The heroine of No Such Thing as Monday by Siân Hughes expertly removes laundry stains at the dry cleaners where she works, but it is the memories of her blemished past she can't erase. A poignant, darkly satirical story, Hughes's second novel is set in the heart of contemporary, working-class England and is centered on her narrator's search for the sister who ran away from home in her teens.

Steffie Cartwright grew up near Birmingham, her childhood dominated by a violent bully of a father, Stan. Her mother and older sister, Caroline, bore the brunt of Stan's cruelty while Steffie, his favorite, swallowed her confusion and learned not to peer too closely at the menacing "undercurrent" of family dysfunction.

Steffie is a chain-smoking, prickly, middle-aged woman when the novel opens. She's a master of deadpan humor, her narration spiked with liberal swearing. Stan has just died and this sets off in his daughter a much-delayed reckoning with shame and guilt over not helping Caroline when they were children. It's only by seeking forgiveness from Caroline that Steffie can dismantle her father's horrible legacy. To this end, Steffie steals a posh coat and sets off north in search of a sister who may not want to be found.

Hughes, a poet and Booker Prize-longlisted novelist (Pearl), offers a tender portrayal of Steffie's complexities, both the aching vulnerability of a child who doesn't know "which way was up" and her tough exterior as an adult. No Such Thing as Monday celebrates its heroine's complicated road to redemption even as she accepts that some memories, like old stains, don't ever disappear. --Shahina Piyarali

Immersive, profound, and written with a scalpel's precision, Louise Kennedy's follow-up to her debut novel, Trespasses, has the emotional impact of an imploding star. Set in a small town in Northern Ireland and in London between the 1980s and early 2000s, Stations follows the complicated relationship between teenagers Róisín and Red, whose close connection looms over them even as their paths diverge. Drawn together by their sense of alienation in a town where everyone knows their business, Róisín and Red have a bond deeper and more intense than either friendship or romance. For Róisín, especially, it feels fated. Compelled both by her longing for him and her need to escape the confines of Northern Ireland, Róisín follows Red to London. It is there, in a squalid squat inhabited by several other shiftless drifters, that their relationship begins to fracture as the choices they each make drive them apart. For troubled Red, there is a precipitous fall into drug addiction and homelessness. Róisín, who will ultimately be haunted by her inability to save Red, gradually reconciles with her family and the community she left behind even while toughing it out in a city that seems to reject her.

Kennedy's plot is deceptively simple, a perfect balance for her layered, complex protagonists. Even the characters with only walk-on parts feel fully inhabited, their tragedies, loves, and struggles evoked with such authentic detail that, by the novel's close, readers have experienced them as well. Stations is an exquisitely rendered novel by an author with an uncanny understanding of the human heart. --Debra Ginsberg, author and freelance editor

That women see a lot of disturbing things in the story collection What She Saw should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of the Argentine-born Chilean American author Ariel Dorfman (The Suicide Museum; Konfidenz). Throughout his career, Dorfman has melded themes of love and war, with a frequent focus on the military coup that ousted Chilean president Salvador Allende, for whom Dorfman worked as a cultural adviser in the early 1970s. Dorfman returns to those themes in the eight pieces in this trenchant compilation.

Most of these pieces highlight a female character who is either a witness to proceedings or a victim of atrocities. In the latter category is the long opening story, "Corderita," a devastating work about the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The married protagonists met in Santiago in 1973, when they marched in defense of the Allende government. Decades later, the man has lost his wife on a train to Bourges, where she is scheduled to testify against the captor who tortured her. Her husband, meanwhile, wrestles with whether to finally reveal his involvement in her ordeal.

Other stories are equally immersive. One of the more surreal pieces is "Blank," a story about a firing squad told from a remarkable perspective: one of the 12 bullets. This story is a singular take on war, with the bullet articulating a statement that applies equally to most of this collection's protagonists: "I am about to find out who I really am." What She Saw is another excellent work by a dedicated polemicist unafraid to tackle the political travesties of his country and his era. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Ian Rankin puts aside his long-running, gritty series about Scottish police detective John Rebus for The Heights, a solid police procedural set in an exclusive London apartment complex.

Night-shift concierge Dwayne Hogarth's body is found in the lobby of the Heights following a late-night party at the 18-story building, which has inspiring views of Hyde Park. Security cameras at the Heights had been turned off, despite its state-of-the-art amenities, including a private cinema and a spa with therapists on duty 24/7.

Well-respected Detective Sergeant Gillian Gish receives cooperation from the building's owner, Allan Franklyn, a high-end developer who worries a long investigation may affect investments for his plan to build a second Heights tower. But the rest of the residents--including a pop singer, a reality TV personality, a gangster's wife, and a mysterious man who allegedly made "a mint in post-glasnost Russia"--are closemouthed. Politics enter when the Foreign Office meddles in the investigation, concerned that a high-profile resident's involvement may affect trade negotiations with Mozambique.

In The Heights, Rankin (Rather Be the Devil; Standing in Another Man's Grave) layers economics and classism into a tightly focused procedural. The building's residents are from "Money London," which does not reflect the status of Gillian and her team or of Dwayne and his DJ brother, Mark, who are Black. The insightful Gillian must also juggle her intense police work with arranging caregivers for her mother, who has dementia.

The Heights delivers the sort of satisfying story readers have come to expect from Rankin. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer

In Danica Nava's Sunflower Season, June Walker's all-consuming job at a San Francisco tech company ends with an unceremonious exit and a sigh of relief. She discovers that a sunflower farm she loved visiting as a child is for sale, and June decides that returning home to Love County, Okla., and buying Sunflower Farm is the fresh start she needs. But June's excitement at winning the land auction is cut short when she arrives to find that one of her new fields is engulfed in flames. To make matters worse, the fire captain putting out the blaze is none other than Noah Abbott, her ex-boyfriend.

Noah is still hurt and confused by the way June left town 10 years ago without so much as a good-bye. But his easy charm, and his steady determination to prove to June that their connection is just as strong as it used to be, pulls June back into his orbit, despite her protests and witty retorts.

Nava's clever banter and heated chemistry come with an endearing cast of quirky small-town characters such as Buzz, Love County's "Okie version of Joe Dirt." While most welcome June back with open arms, questions remain about whether she really plans to stay. Coupled with June's own sadness surrounding the events that caused her to leave home--and Noah--for so long, June's journey to rebuild the farm and her life shows her what it truly means to belong. As Sunflower Farm buzzes back to life with flowers, honeybees, and lively community activities, June and Noah's heartwarming second chance shines with forgiveness, hope, and true love. --Clara Newton, freelance reviewer

The Fist of Memory by Wole Talabi is an action-packed, sci-fi thriller that follows a cast of complex, multifaceted characters. Their stories collide as they try to move forward with their lives and struggle to escape the bonds created by past traumas while the world readies for impending first contact.

Itumeleng, a scientist at the South African Astronomical Observatory, identifies an object traveling at impossible speed toward Earth. Moreover, it appears to be decelerating. As events progress, he is forced into a reckoning between his life of science and the belief he left behind. Tope presents herself as a callous and deadly assassin, but she bears acute scars from the loss of her mother to violence. Ahanna is also caught in the world of murder for hire, and his singular focus on revenge puts him on a dangerous trajectory.

Talabi has created a fascinating and detailed world. Set in a near-future Africa and centered around Nigeria, the novel combines techno-thriller elements such as digital brain augmentation with more supernatural aspects, including healing potions and ancestral spirits. All the pieces come to life in striking, contemplative prose, such as the bland meeting room described as if "someone was trying to translate the desolation of being in outer space into interior décor, without preserving any of the wonder."

As Earth reckons with the mysterious object hurtling toward it, the storylines of the characters converge. The Fist of Memory is both a stay-up-all-night read full of peril and an insightful exploration of faith, science, and the nature of human interconnection. --Carol Caley, writer

An evil force may be rising, a student came back from summer break sporting antlers, a parent sends in cupcakes enchanted with toxic-positivity messaging--and it's only the first day of school. Tanya Huff (Direct Descendant) winks at the conventions of magical school stories in the clever, tongue-in-cheek fantasy novel Saved by the Spell.

Abby Bellman teaches at the High School for the Magical Arts's Canadian campus. She's gearing up for a new year when a fluke floor collapse causes mayhem at a school assembly. Next, a magical portal in a platter of scrambled eggs lets in a pack of poisonous sprites. The danger seems targeted at a particularly brave freshman named Bex, who has two gifted yet awkward best friends. Abby knows those signs. Bex is a destined hero, which means lurking somewhere is a destined villain. Now Abby has to figure out who the villain is, partly for the safety of the world, but mostly because Bex is in her homeroom. (She half suspects a senior girl who's been described as "a little too willing to toss a virgin into a volcano.") Abby must face down magical attacks, an anti-magic protest on school grounds, and the adolescent sense of humor if her students and her sanity are to survive.

Huff makes the chosen one trope new again by building its trappings into the acknowledged rules of her world. Fans of Emily Tesh's The Incandescent will find a similar concept here, delivered in a fast, snappy, and very funny package. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Contemporary life rests on centuries of accumulated ingenuity, most of which goes entirely unnoticed. In The Science of History, coauthors Mark Brake, professor emeritus of science communication at the University of Glamorgan, and journalist and documentary filmmaker Benjamin Bryant make the case that inventiveness is a characteristic thread running through nearly every society that's tried to make sense of the world and survive in it.

As its title suggests, the work's scope is sprawling, moving across eras and cultures to show how groups observed nature, tested ideas, and built tools suited to their circumstances, often arriving at methods and insights that anticipated modern science by centuries. Rather than organizing their text chronologically, Brake and Bryant sort their material by element (air, earth, fire, water). For example, the "Merry Men depended on knowledge of meteorology to succeed in robbing the rich and giving to the poor. Rain, fog, and wind were essential tools to the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, dependable allies on side to outwit the sheriff of Nottingham." This organizational method allows Brake and Bryant to draw unexpected connections between wildly disparate times and places.

While three of the elements depict a relatively steady progression from necessity to invention, the section on fire concludes differently, with a description of how societies pushed their command of that element past what survival required, often before they understood what they'd built. Brake and Bryant don't dwell on this imbalance, but the message is there nonetheless, and it suggests that the capacity to innovate needs to be matched by the wisdom to know when to stop or change course. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.

Adult author O.O. Sangoyomi's first YA fantasy, Dreamweaving, is an exhilarating occult mystery about five teens investigating the death of a former student at their prestigious prep school.

The women in Black 16-year-old Deja Freeman's family are magic workers who "heal or physically alter themselves." To be a "weaver," an older woman must induct a girl into "The Web," a mystical energy source. Deja's mother, Renée, "sacrificed her spot at the best secondary school in the United States for... drugs," gave birth to Deja as a teen, and died before passing on the tradition. When Deja, who has a 4.2 GPA, receives a scholarship and enrolls at the illustrious Tanglewood Preparatory School, she finds herself walking the same halls as her mother once did. There Deja meets Eden, a brilliant, shy Black computer whiz from Louisiana; Tóbi, an ambitious, high-achieving Nigerian American junior; Tóbi's academic rival, Monte, a white boy with Rockefeller-esque wealth; and trumpet player Fabien, "the biracial love child of the British royal family." After the quintet of students interacts with a meteorite that fell on school grounds, they experience strange, shared dreams that repeat the name of the school's first Black female student. The teens join forces to untangle the secrets around her disappearance.

Sangoyomi delivers an affecting, taut mystery that includes supernatural elements while exploring the pressures placed on teenagers to excel. The driven teens gradually learn to trust and support one another, developing their own found family. Fans of Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Boys series and Tracy Deonn's Legendborn Cycle will find familiar elements in Dreamweaving's mysterious school setting and close-knit group of friends, as well as an entrancing magic spun from Black traditions. --Natasha Harris, freelance reviewer

Silvia Romeral Andrés's marvelously written and illustrated picture book, Mina and the Monster, is the beguiling story of a courageous child who seeks a legendary creature. Although she believes her quest unsuccessful, illustrations prove otherwise.

"Beware!" a storyteller warns. There's a "fearsome monster" dwelling in the forest that's so scary, "its roar alone can unleash a storm." The monster knocks down trees and "creates uncontrollable avalanches" with its loud, rumbling footsteps. But Mina, "somewhat short... for her age," isn't afraid: "everything she lacked in height she made up for in bravery." The girl and her foxlike dog set out first thing the next morning to hunt for the beast. She searches the forest and the mountains but sees no sign of a monster. Readers, however, may join Mina's savvy dog in noticing a white, furry creature working overtime to keep Mina safe. The monster barricades an impending avalanche, holds up a broken bridge, and places a blanket on her when she falls asleep. As Mina heads home, she "feels strangely comforted inside," and it's not just because of the "mysterious, huge mug of hot chocolate" waiting for her when she wakes.

This seriously charismatic U.S. authorial debut is driven by the contrast between words and image; in the text, Andrés never alludes to the playful monster hiding from Mina. Andrés's mixed-media art uses a limited palette to depict the isolated town and the snowy expanse of field and wood surrounding it. Mina's red jacket stands out in the white space, as do the rosy nose, cheeks, and ears of the creature. Though monsters are not "easy to find," they can be endlessly entertaining. --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author

Children's author Amy Alznauer (The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor) adds to the tradition of great "horse girl" books with her charming middle-grade novel Where the Wild Horses Are.

Six-year-old Nash and her cousin Benny share a dream: to each have a horse of their own. Like both of Nash's parents, Benny is Deaf, and she and Nash, who is hearing, are as close as sisters, signing to each other from their windows across their Chicago alley. Then Nash and her parents move to Smoke County, Pa., separating the cousins. Now 12, Nash bemoans her horseless state, until she learns about the Extreme Mustang Makeover competition, a summer program in which she would train a "certifiably wild horse." Her parents let her sign up with the condition that Benny, who is visiting for the first time since Nash moved, signs up too. Nash is thrilled by her progress with her horse, but Benny's presence feels strange. The girls have spent so much time apart, and Benny has so much in common with Nash's mother that Nash questions her friendship with Benny, her relationship with her parents, and even her horse dreams.

Alznauer deftly captures the voice of a 12-year-old about to receive a dream opportunity while also figuring out who she is as Nash of Smoke County, Pa. Nash's earnest, first-person perspective is reflective, allowing readers to cheer with her during highs and root for her during lows. Where the Wild Horses Are features an enjoyable community of characters and a relatable, kind protagonist chasing the dream of having a horse of her own. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

In Rumor Has It, the irresistible, fast-paced first title in the Luckies series by Sarah Mlynowski (Whatever After series) and three-time Newbery Honor recipient Christina Soontornvat (A Wish in the Dark), two stepsisters-to-be navigate their brand-new lives together.

When her freshly blended family of seven moves to Lost Bluff, Tenn., 15-year-old Leela longs for her life back in Brooklyn. She is appalled at having to live with "four random people" she barely knows, including boys who make fart jokes and Annie, who seems excessively perky. But Annie, also 15, is thrilled at the chance for stability and real friendships after years of frequent moves. When Leela schemes to convince her mom that "this whole Lost Bluff idea" isn't working so they can return to New York, she does not consider how much damage her sabotage might cause.

The lively Luckies, designed to appeal to middle-grade readers who are used to inhaling visual and digital content, is Mlynowski and Soontornvat's first series collaboration after co-writing Time After Time, the third volume in the Best Wishes series. Rumor Has It opens with six dynamic full-color illustrations by Madi Wong (You Did It!) that introduce each family member (including pets) and set the stage for small-town drama. The rest of the novel is peppered with similarly high-spirited and inviting illustrations in black-and-white. A cliff-hanger ending ensures readers will want to keep returning to this fun series. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor