"The freedom is exhilarating. The disappearance of gates is terrifying." In Walking the Dog by composer, writer and director Elizabeth Swados (My Depression), Carleen Kepper is out on parole from a life sentence she received at age 18. She is now 43, with a dog-walking job in downtown Manhattan.

Before prison, Carleen was Ester Rosenthal, a celebrated multimillionaire artistic prodigy and a spoiled uptown drug addict with a love of theft that escalated to a deadly gang heist of a jeweler's truck. The merciless violence of prison exacerbated her mental illness, and a conjugal visit with her ex-husband resulted in a daughter she doesn't know. While in prison, she was forced to make art for others but eventually found a new calling as a gifted dog trainer. "I stayed in the motion of dogs, and I found a permanent boundary between my hellish impulses and what was good for animals." With the help of a glamorous Hebrew tutor, Carleen begins to connect with her mistrustful 11-year-old daughter, both of them lurching between curiosity and revulsion. Clients attempt to befriend her, an old artist friend insists on reconnecting, and she begins to piece together a new life.

Swados is an eloquent, unsentimental writer with a dry, black sense of humor. She has a sharp eye for human and canine character and an excellent sense of dramatic pacing, moving between Carleen's present and past, developing her relationships, unfolding her memories and delusions, exposing deeply layered emotions. This is a rich, complex novel and may be one of the best of the year. --Sara Catterall

Poppy and Winona both loved the golden summers they spent with their grandparents at Butternut Lake when they were kids. But that's about all the two sisters have in common these days. Free spirit Poppy, who's never had a serious job or a stable relationship, suddenly shows up at Win's door one night with a strange man in tow. Uptight Win, who has become a bit of a recluse since her husband passed away and she inherited her grandparents' cottage, is annoyed, but can't turn her sister away.

Over the next few weeks, Win and Poppy will learn some surprising and occasionally shocking truths about each other, as the gentle pace and kind people of Butternut Lake weave their magic again. Along the way, each of them encounters a chance to find love, if they can be brave enough to grasp it and to forget the tragedies of the past.

Mary McNear (Up at Butternut Lake, Butternut Summer) has mastered the art of the quiet romance. With funny characters, a charming Minnesotan setting and a pleasantly predictable plot, The Space Between Sisters will appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah or Susan Wiggs. Those familiar with McNear's Butternut Lake trilogy are sure to be happy revisiting the town's memorable faces and places.

Readers looking forward to making some summer reading memories of their own, or eager to reminisce about the golden summers of their youth, need look no further than The Space Between Sisters. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

After 13 Easy Rawlins mysteries (most recently Rose Gold), Walter Mosley has honed his many characters to a crisp edge. A well-read African American with a taste for jazz and fine clothes, Easy moves just as comfortably in the offices and restaurants of West L.A. as he does in the barbershops and bars of Watts. When useful, he consults with both Ju-Ju seers and high-ranking police friends. As he describes himself, "I'm 90 percent pragmatist and the rest superstition." He also carries a gun.

Charcoal Joe features many of Easy's broad swath of friends, including Raymond "Mouse" Alexander ("one of the most dangerous men alive"); his right hand, Fearless Jones; industry executive Jackson Blue; and LAPD's Melvin Suggs. Mouse asks Easy to take a case helping notoriously powerful criminal Rufus "Charcoal Joe" Tyler. Easy owes Mouse and takes the case even though a bartender friend warns him off: "[Joe] don't play according to our rules.... If you after him--stop. If he want somethin' from you then give it up and move on." Bartenders are rarely wrong. Before long, Easy's persistent digging leads him to mob hitmen, money-laundering schemes and a string of corpses across the sprawl of Los Angeles. More insidious are the racial roadblocks put in his way by low-rent diner servers, high-rise security guards and belligerent traffic cops. He hates it but understands where the prejudice comes from: "I was a black man in a brown suit asking directions that would take me into the middle of a white neighborhood." Charcoal Joe is another winner in Mosley's long string of Easy Rawlins triumphs. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Stand-up comedian, writer and actress Tig Notaro's slim, harrowing and unashamedly emotional memoir, I'm Just a Person, focuses on a series of devastating blows she was dealt over a four-month period in 2012--beginning when she was hospitalized with clostridium difficile colitis (C. diff), a bacterial infection that is often fatal. Days after leaving the hospital, Notaro discovered her mother had fallen, hit her head and was now in a coma, being kept alive just long enough until she and her brother could fly home. A few weeks after the funeral, Notaro was diagnosed with invasive stage II breast cancer and told she needed a double mastectomy.

Nine days after her diagnosis, Notaro (who's appeared on Inside Amy Schumer and Transparent) was back on stage at a comedy club. Instead of doing her familiar material, she decided to talk about her cancer. Fearing it could be her last stand-up, she asked a friend to record it. The next morning, she was trending on Twitter and Rolling Stone magazine wanted to interview her. Comedian Louis C.K. convinced her to sell audio downloads of her show on his popular website. It earned her a Grammy nomination. "I certainly never imagined that success would arrive in tandem with stress, mourning, and a deadly disease," she writes.

Artist Tony Achilles provides excellent illustrations throughout the book, but there are few laughs in Notaro's memoir about grief, mortality and unexpected success. Her writing, however, is so concise, thoughtful and revealing, readers won't miss them any more than they did in Steve Martin's Born Standing Up or Joan Rivers's Enter Talking. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

A history book hits home when it offers judicious research and clear writing, along with a focus on events and people that reflects their own times and resonates in ours. Columbia University social historian Karl Jacoby (Shadows at Dawn) touches all the bases in The Strange Career of William Ellis. Born in 1864 near the end of the Civil War, Ellis was a light-skinned African American slave on a cotton plantation in the small southern Texas town of Victoria. He grew up bilingual in an area where property-owning Mexicans were more accepted than recently emancipated slaves. As an ambitious freedman, Ellis left the fields to work for a small trading company brokering cotton and leather across the Mexican border. He then moved to San Antonio, changed his name to Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, and set up his own business.

Still reeling from war, and absorbing free blacks after slavery's demise, both Mexico and the United States were on the cusp of the Gilded Age when the smooth-talking Ellis parlayed his ambiguous racial and national identity into enough wealth to move to New York to found what would later be recognized as the first African American brokerage on Wall Street. With his "carefully waxed mustache, impeccable tailoring, ostentatious jewelry, and lavish distributions of Cuban cigars and Mexican leatherwork," he could play an aristocratic Mexican, Cuban, African, even Hawaiian as needed to close a lucrative deal. In Ellis's story, Jacoby has found the perfect manifestation of that point in American history when race, language and class evolved to become the complicated issues with which we still struggle today. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Ben Ehrenreich's The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine is a work of journalism written with the lyrical passion of a novelist. For his first nonfiction book, Ehrenreich (The Suitors) spent three years embedded with Palestinian families living in the West Bank. "I do not aspire in these pages to objectivity," he writes, instead invoking "something more modest than objectivity, which is truth." The Way to the Spring is unapologetically on the side of the Palestinian people, marshalling facts, history, anecdote and personal experience in order to persuade the reader to the author's point of view. That does not mean, however, that Ehrenreich's book is interested only in proving rhetorical points. The Way to the Spring functions primarily as an extraordinary love letter to a people that persist.

Ehrenreich has a good eye for the absurdities that emerge under occupation. In one example, he depicts a Palestinian house that was in the path of a wall being built between Israeli and Palestinian sectors. The owner refused to move, and Israeli authorities responded by building both the wall and fencing that left the family "caged in and cut off from the rest of the village."

We get only a peek into the settlers' worldview, however, because Ehrenreich's goal is not objectivity and he doesn't attempt to give anything like equal time. Instead, he analyzes the current situation as seen through Palestinian eyes: the complicated history that leads to the current moment, the hidden mechanisms of subjugation and the vast reserves of hope and bravery that insure the Palestinian people will continue marching to the spring. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

"In any given year, more than 50 million people in this country [the U.S.] have a diagnosable mental illness, and 15 percent of those can be considered seriously mentally ill," writes Lee Gutkind in his introduction. In Show Me All Your Scars, 20 people dealing with mental illness as well as the stigmas, the fears and isolation that go along with such a diagnosis tell their stories. The diseases run the gamut from suicidal depression to bipolar disorder, PTSD and psychosis.

These 20 essays feature vibrant writing that plunges readers deep into the world of the mentally ill. They are not easy to read--descriptions of attempted and successful suicides, of neglect, of cutting of arms and thighs and other compulsive behaviors--yet they are important. Gutkind writes, "I believe that one of the most important tools we have for combating stigma--by making it clear that mental health difficulties are not so unusual, and by fostering empathy and understanding and helping people appreciate others' experiences more fully and compassionately--is telling true stories." These stories place a spotlight on the emotional and physical battles millions with diagnosed mental illness face on a daily basis, allowing readers to gain deeper understanding and empathy about this commonly taboo subject. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

When television writer (30 Rock, The Office) and novelist (How I Became a Famous Novelist) Steve Hely decided to leave Los Angeles to "go south," he didn't mean San Diego or even Cabo. No, this footloose funny guy, who had already circled the globe to write The Ridiculous Race, decided to go all the way south--down through Mexico along the Pacific coast of South America to "the bottom of the Western Hemisphere." With marginal Spanish-language skills ("Immersion is the best way to learn anyway"), Hely flew to Mexico City, spent three days walking in the giant metropolis, flew to Oaxaca to look at Mayan ruins and the "world's widest tree," and that was that for Mexico. His first steps into Central America, however, launched him into the meat of his journey and the serendipitous travel diary he calls The Wonder Trail.

Hely introduces readers to both locals and fellow travelers (like the four Australian vagabonds who take him in as they toot and drink their way across Colombia). He narrates archeological hikes, a boat ride down the Panama Canal, rickety bus travel on precarious mountain switchbacks, surfing the El Salvador coast, sailing to Galápagos, climbing up Machu Picchu and more. While he drops in many historical asides, cocktail napkin maps and background cultural context, there is no attraction here that can't be found in his trusty Lonely Planet guides. Instead, The Wonder Trail is a captivating road trip tale as much about Hely as about the road--even though, at 35, he admits he is on the raggedy edge of being too old for this stuff. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Tricia Springstubb (What Happened on Fox Street; Moonpenny Island) has written a philosophical, often poetic, remarkably spot-on novel about universalities--growing up, family, friendship, honesty, faith, death, time and race--set in the context of the big, important preteen years of a present-day Italian American "skyscraper of a girl," 12-year-old Nella Sabatini.

Until a few years ago, life in Nella's Little Italy neighborhood strolled along steadily: the "Sacred Scent of Doughnuts" from Franny's shop; the familiar cemetery where her dad works; her Catholic school; the clamor of "the barbarians," aka her endless supply of younger brothers; her best-friendship with "secret sister" Angela DeMarco; and her quiet worship of Angela's older brother Anthony. It's third grade when Nella starts questioning everything, especially about right and wrong, good and evil. Can those who do bad things still be good people? Nella's questions about Angela's scary, angry, PTSD-stricken dad take on broader relevance as the girls grow, and grow apart. When Anthony is arrested for killing a black man, Nella's questions about judgment and redemption come even faster and more furious.

Springstubb alternates chapters identified as "now," "then" and a few variations on "What Jeptha A. Stone Would Say if He Could," the latter being the silent orations of a long-dead man in the neighborhood cemetery who watches over all in a blustery, self-righteous and ultimately lovable manner. Nella is authentic as a child who is emerging from her own age of innocence into a world of almost unbearable complexity and ambiguity. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor