A familiar cringe may occur when reading Paul Theroux's sprawling family drama Mother Land. The well-known author of both fiction (The Mosquito Coast) and travelogue nonfiction (Deep South) delivers what is perhaps his most personal novel: an engrossing, emotionally tangled and often merciless examination of family and self.

Theroux builds his characters around the seasons of their Cape Cod hometown, including seven bickering siblings, a bemused father and, at the center of it all, a scheming matriarch, who is simply referred to as "Mother." From the onset, it's clear this New England family is unwieldy and dysfunctional, characterized by "a noiseless bewilderment and uncertainty, the vibrant presence of low-pitched rivalries." These muted tensions break open in adulthood as the brothers and sisters try to escape the grasp of family life. Nowhere is this break more painfully clear than when the narrator--a writer who bears a striking resemblance to Theroux--has one of his books ripped apart in a review written by his own brother Floyd, a poet and professor.

The hostility is rendered with Theroux's trademark perceptiveness, if a bit more bitterly here than in other works. There are times he exhausts his own conceits, such as the comparisons of Mother to a cold-blooded queen or his siblings to feuding tribes-people, but mostly his prose succeeds. It excels when evoking the setting and weather. With painterly effect, he ties the Cape's harsh winters, muddy springs and splendid summers to the changing moods of his characters' relationships. Mother Land is a bittersweet, brutally frank family saga that offers enough redemption to make the journey worth it. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author

Thirty-year-old Eleanor Oliphant is a creature of habit who keeps to herself. Plagued with a facial scar and often donning white gloves to conceal flares of psoriasis, the bright, articulate yet lowly office worker lives alone in a small Glasgow flat. She has managed to survive and circumvent the horrors of her early life--including stints in foster care--by taking comfort in books, doing crossword puzzles, watching the BBC, having a weekly chat with her cruel and demeaning "Mummy" and indulging in vodka on a regular basis. When Eleanor develops a crush--from afar--on a singer in a local rock band, she embarks on a self-improvement crusade that includes hilarious firsts in bikini waxing, manicures and becoming techno-literate in computers and smartphones. Along the way of her transformation, she crosses paths with warmhearted Raymond, who works in the IT department of her company. As the two are leaving the office one day, they stop to help an elderly man who has collapsed in the street. This simple act upends Eleanor's life in enlightening and challenging ways.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman's intriguing, hopeful first novel, explores the power of kindness and how unexpected friendships can liberate lives. Eleanor's lovable, eccentric and original narrative voice is entrancing. It draws readers fully into her damaged, unconventional psyche as she is forced to deal with a deeply repressed past and come to grips with who she is, and who she'd like to be. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Michelle Gable (A Paris Apartment; I'll See You in Paris) turns to Nantucket in The Book of Summer. Bess Codman, whose marriage has disintegrated in San Francisco, is heading back to Massachusetts to pry (hopefully) her stubborn mother, Cissy, out of the family's summer home before it kills her. The bluff beneath Cliff House is crumbling away; the swimming pool and lawn are gone, as is half of the back veranda. Cissy refuses to leave the house, however, insisting she'll find a way to save it.

As she tries to cajole her mother into packing, Bess comes across "The Book of Summer"--a combination guestbook and diary that her great-grandmother started when the house was built 99 years earlier. As Bess pages through the entries, she discovers that history has repeated itself quite often, with her grandmother Ruby, Cissy and herself facing similar predicaments in life and love.

Alternating primarily between the story of Bess in the present and Ruby during World War II, The Book of Summer is delightful. The three main women in the story are quirky creatures with major differences, but their family bond shines through, making this a charming, profane, funny and touching read. Spitfire Cissy, the middle generation, has a lot to teach her mother and her daughter, even if the lessons aren't easy. A perfect book to bring to the beach, Michelle Gable's fourth novel is sure to appeal to readers of Elin Hilderbrand and Kristan Higgins. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Thriller writer Joseph Kanon (Leaving Berlin) infiltrates period and locale as if he were an experienced spy, and Defectors nimbly captures an era: Moscow at the peak of the Cold War, where a turncoat CIA agent has lived for 12 years under the watchful eye of the KGB.

Defector Frank Weeks was big news when he slipped out of the United States in 1949, a rising star of the new CIA, exposed as a Communist spy. He escaped Hoover and treason charges, but left his family behind--including his brother, Simon, who worked for the State Department and unwittingly fed Frank intelligence information. With a traitorous brother, Simon had to resign from State and join his father-in-law's publishing company. Twelve years later, the publisher pays the Russians for access to Frank, and Simon travels to Moscow as editor of Frank's memoirs. The CIA has conceded to freedom of the press, but is monitoring the project.

Simon's anxieties are substantial and the brothers' reunion is infused with intrigue. Who is Frank now, and can he be trusted? Will his wife, once close to Simon, confide in him? Frank's associate Boris is always within earshot, though his role remains unclear to Simon. An American reporter shows up attempting to discover the truth about a nuclear scientist's sudden death in the dacha next to Frank's. Simon is on guard, but is unprepared for Frank's announcement: he's orchestrating a defection back to the U.S. Soon Simon is a player in Frank's plan, a race involving the CIA, the KGB, deceit, high-speed car chases and a heartbreaking truth. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

You Belong to Me is steeped in the stewpot of Colin Harrison's New York City--each of its chapters is titled with a location described as a local might, e.g., Chapter 1: "West Forty-Ninth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues." "Crime novel" is perhaps too restrictive a label for Harrison's story of money, power, sex and the obsession to possess--both objects (rare maps) and people (spouses, family and friends).

Twice-divorced and in his 50s, with "some money but not big money... rumpled and wrinkled, his best years already behind him," Paul Reeves runs a lucrative boutique immigration law firm and collects old maps of New York City--a long-sought 1766 Stassen-Ratzer is on the market for the first time. His neighbors in his high-rise apartment building are 32-year-old Iranian American financier Ahmed Mehraz and his trophy wife, Jennifer. When former baseball phenom Billy Wilkerson arrives to rekindle the passionate romance he had with "Jenny" in their late teens and to take her back to Texas, her comfortable marriage begins to unravel. Who better to turn to for help than her quiet, reliable neighbor Paul? With Paul competing with another mysterious bidder to lock up the Stassen-Ratzer purchase, and concealing Jennifer and Billy's affair to avoid Ahmed's network of mercenary operatives, You Belong to Me ratchets up the action and intrigue.

Harrison loads his New York City fiction with historical, geographical and ephemeral background, but the city's underbelly of violence and menace is never far away. You Belong to Me is a solid addition to what has become Colin Harrison's own particular brand of New York City noir. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Reflecting on dozens of wedding toasts she's heard over the years, Ada Calhoun (St. Marks Is Dead) writes, "Finding something new or helpful to say about marriage feels borderline impossible." Where unspoken rules dictate that wedding toasts focus on the happily-ever-afters of marriage, however, the essays in Calhoun's collection, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, don't conform to that. That's precisely why Calhoun succeeds in doing what she calls impossible: writing about modern marriage in ways that are new or helpful (or both).

With humor and remarkable candor, Calhoun writes about "soul mates," infidelity, what it takes to stay married and what staying offers in return. Much of her writing is based on her own experiences, which makes the collection intimate and heartfelt (though it also means much of the focus is on straight marriages). Combining the personal with thoughts from priests, therapists, literature, friends and family, Calhoun considers big catastrophes and small moments of joy in equal measure--an accurate reflection of the ups and downs and day-to-day routines that make up any marriage.

Calhoun was once told, "We have to hold so many realities at once: here's me, here's you, here's us, here's the rest of the world." The essays in Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give offer insight into Calhoun's realities: herself, her husband, her marriage. And in exploring how those pieces fit into the rest of the world, Calhoun's essays will prove meaningful for any who have chosen to walk down the aisle--for better and worse. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski (Romanticism: A German Affair) achieves serious artistic and intellectual heights in his epic biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Translated into English by David Dollenmayer, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is an amazingly detailed and comprehensive study of the 18th-century playwright, poet and novelist often considered "the Shakespeare of German literature." Safranski supplements his scholarship with Goethe's own words, including excerpts from his autobiography, letters to friends and family, and various poems. He expertly layers exegesis of Goethe's major works with biographical and historical exposition, resulting in a thorough understanding of Goethe's development as an artist and thinker. The curve of this development is striking in the way it belies popular conceptions of Goethe, who's often seen as a pioneer of Romanticism. Safranski reveals a writer of great emotion and genius tempered by skepticism and introspection, who slowly turns away from the sentimentalism of his age and toward the quieter revelations of the natural sciences. Safranski devotes as much time to Goethe's scientific treatise Theory of Colors as he does to Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Goethe: Life as a Work of Art also succeeds on another level. Safranski, who has written biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, uses Goethe's life to explore and expound on a number of philosophical ideas and aesthetic theories. "Everyone must sense and find their own God, which means nothing more than grasping the guiding principle of their life," he writes after paraphrasing Goethe's conception of divinity. In this way, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art transcends biography and becomes a compelling overview of German philosophy. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author

When science journalist David Baron (The Beast in the Garden) viewed a total solar eclipse for the first time, he was surprised by his passionate response. "For three glorious minutes... my consciousness departed the earth and I gaped at an alien sky." That experience made him a devoted eclipse chaser, and eventually led him to the story of the eclipse that was visible from the United States' Wild West in 1878.

In the late 19th century, eclipses were not only a rare spectacle, but an exceptional opportunity for American astronomers, too. They could study the bodies of the solar system and the chemical composition of the sun, and prove themselves the scientific equals of their European counterparts. Congress reluctantly funded an expedition, and independent teams as well as mobs of tourists swarmed west for the great 175-second (or less) event. Baron builds his story around three vivid figures: young Thomas Edison, who assembled a "tasimeter" to measure the heat of the stars; Maria Mitchell, an adored astronomy professor at Vassar College who headed an all-woman team; and James Craig Watson, a competitive, unscrupulous astronomer who had discovered a record number of asteroids.

Baron mingles the excitement, aspiration and drama of these events with a good dose of technical information and scientific history. Archival photos, sketches and prints are scattered throughout the pages. This is a wonderful, dramatic piece of scientific history, and a fine companion for eclipses to come. --Sara Catterall

Sadie Sullivan begins the summer before senior year with low expectations. All her friends have graduated and gone off to camp jobs and vacations, leaving her behind with the "gadflies," her name for girls who "hung around like insects, buzzing in tightly drawn circles, gossiping and side whispering and basically being petty, drama-slinging troublemakers." Her plans are to work at a farmstand near her Long Island, N.Y., home and mope. But on her second day, she saves a baby from a drunk and unhinged man, getting badly beaten in the process. A bystander captures the incident on a phone, and the rest is viral YouTube history. At a Homegrown Hero luncheon Sadie meets four other "heroes." The five instantly develop an easy friendship, in spite of socioeconomic, ethnic and cultural differences, and soon are planning ways to right some wrongs in their community and beyond. They start by posting positive messages on a blog set up by an unpopular boy, countering the cruel ones that online trolls have left. An unexpected windfall for Sadie, bequeathed by an elderly man who witnessed the farmstand attack, ups the ante for the five, who call themselves The Unlikelies. But can money and positive messages really solve all the problems of troubled people?

Carrie Firestone (The Loose Ends List) weaves together humanitarianism, friendship, love, heartbreak and good old-fashioned summertime fun in her exquisite novel. The Unlikelies are sweet, sharp-witted and authentic, and their do-good instincts are never mawkish or saccharine, whether they're addressing body shamers or drug addicts. Odds that this will be a YA favorite? Likely. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

Rickety Stitch lives in a world of imps, unicorns and gnomes, but as a skeleton with a soul, he's the odd one out. Other skeletons are passive "workin' machines," but he's prone to dozing off, cracking wise and "inciting a mutiny with song and dance." After these and other bad habits lead Rickety Stitch and his friend the Gelatinous Goo to be unceremoniously fired from their job at Subterranean Pits and Lairs LLC, they begin a quest to find out who Rickety was when he was alive. With little to go on but vague scraps of music, Rickety and Gooey are thrust into the vivacious and unruly world of Eem in search of Epoli, a place they know only through Rickety's dreams.

Ben Costa and James Parks have been creating Eem together for years online, and their solid world-building strengthens every panel of Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo. Though Costa's full-color, jaunty illustrations may appeal to younger readers, due to a healthy dose of cartoon violence and adult humor ("I still have, like, six days of PTO left"), the book is definitely meant for teens and adults. The goofy jokes leavened with existential musings recall Terry Pratchett and Patricia Wrede, and well-read fans of fantasy will appreciate the loving homage to the genre. "You are someone, Rickety Stitch. That much I know," the skeleton is told toward the end of the story--Rickety and his readers will have to wait for the second installment to find out who. --Stephanie Anderson, assistant director for public services, Darien Library (Conn.)