town its name. She loves Jaime, then Eloisa, neither, both, but she stays. Each time the story seems to be headed in a particular direction it stalls, and the narrator slides sideways into another half-hearted endeavor.

Underneath the oddly sterile surface of Havilio's novel is a mesmerizing void. Are the characters really any different from the "loonies" living in the Open Door asylum? Are we? --Emma Page, intern at Shelf Awareness, bookseller at Island Books in Mercer Island, Wash.

Though no one named Jesus appears in J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus, there are parallels aplenty to the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, set in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country where the people are decent, well-intentioned, strangely satisfied, don't eat meat, don't fight and don't charge for services.

Five-year-old David, extremely bright but troubled, and his 50ish guardian, Simon, have just arrived by boat in the Relocation Center. They've come there to find the boy's mother, whose name has been lost at sea. Simon gets hired as a stevedore.

Too complicated and realistic to be an allegory, too multi-dimensional and idiosyncratic to be a fable, Coetzee's surreal philosophical discourse on childrearing and education still manages to remain human and frequently touching. Coetzee is known for his pessimism--his Booker Prize-winning Disgrace has one of the most depressing endings in modern fiction--but the world Simon finds himself in is surprisingly warm-hearted. The foreman at the docks not only minds David while his guardian works, he even loans them money. Impulsively, Simon decides that a wealthy young woman playing tennis is the boy's mother. He announces as much to her; more astonishing yet, she agrees to adopt the boy.

In this small, baffling riddle of a novel, where people arrive mysteriously by boat, washed clean of memory, to labor in a peaceful agrarian world, David grows more and more out of control. Running away from school, defying his teachers, he begins gathering doctors and hitchhikers like apostles and saying things like, "You must call me by my real name" and "Yo soy la verdad." What exactly Coetzee has in mind is anyone's guess, but just try to stop puzzling over this thought-provoking novel. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

Andrew Rosenheim introduced FBI agent Jimmy Nessheim in Fear Itself, a smart thriller with a 1930s milieu. For the sequel, The Little Tokyo Informant, Nessheim's in Los Angeles, and Rosenheim clearly enjoys dipping into the hot, sweaty, noir-ish atmosphere of Chandler and Hammett's Southern California.

The story takes place from September 1941 to March 1942, in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Nessheim has been assigned by J. Edgar Hoover to advise a film studio on FBI tactics for a "B" film called The Red Herring: "Make sure the studio makes the Bureau look good," he's told.

Along the way, Nessheim finds out about $50,000 wired by Soviet intelligence officers in New York to a Japanese bank in Los Angeles. He wants to talk with Billy Osaka, a small-time Japanese-American journalist who's been recruited to do some translating and help identify subversives who might be working for Japanese intelligence--but he's missing. He does find Billy's grandmother--only she's been murdered. Meanwhile, an assistant director at the Bureau, working leads in Washington, finds a dead State Department official. It looks like he was involved in the money transfer. Why?

Rosenheim deftly juggles all the pieces of a mystery set in a world on the cusp of war in a thriller that could point to nefarious goings on at the highest levels of the government. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Karl Shapiro's introduction to Ted Kooser's second collection, A Local Habitation & a Name (1974), contains a still perfect assessment of Kooser's poetry: "honesty and lucidity, the sharpness of focus" and "that mysterious quality of voice." With The Life and Poetry of Ted Kooser, Mary Stillwell--a former student of her subject as well as a fellow Nebraskan--has written a fine, authoritative first biography of the former U.S. Poet Laureate.

Though Iowan by birth, Kooser has spent most of his life in Nebraska, where, for years, he was employed in the same business as Wallace Stevens: insurance. So, at first, poetry was an avocation, not an academic career. He studied architecture at Iowa State but turned to English, teaching high school for a year before going to graduate school in Lincoln, where he worked with Shapiro. His first book, Official Entry Blank, foreshadows lifelong themes such as the language and expanse of the Great Prairie, already casting his idiomatic voice into favorite forms like the lyric and dramatic monologue.

Stillwell beautifully chronicles Kooser's close relationship with fellow Midwest writer Jim Harrison. When Kooser was chosen as poet laureate, she writes, he was "completely flummoxed," and worked hard to get his weekly poetry columns picked up by newspapers. This is a lovely book about a humble man's life. As he says in his memoir, Local Wonders, "This is the life, I have chosen." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

The great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, Ruth Padel brings readers an intriguing look at the vast subject of migration--the movement of birds, animals, humans, thoughts, concepts and perceptions from one time and space to another. Lives have always been in flux, from the annual flights of birds and butterflies to the movements of herd animals from one grazing ground to another to humans who have searched for food, land and freedom. On Migration intertwines poetic prose with poetry as Padel explores the "push and pull" of migration.

"The push may be escaping war or famine or a freezing winter," she elaborates. "The pull is usually safety, warmth, food or work. But whichever is uppermost, whether the travel is cyclical like swallows in spring and autumn, or once in a lifetime, migration is about survival." Juxtaposed with survival is the hope for a better life and the imagination that such a place exists. This is why, for example, Mexicans cross searing deserts, and Cubans launch into the ocean on rafts made of lashed-together chairs, to reach the United States.

Padel's essays elaborate on the concepts she empathetically writes about in her poems; the combination of the two styles enhance and enrich each other, pushing and pulling the reader toward a fuller, rounder understanding of the various forms migration takes from one species to another. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

With more than 30 years of teaching writing to his credit, Roy Clark (Help! For Writers) brings writers and lovers of language new ways to write for today's fast-paced life. "We need more good short writing--the kind that makes us stop, read and think--in an accelerating world," Clark says in How to Write Short. "A time-starved culture bloated with information hungers for the lean, clean, simple and direct."

Although you may be familiar with the brevity of a modern text message or a tweet, Clark shows that the history of short writing--texts of about 300 words or less--goes back thousands of years. Sonnets, baseball cards, jingles in ads, song lyrics, lists, reviews and definitions are just some of the examples Clark encourages readers to look for, read and imitate. Search for short texts in odd places such as ship logs, tattoos, epitaphs and bumper stickers and jot them down in a notebook. By comparing and contrasting, cutting the repetition of words and changing the pace of a piece, Clark advises, one can still entice the reader, sell a product or show a story--even in as few as six words. Copious exercises reinforce each lesson as practice leads to perfection.

"Short work," Clark says, "need not be a compromise forced on the writer by technology, evolving social habits or shrinking resources." He aptly demonstrates that sparse writing doesn't have to mean stark writing. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Jasper Fforde's powers of invention are seemingly endless, and he puts them to good use in this second book of the Chronicles of Kazam.

After besting a centuries-old plot and becoming a Dragonslayer, 16-year-old Jennifer Strange hopes for a little peace and quiet. Alas, no such luck. Wrangling the magic users of Kazam is hard enough for Jennifer, and it only gets harder when a rival company plots to take over their business. Throw in some court politics, old rivalries and the return of everyone's favorite weird-physics pet, the Quarkbeast, and Jennifer's got more than enough to contend with. And that doesn't even include normal teen problems, like dating....

What first seems to be a fight with squabbling magicians and politicians turns out to be a battle for the future of Magic itself, and Jennifer has some difficult choices to make. Luckily, she's got all of Kazam behind her, from her next-in-command, Tiger, to the crotchety Lady Mawgon to the newly certified (and very crush-worthy) Perkins. There are new faces as well, most notably the mysterious and severe Once Magnificent Boo, who gives Rowling's Professor McGonagall a run for her money as the most terrifying wizard you also kind of want to hug.

This second entry is just as quirky and wry as the first, with a focused, fast-paced plot that will have readers on tenterhooks. Fforde is a master of the strange and wonderful, and fans will want to follow the employees of Kazam--and their new allies--on into their next adventures. --Jenn Northington, events manager, WORD bookstore