Hala Alyan's sophomore novel, The Arsonists' City, is a heartfelt and moving family saga that spans both generations and continents.

The Nasr family has always had a family home in Beirut, even as generations of Nasrs have moved across the world: Mazna, born in Syria, and Idris, in Lebanon, now live in California, their adult children scattered in Brooklyn, Austin and Beirut. But when Idris's father dies and Idris decides to sell his family home, three generations of relatives descend on the house to try to talk him out of it--or maybe talk themselves into it. The resultant piling-on is as emotional (and occasionally hilarious) as one would expect, with long-buried secrets and tightly held grudges brought to the surface, testing bonds of parent and child, brother and sister, friend and lover.

Alyan (Salt Houses) is an excellent storyteller; the many threads of the Nasr family's history are all tightly woven through The Arsonists' City, and the characters across its pages are fully developed, complex and familiarly imperfect. That alone would be enough to set The Arsonists' City apart from other epic family sagas, but the novel becomes something even larger in Alyan's capable hands: an exploration of the legacy of war and violence, the decisions people make to survive and the lies they tell themselves--and those they love--to accept those decisions. "We don't choose what we belong to," writes Alyan. "What claims us." But with The Arsonists' City, she does raise questions about what we choose to do with that belonging, and what power lies in the mere fact of claiming--by a people, by a place, or both. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Paula Munier (Blind Search) delivers a tightly plotted adventure in her third Mercy Carr novel, The Hiding Place. March in Vermont may technically be spring, but the weather is still frigid--and treacherous. For former military policewoman Mercy Carr, this spring may be particularly so. Mercy digs into the cold case that haunted her long-dead sheriff grandfather and uncovers a nest of secrets.

Munier's story begins with an unwelcome surprise: an army vet who knew Mercy's deceased fiancé shows up claiming that Mercy's dog, Elvis, belongs to him. Mercy is devoted to Elvis, but the dangerous nature of her sleuthing work makes her wonder if the dog wouldn't be safer with someone else. When the man who shot her grandfather escapes from prison and Mercy's grandmother is kidnapped, Mercy must work with game warden Troy Warner and his dog, Susie Bear, to find her and crack the cold case before any more lives are lost. (As she's debating whether she should give Elvis up, the dog joins their rescue team, again proving his aptitude for the work.) They encounter a host of colorful personalities, including a salt-of-the-earth café owner and an elegant animal lover who may not be what she seems. While solving mysteries is often a way for Mercy to ignore her tangled personal life, this case forces her to confront her feelings about several tricky situations, including her relationship with Troy. Twisty and tense, with occasional heroics by the dogs, The Hiding Place is a satisfying entry in this series. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Actress and human rights activist Sharon Stone's brave, contemplative and inspiring memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, is a tale of survival: surviving physical and sexual abuse as a child, an aneurysm and stroke that derailed her life for two years and the 13-year legal fight to regain the custody of her first adopted son.

Stone's acting career skyrocketed with 1992's Basic Instinct. She was 34 and writes, "I was aging out of the business I hadn't really gotten into yet." The role earned her a Golden Globe nomination, but she remembers when her name was read at the ceremony, many in the audience laughed. That disrespect and sexism continued on the sets of other films (including one unnamed director who wouldn't direct her unless she sat on his lap). Even though she produced the 1995 western The Quick and the Dead, she had to fight for her choice of director and co-stars. (She personally paid Leonardo DiCaprio's salary when the studio didn't want him.) In 2001, she suffered a stroke. "My right vertebral artery... was torn to a fine shred and I was bleeding into my face, my brain, my head, and my spine," she writes. Doctors told her family she had a 1% chance of survival. "No one told me those odds," she writes. "I read them in People magazine." Her painful and arduous recovery took more than two years.

Stone's tough and touching memoir reveals the traumas, setbacks and gritty determination to survive and thrive that have previously been hidden beneath a beautiful façade. This will be a book club favorite. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

U.S. senator Tammy Duckworth's Every Day Is a Gift isn't the typical politician's memoir. She doesn't have an ax to grind, a campaign to hype, a decades-long career in politics to relive. She has a remarkable story to tell.

Born in Thailand in 1968 to an ethnically Chinese mother and an American serviceman father, Duckworth moved around Southeast Asia for her dad's communications work until it dried up. In 1984, the family relocated to Hawaii, where they relied on food stamps and income from odd jobs. Her father's patriotism rubbed off on her: after graduating from the University of Hawaii and while pursuing a master's degree, Duckworth joined ROTC and did basic training--"the best decision of my life." Although she believed it was a mistake for the United States to invade Iraq, she volunteered to go overseas, spending eight months as a helicopter pilot before her Black Hawk was shot down. Duckworth lost her legs but not the drive to serve ("Working hard was my superpower"). She won a House seat in 2012, a Senate seat in 2016, and the rest is literally history: Duckworth became the first U.S. senator to give birth while holding office.

Every Day Is a Gift is a compelling and deeply humane book. One needn't be a Democrat to admire Duckworth's efforts to improve the lives of veterans, nor to appreciate her sense of humor: during the victory party after she won her House seat, Duckworth had her staff play ZZ Top's "Legs." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

In 2017, former Sports Illustrated journalist Alexander Wolff (Big Game, Small World) set out to explore his family's German roots. The result is Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home, a fascinating mixture of memoir, journalism, history and an up-close look at one family's complicated relationship with Nazi Germany.

Two biographical narratives stand at the heart of Endpapers. Wolff's grandfather, Kurt Wolff, was a leading publisher of contemporary literature in Germany, publishing authors whose works would later be burned by the Nazis. In 1933, he fled Germany with his wife, Helen, and took refuge in the United States, where they founded a new, equally influential, publishing house. They left behind Kurt's family from his first marriage, including Wolff's father, Niko, who served in the German army, spent time in a POW camp and emigrated to the U.S. in 1948.

In the course of tracing their stories, Wolff discovers family secrets. He learns the intricacies of which family members escaped being labeled as Jewish by the Nazis. He realizes how deeply his grandmother's family, the Mercks of Merck Pharmaceuticals, were involved with the Nazis. And he eventually confronts the questions of guilt, shame and accountability that many Germans of his generation struggled with decades earlier.

Ultimately, Endpapers is not only the gripping story of one family's history, but an important exploration of responsibility for the past. It will appeal to those concerned with how the United States should recognize past atrocities as well as to history buffs. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Ximena Vengoechea is a successful researcher and manager from Silicon Valley. She shares a trove of fascinating, practical insight and wisdom about how and why cultivating judicious listening skills are the cornerstone to improving any relationship--in both personal and professional arenas. Vengoechea believes more conscious listening is able to condition the human psyche to stay in the present and remain carefully attuned to what is heard and experienced. Deconstructing and defining what it truly means to listen, Listen Like You Mean It presents ways listeners can expand their perceptions while fostering more responsive openness.

There are two threads to listening: what is being said and what is implied. The human mind can often muddle the two. Information about cultivating better listening skills is presented alongside interviews with experts and numerous case studies where Vengoechea troubleshoots and offers in-depth analysis of actual conversations rife with complications and red flags. These constructs demonstrate ways to listen more acutely in order to navigate and initiate more productive communication regardless of circumstance. Vengoechea believes a majority of people employ "surface listening" and don't dig deeper into underlying emotional contexts of conversations. By focusing on becoming a more empathetic listener--anticipating the needs of others and hearing what is not said--conversation can thus become richer and deeper and yield more positive, effective results.

In a world that's become more virtual--filled with an array of distractions--Vengoechea's timely, necessary handbook on real-world strategic listening will greatly benefit those who seek to improve upon their own communication skills. -- Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In The Hunt Is On, set in a fantastical version of medieval China, Nie Jun (My Beijing) combines breathtaking illustrations with a thrilling and unpredictable quest. Hunt, the first in a YA graphic novel series, balances dynamic action sequences with a nuanced exploration of environmental commodification and resource scarcity.

Brothers Xinyue and Qiliu and their mother, Bu Ren Niang, are "aweto seekers," magical thieves who roam the countryside in search of deities called chadolos. Each chadolo contains an aweto, a primitive magical being with the ability to bring life to the land it inhabits. Aweto are coveted for their agricultural value and can be sold at very high prices; as a result, they have become vanishingly rare.

Xinyue and Qiliu botch a raid on a local village where a dying chadolo begs Xinyue to save its child. Xinyue, keeping the baby chadolo a secret from his brother, begins to suspect that it contains a priceless "celestial aweto," rumored to grant eternal life. The chadolo's presence soon threatens to undermine Xinyue's bonds with his family--but it may also hold the key to Xinyue's true identity and fate.

Jun's watercolor illustrations pulse with energetic movement--the huge, temperamental chadolos erupt out of the earth in swirling explosions of color each time they appear. Jun's expressive character designs imbue his protagonists with nuance, wit and humanity, and his brisk narrative (translated by Edward Gauvin referring to the French translation and the original Chinese text) remains fresh and unpredictable, building toward a conclusion as exhilarating as it is devastating. --Devon Ashby, marketing and sales assistant, Shelf Awareness

Children's literature blogger, podcaster, elementary school librarian and author Travis Jonker follows up his debut picture book, The Very Last Castle, with a title that sneakily teaches as it enchants. Blue Floats Away, illustrated by Grant Snider (What Color Is Night), is a full reenactment of the water cycle through one inquisitive and brave iceberg's travels around the planet.

"Little Blue lived near the North Pole with his parents. They were close." But one day, "CRACK--Blue was suddenly on his own, floating away." There isn't much a child glacier separated from his parents can do other than follow the tide. And that is exactly what Blue does. He begins to see "new things/ Beautiful things." He learns from his new friends about "wind and ocean currents. Things that could get him home." However, the farther south Blue floats, the hotter it gets and the smaller he shrinks. Until... "Blue mixed with the ocean water, evaporated, condensed, and was transformed." As a cloud, enterprising Blue brings himself back to his parents. "Were they ever surprised."

Jonker's simple language makes this picture book an excellent read-aloud that is also approachable for the four- to six-year-old set, while his author's note ages the book up for kids 6-8 by describing the water cycle, explaining that "polar ice is in real trouble" and listing ideas to help save the planet. Snider's use of artistic mediums children will know intimately--cut paper, colored pencil, ink--makes the book all the more friendly to young readers. Blue's drawn-on smiley face and cut-paper backgrounds offer children a chance to make their own Blue Floats Away-style stories, perhaps even with messages as important as Jonker and Snider's. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness