To enter the world of Cassandra Puffin and Sylvie Furst is to join an uneasy sorority of sniping, snark and impeccable taste. It's an invitation to buoy oneself against reality with beauty. It's not that these privileged women, groomed on Bennington's leafy New England campus, have everything; it's that they expect it, and their plummet to earth takes turns both devastating and delightful.

What John Updike did for the minutiae of men's lives--brand names, domesticity and office trivia--Silver does for the Bennington graduates she follows from Vermont to their apartments in Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Like the spritz of L'air du Temps Cassandra sprays on a letter to her ex, the novel is positively infused with sensory details, mostly in the form of luxurious objects--orange silk scarves tied just so, artisanal oatmeal sprinkled with extra cranberries, Hermès, Italian suede and silk lingerie. To say that Silver steeps the reader in these details is only appropriate, since their cumulative effect is that of a heady brew, permeating the post-grad disasters and discoveries that propel these characters forward. In this way, she asserts that the objects furnishing women's lives can be telling and evocative, important despite and because of their superficiality.

The plot, like life, is a series of episodes, tracing the pair's path from wide-eyed dewiness to urbanity. Even at the novel's close, you'd be hard-pressed to call either protagonist "likable," but it's their tenacity that makes them winsome, two "easy" Bennington girls whose shells have grown just hard enough. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer

The many characters in Annie Liontas's first novel, Let Me Explain You, can't quite explain exactly what's going on. A twice-divorced father of three is convinced he's dying in 10 days; he's not sure how or why, but he knows his death is looming with the same confidence that he knows that his family never respected him and the world will miss him when he's gone.

The novel's perspective shifts from the family's patriarch, Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, to the women in his life who he feels disrespected him, alternating accounts for a story that is equal parts farcical humor and heartbreaking character study. Mavrakis came to the United States from Greece almost three decades before the events of the novel, as a new husband, an abused and forgotten son and a delusional optimist. He's obsessed with the idea that he's too good for Greece and is immediately disappointed that the U.S. isn't good enough for him. When he's finally built a life for himself and realizes he's still unfulfilled, he has a vision of his own death and writes his daughters a letter that tells them all the ways they've managed to ruin him.

Let Me Explain You depicts an immigrant's experience in the U.S. and treats its characters with so much empathy and tenderness that it's hard not to think of the Mavrakis family as any other than the reader's own. Like all families, immigrant or otherwise, the Mavrakises encounter profound struggle, but what marks their true character is the way they navigate it. --Josh Potter

If 20 years of news about the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia into a half dozen ethnically embattled countries is confusing, perhaps Alen Mattich's entertaining first Marko della Torre thriller can help. Set in Croatia just before the U.S.S.R. unraveled and Yugoslavia splintered, Zagreb Cowboy unveils former dictator Tito's infamous federal secret police agency, U.D.B.A. (Yugoslavia's version of the K.G.B.), and the corrupt local cops and bureaucrats of Croatia's capital. Raised in Ohio by his now-deceased American mother and Croatian professor father, della Torre has lived in Zagreb with his father since his 20s and works for the newly established U.D.B.A. internal affairs division. To open doors in his investigations, della Torre finds himself selling classified documents to the powerful Zagreb police Captain Strumbic, who then resells them to add to his illicit wealth. Neither trusts the other, but when one document threatens to expose a secret international sale of weapons-grade nuclear fuel centrifuges, both men find themselves targets of inept Bosnian assassins hired by old-school Belgrade politicos.

Zagreb-born Mattich is a London columnist for the Wall Street Journal with a flair for comic dialogue and an eye for Croatia's "artificially lit, nicotine-tinted wash of concrete tower blocks." He propels his thriller down the dark roads of imploding Yugoslavia and across borders to the wealthy Hampstead parks of London. Della Torre's estranged wife describes him as just "an unreformed Communist, already nostalgic for the days when you could pass a whole leisurely morning queuing up for a loaf of bread." Who needs CNN when Mattich can nail the heart of old Yugoslavia so precisely? --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

On their first visit to the up-and-coming Sussex village of Sanditon, Elizabeth (née Bennet) and Fitzwilliam Darcy are invited to a dinner party. But when their hostess, the wealthy widow Lady Denham, disappears before dinner is even served, the Darcys organize a search while trying to determine who would want to harm Lady Denham. Carrie Bebris (The Deception at Lyme) draws on Jane Austen's final (unfinished) novel for her seventh Mr. & Mrs. Darcy mystery, The Suspicion at Sanditon.

Bebris's setting and characters--Miss Charlotte Heywood, Lady Denham and her young companion, Miss Brereton, the Parker family--are mostly drawn from Austen's Sanditon. The mystery, however, is Bebris's own, and includes several classic elements of gothic fiction: a local ghost story, star-crossed lovers, a mysterious old mansion containing secret passageways. (Austen's heroines--or perhaps the author herself--would approve.) As the Darcys and their fellow guests search for Lady Denham, the other ladies of the party begin to disappear one by one. Concerned for their own safety and that of their new friends, Elizabeth and Darcy must find the culprit before anyone else comes to harm.

Many Austen fans delight in her entertaining minor characters, and Bebris's supporting cast is certainly quirky, though they often tip over into absurdity. Several romantic subplots, including one related to the ghost story, add depth to the narrative. The mystery's solution is a bit far-fetched, but the pleasure of the book--as of any Austen pastiche--lies in the period detail and familiar characters. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Dark Orbit does what good science fiction should do: it tells readers of a distant future in which we see our present.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominee Carolyn Ives Gilman (Ison of the Isles) opens her novel among the Twenty Planets on which humanity lives. Much of space has been explored and colonized, and people are faced with the struggle of finding work and room in their increasingly crowded and governed existence. When an old starship unexpectedly sends a beacon about a new habitable planet, people clamor to be part of the first contact team.

Sara Callicot did not think she would be a part of this group. As an exoethnologist, she negotiates between humans and native inhabitants; however, her fondness for subverting authority, disobeying rules and not doing paperwork (causing her last job to go horribly awry) has left her without the prospect of employment. When an old acquaintance offers her a place aboard the ship going to explore the new planet, she can't refuse the opportunity. While she is trained in making first contact with new populations and life forms, her role abroad the ship is to spy on one of the crew members, Thora Lassiter, an unpredictable woman from an influential family with ties to the trip.

Gilman's characters are delightfully imagined. The cultural wellspring from which Gilman drafts the future of humanity is deep and lush. She delves into thought-provoking speculative science one expects alongside philosophy as ancient as Plato's cave. Dark Orbit is a stimulating and absorbing story. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

By 1206, Temujin had consolidated power over the quarrelsome confederation of tribes on the Mongolian steppe. That year a quriltai, or general assembly of Mongol nobles, named Temujin Genghis Khan, recognizing his sole leadership over a nation of two million nomads. Genghis and his genius generals--including Subedei, the most successful military commander in history--swept into northern China, then home of the Jin dynasty, where they consistently defeated numerically superior forces. Genghis then turned west to the Khwarezmian Empire, whose shah had foolishly executed Genghis's envoys, among other insults. The Mongols made an even greater showing in Khwarezmia, though their treatment of civilians bordered on genocidal (cities that surrendered immediately were spared, the rest were massacred). The Mongol tide continued through Khwarezmia into Eastern Europe, stretching from Poland to Korea at its height under Ogodei, son of Genghis.

Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy by Frank McLynn (Richard and John; Marcus Aurelius) is a staggeringly ambitious biography of history's greatest conqueror and a singularly divisive figure. McLynn treads a fine line between propaganda (like inflated civilian casualties tallied by Genghis's contemporary foes) and recent historical revisionism depicting the Khan as a champion of tolerance and civilization (like in the bestseller Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford), finding a still blood-soaked middle ground between these extremes. Though Mongolian names and Central Asian geographic features may run together after the first hundred pages, Genghis Khan is fascinating enough to appeal to any history fan. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

After 10 months of working as a line cook, Layne Mosler's fantasy of opening her own restaurant fizzled, so she moved to Buenos Aires to follow another passion, the tango. But after one terrible night of dancing, when her partner committed the ultimate insult by abandoning her on the dance floor, Mosler needed solace, which she had always found through good food. She asked her taxi driver about his favorite restaurant and suddenly discovered a new way to learn about a city--through its food as recommended by the local drivers. Inspired by this, she started a blog, the Taxi Gourmet, to document her adventures.

After almost three years in Argentina and running out of tourist visas, she moved to New York, another city of taxis and good food, to continue her experiment. But when drivers there failed to recommend good places, Mosley became a taxi driver to find restaurants on her own, and discovered it was quite different to be behind the wheel in a huge city. Months passed, with Mosler still searching for something intangible. She eventually moved from New York to Berlin and continued interviewing taxi drivers for their restaurant recommendations.

Mosler's memoir is filled with lyrical explanations of dancing the tango in Buenos Aires, mouthwatering descriptions of the many meals she ate in Argentina, New York and Berlin, and humorous moments as passenger and as driver. She skillfully integrates her personal life, full of passions, problems, expectations and disappointments, with brief portrayals of the varied lives of the men and women drivers she met as she explored these three different cities. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

It's not easy growing older, but for Patricia Marx, the decline of the mind provides fodder for a smart, often laugh-out-loud exploration of the human brain--"the three-pound wrinkly glop of glopoplasm in your skull [that] contains about a hundred billion neurons." In Let's Be Less Stupid, Marx--former Saturday Night Live writer, contributor to the New Yorker and the author of Starting from Happy--presents a candid, loosely structured memoir about her four-month mission to understand better and boost her brain, which she claims is, "the size of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's fist, the consistency of flan, and weighs as much as a two-slice toaster." She states, "If you were a plastic surgeon, you'd say my brain needed a facelift."

Marx believes the modern world inundates minds, especially hers, with an overabundance of information--"the shoe size of my ex, the names of Sarah Jessica Parker's children, the calories in cottage cheese"--and, with age, the brain becomes a clogged think tank where "our cerebrums are filled with more facts than are contained in all the editions of Trivial Pursuit." Thus, she sets out to examine and test ways of transforming and rejuvenating her ol' noggin. She offers a trove of neuro-knowledge factoids and clever self-help strategies fortified with statistical data, word problems, quizzes, brainteasers and "Middle-Age Mad Libs"; graphics, doodles, photographs and charts; physical and nutritional enhancements, medical tests and meditations. These accoutrements illustrate, reinforce or dispute theories Marx encounters amid her hilariously sophisticated, often literally mind-boggling, "get-smart" crusade. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Many of Tad Hills's characters make cameos in this humorous approach to the alphabet, starring the beloved canine reader and writer.

With the passion of a convert, Rocket touts the most important tool for reading: learning the ABCs. Each page highlights a different letter in the alphabet, repeated in bold at the start of a string of words: "Rocket finds acorns. Owl draws an angry alligator." On the opposite page, the squirrel from Rocket's 100th Day of School enters with the letter B: "Bella balances on a ball while a big butterfly watches." Owl coaxes a crow to stop cawing by offering it a cookie and a crayon on the next spread, and, with another turn of the page, Emma digs a deep hole in the dirt by the daisies. Even Goose passes through in "the tall green grass." Hills moves between silhouette images (such as Bella before and after playing "in the ivy"--why does it make her itch?), full-spread landscapes of Owl flying kites or with Bella on the beach, and even a vertical view of Bella up in a tree while Rocket, on the ground, "wonders, 'Is it windy up there?' " Yes, xylophone appears for "X" (Bella plays it), and the Little Yellow Bird ends the adventure with "zest and zeal." Hills wraps up with a favorite refrain that Rocket's fans will readily recognize: "Ah, the wondrous, mighty, gorgeous alphabet."

What better teachers could youngsters wish for than Rocket and the Little Yellow Bird to launch their own journeys as readers and writers? --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

A line of animals marching onto an ark on the title page offers a hint of what's to come in Kenneth Steven's clever story involving "a man named Noah."

A bearded man stands under an umbrella, overlooking a valley, as the story starts: "A long, long time ago, not long after the world began, it started to rain." As the rain continues, the man "began to build a lifeboat" and called it "the Ark." Oyvind Torseter's line drawings on a cream-colored background, with a patch of blue to represent sky and a large swath of salmon pink for the interior of the vessel, depict its mammoth size, as Noah saws a plank six stories up. Comic touches include an alligator sporting a backpack, a monkey pulling a suitcase on wheels and Noah with a pea-green tattoo on his left forearm as the passengers arrive. A dog boards last. Several pages in, "Land had long since vanished." Children will pour over the details in Torseter's cutaway view as creatures play cards, a crew member draws a map, and the dog shadows Noah carrying supplies. Twenty days in, the Ark springs a leak, and what do you think is the remedy? (Hint: It answers the title question.) As an extra bonus, Noah needs no dove when he has man's best friend on board to catch a whiff of land.

Whether or not children are familiar with Noah and his Ark, they will clamor for repeated readings of this original retelling that doubles as a pourquoi tale. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness