A sense of doom permeates Andrew Michael Hurley's debut novel from the start. Is it the reference to the bones of a baby discovered at the Loney, a part of the Lancashire coastline, or because Smith, the narrator, lets slip that his parish priest has recently died under mysterious circumstances? Is it his devoutly Catholic mother's rigid overemphasis on ritual, or the secret quarantine room his family discovers in the Moorings, a rental property on the coast? Whatever it is, the menace that pervades Hurley's novel hangs over the Loney itself as Smith and his family visit the strange area on their annual Easter pilgrimage to find a miracle cure for Hanny, his disabled brother.

After establishing this unspoken air of menace, Hurley moves The Loney backward and forward in time, weaving Smith's recollections of his childhood as an altar boy, memories of past visits to the Loney, and strange moments surrounding the Moorings' history into the story of Smith's final pilgrimage. The slow, creeping nature of the plot gives Hurley room to explore questions of faith and doubt.

"It's funny, int it?" asks one of the Loney townsfolk. "How you church people can have more faith in something that can't be proved than something that's standing right in front of you? I suppose it comes down to seeing what you want to see, dunt it?" The Loney offers a story of things seen and proved and then things unseen and unproved--and what happens when one boy's memories live between the two. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Fans of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or his many works for children might be startled by The Pier Falls--it's as far away from a children's book as one could get. A collection of short stories that begins with a minute-by-minute breakdown of a fatal disaster, The Pier Falls takes a series of cold, hard looks at the darkness in human existence.

Haddon's goal here is not to provide comfort or distraction, but to plunge readers into the most uncomfortable aspects of life. In the aforementioned opening story, an unnamed narrator watches as dozens of people fall to their deaths when a pier on the English coast collapses. Another tale imagines a doomed group of astronauts, set to live the rest of their days on Mars with no hope of rescue. Another follows a similar band of explorers in an unnamed jungle as nature takes them, one by one.

It would be easy to write off The Pier Falls as a nihilistic slog, but that's a reductive criticism. Yes, the book is emotionally brutal, and most certainly nihilistic. But, like the provocative films of directors Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, it is a masterful look into how easily what little meaning we have can be destroyed. It will probably make readers squirm as they consider their own lives, but isn't that what good art should do? --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

Julian Barnes (Keeping an Eye Open) is the author of more than 25 books, many of them novels based on historical figures and events. With The Noise of Time, Barnes has created a brief, beautifully structured and moving work that improvises on the tragic life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Shostakovich survived by placating authorities "who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges." During Stalin's Great Terror, he was denounced in a Pravda editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music." He was reprieved by his interrogator's execution, but was never able to work freely again--"From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened, and those who were dead." Truth is hard to come by under totalitarian rule, and Barnes mirrors this in his mingling of fiction with historical facts and versions of facts, viewed through the prism of his sensitive, neurotic and brilliant protagonist's mind.

To contain all this passion and mortal insecurity, Barnes has built his novel almost like a symphony. There are three parts, each involving transportation (an elevator, an airplane, a chauffeured car), each opening with a version of the sentence: "All he knew was that this was the worst time." Barnes introduces recurring phrases and themes, developing and interweaving them with ever-deepening complexity and resonance. The whole is framed by an incident involving three characters who, stepping briefly outside their lives onto a train station platform, accidentally create a triad by clinking vodka glasses, "a sound that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything." --Sara Catterall

Ronnie Black denied involvement, but the people of Goldengate, Ill., horrified at what happened out at Della Black's trailer, are eager to assign blame. In the taut, suspenseful Late One Night, Lee Martin (The Bright Forever; Such a Life) reveals the consequences of a rash act and its impact on a community, infusing his characters with anger and guilt, regret and compassion.

In this one-main-street Plains town, folks have known each other for generations. When Ronnie and Della got into a "snort and holler" right in the sundries store, neighbors heard, and when Ronnie left Della and their seven kids for Brandi, they gossiped. So everybody wondered: Was Ronnie guilty of setting the fire that trapped Della and their three youngest children that blustery January night? Martin parcels out hints to the mystery, but life in Goldengate goes on, and his characters develop as they react. Crotchety neighbor Shooter Rowe thinks ill of Ronnie, but Captain, his disabled son, adores him. Godparents Missy and Pat seek custody of the surviving children, but Missy frets that she's misjudged Ronnie. Brandi, pregnant with Ronnie's baby, desperately believes he's innocent. Even Ronnie, despite evidence implicating him, evokes sympathy.

The blacktop road leading to the trailer in a barren cornfield, wisps of snow snaking across the road, the blue-gray winter skies evoke the spare Goldengate life and the town's sorrow. But redemption comes with forgiveness and generosity, and "a chance to do something good, to let people know they weren't alone." In the end, Martin's story inspires hope. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Sofie Sarenbrant, well known in Sweden for her series of mystery novels starring Emma Sköld, has now been translated into English for the first time. As Killer Deal begins, Detective Emma Sköld is pregnant, and trying to overcome horrible morning sickness in order to continue working.

Emma and her partner are called to investigate a murder in an upscale Stockholm suburb. The day after an open house, the owner of the home is found murdered. The real estate agent who held the open house swore that she checked the house thoroughly before leaving, so Emma's suspicions quickly fall upon the victim's wife, Cornelia--until another shocking murder occurs at a different open house, turning Emma's theory upside-down.

Interspersed with the investigation are the details of Emma's tumultuous personal life, which ends up entangled with Cornelia's, because Cornelia turns out to be a friend of Emma's sister Josefin. The complicated dynamics involved in investigating her sister's friend for murder make Killer Deal particularly compelling, while the situations the characters are dealing with will be all too familiar to anyone who's ever been pregnant or who has waited impatiently for their house to sell.

Killer Deal makes a great entry point for those unfamiliar with Swedish crime novels, and is sure to lead readers to authors like Henning Mankell and Kjell Eriksson. This entertaining blend of family drama, murder and real estate is reminiscent of Camilla Läckberg's mystery novels, and will hold any crime-loving reader's interest; they'll eagerly await the next Sofie Sarenbrant to be translated. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

The Mercy Journals by Claudia Casper (The Reconstruction) opens with a statement that the pages of this book are taken from two journals discovered in 2072 and reproduced here with only minor copyediting. The author of these journals, Allen Levy Quincy, writes to forget his past. He seeks oblivion in whatever form it comes, eager to escape the memories that keep his mind in near hysteria. At first, Allen writes little that is personal. He explains that nearly four billion people have died due to catastrophic climate change; following this mass die-out and global government collapse, an emergency government called OneWorld was formed. Both benevolent and autocratic, OneWorld enforces severe measures for humanity's survival, but can't dispel the tension between the old world's promise of prosperity and the new world's uncertainty.

After an encounter with a woman named Ruby, Allen's emotional defenses begin to fail. His journal pages become more intimate as he shares his own story. When his estranged brother, Leo, appears after many years and proposes the two of them go to Allen's cabin in the woods, he wants to turn Leo away. But the promise of connection draws Allen out of his carefully structured life and into a journey he hesitates to take. His struggle to heal after his traumatic time in the military, to find a purpose in life beyond survival, makes him a compelling character. Through the distressed voice of Allen, Casper creates a dystopian future that appears uncomfortably familiar as it echoes our own fears for the future. -–Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

World Fantasy Award winner Guy Gavriel Kay (River of Stars, Ysabel) is known for boundary-pushing, genre-defying stories set in fictional realms that borrow from real historical periods. In Children of Earth and Sky, he brings readers into a richly layered and detailed world inspired by Renaissance Europe. Through the main characters, who include Danica, a pirate set on revenge, two spies--the elderly Faleri and young Leonora, passing as a physician's wife--and Marin, the youngest son of a wealthy merchant, Kay explores themes of family and power and independence. His empathic style allows his diverse cast of characters to become fully realized and complicated, and he deftly incorporates places and people from his other novels.

Danica dreams of retribution against those who killed her family, but an incident during a shipboard raid forces her to leave Senjan for Dubrava's hostile court life. Leonora, who desired freedom so much she agreed to spy for Seressa, a foreign government, finds her own position jeopardized when her escort is killed in the raid. Along with others, they try to navigate an unpredictable political landscape. At times the narrator is all-seeing, foreshadowing events with a knowing phrase or insinuation. Kay moves between this omniscient voice and the intimate point of view of a single character. The rhythm of these subtle shifts pulls the story along at a rousing pace. Kay's writing is so wise, knowing and beautifully arranged that readers will be left feeling drunk on its poetic richness and thrilled with the repeated discoveries of how each character's narrative influences the others. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

Julie M. Fenster's history of the Louisiana Purchase is a kind of history of the United States as we know it today. Jefferson's America: The President, the Purchase and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation reveals that the Louisiana Purchase not only shaped the country's physical border, it redefined America's cultural identity.

Fenster recounts an episode when a small band of explorers is traveling up the Ouachita River in 1804; one of them falls overboard at night and is never seen again. She perfectly captures the moment's gravity: "He was one of the many who went into the West, sooner or later to be enveloped by it." The event is even more telling because, as Jefferson's America explains, the death happened at the same time a handful of other expeditions were headed up newly acquired rivers in the territory--including the famed Lewis and Clark party.

Thomas Jefferson, through both diplomacy and espionage, acquired the yet-unexplored tract of land west of the Mississippi, but no one knew what to do with it. The Spanish had mismanaged it, the French had taken it, then Jefferson saw an opportunity. It wasn't until he sent countless explorers into the endless plains that he discovered what he had. Through a cast of characters that includes notables from Meriwether Lewis to Napoleon Bonaparte, Fenster shows us the moment a haphazard land dispute became the United States's future. --Josh Potter

When Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was living in Paris, he used to gaze down onto the bustling street from his studio window and wonder why he persisted in painting pictures of cloth-draped figures and ancient wars and not "the beauty of the passing moment."

In the splendid picture book What Degas Saw by Samantha Friedman (Matisse's Garden), visions of the caped Degas on his Parisian wanderings--from laundries to theaters--are deftly captured in "aquatint etchings" by Italian illustrator Cristina Pieropan, then juxtaposed with reproductions of the artist's actual paintings. This is a rare opportunity for readers to see an artist's close observation and creative interpretation at work. Degas loved to watch people: "We are made to look at each other, don't you think?" At the Opera House, "dancers performed glorious ballets on the wide wooden stage." Here, several of Degas's ballet paintings, such as Pas battu, are reproduced, with brief descriptions of the fleeting moment the artist caught, "like the moment at the peak of a ballerina's jump...." Pieropan's illustrations--expansive, richly textured, full-bleed spreads, detailed in careful, fine lines--are lovely. Her beautiful rendering of the dancers backstage, "[a] quieter kind of dance," is followed by one of Degas's paintings, Frieze of Dancers, showing ballerinas tying the ribbons of their slippers.

Friedman's text, artful and elegant, is perfectly choreographed with the artwork and design. The author finds just the right words for Degas's impulse to "try to describe the city's push and pull, its run and jump, its lean and stretch." A work of art. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Award-winning writer Sarah Weeks (Pie; So B. It) and India-born debut author Gita Varadarajan present a poignant, comical cultural exchange in the alternating voices of two fifth-grade boys.

Joe Sylvester has been living in the same New Jersey town, going to the same school and hanging out with the same two buddies most of his life. Until he isn't. Over the summer, his only friends moved away, which means Joe is starting the new year alone. Worse still, his mother is the new cafeteria monitor, and her public air kisses are almost enough to make him lose his ever-voracious appetite. Two things remain the same: his Auditory Processing Disorder and his bullying nemesis, Dillon Samreen.

Enter Ravi Suryanarayanan, for whom absolutely nothing is the same. He's recently arrived from Bangalore, India, where he was a star student and athlete.  Here, his new teacher misunderstands his fluent English just because he's lacking a New Jersey accent. Ravi initially scorns Joe, "the big white kid with yellow hair," who he thinks tripped him, while he waits to become best pals with manipulative Dillon, who keeps winking and smiling at him.

Over a single school week, Joe and Ravi overcome many false starts and decipher mixed signals to understand finally that they just might become the best of buddies. Blue M&Ms and leeches prove to be remarkably effective bonding agents indeed. Rollicking humor aside, Save Me a Seat is an affecting, compassionate reminder to look beyond assumptions and discover true friendship. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon