Emma Hooper's debut novel opens with Etta's note to her husband notifying him, "I've never seen the water, so I've gone there." Otto checks their globe and calculates Etta will have to traverse 3,232 kilometers--from the interior of Saskatchewan to Halifax, Nova Scotia--to see the Atlantic. "I will try to remember to come back," the note concludes. Thus begins the remarkable trek of 83-year-old Etta, whose journey advances in chapters alternating with the stories of the three best friends from childhood: Etta, Otto and their lifelong friend Russell. James, the fourth in the eponymous quartet, joins Etta as a most unlikely traveling companion.

Russell, an only child, preferred the bustling farm of Otto and his 13 siblings. Etta became their teacher at Gopherlands School at 18; World War II erupted as the boys reached draft age. Russell was deferred and remained behind, hoping to romance Etta, but her wartime correspondence with Otto led to marriage.

Now, decades later, Otto accepts Etta's journey but denies her wish to keep it a secret. When Russell discovers she's gone, he strikes out to find her and make sure she's safe. Both men act on their lifelong love for Etta, but her walking partner, James, is the surprising catalyst for Etta's reflections.

Hooper's prose--as spare as the Canadian plains, as rich as her unassuming characters--is slyly touched with the fantastical. Letters and flashbacks reveal striking histories, and the endearing protagonists embark on bold, out-of-character adventures in a style that recalls The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

French border guard Romain Puertolas's debut novel, about a con artist whose adventures kick into high gear when he inadvertently locks himself in an Ikea wardrobe, topped France's bestseller lists when it was published in 2014. This picaresque caper, which delights in puns while satirizing consumerism and the capriciousness of the immigration system, will also win over American readers.

Ajatashatru Oghash Rathod, from a remote Indian village, is on a long-dreamt-of trip to Ikea in Paris to purchase a Hertsyörbåk bed (read that name out loud) and a free stay in one of its irresistible micro-apartments. Here he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Marie and later accidentally locks himself into a wardrobe bound for England. Once in London, he is caught by immigration officials and sent to Barcelona. He escapes and, by way of a circuitous route through Vienna, Tripoli and other cities, eventually returns to Paris and (he hopes) Marie, ready for an honest life.

The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe is a manic fairy tale peppered with wry observations and social criticism from a faux-naïve protagonist whose outsider eyes focus on the absurdities of consumer culture and regressive immigration policies. Puertolas's targets tend toward the obvious and his humor is usually slapstick, which could appeal to some older teen readers. Driven largely by a series of absurd situations that lead to an inevitable end, it charms with its exuberance and satirical sensibility. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Almost a year earlier, in New York, emotionally distant patriarch Han Tang died suddenly. His deep reticence led his widow, Ling, and children, Emily and Michael, on lifelong paths of isolation and disconnection. In gentle, somber prose, Wendy Lee (Happy Family) relates each family member's attempt to come to terms with Han's legacy. Ling, terrified to move on and deepen a burgeoning relationship with a widower, cannot bring herself even to mow the green ocean of her backyard, a task Han assiduously completed each week. Emily, an immigration lawyer, succumbs to the emotional toll of her work when confronted with a case that reminds her too much of her dad, and Michael, perhaps the most scarred of all, is compelled to abscond from his rundown Manhattan apartment and visit a remote part of China when he finds a letter addressed to Han from an old friend who is offering forgiveness.

Across a Green Ocean introduces strongly defined characters, each haunted in vivid ways. Michael was caught by his father while exploring his nascent homosexuality and has remained largely closeted ever since. Han's pained remark--"You are my punishment. You are what I deserve"--defines both father and son in tangled, complex ways.

The descriptions of both rural and urban China and their residents are particularly engaging, depicting the country with equanimity and fascinating details based on Lee's years living there. One character remarks that "even when they dance disco, the Chinese like to be unified." Through this moving exploration of heritage, Michael can begin to reconcile with the memory of his father. --Evan M. Anderson, collection development librarian, Kirkendall Public Library, Ankeny, Iowa

Angelina Mirabella's debut novel, The Sweetheart, opens with an older woman's reflections, then quickly flashes back to 1953 Philadelphia. Leonie Putzkammer is an awkward, bookish teen with no self-confidence, despite a figure her peers would kill for and some tumbling skills left over from gymnastics. When she is recruited to attend Joe Pospisil's School for Lady Grappling in Florida, a star-struck Leonie is sure everything will change. She gains a tag-team partner, Screaming Mimi, and a boyfriend, Spider, as well as an intimidating coach. Soon she is assigned a new name, Gwen Davies--later, Gorgeous Gwen Davies and, finally, the Sweetheart.

Many readers will sympathize with the older protagonist when she addresses her younger self: "What you have wanted more than anything was change... but the idea that the old life would no longer be waiting here for you is hard to accept." The heart of this story addresses questions of autonomy, self-determination and regret: how to become someone different without entirely losing your past, how to recover from making the wrong choices or even how to tell when you have made wrong choices. Told from an unusual retrospective second-person perspective and perfectly evoking 1950s culture, The Sweetheart is often hilarious but also filled with the wholly realistic yearnings and heartbreak of young-adult reinvention, and is peopled by familiar, sympathetic characters. Mirabella's impressive debut offers laughter, tears, failure, redemption, striving, success and a sweetheart we can't help but love. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

At the start of British author Tina Seskis's debut novel, One Step Too Far, a married lawyer named Emily Coleman is running away from her family and establishing a new identity as the single Catherine "Cat" Brown, who lives in a hovel with a gaggle of roommates. Her personality and wardrobe get a complete makeover, as does her career. She lands a job answering phones at an ad agency and works her way up to account manager within nine months. Her success is tempered, however, by the dreaded anniversary of the event that sent her on the run. Can she keep up her façade as the date approaches, or will her new life unravel under the strain of her secret?

Seskis slowly doles out the details surrounding the darkness in Emily's past while keeping momentum, showing the devastation Emily's husband experiences as she tries to forget him, and moving back and forth in time to delve into Emily's family history. Frances, Andrew and Caroline--her mother, father and sister--are all flawed and often unlikable, but they are well-fleshed-out characters with clear and plausible motivations who make no excuses for their bad behavior.

The novel is touted as a psychological thriller with a shocking twist. It's more accurate to say One Step Too Far is a study of a dysfunctional family; rather than a twist, the end is an explanation of Emily's behavior that will leave readers feeling gut-punched. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

In 1928, T.E. Lawrence wrote to a friend: "Woe's me, I suppose I'll never dig again." British journalist Anthony Sattin (The Gates of Africa) tells the story of Lawrence's happiest years as a field archeologist before World War I, and the experiences that motivated his later career.

Lawrence was an obsessive, adventurous, romantic boy who loved to test his physical limits. He was fascinated by history and artifacts, cycling all over England to collect brass rubbings, plucking antiquities from construction sites, and touring France by bicycle. In 1909, as an Oxford undergraduate, he traveled to the Middle East to study architecture. While walking 30 miles a day in the summer heat and staying in the houses of Arabs and expatriates, he fell in love with the land and the people. When he graduated, he joined the excavation at Carchemish, where, despite clashes with his compatriots and local officials, he enjoyed some of the most rewarding work of his life and developed close relationships with the villagers, including a teenager nicknamed Dahoum who would become one of the most emotionally powerful figures in Lawrence's life.

Sattin has traveled extensively in the places he writes about here, and his passion for that part of the world mirrors Lawrence's. He fills The Young T.E. Lawrence with dramatic beauty, vivid characters and memorable anecdotes drawn from the letters and writings of Lawrence and his contemporaries. This is a sensitive portrait of a secretive legendary man whose favorite years were not the ones that gave him fame. --Sara Catterall

In 1828, Franz Schubert, one of Vienna's most celebrated composers, wrote a cycle of songs called Winterreise, or Winter Journey, the lyrics of which are taken from a poem written by Wilhelm Müller. Ideally performed in one sitting, this 70-minute cycle has since become one of the world's most significant musical pieces for a male soloist. In Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge, an English tenor, takes readers through Winterreise, examining each of the 24 songs.

Bostridge himself has sung Winterreise for 30 years, and he believes what Schubert accomplished is as worthy of praise and study as works by Shakespeare and Dante. In his own time, Schubert enjoyed a renown not known to many composers; but when he first performed Winterreise at an intimate gathering of friends, the reception was middling. The piece marked a departure from Schubert's previous compositions, and he focused on it with a single-minded passion, convinced even his reluctant first audience would come to love it as his best work.

Bostridge dissects and explains each song in depth, providing detailed historical, biographical and cultural backgrounds through which readers may come to understand them better. He captures how, and in many instances why, Winterreise is a singular work that has a profound effect on audiences even today. Whether explaining what the music is designed to do, and its various effects, or recalling his own experiences performing it, Bostridge shows, in a book that is just as captivating, how psychologically, emotionally and physically thrilling the composition is. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

Historian Jenny Uglow (The Pinecone) describes In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 as "a crowd biography." For much of her career, Uglow has looked at the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the lens of individual lives. Here she offers a broader account of how the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars affected those who remained at home. The big names of British history--William Pitt and William Cobbett, Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen--appear in their proper places. But Uglow focuses on less-celebrated lives in all levels of society, from factory boy to aristocratic lady, as recorded in letters, memoirs, diaries and parish records.

In These Times is not another "day in the life" historical text. Instead, Uglow looks at how 22 years of constant warfare shaped society in fundamental ways. She not only describes direct effects of war, such as enlistment practices and the economic impact of government military contracts, but also places events that are normally described in terms of their domestic impact (such as the social disruption of the Industrial Revolution) within the context of war. She looks at newspaper distribution, shoe manufacturing, the relationship between war loans and private banking and the ethical dilemmas of Quaker gun manufacturers.

Depicting a society in which war is as pervasive as bad weather, Uglow's book combines social and military history in a manner that will appeal to readers of both. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Initially, readers may wish Lentil Underground were a memoir--Liz Carlisle boasts degrees from prestigious schools and is an accomplished country singer-songwriter who has opened for Travis Tritt, LeAnn Rimes and Sugarland. However, the inspiration for her agricultural exploration Lentil Underground struck when Carlisle was crisscrossing the United States, singing about rural America. As her fans described their lives, she realized she had been "lying" about the romantic agrarian life: "Big Food had all of middle America fooled into thinking that their folksy branded products were the protectors of the family farm and its wholesome values.... Farming had become a grueling industrial occupation, squeezed between the corporations that sold farmers their chemicals and the corporations that bought their grain." Carlisle decided to take a break from touring and tell the real story of farming in America instead.

She soon learned about a true hero's journey: Dave Oien from Conrad, Mont., revolutionized the farming practices of his home state with the use of legumes, which she calls the "Robin Hood of the dryland prairie" because they turn atmospheric nitrogen into rich fertilized soil and are remarkably drought resistant. Oien and a small group of committed neighbors created Timeless Seeds in 1987, a revolutionary organization that began as an experiment and became a million-dollar enterprise with products on the shelves of Whole Foods and on the tables of first-class restaurants. In Carlisle's capable hands, this story of how a few renegade farmers bucked the prevailing culture of Big Ag is riveting and inspiring. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

George O'Connor zeroes in on the god of War and the tensions between Zeus and his children in this seventh action-packed installment of his Olympians series.

He first contrasts Athena--a strategist of war, "of training realized and wisdom applied," rendered in  a calming gray-blue palette that matches her cloak--with Ares, motivated by bloodlust and attired in sanguine vestments. However, both siblings come off as warmongers here, as O'Connor chronicles the events leading to the fall of Troy. The author-artist first flashes back to the beauty contest in Aphrodite, in which she promised Paris, prince of Troy, the hand of Helen, queen of Sparta, if he selected Aphrodite over both Athena and Hera as most beautiful. His choice made him no friends among the other gods. After Aphrodite interferes in a duel between Paris and Menelaus, king of Troy and Helen's husband, all of the gods pile on, playing out their own personal conflicts on the poor mortals' battlefield. (O'Connor brilliantly draws enemy lines around a kind of game table in Olympus, exhibiting a mock-up of Troy.) After Thetis begs an apathetic Zeus to spare her son, Achilles, she then appeals to Hephaistos, husband to Aphrodite, who gives her impenetrable armor, and also (in a dramatic sequence of panels) bests Scamander, god of the river of Troy, on behalf of Achilles.

In the kind of surprise twist that characterizes this outstanding series, O'Connor does not make the entrance of the Trojan Horse his climax. Rather, he concludes with a thought-provoking scene between Zeus and Ares. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Selina Alko (B Is for Brooklyn) recounts the landmark 1967 case Loving v. Virginia as a quest by two people who want to raise their interracial family in their hometown of Central Point, Va., where their marriage is "unlawful."

Alko frames complex themes in the simplest terms. "Donald, Peggy, and Sidney had two parents who loved them, and who loved each other," she begins. Gouache and acrylic paints depict the swirling grays of their front stoop, a heart-colored pink door, and the three siblings playing with toys as their parents' watch. Collage elements depict music wafting from inside, accompanied by birds and butterflies. Husband-and-wife team Selina Alko and Sean Qualls (Dizzy) convey the bond between Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving in every composition, from that opening family portrait to the final image when they've won their case. Even as the artists introduce them--he's "a fair-skinned boy who got quickly sunburned in July," and she has "skin a creamy caramel"--their individual portraits are two in a town "where people every shade from the color of chamomile tea to summer midnight made their homes."

Aware that they couldn't be legally married in Virginia, Loving and Jeter wed in Washington, D.C., then returned to Virginia to make their home. They were soon arrested. A series of collage spreads chart their progress through the U.S. Supreme Court Building and, full circle, with the family reunited on the stoop where they started, "Happily (and legally!) ever after." In this uplifting tale, love truly conquers all. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness