Alabama novelist and historian Winston Groom (Forrest Gump) combines his love of history with a mature talent for well-paced storytelling in El Paso. Set along the United States/Mexican border in the early 20th century, El Paso is the saga of a Boston railroad baron's financial slide as he tries to save his family's business and its vast cattle ranch in the state of Chihuahua in the face of the nascent uprising of Mexico's populist revolution. Pitting the fictional John "Colonel" Shaughnessy and his adopted orphan son, Arthur, against the popular Mexican bandit Pancho Villa, El Paso has the drama, coincidence and class intrigue of Dickens's Great Expectations in a setting reminiscent of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. Reflecting the historical zeitgeist, Groom scatters archival tidbits throughout his story--the engineering of single-wing airplanes, railroad technology and economics, Aztec mysticism and the Colonel's political nemeses: "the infernal federal income tax, Mexico, socialism, unionism, anarchism, trustbustingism, notions of alcohol prohibition and women's suffrage."

In Groom's capable hands, this history mixes easily into what is at its core a story of family, class warfare, loyalty and the violence of revolution. It is the story of the United States on the cusp of world dominance, with themes of immigration, wealth, self-determination and entitlement balanced against a strong sense of compassion and fairness. The nexus is the border city of El Paso. In Groom's imagined history, both sides of the Rio Grande have their dangers and rewards. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

What does a restless, middle-aged wife and mother--a graphic artist and renowned animator of a legendary cartoon--have in common with a Catholic-turned-atheist hand surgeon to the stars; a makeup-wearing third grader named Timby, who got his name from an autocorrect spelling of the name Timothy; a frustrated poet who works at Costco; and a dog named Yo-Yo? They are the cast of quirky characters created by Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette?) in her comic third novel, Today Will Be Different.

Semple sets Today Will Be Different in the supposed "least religious city in America," Seattle, where scatterbrained, middle-aged Eleanor Flood--resettled from New York--narrates her angst. She feels stalled in her life, unfulfilled and failing those she loves. She wakes one morning and vows, determinedly, to live in the moment and be her "best self." As on any other day, she makes breakfast for her doctor husband and drops Timby off at his progressive, politically correct elementary school before going to her weekly private poetry lesson. But Eleanor's noble quest to reinvigorate her life goes awry when, during the course of one day, she's faced with a string of mishaps--starting with Timby faking a sickness at school--which snowballs when she comes face-to-face with a former employee, an "ingratiating wannabe... sweaty ass-kisser" she fired 10 years earlier, who is now a famous, accomplished artist.

With a strong narrative voice, fast pace and her signature wit, Semple cleverly spins another raucously funny story wound around deeper implications about the unexpected ways life teaches us to find meaning. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Jacob, the aging Arab American poet in The Angel of History, has kept company with death for years, watching every close friend he has known wither away in the AIDS epidemic. Now Death is holding court with Satan and a host of saints in Jacob's San Francisco apartment, the poet's fiendish cat Behemoth their only audience, as Jacob flees in search of his sanity. In the spirit of Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical masterpiece The Master and Margarita, Rabih Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman) conjures an elegiac comedy with aplomb, his incantations rich with sincerity and irreverence.

Born Ya'qub to the young Yemeni maid of a wealthy Lebanese family, the illegitimate child of the couple's son, the poet knows strife from the beginning: seeing his mother degraded in a brothel, being stripped of his dignity by nuns at his Catholic school, his heritage and sexuality stirring hatred in the hearts of Americans. These memories, prompted by Satan, flash through Jacob's mind against his will as he waits to see a psychiatrist.

Alameddine is an entrancing storyteller. As endearing as he is ribald, Jacob is the remnant of a generation lost to illness, shouting at oblivious young gay men, "How can you not know your history... how can you allow the world to forget us... the grand elision of queer history?"--even as he would like nothing more than to unlearn his own painful past. The Angel of History is outstanding, a novel that leaves a lasting mark. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Joe Ide blasts onto the crime fiction scene as one of the most exciting voices in recent years, introducing readers to engaging protagonist Isaiah Quintabe in IQ.

Isaiah may be a high school dropout, but his intelligence is off the charts. He sees details others don't, and uses inductive--the opposite of deductive--reasoning to find missing items or resolve situations for his neighbors in East Long Beach, Calif. At first his clients pay him in food or goods, but as his reputation grows, Isaiah graduates to gigs that pay in money.

His latest client is rap star Black the Knife, real name Calvin Wright, who believes someone is out to kill him. Wright refuses to leave his mansion, while his manager desperately needs the rapper in the studio to finish his latest album. Isaiah is hired to solve the case, to make Wright feel safe going outside again, and discovers there is in fact a killer hunting the artist, one who has chilling methods and has never failed to slay his prey.

Mystery fans should hunt down IQ; Isaiah and his sidekick, Dodson, are a hilarious urban version of Holmes and Watson. One can hear the characters talking in their lively, rhythmic dialogue, and the descriptions paint vivid pictures: "Miss Myra wondered if Ed was auditioning for a part in a movie about rednecks with his Hitler haircut and Mr. Potato Head ears." Besides providing laugh-out-loud moments, the story is also gritty and tragic and melancholy, just like life where IQ lives. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Tana French's sixth novel, The Trespasser, revisits the burgeoning careers of Dublin Murder Squad Detectives Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran, introduced in The Secret Place. As atmospheric and intricate as French's past work, this engrossing mystery succeeds in both style and plot. Fans and new readers alike will be captivated.

Conway and Moran are partners now, and in the opening pages, they are assigned what looks like yet another boring domestic homicide: a beautiful young woman has been killed, apparently in a fit of passion during a romantic dinner at home. A little too perfect, she "looks like Dead Barbie," and her apartment "like it was bought through some Decorate Your Home app." But most disturbingly, Conway is sure she's seen the vic somewhere before. As the case unfolds, the partners find wider-reaching connections than they'd bargained for.

French's fans will recognize the hallmarks of her mystery novels: intense interior struggles; a potent undercurrent of class tensions; a case that appears to have a mind of its own; and a victim whose personality haunts those who are seeking justice. French offers layers of possible betrayal, hypothetical events and convoluted stories, even an upheaval in Conway's private life that echoes an element of the case at hand. More than 400 pages pass by almost without blinking, as The Trespasser's momentum presses forward to a finish that staggers Conway and Moran as much as it does the reader. This is a complex, compulsively readable novel; French keeps getting better and better. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Things That Can and Cannot Be Said is a slim, complicated volume. On its surface, the essay collection offers an account of Edward Snowden's 2014 meeting with John Cusack (star of High Fidelity and board member of the Freedom of Press Foundation), Arundhati Roy (author of The God of Small Things) and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971). Things That Can and Cannot Be Said is less about Snowden's 2013 decision to leak classified NSA data than it is about the context of that decision, offering a statement on the surveillance state as it relates to war and peace in the 21st century.

"Through our conversations," writes Cusack, "I became very aware that what gets lost, or goes unsaid, in most of the debates around surveillance and whistleblowing is a perspective and context from outside the United States and Europe." Cusack's essays set up the need for this context, and Roy provides it with her reflections on her experiences living in India and traveling around the world. The collection bounces back and forth between the works of both writers as it builds to its crescendo: a transcript from their 2014 meeting with Snowden and Ellsberg. "It definitely cannot not be written about... because the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations." Things That Can and Cannot Be Said is an unapologetically radical account of several such real conversations aiming to do just that: inch the world forward. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Veteran Sports Illustrated writer S.L. Price (Pitching Around Fidel; Heart of the Game) captures a microcosm of the 20th-century United States, as the town of Aliquippa, in western Pennsylvania, flooded with people in search of economic opportunity, and the generations that followed discovered the potential jackpot of athletic prowess. Playing Through the Whistle is the rich history of the Poles, Croats, Ukrainians, Serbs, Italians and African Americans who worked in the huge Jones & Laughlin steel mill and played ball for Aliquippa High School. Price takes us through the century's wars; the groundbreaking 1930s labor and 1960s civil rights legislation; and Aliquippa's unparalleled string of National Football League stars, including Mike Ditka, Ty Law, Tony Dorsett, Sean Gilbert and Darrelle Revis. If the growth of Jones & Laughlin created this melting pot, Price suggests, "Sport is where the melt in the pot began."

The "Quips" still play their games in "The Pit," built in 1937 when the town was growing--and it's still "sacred space, a bubble that gang conflict and crime almost never penetrate." But Jones & Laughlin closed the mill in 1988, and Aliquippa is barely holding on with a population now under 10,000 and the possibility of the high school merging with that of a neighboring community. Price dramatically chronicles the town's rise and fall: the early union labor strife, war sacrifices, segregation, race riots, drugs, the economic recession. Through it all, Aliquippa keeps hammering out football stars. Football may be all they have, and the Quips' future NFL aspirants are coached never to give up--to keep playing through the whistle. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

"Every garden plant comes from somewhere. It will have ancestral species growing on a mountainside or deep within a forest, or be part of some great remaining grassland.... But when were these plants introduced into cultivation? Where, when and how did we end up with the range of cultivars we currently have down at the garden centre or nursery?" Noel Kingsbury (New Small Garden) is a British garden designer and the author of many volumes on various aspects of gardening. This is not a book on how to cultivate these plants, but rather an overview of the most widely grown genera of European and U.S. gardens.

He glances at their origins, natural habitats, evolution, ecology, ornamental culinary and medicinal uses, their history of cultivation and their introduction to Europe. More than 130 entries are dedicated to specific genera and a few broader categories, such as asters and ferns. Kingsbury provides a well-organized introduction that also acts as a glossary, laying out his terms and concepts. There is also a long list of recommended further reading organized by author, and (unfortunately) a poorly constructed index. Beautiful color illustrations, many of them full-page, accompany the entries, reproductions of engravings, paintings, prints, photographs and garden catalogue art. Garden Flora is a light, beautifully produced reference work that would make a lovely gift for quick histories of favorite garden plants, or as a jumping-off point for further research. --Sara Catterall

"Grandad promised to take his grandchildren to the park today./ But he needs some help getting ready./ He's lost a few things." It's no wonder that Grandad, a dapper and mustachioed bulldog, has misplaced his socks, shoes, house keys, even his false teeth, because his splendidly overstuffed house is crammed to its lofty ceilings with curiosities, artwork, furniture and collectibles. His two grandpuppies--and by extension, readers--are charged with finding what Grandad has lost, item by item, and this none-too-easy seek-and-find challenge is the core of The Lost House by B.B. Cronin, an award-winning illustrator originally from Dublin, Ireland. Needless to say, the trio never quite makes it to the park.

It's a delight to wander through Grandad's eccentric house of fascinating, slightly insane rooms, from the magenta mezzanine to the shiny red kitchen and green greenhouse. Each gorgeous room and its eclectic contents are all awash in one color, some so neon as to inspire rapid blinking: "In the pink drawing room, there are pairs of galoshes and plenty of glass lamps./ There should also be a pair of Grandad's glasses in here. Where are they?" Readers can flip to the title-page spread to see what each item looks like. Cronin's minimal text is noteworthy, too--lively, often alliterative and occasionally poetic. A glorious world of oddities, sly winks and red herrings, The Lost House is a find. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness