The Rib King is every bit as inventive and original as Ladee Hubbard's confident debut, The Talented Ribkins, finding the tragedy and the bitter humor contained within the American obsession with Black iconography. The novel begins in 1914 with Mr. Sitwell, a member of the all-Black staff that holds together a wealthy white family's household as their fortunes fade. The novel's interest in the connection of race and capitalism is evident at the outset, but the book is equally concerned with the ways narratives are shaped to disguise the sins of the past. Mr. Sitwell begins to lose his signature composure when he discovers a book recounting events disturbingly similar to a horrific incident in his childhood. What follows is one of the many unpredictable turns that makes The Rib King such an exciting read.

The second half of the novel picks up years later, when a caricature of Mr. Sitwell known as "The Rib King" has become the face of a wildly successful rib sauce. The "Rib King" iconography is reminiscent of many real-life examples of brands using racist archetypes like Aunt Jemima to sell products. Mr. Sitwell's transformation into caricature has made him an equivocal figure in the Black community. In one scene, a character argues that Sitwell is "just doing what he's got to, to survive," while another responds that "every time somebody acts a fool trying to slip in through a back door it makes it that much harder for all of us...."

That tension--the lack of clear-cut moral choices for people living under such brutal pressure--drives the book, but never resolves into simple dichotomies. Hubbard shows the monstrously strange methods through which a racist corporate world can recast suffering and injustice into profitable icons. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader

The families of Nashville's Belle Meade Boulevard may be fortunate, but as the characters in Ed Tarkington's moving second novel (after Only Love Can Break Your Heart) reveal, money does not buy happiness.

In the prologue of The Fortunate Ones, army officer Charlie Boykin is comforting the family of an Iraq war casualty when a TV bulletin announces the suicide of Tennessee Senator Archer Creigh, and Charlie suddenly dissolves in tears. The novel explores the ties between the two men--Charlie from a poor background and Archer to the manor born--leading to this moment of grief.  

A struggling waitress, single mom Bonnie Boykin arranges a scholarship to Yeatman, "a rich white boys school," according to 13-year-old Charlie's friends. "Big brother" Archer Creigh introduces Charlie to the world of Belle Meade and Southern graciousness. Bonnie is welcomed as well, with far-reaching effects. Charlie has misgivings; he leaves a funeral for a Black friend's grandmother in his old neighborhood to get to a party "surrounded by Confederate flags in a field of drunken white college students." He's seduced by "the bright and beautiful world," but, facing secrets that reveal a darker story, after Yeatman he flees Nashville.

Years later, Archer entreats him to join his campaign. Observing Archer the candidate and his wife, Charlie's old flame, he notes, "I, looking on from afar, their erstwhile friend and confidant, admire them with both ardor and spite."

Through his first-person narration, readers come to a deeper understanding of Charlie's flawed yet noble character, as he struggles with the conflict between privilege and idealism. --Cheryl McKeon, bookseller, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

In a town with "three dozen jobs, give or take," the history of each Madson, Neb., homestead permeates the land and its denizens. Deputy Harley Jensen patrols every night, "absently tick[ing] off names of passing tracts like reading a plat map in an old atlas." The events at his abandoned childhood farmhouse are inescapable, often reflected in the eyes or words of his community, and Harley always speeds past. But as Chris Harding Thornton's dark and brilliant debut, Pickard County Atlas, opens, Harley pulls in and finds Paul Reddick there.

The Reddicks were scarred by a 1960 tragedy that remains part mystery. Paul, then four, remembers his family only as broken. In the 18 years since, he's been involved in numerous violent events and run-ins with Harley, who likens him to a bad penny, though "you turn up often enough--wrong place, wrong time--you seem less like an omen than a reason."  

Thornton immediately sets a country noirish stage, dropping clues that smolder through the pages as she reveals each family's past. Paul's parents are long-divorced and shells of their former selves. Brother Rick is married with a young daughter, his family a tinderbox of desperation. Though the plot appears male-centric, the women are its true, complex heart. Thornton's expert prose and turns of phrase beg for repeat reading ("cooked like those hobos her mother once told her had roasted in a freight car") and the character work is full of depth and detail that astonish; a dazzling display of literary prowess. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

When two awkward teens discover a house at the bottom of a lake, their first date becomes sexually charged at the start of this supernatural thriller by Josh Malerman (Birdbox).

Hoping to get to know one another better, 17-year-olds James and Amelia plan a first date canoeing across a series of small lakes. They paddle, take in the sights, picnic and stumble between what they'd like to say and the fear of being misunderstood. Their stilted banter drops when they notice a graffitied, semi-submerged tunnel that connects to a hidden lake. The couple scrape their canoe through to find a smaller body of water--with a two-story house under the surface. The impossibility of the structure's existence draws them beneath the waves, where they find that, unbelievably, the house is intact. Both feel an ominous presence within the walls, but the fear excites them and they suddenly can't keep their hands off each other. They ignore the hows and whys of their find and the voices in their heads coming from the house. The two return with diving equipment, giving themselves over to whatever supernatural entity is drawing them inside the underwater residence.

Just as A House at the Bottom of a Lake reels in James and Amelia, so will Malerman's writing force readers to plunge the depths of this novel. The author perfectly blends magical realism and abject terror to create "don't go in there!" screaming and "what the hell is that?!" curiosity. House may need multiple readings to peel back all the metaphorical layers packed into this scary story. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer

The World Turned Upside Down is a detailed, deeply researched history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, precisely tracking the complex currents and countercurrents that devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens from 1966 to 1976. The Cultural Revolution is still a highly sensitive topic in China: journalist Yang Jisheng's lengthy book, translated and pared down from its original immensity, was published in Hong Kong and "cannot be legally sold or circulated in mainland China." Indeed, the book presents a highly unflattering picture of Mao Zedong and the ruling "bureaucratic clique" that, from the author's perspective, "won" the Cultural Revolution at a terrible cost to both ordinary citizens and bureaucrats.

While official histories often pin blame for the chaos and destruction on the rebel factions that proliferated during the period, Yang takes a much more top-down view. The World Turned Upside Down shows that the Cultural Revolution began as Mao's attempt to attack his enemies in the bureaucracy and "clear away obstacles for his envisaged paradise." However, the bureaucratic clique fought back, and Mao's calls for continuous revolution were followed by waves of repression in a constant back-and-forth that paralyzed the economy and resulted in terrible violence.

Yang presents facts and mostly lets them speak for themselves, only occasionally dropping in a personal anecdote (Yang was a student in Beijing and participated when the revolution began). Which isn't to say The World Turned Upside Down lacks perspective: Yang's careful accumulation of facts becomes a moral accounting, providing a model for how rigorous scholarship can penetrate ideology and arrive at something like the truth. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine

Except perhaps when the earth shakes, most people don't devote a lot of thought to the ground beneath their feet. That may change for anyone who has the pleasure of reading Simon Winchester's informative and thought-provoking survey Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.

Winchester (Atlantic) admits he became "transfixedly fascinated with the notion of land ownership, and of how such a thing could possibly be," after his first purchase--123 acres of unimproved woodland in upstate New York, in 1999. For all the subject matter his book covers, he is most passionate when it comes to describing how peoples like Native Americans, New Zealand's Maori and Scotland's humble crofters have been ruthlessly ejected from lands they once possessed, though the idea of actual ownership was alien to them. In doing so, he lays bare the injustice of the 1889 Oklahoma land run; the duplicity of the still-disputed Treaty of Waitangi, which established British sovereignty over New Zealand in 1840; and the brutality of the Highland clearances of the 19th century. Winchester is equally instructive when he's describing the massive Dutch project to reclaim land from the North Sea and the catastrophe set off by retired British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe, with his ill-conceived line partitioning India and Pakistan in 1947.

Whether nations, tribes or individuals are coveting it, fighting over it, losing it or gaining it, land will always possess the power to excite the human imagination. One couldn't ask for a more accessible or comprehensive treatment of the subject than Simon Winchester's book. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

In Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It, Brian D. McLaren (A New Kind of Christianity; A Generous Orthodoxy) explores the effects of doubt on faith, and how doubt can be a tool to strengthen one's faith. McLaren, long appreciated by progressive Christians, begins by talking about how threatening doubts can feel to believers, especially those from very conservative communities. As McLaren says, "It's scary to be a sinner falling into the hands of an angry God, but it can be equally scary to be a doubter falling into the hands of angry believers."

McLaren gently guides readers through the four stages of faith development that he has defined: Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity and Harmony. Believers in the first stage, Simplicity, honor being right, and "see dissent as a danger to avoid." As doubt begins to creep in, however, believers cycle through varying mini-stages of Complexity and Perplexity, finally ending with Harmony, which seeks holistic inclusion and sees doubt as necessary.

Although McLaren writes from the Christian tradition, Faith After Doubt has appeal for people of all faiths who have ever doubted the status quo or sought a more inclusive path. His thoughtful analysis of how something as intimidating as doubt can be used for the greater good is encouraging and optimistic. Filled with personal stories about pastors and lay people who have shared their doubts with McLaren, Faith After Doubt is both insightful and anecdotal, drawing in a broad range of readers. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet provides a guide of sorts to the current state of the decades-long debate about climate change, a bitter conflict that pits climate activists against the forces of inaction, and sometimes against each other. Climate scientist Michael E. Mann has been at the forefront of what he calls a war ever since he and his colleagues introduced the influential "Hockey Stick" graph in 1998, demonstrating rapid warming. In the years since, the rules of war have changed, and Mann seeks to offer a suitable battle plan.

As the effects of climate change become increasingly apparent, Mann argues "inactivists" have largely moved from outright climate change denial to more subtle methods. "The forces of denial and delay" have engaged in deflection campaigns, for example, in an attempt to shift responsibility for climate change from corporations to individuals. Inactivists have successfully used online bots, trolls and social media in order to amplify disagreements within the environmental movement. Mann even accuses some activists and writers of playing into the hands of fossil fuel companies and oil-funded governments by engaging in "doomism"--apocalyptic, defeatist rhetoric he finds in books such as The Uninhabitable Earth. Mann makes what could be called a technocratic argument for defeating climate change, standing up for market-based solutions like pricing carbon, which have fallen out of favor in activist circles. Whether or not readers find his arguments persuasive, The New Climate War is an informed, opinionated guide to an ever-changing conflict. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader

Supernatural creatures are hidden in plain sight in B.B. Alston's exhilarating middle-grade fantasy debut.

Thirteen-year-old Amari Peters is obsessed with discovering what happened to her older brother, Quinton. He had been working for a mysterious organization and then he simply disappeared. Amari knows it's possible he's dead, but she refuses to believe Quinton might be gone. Amari's faith is rewarded when she receives a magical briefcase that contains clues about the double life Quinton was leading. Turns out, he was a special agent working on a confidential assignment for the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs, "the link between the known world and the hidden." He has also nominated Amari to attend an elite summer camp that prepares children to become junior agents in the Bureau. Hoping to learn more about her brother's world, Amari attends the camp and is introduced to the paranormal.

The definitive hook of this narrative is Alston's exceptional skill for world building. Humans work alongside mystical beings in bureaucratic departments such as the Department of Supernatural Health, the Department of the Unexplained and the Department of Good Omens and Bad Fortunes. Amari has a practical, non-magical background that provides a realistic undercurrent to the supernatural elements. While the rapid plot pacing at times detracts from the inventive nuances, fans of the Harry Potter series will likely find much to enjoy in Alston's imaginary Bureau, which features significantly more authentic diversity than Rowling's Hogwarts. Amari stumbles into one capricious adventure after another en route to a stunning conclusion that also lays the track for a sequel to this breakout debut. --Rachel Werner, Hugo House and The Loft Literary Center faculty