Josie Lloyd (co-author of Come Together) delivers a witty, warmhearted story of a woman dealing with breast cancer treatment alongside a group of unlikely new friends in The Bright Side Running Club. Keira is happily married, a mother of three and the owner of a thriving small business when a breast cancer diagnosis upends her comfortable life. Somewhat reluctantly, she joins a running group made up of women who also have cancer. To her surprise, not only does running help her feel better physically, but her new friends provide deep empathy, moral support and much-needed humor as they all face cancer's cascading effects on their lives.

Lloyd, herself a breast cancer survivor, vividly captures the early stages of diagnosis and treatment: the physical details as well as the maelstrom of emotions. She skillfully depicts the effects of Keira's diagnosis on the important relationships in her life (her husband, children, mother and colleagues) as well as how she learns to advocate for herself both in and out of the treatment room. Meanwhile, Keira suspects her longtime business partner of some shady dealings, and her new friends struggle with their own treatments and other challenges. The women band together in sometimes surprising ways to support one another, and they organize a charity run in honor of one of their own.

Full of wry humor, despite the heavy subject matter, The Bright Side Running Club is a clear-eyed, ultimately hopeful story and a testament to the power of female friendships. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

"Snowfalls have unique bouquets," Sarah Manguso writes in her first novel, Very Cold People. "Snow isn't just frozen water; it carries a remnant of the sky." Manguso's book hosts impressions so immediate that readers may half wonder if the childhood depicted on the page is theirs.

Ruth, who narrates Very Cold People, grew up an only child in the 1980s in the (fictional) colonial town of Waitsfield, Mass., whose "historically correct" paint colors are considerably more subdued than its class distinctions. Ruth, a devotee of "playing at belonging," takes readers through the childhood events that have marked her--fleeting occasions like a trip to a fancy restaurant in Boston with family, and major developments like her move at age 13 to a new Waitsfield home (historically significant house, better school zone).

Manguso, whose previous books are works of poetry and nonfiction (Ongoingness; 300 Arguments), is a sensational writer (her school auditorium "was like the inside of a slaughtered animal, all oxblood paint and maroon velveteen"). But with a hundred-odd pages behind them, readers may well wonder: Is Very Cold People truly a novel, as advertised? Manguso certainly massages her themes (social and familial alienation, predatory men who are trusted members of the community), but as vignette-like paragraphs skip by, each bluntly delineated from the next by a page break, there seems to be no forward momentum beyond the ticking of time.

Readers should hang in there. Manguso's accreting vignettes retroactively assume a shape toward the end of Very Cold People, when something happens that fulfills every novel's basic requirement: life for at least one character in it irrevocably changes. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Quake, by Icelandic Literary Prize-winning author Auður Jónsdóttir (The People in the Basement), is an engrossing, multilayered mystery in which memories--imagined, erased and recovered--determine the future of a fractured family. Jónsdóttir introduces the protagonist in various scenarios in the novel's opening--anonymous in the brief first chapter, waking from an accident in the second and hospitalized in chapter three--as if immediately signaling the unreliability of knowing and remembering.

Saga is the mother of three-and-a-half-year-old Ívar. He goes missing when Saga, as later revealed, has three sequential epileptic seizures. Ívar is quickly retrieved and placed safely with his father, but when Saga returns to her apartment, she can't understand why her husband lives somewhere else. She can "conjure the good" when trying to recall their past, but attempts to access anything difficult result in "stabbing pain." Betrayed by her mind and body, she can't be left alone--and she can't be trusted with Ívar. Understanding and recovery require the untangling of decades of labyrinthine secrets, hidden especially between parents and children.

Originally published in Iceland in 2015 and adapted into a lauded film, Quake is Jónsdóttir's first novel to be translated into English. It is an intimate collaboration with translator and poet Meg Matich. Matich notes that "Icelandic is a precious language," spoken by 350,000 people. With empathic insight and precision, Matich enables readers access to what she calls "Auður's floating, feral Icelandic." --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Linda Hirshman (Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution) has researched another fascinating aspect of social history in The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation. Much has been written about Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and their impact on the abolition movement. But Hirshman has uncovered an overlooked woman in the movement: socialite Maria Weston Chapman, known as "the Contessa" to Boston society. When Weston Chapman first visited the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, other members thought her a spy because "No one that well dressed had ever shown an interest in their movement." Weston Chapman, however, became a key player in Bostonian abolition groups and worked closely with Garrison and Douglass as an editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard newspaper.

Analyzing the racist and classist overtones in internal battles within the abolition movement, Hirshman has created a brisk and intriguing history of it from the 1830s to 1860s. She explores the lives of three key players--Douglass, Garrison and Weston Chapman--and how they influenced the Massachusetts chapter of abolitionists, and society at large. As Hirshman points out, abolition had astonishingly rapid success on the scale of social change: in less than 20 years, the movement morphed from a dozen white men gathering in Boston to Black and white men and women across the nation uniting to protest slavery. Those interested in history or social justice movements are sure to appreciate the combination of the two in The Color of Abolition. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Flagstaff, Ariz.

Before apps like Pinterest, there were scrapbooks. That's the format that comes to mind when considering the blend of political and social commentary and memoir that is Colette Brooks's idiosyncratic and evocative Trapped in the Present Tense: Meditations on American Memory. Whether it's gun violence, nuclear war or government incursions on Americans' privacy, Brooks's concerns are broad and vital. Recognizing that the "hard and fast divisions of the old days" between "number people" and "story people" are "no longer useful," she brings to bear both techniques in her attempt to illuminate some of the darker corners of American life.

Brooks (In the City: Random Acts of Awareness) applies this complementary technique to reflections on other pressing subjects: what she calls our "casual habituation to conflict" that "has helped to create a vicarious warrior culture in which most of us just watch from afar," is illustrated by the account of an errant Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad in July 2007, a story that sits adjacent to the recollections of a man named Jimmy Nelson about his service in the Navy in occupied Japan after atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The significance of Nelson's account becomes clear only at the end of the book, in a section that pairs a series of arresting snapshots with Brooks's penetrating and poignant commentary.

In both content and format, Trapped in the Present Tense is a book that's well suited to this age of short and fragmented attention spans. Readers receptive to Colette Brooks's preoccupations will find much that's informative and moving here. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Ah, the 1990s, brought to you by Nirvana, Generation X, the Gulf War, Seinfeld, Fox News, Pulp Fiction and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In The Nineties, de facto cultural historian and affable know-it-all Chuck Klosterman dissects the decade's most iconic people, events and artifacts, using his customary high-energy prose, sidelong point of view and delight in the preposterous.

Each chapter in The Nineties reads like a work of long-form reporting, as in the exploration of Ross Perot's possibly history-altering role in the 1992 presidential election and the examination of technology in the '90s, when the "concept of buying a new phone every other year would have seemed as crazy as installing a new toilet every other Thanksgiving." A wily and pitiless social critic operating from a position of rapt astonishment, Klosterman takes every opportunity to show how one-time cultural high-water marks have been reappraised: "Modern people," Klosterman writes, "hate American Beauty for the same reason people in 1999 loved American Beauty: It examines the interior problems of upper-middle-class white people living in the late twentieth century."

Born in 1972, Klosterman (Raised in Captivity) reached the age of majority at the start of a decade in which "the worst thing you could be was a sellout.... Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible." Since it's no longer the '90s, Klosterman will presumably find a way to live with himself should his boffo essay collection become deservedly popular. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Words are merely a tool for the intellect, and it is not often that they are able to articulate the subtlety of feeling, depth of truth and breadth of love that make up moments of existence, and the fabric of natural life. Fortunately for readers, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, in her bright and ethereal The Shamanic Bones of Zen, brings together the perfect blend of literary skill, Buddhist teachings and personal insight, providing readers with a rare moment when words reach farther, wider and deeper than they ever knew possible.  

A magnificent guide through the world of Zen Buddhism, Manuel points toward meaning without lifting a finger, touches on concepts without leaving her prints, and breathes out wisdom without needing to exhale. What makes Manuel such an important player in the world of Zen is her understanding that Zen does not offer a pathway toward something new. Rather, it provides a means to learn more about all that is already inside oneself. Manuel opens this part of herself to the world in The Shamanic Bones of Zen, and what readers find there is a transcendent passion for ritual, for meditation, for ancestry, for childhood and for the magic that has grown harder and harder to find in Buddhist religion and scholarship. This is a work that cannot be merely observed, but in which one must be engaged--for, like a Zen ritual, Manuel's work will speak only to those who have given themselves to listen. --Eamon Stein, reader, writer and filmmaker in Seattle, Wash.

Tiya Miles (The Dawn of Detroit; Ties that Bind), a professor of history at Harvard University, does a difficult task incomparably well in the National Book Award-winning All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. With gentleness and historical acumen, Miles explores the history of this sack, and why it is important in larger terms as part of African American history.

In 1921, Ruth Middleton embroidered a sack that had belonged to her grandmother Ashley, listing what the sack originally contained. Her great-grandmother Rose, an enslaved woman, gave the sack to her daughter Ashley when the nine-year-old girl was sold away from her in 1850s South Carolina. Miles carefully researches the items mentioned in the embroidery: a dress, a handful of pecans, a lock of Rose's hair, "my Love always." Miles explores what these would have meant to both Ashley and Rose, and how Rose was doing her best to care for her daughter, even when the terrible system of chattel slavery attempted to thwart Rose's basic humanity.

Little is known about Rose or Ashley's early lives, but Miles has found many contemporary accounts to enlighten readers as to what may have gone on in the lives of enslaved women of that era. And she elucidates how a sack was specifically important. As Miles says, "African American things had little chance to last.... How could people who were property acquire and pass down property?" All that She Carried will transport readers to difficult times in American history, and make them think more carefully about all the physical goods they take for granted in their day-to-day lives. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Flagstaff, Ariz.

It doesn't take a pandemic to introduce drama into the lives of middle-schoolers: they already have plenty going on. It's all there in K. Ibura's When the World Turned Upside Down, a virtuosic middle-grade novel in which four tweenagers who live in the same apartment building must find new ways to relate to their families and to each other after Covid-19 suddenly closes their school.

Life is always difficult for Liam, who has panic attacks and must tend to his younger siblings while their single mom works. For Ben, being stuck indoors means that he can't escape his parents' constant arguing. Ai wishes she saw more of her parents, but her doctor father is always at the hospital and her depressed mother won't leave her bedroom. This is all the harder for Ai because she isn't speaking to her best friend, the conflicted Shayla, who, before their school shuttered, seemed to prefer two other girls' company.

With her first book for kids, Ibura has created a higher-order middle-grade novel by showing a cast transcending their cohort's reputation for self-absorption: together the friends, who are from a range of backgrounds, help a sick neighbor, form their building's "antivirus team" and, after they learn of George Floyd's murder, take a stand against racism. Ai thinks at one point, "Even if her family had lost the ability to show up for one another, she could show up for her neighbors. She had the power to make people's hard times a little easier." So does When the World Turned Upside Down. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

Former elementary school teacher Nicole D. Collier's debut book, Just Right Jillian, offers an inspiring and inviting tale for middle-grade readers about an African American girl named Jillian.

Fifth-grader Jillian is shy, uncertain and, a year later, still grieving the loss of her grandmother. Jillian often lets her opinions, ideas and thoughts go unheard because she is afraid of standing out. Then, she loses a class competition because she doesn't speak up. When a bully proclaims Jillian will never be a winner, Jillian promises herself and Grammy that she will find her voice and break out of her shell--just like the chicks her class is currently incubating. Jillian, with less than a month to prepare, works hard to compete in the school-wide Mind Bender competition with the goal of beating Rashida, her "Sworn Enemy" and "Foe."

Just Right Jillian is broken up into approachably short chapters, with accessible language for children on the younger end of the middle-grade spectrum. It covers topics such as grief, friendship, speaking up, shyness and not judging anyone without getting to know them first, making it a perfect book for any sensitive, creative, insecure child who might also fear being visible. Collier's many funny metaphors about chicks and their hatching process should keep readers laughing as it connects them to Jillian and her attempts to break out of her own shell. Just Right Jillian shows children how to stand out and show up for themselves. --Natasha Harris, freelance reviewer