Suspend your disbelief and enter Le Cirque des Reves. We believed in witches and wands; now we can believe in a magical circus that arrives without warning and opens only at nightfall. Believe, as well, in its amazing inhabitants: magicians who really do magic, a contortionist who collapses her body into a small glass box, a fortune teller who really tells fortunes. Here clothes change colors depending on mood, a face can change to hide its true self, a person can read the past that covers your clothes, a man has no shadow, and each tent--who knows how many--like Calvino's "invisible cities" contains a fantastical world unto itself.

This turn-of-the-century fable by first-time author Morgenstern is told in short episodes. At its heart is the story of a mysterious, years old, arranged contest--to the death, they later find out--between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who had no say in their parents' decision. Also at stake is their love for each other, which has grown deep over the years, and nothing less than the very existence of the circus itself. It's also the story of Bailey, a young boy who loves this circus more than anything else. The book drags some in the middle, but it's quickly overcome, and the flashbacks seem unnecessary. Still, this is a stellar work destined to pick up prizes. The publisher is behind this one in a big way and, yes, film rights have been sold. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Lisa Tucker's (The Song Reader) latest novel focuses on "helicopter parents" (they hover) Kyra and David Winter, whose seven-year-old son is kidnapped. A note left behind claims that Michael's abductor loves him and won't harm him. While this is cold comfort, Tucker tempers the family's devastation with descriptions of the Winters' smothering control over their son. Michael is home schooled just in case he might encounter a bully; he's not permitted playmates because they could carry germs; and Legos are forbidden as a potential choke hazard. While it's clear that the Winters adore their son, they are so neurotically overprotective that you can't help but feel a twinge of satisfaction when his mysterious kidnapper takes the sheltered kid whale watching and lets him eat a candy bar.

Kyra and David carry traumatic baggage of their own. This isn't David's first marriage or child, and Kyra is weighed down with guilt about her once-beloved sister. Is David's crazy ex-wife the culprit or has the sister that Kyra betrayed finally come to seek her revenge?

Tucker is a master chef of character development and living with heartbreak. This work examines the fallible side of human nature, creating characters so achingly real that at times you forget you're reading a work of fiction. As the book reaches its suspenseful climax, Tucker's message resonates: ultimately all human error can be conquered by forgiveness. --Natalie Papailiou, blogger at MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

This slim novel from Sara Greenslit (The Blue of Her Body) reads like a beautiful, haunting dream, and its sparkling mesh of lyricism and imagery netted Greenslit the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize, ensuring the work's availability to captivate lovers of fine wordcraft.

Light on word count but heavy with impact, Greenslit's narrative follows brief thoughts and moments in the lives of a lapsed cellist attempting to master her instrument anew; her neighbor Celia; and Celia's ancestor Ann Pudeator, executed during the Salem witch trials and now alive only in Celia's amateur genealogy attempts. Though these three women ostensibly make up the focus of the novel, in reality a myriad of human and animal stories link and interlink in a succession of interludes and fragments that is part fiction, part field guide, part poetry. Greenslit possesses a rare gift for capturing the lovely and eerie connections between past, present and future, between strangers who never meet, and between humanity and the natural world we barely notice. She offers us the secrets of birds, the alchemy of music and the mystery of migration.

Fans of free verse and prose poetry will savor As If a Bird Flew by Me as though walking through a gem-studded cavern, each sliver of language a shining stone. One caveat: not reading Greenslit's most striking passages aloud will feel akin to thumbing through sheet music without ever sounding a note, so savor in solitude or among other lovers of unique, expressive writing. --Jaclyn Fulwood, graduate assistant, University of Oklahoma Libraries

On August 31, 1997, in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, a speeding Mercedes crashed into a pillar, killing two of the four passengers instantly and seriously injuring the other two, one of whom died four hours later; the last spent time in a coma. These are the facts of the night that Princess Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, died.

In Laurence Cossé's (The Corner of the Veil) fictional version of the story, there is also a small Fiat Uno traveling into the tunnel at 30 miles per hour. The Mercedes driver, trying to avoid the paparazzi, scrapes the side of the Fiat and loses control of his car in the process. The Fiat driver, 25-year-old waitress Louise Origan, keeps going. Was she responsible for the accident? She has her car repaired by an Indian mechanic who seems wholly indifferent to the transaction, which calms her a little.

For days immediately following the accident, Louise is terrified of discovery, not sure if she caused the accident, but certain that she could easily be made a scapegoat for the tragedy. Pieces of her car's broken taillight are identified, and news sources share that the police will seek out every Fiat in the country.

Louise is already spiraling downward when she learns this news; indifferent to her boyfriend, missing work, not sleeping, reading and watching everything pertaining to the accident. Then the man who repaired the Fiat shows up , and what has been a tense recital of a woman suffering inner torment becomes a study in psychology and survival. Cossé maintains perfect control of her terrifying story, through to the ambiguous ending. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Imagine a world almost exactly like the one we live in, except that some of us are participants in a shadow "War" against an unknown enemy. Joe, the narrator of Trevor Shane's debut, Children of Paranoia, is one of the War's frontline soldiers. When he was 16, he was told the real reason why members of his family were constantly dying in "accidents" or attacks, and soon after that he signed up to start killing people on the other side. He's been at it for years; he goes where his superiors send him, kills whoever he's instructed to kill. Lately, though, he's starting to have second thoughts....

Children of Paranoia is structured as a journal in which Joe explains his past to Maria, a college student he meets in Montreal, where he's been sent on a mission. Joe lays his story out in painstaking detail, and the pervasiveness with which the War encompasses every aspect of his life helps keep readers' disbelief suspended.

The first half of the novel lays the fatalism on especially thick, though things pick up when he decides to run off with Maria. Shane intensifies the suspense here as Maria is shown incontrovertible evidence that Joe isn't just deluded, and making her susceptible to the same all-encompassing paranoia that drives him.

There are times when the full-on dedication characters show toward the War becomes a bit hard to swallow. But Shane pushes past those rough spots by maintaining a tight focus on Joe and his devotion to Maria. By sticking to that emotional core, Children of Paranoia functions neatly as a surreal variant on the noir thriller where evil lurks in every shadow and happiness either remains tantalizingly just out of reach or could be snatched away in an instant. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

Stephanie Barron (Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron) sends her literary heroine to Kent on an extended visit to her brother, Edward, in her 11th delightful installment of the Jane Austen Mysteries. While attending a reception following the wedding of the widow Adelaide Fiske to Captain Andrew MacAllister, Jane observes the delivery of a pouch of tamarind seeds and the subsequent distress the curious package causes the bride. The next day, a stranger is found dead on the famous Pilgrim's Way of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. When the stranger is discovered to be none other than Adelaide's first husband, the presumably long-dead Curzon Fiske, Adelaide's family and closest friends, and eventually Adelaide herself, fall under the cloud of suspicion. As the local magistrate, Edward must see to the legal proceedings, and he relies heavily on Jane's keen observations and quick mind to uncover the truth.

Jane Austen's famous wit comes through so artfully in Barron's reverent, warm rendering of the author that the reader is likely to mistake it for a lost journal. Barron is as masterful in styling her prose in the mode of Austen's own voice as she is in building a mystery. Barron's own background as an intelligence analyst for the CIA undoubtedly serves her well as every chapter she writes presents a new level of discovery, creating a knot the reader will not easily untangle. All these elements combine to make Jane Austen's latest adventure thoroughly entertaining and impossible to put down. --Sarah Borders, librarian, Houston Public Library

Dan Brown didn't invent the thriller that promises to blow your mind by explaining that everything you knew about religious history was a lie, but The Da Vinci Code has become the benchmark for the genre. In some respects, debut novelist Simon Toyne strives to surpass Brown: while The Da Vinci Code was content to throw the origins of Christianity into doubt, Sanctus posits a brutal conspiracy that stretches back to the dawn of civilization and continues to hide its mysterious "Sacrament" deep inside the Citadel, a monastery carved into a mountain in Turkey.

The opening of the novel is impressively spectacular: one of the monks has discovered the truth about the Sacrament and has been scheduled for execution. Instead, he breaks out of his cell and climbs to the top of the Citadel, where he poses like a crucified figure until news networks broadcast his image all over the world, at which point he hurtles himself to the ground below. But... was he mimicking Jesus on the cross, or was he depicting the Greek letter tau, the origins of which stretch all the way back to the ancient Sumerians?

This is exciting stuff, especially when you throw in an intrepid Turkish police inspector, commando monks sent to recover their apostate brother's corpse, an ancient counter-conspiracy that sees his suicide as the first movement of a long-awaited prophecy, and his sister, a reporter who immediately jumps on a plane to Turkey when she gets the first news of her brother in eight years. Toyne sets all these components in motion and never lets the pace falter, right up to the startling revelation.

But where Brown nurtures the plausibility of his alternative theologies by aligning key narrative details with the world as we know it, Toyne vaults into pure fantasy.

Despite flaws in logic--as well as an ending that isn't really an ending--Sanctus can be awfully fun if you give yourself over to the ride. The non-realistic aspects of the story mean it's not likely to spark the sorts of debate Dan Brown's fiction can, but it reads as though Toyne's real focus may not be on theological revolution so much as sheer entertainment, and on that front his career is off to a rollicking start. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

Joan Slonczewski’s (A Door into Ocean) first novel in more than 10 years, The Highest Frontier, shows the author at the top of her game, weaving biological hard science fiction with approachable, lived-in characters and situations within a fully realized near-future world that, like all good SF, grapples with current world social and technological issues and fears.

Jenny Ramos-Kennedy, the current scion of a politically influential family, arrives for her freshman year at Frontera College--in orbit above Earth, built with media and tribal casino money, attracting the best and brightest of the current generation--already struggling, having recently lost her twin brother. Her on-and-off again boyfriend is an Amish work-study student; her best girlfriend is a polymath Parisian hacker; and her roommate compañera is introduced as an omniprosthete--a human brain in an artificial body. The Earth is in ecological collapse, the body politic relies perhaps too heavily on technology and constant polling, and the students at Frontera College must navigate their very public lives along with their personal desires and demons.

This is a character-driven novel of ideas with wonderfully extrapolated technologies in the digital and biological sciences. The ideas are well explained with minimal exposition, making Jenny and her friends and teachers come alive as they explore their new frontier habitat as well as their new status as the last great hope of humanity, hovering far above the planet, polarizing politics and culture as they do so. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Photographer Walker Evans once offered this prescription for a meaningful life: "Stare. Pry. Listen. Eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." In this masterly collection of 45 brief personal essays, critic Sven Birkerts's work is a testimonial to one writer's effort to take Evans's injunction to heart.

Birkerts's keen eye and sinuous prose are triggered by the humblest of objects: his daughter's clay sculpture, a red tin cup cherished for 30 years, an inexpensive ring from his family's ancestral home in Latvia, a child's drawing on a fogged bus window. "And somehow," he writes, "who knows why, when I saw that finger it was like someone reached inside and tapped the dial, put me square on my station."

Birkerts's reminiscences focus as intently on personal relationships as they do on objects. In "Chessboard," an intense engagement with the game becomes a metaphor for the evolution and eventual death of a friendship. "The Points of Sail" recounts his son's brush with death when his sailboat capsizes off Cape Cod, allowing Birkerts to meditate in the aftermath of that near tragedy on "how it is between parents and their children... how it snarls up together, all the vigilance and ignorance, luck and readiness, love and fear. We know nothing."

With the demise of Borders, Birkerts's essay "Postcard," describing his years working in the original Ann Arbor store in the early '70s, might serve as an elegy for the bookstore chain. And Birkerts is nothing if not a man of books. "Truth is, I like the feel of a place that is overrun with books," he concedes. His love of literature and writing informs these often intimate pieces without dominating them.

The Other Walk is a book best consumed in slow, contemplative bites, with ample time allowed to reflect on and absorb them. And it's one that should be picked up, reread and savored for its expressive beauty and its gentle reminder that we can find life's fullness amid its most inconsequential moments. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Some celebrity memoirists are preeningly coy; others over-divulge. Jane Lynch, the actor who embodies Glee's Sue Sylvester with such pugilistic panache, wisely strides through her first 50 years in Happy Accidents with more zip than wallow. Her candor is unafflicted by over-dramatization, and every chapter or so she lands a deft punch line.

Written chronologically, Happy Accidents covers Lynch's cozy childhood, self-actualization efforts and career strivings before it gets to Glee. Despite a tendency to sum up personal growth in New Age buzzwords, the actual scenes Lynch recreates are specific and sharp. She hears the word "gay" for the first time at the age of 12 and realizes that a) it applies to her, and b) in suburban 1970s Illinois it was "a disease and a curse." Of her remarkably effective stint in Alcoholics Anonymous, she says, "Had I known that in AA one of the things you do is tell your drinking story over and over, I would have made mine much more interesting."

The account of Lynch's ascendance in Happy Accidents is instructive for any aspiring actor. She makes her own luck by earning an MFA in classical theater, auditioning promiscuously, hawking Frosted Flakes on TV, nabbing roles originally written for men and honing the improv skills that drive her smartly unhinged cameos in Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. The memoir's happy ending entwines Lynch's showbiz home on Glee with the emotional home she builds after she crosses paths with her future wife, a meet-cute that is documented by one of the many charming photographs reproduced in Happy Accidents. The title fits, but Lynch's talent and charisma deserve equal billing. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

As a home-schooled, gingham-wearing, picket sign-carrying teenager, Alisa Harris believed that with enough fervent prayer, doctrinal argument and political activism, God's people could save the world. She picketed abortion clinics as a small child, volunteered for Republican campaigns as a teenager and even dressed up as Hillary Clinton to make a point about government corruption at a county fair.

But as Alisa moved outside her family circle, encountering people she truly respected who didn't share her beliefs, she began to wonder if it were possible--or necessary--to argue people into faith. Gradually, she acknowledged the frustrating complexity of living in a world with so many gray areas--and came to rely less on carefully constructed arguments and more on the grace of a God whose benevolence reached far beyond the boundaries of politics.

Harris, now a journalist, writes with a wry self-awareness, poking gentle fun at her own past arrogance, while admitting she hasn't figured out exactly how to live as a person of faith. She deeply respects her parents' beliefs and the principles they taught her, but in the wake of 9/11, various political scandals and several controversial wars, she rejects the idea that Americans--or anyone--should conflate politics and faith.

In our highly polarized political climate, Harris is a refreshing contrast to pundits who insist on the "right" way to vote (and believe). She speaks for a new generation of Christians, who believe faith and politics should interact, but prefer asking questions--and helping others--to forming picket lines. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Jack Gantos's (Joey Pigza Loses Control) latest winning novel, both humorous and heartwarming, introduces us to Norvelt, Pa., created by the U.S. government as a model community after the closing of its coalmines. The book is set during the summer of 1962, when narrator Jack turns 12 and spends most of his days grounded. Jack's main "get out of jail free card"--and one of the novel's most charming characters--is Miss Volker. The blossoming of their friendship coincides with the blooming of Jack's character.

Miss Volcker, the town historian and medical examiner, suffers from acute arthritis. So she dictates the obituaries to Jack, who types them up, takes them to the newspaper editor and places a pin on the house of the deceased on her map of Norvelt. As the Norvelters start to go (faster than anticipated), no new families move in to take their places. Miss Volker does her part, by selling her sister's home to a "nice young man." Except that he turns out to be a Hell's Angel, is accidentally run down by a cement truck, and his friends return to take their revenge on the town.

Jack often feels caught between a mother who loves Norvelt and all it stands for, and his father, a World War II veteran who sees the dying town as a "dead end." Jack and Miss Volker's relationship gives the boy a fresh perspective. Her love of history is infectious, and her respect for Jack and her belief in him as a hope for the future allows him to believe in himself. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

With this brilliantly constructed novel, told alternately in prose and visual sequences, Brian Selznick may have topped even his Caldecott Medal-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Here he tells the story of 12-year-old Ben Wilson in words and the story of 12-year-old Rose Kincaid in images. When the two stories--which begin 50 years apart--join, their convergence delivers an intense emotional impact.

Although Ben's story unfolds in prose in 1977, it begins in images, with a dream of two wolves chasing him that unfolds as if through film stills. The camera zooms in on the alpha wolf, then its face, and closes in on the reflected light of one wolf's eye. This bright light connects with Ben's love of the stars. Ben's mother told him that "he'd never be lost as long as he could find the North Star." But after her death, he stopped believing it. The first image in Rose's story is the light in the eyes of a glamorous-looking woman dressed in 1927 fashion. The camera lens then widens to reveal she is Lillian Mayhew, one of "Today's Stars," in MovieStar magazine. We soon learn that Mayhew is Rose's mother and that her story unfolds wordlessly because Rose is deaf. A series of events lead both Ben and Rose to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Like an intricate mosaic, Selznick's subtle patterns connect elements of Ben and Rose's lives in a master design. The way Selznick bridges their stories over half a century will leave you wonderstruck. --Jennifer M. Brown, children’s editor, Shelf Awareness