Unsettled Ground by critically acclaimed author Claire Fuller (Bitter Orange; Our Endless Numbered Days) is a moving portrait of two unusual siblings desperate to find a place to belong in their small, rural English hometown. Fifty-one-year-old twins Jeanie and Julius have always lived with their mother, Dot, tending to the garden near their small, rented cottage. But when Dot dies suddenly, and the cottage landlords claim the twins owe years' worth of rent, Jeanie and Julius find themselves overwhelmed by both grief and poverty as they face eviction. While Jeanie scrambles to find a job and a way to hold onto their home, Julius begins to see that there may be ways to live other than the limited and dependent life their difficult mother led them to.

Fuller's ability to craft nuanced and affecting characters is on full display in Unsettled Ground. Jeanie in particular stands out as a lesser-seen heroine who may stumble through the unrelenting obstacles in her way, but nonetheless holds tight to her loyalties, convictions and desires to carve out a small and quiet place for herself in a fast-changing and often unforgiving world. Like Fuller's other novels, Jeanie and Julius's story is tinged with a haunting atmosphere of loss. From a worn wooden piano rutted in mud to a rusted and gutted camper lost deep in the woods, the novel is filled with evocative images that embody the deep-rooted pathos of the book's setting and characters. And while the slow-burn tension of the plot builds gradually, the unexpectedly explosive climax will reward reader anticipation in this devastating and contemplative family drama. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Lina Meruane's Nervous System is a novel both fanciful and visceral, pairing the study of the cosmos with medical mysteries and wounds on earth. It is set dually in "the country of the present" and "the country of the past," the latter swimming with political violence and trauma, and bearing a resemblance to Meruane's native Chile. Megan McDowell's translation from the Spanish establishes an eerie tone.

The protagonist is Ella. Her partner is El: Are these names, or the Spanish pronouns She and He? El is also known as "the bone guy," a forensic scientist combing through mass graves, "more migrant bodies made to disappear piece by piece," to determine cause of death. Ella's father is simply the Father, her stepmother the Mother; only gradually the reader becomes aware of the Firstborn and the Twins (Boy Twin and Girl Twin), completing a family filled with holes and secrets. Ella is supposed to be writing her doctoral dissertation in astrophysics, but she has stalled. "This final attempt would be spent on stars that had already lost their light and collapsed in on themselves, forming dense black holes." Instead, she winds up tracking not solar systems but the systems of her own body, as an undiagnosed condition contributes to her long, slow downfall.

The narrative unfolds in a bit of a fever dream, narrated in a third-person perspective close to Ella's own consciousness, and characterized by a distant way of describing even horrendous events, "women hacked to pieces and children lost in arid lands." Nervous System is filled with anguish and unease, but also starlight, which touches Ella at its close. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In Local Woman Missing, Mary Kubica (When the Lights Go Out; The Other Mrs.) moves around in time and perspective to create a kaleidoscopic view of the disappearance of a young mother, and then of another woman and her young daughter, rocking the quiet suburb in which they all lived.

The first woman to vanish is Shelby Tebow, new mother unhappily married to an unfaithful husband. Weeks later, Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, are gone, too, without a trace. It's unclear to all--families, neighbors, police, readers--if these disappearances are related, though they feel too close to be coincidence. And when the bodies of both women are found and identified, the questions shift: Who would want these women dead, and what happened to Delilah? When a teenage Delilah shows up out of nowhere 11 years later, covered in dirt and with no memory of her life before her kidnapping, the questions only multiply, sucking in everyone in the orbit of both families.

There are a lot of threads in Local Woman Missing, which may make the novel difficult to follow, but also the best of the whodunit variety: red herrings and false leads abound, leaving readers guessing to the very end about how these threads connect to one another, despite an absolute certainty that they do. As they do, Kubica further owns her role as a master of domestic suspense, weaving a dark mystery that reveals just how far some people will go to keep a secret--no matter the cost. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Some people aren't aware they are in a toxic relationship until they are well out of it. That's not the case with lifestyle journalist Sophie O'Neill who, with her architect husband, Graham, and preschooler son, Jack, moved seven months ago from suburban Chicago to slower paced Mapleton, Tex., "small enough to feel quaint... big enough to have a Chipotle." There, Sophie finds a honeycomb of society women oozing with noxious gossip and backbiting--and Sophie desperately wants in. May Cobb (Big Woods) compellingly explores the dark side of female friendship in The Hunting Wives, her second novel.

Sophie becomes infatuated with queen bee Margot Banks, whose family has "oil money dripping out of their ears," and her three women friends. Sophie trolls them on social media and wangles invitations to parties where they will be. She's finally invited to join their "Hunting Wives" club, which involves a lot of drinking and shooting skeet at Margot's remote lake house. Then comes barhopping, which moves from flirting with strangers to adultery. Sophie's fascination with Margot puts her marriage in jeopardy, ignoring that she isn't a pal but a pawn in their risky games--until a fatality occurs.

Cobb plumbs the depths of Sophie's ennui as she realizes that this small-town life that she craved--"the quiet ticktock of the street"--begins to feel "oppressive." Sophie sees the manipulative Margot as a "glamour fix," an outlet for her restlessness. Cobb intelligently imbues The Hunting Wives with unexpected twists, accented by witty dialogue, leading to a surprising finale. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer 

In Fictional Father, his darkly humorous and self-referential graphic novel, Joe Ollmann (The Abominable Mr. Seabrook) charts the journey of a middle-aged artist to define his life apart from his famous father.

Caleb Wyatt has led an apparently charmed life, owed to the success of his father's long-running comic strip, Sonny Side Up. Beloved by many, the schmaltzy father-and-son daily earned Jimmi Wyatt the nickname "Everybody's Dad." But to Caleb and his mother, Jimmi was nothing but cruel and withholding. Now an adult, Caleb struggles to balance the pressures of life: his sobriety; his own art career, forever overshadowed by his father's; and his boyfriend James who, though supportive, is growing weary of Caleb's privileged, boneheaded behavior. When suddenly faced with the opportunity to take over his father's strip, he must choose between preserving a legacy he resents and carving his own creative path.

Caleb notes that his father's strip was celebrated for the "deceptive simplicity" of Jimmi's lines, a suggestive phrase given the tumultuous reality the comic concealed. By contrast, Ollmann's own style is marked by bold linework and richly saturated colors, with frames full of craggy faces given to bouts of red-cheeked rage and exasperation. This expressive quality suits Ollmann's interest in the potential of comics to represent the messiness of life. Structurally, Ollmann plays with this same idea by incorporating a nonfictional frame story into the book's prologue and conclusion. Readers--especially those with a keen interest in the history and mechanics of comics--will appreciate Ollmann's formal playfulness and emotional honesty. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books, Seattle, Wash.

Sociologist Grace M. Cho untangles a menacing snarl of family history in Tastes Like War, a poignant memoir of steadfast love between a troubled mother and her determined daughter. Cho was 15 years old when her mother, Koonja, began showing signs of mental illness and fierce suspicion toward everyone in their small town of Chehalis, Wash., even those once considered friends. Although Cho diagnosed her with schizophrenia from a textbook in 1986, it wasn't until 1994 that a psychiatrist confirmed Koonja's condition, by which time shared and secret traumas had set each member of their family adrift in different directions.

As Cho works to parse "my han--the untranslatable Korean word that refers to 'unresolved resentment against injustice'... or 'knotted grief,' " she follows dark and varied threads into arenas of devastating oppression. She navigates an unreliable mental health industrial complex vacillating between psychoanalytical and biomedical models of treatment, uncovers a history of abusive sex work for Korean women under Japanese and American occupation, and grapples with vicious xenophobia within the United States. But it is Korean food and flavors that help Cho and her mother deal with this painful mess, quite literally like a trail of breadcrumbs.

Cho's persistent memories of the mother she knew as a child, a wizard in the kitchen, reassures Cho that she lives on somewhere in that fragile mind. And eventually, as Koonja instructs Cho in re-creating dishes like the chilled soybean soup kong-guksu and the fish stew saengtae jjigae, glimmers do reemerge. Somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking, Tastes Like War is a potent personal history. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

In his preface to The Tyranny of Algorithms, anthropologist Régis Meyran notes that for all the discourse surrounding the concept of artificial intelligence (AI), "we cannot be 'for' or 'against' AI, insofar as it is already here and not likely to disappear any time soon. The question we now face is rather how to exist qua human beings, individually, social, collectively, in a world governed in large measure by algorithms." What follows is philosopher and psychoanalyst Miguel Benasayag's comprehensive argument for how to go forward as individuals and groups in the world ceded to the structures of AI, framed as a dialogue between Benasayag and Meyran.

The book's engrossing conversational structure makes it easy to follow Benasayag's reasoning, and helps to take readers through some quite complicated arguments. The questions framing the discussion anticipate the questions that readers might themselves have about the idea that the future lies less in models of certainty and more in embracing the idea that humans just need to know what they do not want to happen. Benasayag challenges the reduction of humans to predictive microdata, such as targeted advertising on social media, and confronts a world that uses AI to make social, financial and governing decisions without considering the impact on humans beyond efficiency or profitability. Most significantly, Benasayag puts forth a provocative solution in which new technologies and digital architecture are integrated in a way that emphasizes human emotion and experience, rather than treating such things as secondary. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Although no spoiler alert is needed for a book with Titanic in its title, readers will undoubtedly find themselves neglecting sleep to finish Stacey Lee's thrilling fictionalized account of a small group of Chinese passengers who took that fateful voyage.

Seventeen-year-old twins and former street acrobats Valora and Jamie Luck were orphaned after losing both their British mother and Chinese father. Val, the more impulsive of the twins, masquerades as her recently deceased wealthy employer to board the Titanic, where Jamie and "seven other Chinese men from his company" have been rerouted for an eventual trip on to Cuba. When Val meets a fellow passenger and part owner of the Ringling Brothers Circus, she hopes to convince Jamie to join her in striking out for America--Chinese Exclusion Act be damned. Jamie, however, is not a fan of his sister's "hasty pudding plans." And, of course, fate has its own objectives.

Lee, known for her superb works of historical fiction, including The Downstairs Girl, Outrun the Moon and Under a Painted Sky, hooks readers with the riveting tale of an impetuous and ambitious young woman. Lee keeps them on the line with vivid details of ship life, both mundane (the boiler room layout, the fact that passengers must pay if they want a room key) and sumptuous (crystal bowls filled with candy in the hallways, silk wall panels, the "tidal wave of a staircase"). Lee seamlessly weaves fact and fiction in Luck of the Titanic, inventing a story that gorgeously captures an era and a tragedy. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor