Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano again journeys through nostalgia and lost youth. Villa Triste ("Sad House") portrays the lies people tell themselves and the ones they love. Fans of Modiano's previous work will find the same haunting quality to this novel, translated into English by John Cullen.

Alone in a vacation spot on the French-Swiss border, Modiano's narrator encounters an old friend, Meinthe, from his previous stay in the town. When visiting as a young man, he fell in with Meinthe and Yvonne Jacquet, two bohemians who had never left their idyllic hometown. Looking back to his youth, the narrator relates his intrusion into their lives, and how his need for growth eventually led to a reckoning with their passive ways.

As in many of Modiano's novels, the narrator's motives remain mostly secret, but his urge to remake himself is the clear defining force for the narrative. Arriving in town under an assumed name, he presents himself as a count, and ultimately cannot stay in the easy existence Yvonne and Meinthe have created for themselves, all too aware of how fragile it is. With the layers of secrecy surrounding each character, the reader must always peer through the narrative at what their aims truly are. Villa Triste is like a mystery with no solution; the enigma of the major characters provides enough tension to pull the story along, finally ending where it began, with the narrator looking back. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

Hot Little Hands, the debut short story collection from Abigail Ulman, concerns young women and girls at tipping points. In "Same Old Same As," Ramona struggles to discern whether she experienced what her therapist vaguely refers to as "abuse." In "Chagall's Wife," Sascha flirts with her lonely teacher; in "The Pretty One," Claire near-obsessively pursues a beautiful, much younger man. The stories are often about either clinging desperately to youth or falling into maturity, although their themes are subtle and hidden beneath slice-of-life exteriors. The vague melancholy of growing up has hardly gone unexamined in fiction, but Ulman's millennial take is genuinely insightful. She seems to have a particular grasp of the way technology and postindustrial society hurriedly rush girls out of childhood, and then trap women in an odd liminal state between adolescence and adulthood.

Ulman, an Australian, also has a soft spot for women caught between worlds--minorities, immigrants and expatriates. "Jewish History" features a young Russian girl struggling to fit her family's history of struggle into the accepted narrative of persecution shared by her Jewish Australian classmates. Another Russian protagonist in "Warm Ups"--the stories in the collection are very loosely interconnected--is a 13-year-old girl taking advantage of a gymnastics event to travel to the United States. Ulman portrays her characters as unknowingly determining their places in the world, and she manages to depict this process absent self-seriousness and with a healthy dose of wry humor. Hot Little Hands is the rare collection that portrays how life pivots around mundane moments as readily as earth-shaking events. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Blues musician Cory Beth Ainsworth has always known that her mama, Laura Berry, spent one wild, glamorous year as a backup singer for Elvis. Known as "Honey" during her brief singing career, Laura was at Graceland the night Elvis died. She returned home to South Carolina, married her high school sweetheart and settled down to raise her daughter. But after Laura's death, Honey discovers a vintage Stutz Blackhawk in her stepfather's shed: a mint-condition car that clearly belonged to the King himself. Fueled by a need to delve into her own history and discover how it might be bound up with Elvis's story, Cory takes to the road, retracing Laura's journey in the opposite direction. In her fourth novel, Last Ride to Graceland, Kim Wright follows Cory's circuitous and illuminating pilgrimage from Beaufort, S.C., to Memphis, through the key places of her mother's life.

Wright (The Unexpected Waltz) tells her story in both Cory's and Laura's voices, shifting back and forth between 1977 and the present day. Several characters--Laura's sweetheart Bradley, her fellow backup singer and friend Marilee--appear in both narratives, with different aspects of their characters highlighted through Laura's and Cory's eyes. Elvis himself, both the man and the myth, is also a prominent figure, as flawed and human as any of Wright's less famous characters.

With a tone as Southern as its geography, Last Ride to Graceland is a treat for readers who love the King, enjoy a good family saga or long for the open road. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

It's a universally considered premise: What would have happened if we made different choices in life? In her first novel, The One That Got Away, Leigh Himes humorously unravels the ramifications of such a possibility for Abbey Lahey, a 20-something, stressed wife and "suburban sweatpant mom" of two. Abbey's fraught, middle-class Philadelphia life includes a muffin top; a job in public relations that demands as much attention as her five-year-old bedwetting daughter; a rambunctious toddler of a son; an out-of-work husband, Jimmy; and stacks of unpaid bills.

When Abbey sets off to Nordstrom to return a $598 designer pocketbook to ease the strain on the family bank account and pay for running water and pediatrician co-pays, she falls over the side of an escalator en route to customer service. Blacking out, she suffers a head injury and wakes to someone else's life: Abbey van Holt, the wife of rich, handsome and well-connected Alexander van Holt, who's running for Congress. Abbey and Alex met years before; she considered him "the one that got away." With Abbey suddenly entrenched in an alternate reality of plastic surgery corrections to her former bodily flaws, lavish privilege and high society life--with problems of its own, including the pitfalls of politics and a meddlesome mother-in-law--the culture shock ultimately offers a renewed sense of perspective and unexpected appreciation for her once ordinary, however challenged, middle-class life. Himes's well-constructed comic novel adds thought-provoking depth to a charming be-careful-what-you-wish-for story. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Remember the Ladies, Gina Mulligan's debut novel, focuses on Amelia Cooke, a savvy lobbyist working for the National Women's Suffrage Association, starting in 1887, and takes its title from Abigail Adams's letter to her husband, John, as he was drafting the Declaration of Independence. But the accounts of backroom bargaining and legislators' vote swapping in Washington, D.C., remain topical in the 21st century.

After losing her parents at four, Amelia honed her survival skills in a Montana orphanage. Aged out at 18, she labored in an Arkansas cotton mill, where a brash speech for workers' rights earned her a dismissal and a path to Washington. She cajoled a prominent lobbyist into mentoring her and, after a decade, became a formidable political player. Not above using a strategically angled hat or a demure deference, lovely Amelia was well aware of the drawbacks and advantages of her gender.

As a neophyte, Amelia had a brief affair with a dashing young legislator; years later, when Amelia needed the now-powerful senator's vote, his pledge to keep women "in the bedroom and out of the voting room" hurt her cause and underscored her personal vulnerability. His anti-suffragist political finagling spelled defeat for the 19th Amendment, which didn't pass until 1920, long after Amelia left Washington.

By limiting her scope to the suffrage movement, Gina Mulligan strengthens her story; she mentions the recent Civil War, threats to develop Yellowstone commercially, the "greedy steel industry," styles and trends, but focuses on Amelia and her work for the vote. An entertaining character study of a strong woman, Remember the Ladies also reminds us to appreciate the right to vote. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Abi and Lucy were identical twins, and then a tragic accident took Lucy's life. In the aftermath, Abi struggles to comprehend and adjust to her sister's death, facing survivor's guilt and sister-lookalikes around every bend. When by chance she meets Beatrice, who bears a striking resemblance to Lucy, Abi is eager to enter her privileged circle of friends, and is even happier when she meets Beatrice's brother, Ben. But when she fails to notice the peculiarities that suddenly surround her--the loss of some of Lucy's letters and hostile messages--Abi is forced to question reality and her sanity.

In this gripping psychological debut, Claire Douglas has braided the concept of twins with that of friendship into a taut line that fills each page with tension. Almost every character plays twisted mind games, and readers gain insight into them through the viewpoints of Abi and Beatrice, both of whom vie for Ben's affection in a jealousy-laced, push-me-pull-you game of one-upmanship.

While descriptions of fashion, art and architecture root this manipulative cerebral game of chess in Bath, England, Douglas also uses interesting imagery to help portray events and emotions. She writes, "Returning to my cold, empty flat after the warmth, noise and babble of Beatrice's vibrant house makes me feel like a dog that's been banished from its family home to a kennel in the garden."

Humming with anxiety and friction, The Sisters keep readers guessing as to who is doing what to whom until the very end. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Behind every family recipe is a revelatory story. Helene An's involves a privileged upbringing in Vietnam before the war, the hardship and sacrifice she experienced as a refugee settling in San Francisco, her work as an accountant by day and running her mother-in-law's Italian deli by night. Slowly, An made her mark on the deli, tossing in a favorite dish from her beloved Vietnam here and there until the Italian deli became Thanh Long, and a restaurant empire transformed An into the grand dame of Vietnamese fine dining.

In Vietnamese, Ăn means "to eat," and the joy and love of eating permeates the pages of this cookbook. Co-authored by An's daughter Jacqueline, it includes classic Vietnamese comfort foods like homemade beef pho, bánh mi and lemongrass beef vermicelli. They add fusion twists to turn an ordinary dish into something otherworldly--mouth-watering pork chops, for instance, with caramel marmalade, or Mongolian fried chicken. Tidbits of Vietnamese history and culture, too, provide context for recipes. While the lengthy ingredient lists, multi-step preparations and slightly unwieldy organization (recipes for pho appear near the beginning, but the recipe for broth is in the appendix) may prove challenging for the novice cook, the reward for those willing to follow through is a delightful explosion of flavors. A friendly primer of herbs, pantry ingredients, tools and methods helps steer home cooks through the more involved processes.

At its very heart, Vietnamese cuisine is sensual and elegant, and who better to present its seductive powers than the first ladies of Vietnamese fine dining? --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Joe Gould is best known through two profile pieces Joseph Mitchell wrote for the New Yorker. In 1942, Mitchell introduced a harmless eccentric engrossed in writing "The Oral History of Our Time"--at some nine million words, supposedly the longest unpublished work in history. In the second piece, in 1964, Gould (then deceased) is a dirty, sinister man, and Mitchell asserts that there had never been any such manuscript. Jill Lepore (a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of numerous works of nonfiction), like so many before her, was intrigued. Was there an oral history, or wasn't there? Who was Gould, really?

Joe Gould's Teeth is a biography of Gould, a study of the record he left behind and the story of Lepore's search. Gould was a graphomaniac; his written legacy includes letters, diaries, essays, ramblings but rather little oral history. Lepore seeks the mythical manuscript, but finds the mystery of a man. She describes herself as stumbling, falling into the "chasm" of Gould, who claimed to be "left-handed in both hands" and whose thinking was "sticky" with details. She follows him through archives and memories, and into his obsession with African-American sculptor Augusta Savage. Savage, as a secondary character, is more sympathetic (and sane), and possibly more enigmatic than Gould.

Lepore's contribution to this undeniably riveting story lies in her research, but even more in her wise, nuanced telling. Joe Gould was a genius, a madman, destitute, beloved of e.e. cummings and Ezra Pound, by turns likable and malicious. Joe Gould's Teeth is an astonishing, wide-ranging and thoroughly enthralling work of history. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

"Why is the sky blue?" "How does a boat float?" "Why can't I jump as high as this house?" In the big and bold picture book Professor Astro Cat's Atomic Adventure, by the creators of Professor Astro Cat's Frontiers of Space, the blue feline Professor shows young readers how "physics is all around us, all the time!" His enthusiasm is catching.

In colorful, energetic double-page spreads with headlines such as "Gravity," "The Scientific Method," "Measurement," "A World of Atoms," "Newton's Laws," "Electricity," "Magnetism," "Sound Waves" and "The Science of Light," Professor Astro Cat breaks the basics of physics into small, enticing tidbits, presented in clear, conversational style: "If there was no gravity on Earth then we would all float around, which would make it difficult to eat and drink or see our friends" and "I use kinetic energy when I judo chop super villains."

Mind-bending facts are sure to inspire torrents of "did you knows." Readers will learn why humans float better in salty seawater, how everyone is "hurtling through space at colossal speeds" (even while seated in a nice comfy chair), what lightning is, how the Earth is a giant magnet, why things cast shadows, and that the word physics comes from the Greek physis, which means nature. Each spread bubbles over with cartoonish mini-dramas, instructive graphics and punchy captions that illuminate physical concepts. The groaners ("Elementary, My Dear Atom!") make this entertaining primer all that much more endearing. As Professor Astro Cat says, "Knowledge Awaits!" --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness