For Kirsten Raymonde, Shakespeare came before and after the end of the world. At eight years old, she played an hallucination in a stage production of King Lear starring middle-aged film star Arthur Leander. As an adult, she portrays Cordelia, Titania and others for the Traveling Symphony, an orchestra and Shakespearean theater company touring the wasteland of the former United States under the banner of a Star Trek: Voyager quote: "Survival is insufficient." Twenty years after a virus wiped out so much of the human population that no statisticians were left to tally the damage, many comforts are relics of a lost past: electricity, medicine, digital technology, automobiles. The Traveling Symphony offers cultural enrichment in exchange for food and shelter in loosely governed towns. In one such place, the company meets a dangerous cult leader known as the Prophet and his rabidly loyal followers. When the performers inadvertently attract the Prophet's wrath, they struggle to escape. Their intended destination, an airport rumored to hold a Museum of Civilization, may also hold the key to the Prophet's true identity--and link directly back to Arthur Leander, whose rise to fame, fortune and regret is told in interludes between pieces of the Symphony's story.

Emily St. John Mandel (The Lola Quartet) uses the before-and-after timeline to place modern life under a microscope while painting an unromantic vision of a future without modern advancements. Humanity here is neither blameless nor in control: the collapse snuck up on them. Incisive, suspenseful and peopled with meticulously detailed characters, this stunner will leave readers prickling with dread but also breathless with wonder. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

The title The Children Act refers to the 1989 British law providing for government intervention in situations where parental ability or conviction threaten to harm a child. Ian McEwan (Atonement) uses it to frame a character-driven story about the consequences of unspoken intentions.

At 59, Fiona May is at the height of her career. She's a highly respected judge specializing in family law, particularly in cases complicated by religion. She is famous for a ruling in favor of separating conjoined infants who would otherwise both have died to ensure one would survive, against the wishes of the parents and the Catholic Church. Her decision haunts her despite the resulting acclaim. She has just seen the case of Adam, a lovely and gifted Jehovah's Witness, just shy of legal adulthood, who is dying of leukemia. For reasons of faith, Adam and his parents refuse the blood transfusions needed to save his life. In crisis, she visits the hospitalized Adam to assess the clarity of his wishes. Can Fiona overrule a boy's choice, which is based on his sincere belief? Can a teenager know what he really wants? She has withdrawn into the details of the case when her husband, Jack, shocks her with his threat to embark on an affair in reaction to their sterile marriage.

McEwan seems less interested in exactly how Fiona will decide her case or whether her marriage will survive; instead, The Children Act derives its power from the character's infinitely varied and intimately observed emotional responses--encompassing anger, grief, hope, joy and fear--to love offered or withdrawn. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue published 50 novels and 150 short stories in his lifetime, though few have been translated into English. Pushkin Press aims to introduce Inoue to a broader audience, first with the Akutagawa Prize-winning The Bullfight and now The Hunting Gun, Inoue's debut novella from 1949.

The story revolves around a tragic love triangle and is narrated by a writer who authored a prose poem called "The Hunting Gun" for a Japanese hunting magazine. The poem describes a lonely gentleman's hike to Mount Amagi; his shotgun "leaves the imprint of its creeping weight on the middle-aged man, on his solitary spirit, on his body, all the while radiating an oddly bloody beauty of a sort you will never see when its sights are trained upon a living thing." Soon after publication, the subject of the poem, Misugi Jōsuke, writes to the narrator to explain his emotional state. Misugi encloses three letters: one from Midori, his silent and resentful wife who knows he's having an affair; one from Saiko, Midori's sister and the woman at the heart of the triangle; and one from Shōko, Saiko's daughter and Misugi's niece, who discovers her mother's infidelity in a diary.

His sorrow and emptiness is exposed in nuanced layers; the shotgun represents the destructive coldness to which the relationships descend and a snake--"each of us has a snake living inside"--represents the secrets threatening to ruin these intertwined lives. The Hunting Gun retains a timeless and universal relevance, reflecting on the delicate balance that truth, love and death play in all human relationships. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

A single, 34-year-old man with an aversion and allergy to cats is forced to find homes for six precious felines in The Christmas Cat, a heartwarming novel by Melody Carlson (The Christmas Dog). Garrison Brown--trying to build a new life in Seattle after spending nine years doing missionary work in Uganda, battling malaria and nursing a broken heart--receives word, near Christmas, that his widowed grandmother has died of a heart attack.

Summoned to Vancouver, Wash., to settle her affairs, Garrison is surprised to learn that his frugal Gram--who raised him after his parents died in a car crash when he was 12--left behind her house, fully paid off, along with a substantial nest egg. Before Garrison can claim his inheritance, however, he is designated as "the keeper of the cats," responsible for following Gram's detailed, stringent criteria to match each of her six very different kitties with a compatible new owner. Once Garrison can prove each cat is happily settled, the selected adoptive families will each receive $10,000. Where does this leave Garrison--especially with his ill feelings about felines? And just how can he sort the suitable prospective pet-lovers from the opportunists looking for quick cash?

What ensues is a lighthearted story of Garrison's reconnection to his old neighborhood, his interactions with strangers who may become friends--or even something more--and his rekindling of old hopes and dreams. Carlson, prolific in feel-good, faith-based fiction, once again delivers an affirming tale brimming with compassion and charm. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Charlotte Alton may seem like a well-bred London socialite, but her alter ego, Karla, operates in the shadows, gathering information that can be used for deadly purposes but also for good. While at the opera one evening, Charlotte sees a man she helped disappear eight years ago--a man she never thought she'd see again. Simon Johanssen is a killer for hire who was forced to go underground when a job went wrong.

Johanssen has returned to take a new assignment, but he needs Karla's help--to break into a prison to kill a woman. Karla arranges the necessary paperwork and gets him admitted as a convicted double murderer after she warns him that the man who wanted him dead eight years ago is incarcerated at the same prison.

Karla digs further into the identity of Johanssen's target and discovers no record of the female prisoner or her supposedly horrific crime. Fearing Johanssen has walked into a trap, Karla gives orders to her colleagues to pull him out... and is told he can't be found anywhere.

Helen Giltrow's debut novel, The Distance, has many threads with multiple narrators, and nothing can be taken at face value since most of the characters mistrust each other. Johanssen's determination to finish the job--despite the sadistic treatment he suffers, the lack of information about his target and Karla's repeated attempts to get him to abort--seems unreasonable if not foolish at first, but his commitment helps bring about a satisfying ending to this brutal thriller. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

"Our relationship with nature is evolving, rapidly but incrementally," writes Diane Ackerman, "and at times so subtly that we don't perceive the sonic booms, literally or metaphorically." In this thought-provoking analysis of our connection to the earth, Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife) moves from the macro--the global climate, in its current state of flux--to the micro--the new discoveries in science and biology that are redefining how we perceive our own bodies. While talk of climate change, the increase in extreme storms around the world and rising sea levels is not new, Ackerman brings clarity and insight to these subjects, presenting scientific material with an easily understood conversational tone and making the "planetary chaos that threatens our well-being" seem less dire.

Ackerman discusses the way humans have interfered with the natural order of predator and prey by introducing nonnative plants and animals to different environments, creating imbalances that have cost millions to try to correct. Turning to the inner world of the human body, she illuminates how scientists have crossed cellular boundaries to examine the tiniest microbes and molecules that might influence not only our immune systems but our relationships and career choices as well. Ackerman examines concepts that verge on science fiction, such as the newest prototypes in biochemistry and 3-D printing--labs are currently "printing" spare ears using living cells as the medium, and future possibilities include producing functioning kidneys and other organs. The Human Age is a lens that magnifies and clarifies the fascinating, far-reaching effects humans have had on our planet and ourselves. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

The first book of Saeed Jones's poetry, Prelude to Bruise, reads with astonishing momentum and tenacity, a lyrical torch thrust into shadows and silence to illuminate pain from a history of wounds. "And his darkness/ mistakes me/ for sunrise," he writes in "He Thinks He Can Leave Me." Jones writes often about Boy, whose body reveals truths--about himself and about the outside world--that are dangerous in their acute honesty. He wears dresses, so many dresses, and is met with violence and desire, sometimes as one and the same. In the devastating "Body & Kentucky Bourbon," Jones is loath "to realize you drank/ so you could face me the morning after." Here and again Jones pulls taut the recurring tension of "boy" and "body," a mere letter to distinguish them. Later, in "History, According to Boy," this defining letter--D--stands in for the first willing object of Boy's desire.

Orbiting, interrupting, intersecting and converging upon these intimate moments are wars and news stories: a drowning New Orleans, a burning Paris. A throbbing dance floor welcomes his trysts in "Ketamine & Company" and leads into the staccato blows of "Thralldom II": "Good hurt, hurts good, his lap, smack./ Fishnets, lips pursed, knife wound--red. First pose, third pose, head thrown/ back." Queerness, blackness, violence, resilience, longing and sex roil over every exquisite syllable. Prelude to Bruise proclaims "if you ever find me,/ I won't be there" with the same electrical charge as Audre Lorde announcing, "I am deliberate and afraid of nothing." Saeed Jones's kinetic, shining prelude is one hell of a beginning. -- Dave Wheeler, publishing assistant, Shelf Awareness

Series editor David Lehman offers up his 27th sterling anthology of Best American Poetry with this year's guest editor, Terrance Hayes, who Lehman says has undertaken his daunting task with vigor and inventiveness. Hayes's introduction is in the form of a playful, fictitious conversation between himself and Charles Kinbote (the fictional narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire). Besides commenting on some poems in the collection, the witty banter touches on a key matter Lehman also addresses: is there too much poetry? Does anyone care about or buy it? Hayes's 75 choices--"gifts"--salute the form and, he hopes, transform the reader.

Many are marked by literary inventiveness: prose poems, ad hoc forms, a "script" poem, poems displaying a swashbuckling use of form and meter. Hayes has chosen poems by established and emerging poets, even some poems he "literally" can't understand--Rae Armantrout's "Control" or Kiki Petrosino's "Story Problem"--but loves the "hunch" each sparks. There's even an irreverent piece from the cutting-room floor that he sneaks in via his introduction, Alan Dugan's "Priapus": "I am the only man in the world/ because I have no t*ts."

The surprises continue with Sherman Alexie's prose poem "Sonnet, with Pride"; Jon Sands's fragment-filled piece about Trayvon Martin, "Decoded"; and Rita Dove's "The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude." Patricia Lockwood's controversial and lengthy high-wire act, "Rape Joke," puzzles, jokes and shocks: "The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry."

Enjoy, and be transformed. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

How do you top the star attraction of the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, the Eiffel Tower? That is the burning question for George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. in this picture book, which packs suspense and information in a story about the race to mount a showstopper for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Ferris, an "ambitious" mechanical engineer based in Pittsburgh, had designed some of the U.S.'s biggest bridges and tunnels. When he presents his idea "for a structure that would dazzle and move" to the construction chief of the World's Fair, the man tells George his structure is "so flimsy it would collapse." Finally, with "no star attraction," and only four months to the fair's opening, the judges go with George's "far-fetched idea," but offer him no money to build it. Kathryn Gibbs Davis takes readers through "one of the most brutally cold winters" in Chicago history, as Ferris breaks ground and races against time to build his giant wheel.

Davis peppers the story with tantalizing facts: the workers hit solid ground at 35 feet down and lower a 70-ton axle into the ground. The structure measured 834 feet in circumference and rose 265 feet above the ground. It cost 50¢ per ride. Gilbert Ford's palette of predominantly reds, blues and purples evokes the freezing temperatures, and his artwork nicely balances the human and mechanical developments. The illustration of the riders rising up on "the Queen of the Midway," erupts into full color in celebration of their endless view. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Katherine Rundell (Rooftoppers) once again demonstrates her ability to weave a story with a strong, determined female character.

Wilhelmina Silver has grown up the daughter of an English caretaker on a farm in Zimbabwe. On the farm, Will developed a talent for making friends with both humans and animals. She liked to be dusty and wet ("Dust and rain made mud. Mud was full of possibilities"). Will and her best friend, Simon ("a stretched-catapult of a boy, the scourge of the stables"), go on daily adventures with monkeys, horses and other animals. When her father dies, Captain Browne, the owner of the farm, is convinced by his new wife that it's not a proper place for a girl and Will is sent off to the Leewood School in London. Her parting from Captain Browne (and Simon) will break readers' hearts. At school, Will can't make sense of her new surroundings or the rituals ("where girls sat two by two in rows of spite"). She runs away, using her skills to navigate London, and makes a new friend. Eventually, she finds herself back at school, learning to build a bridge between her life in Zimbabwe and her new life in London.

Rundell's storytelling is magical. She creates a feisty, resilient female character who could have walked right out of a Dickens novel. This one's for readers who appreciate the classic elements of storytelling with a twist. --Susannah Richards, associate professor, Eastern Connecticut State University