Like her National Book Award-nominated Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta's new novel has roots in the 1970s. This time, instead of focusing on the era's politics, she attends to the intimate details of family life, the slow erosion of dreams and the faint persistence of hope.

Narrated mostly in the voice of Denise Krasnis, a woman struggling in midlife, Stone Arabia is the story of her relationship with her older brother, Nick Worth, a talented if only modestly successful post-punk musician in bands with names like the Demonics and the Fakes. Now, in 2004, Nick lives in obscurity in Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, subsisting on a bartender's income. When not working on an elaborate fictional narrative of his life he calls "The Chronicles," he's recording an equally imposing, provocative series of experimental CDs, distributed sporadically and rarely.

Denise, who calls her own story "The Counterchronicles," can't escape the incessant drumbeat of stories from the wider world that insinuate their way into her life as she realizes that she "had, in middle age, become a person whose deepest emotional moments happened vicariously."

Spiotta captures the stew of love, frustration, anger and lack of communication that are the stuff of adult sibling relationships: "We don't talk out everything," Denise tells her daughter, Ada, a filmmaker who's working on a documentary on her uncle's career. "We keep a lot in the air between us." As she watches, with concern and alarm, her brother's increasingly reclusive behavior, she must deal with their mother's early dementia, fearing she's destined for the same fate.

In a voice that rarely rises above an intense whisper, Dana Spiotta's novel leaves us with some profound questions: How well do we know the ones dearest to us and, in the face of our most well-intentioned efforts, can their inner lives ever truly be known? --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Beth Harbison (Shoe Addicts Anonymous) has created a world where ex-boyfriends from high school do not work at a car wash 20 years later.

Protagonist Erin reconnects with her first love, Nate, two decades after their teenage break up to find a man who's as successful, sexy and in love with her as ever. There's nary a paunch in sight as the two romantically collide in a supremely moving sexual reunion. The problems begin on the way to the bathroom, when Erin finds Nate's wedding ring. Meanwhile, Erin is engaged to a catch of her own--the wonderful Rick, who, for all his attributes, doesn't light Erin's fire the way Nate does.

Harbison's wry sense of humor tempers the angst-ridden portions of the book. The story moves back and forth in time, from the passionate teenage Erin to the jaded adult Erin who is torn between doing the right thing and following her heart. We find out what broke up Erin and Nate in the first place--when they were madly in love--and wonder why he didn't try to win her back sooner.

This book will make you want to go through notes from old boyfriends from high school and wonder what might have been, although in most of our cases a trip to the car wash can alleviate any regrets. However, in considering why people stay in mediocre relationships, Harbison's love story is somehow both hopeful and gratifying. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Like 2011 Best Picture Oscar winner The King's Speech, Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You is so absorbing that you don't realize how little has happened until after you've finished reading.

That is, how little has happened on the surface. Like most humans, Alison's characters eat and sleep, fight and make love, take trips and suffer accidents. But book's real action is psychological: battles are fought in the characters' minds and hearts, their actions betraying very little of their inner struggles.

The slight action of The Very Thought of You unfolds at Ashton House, a Yorkshire estate converted to a boarding school as housing for London children fleeing the Blitz. Its narrative switches among the perspectives of several well-drawn characters, with just enough time spent on each one's thoughts for them to be sympathetic and not tiresome. Eight-year-old Anna Sands is the common thread, pulling the reader through Mrs. Ashton's unfulfilled desire to have a child, Mr. Ashton's deep regrets over both his inability to walk and his wife's longing, and his unfolding attachment to schoolteacher Ruth Weir.

Alison deftly handles love, regret and loss, creating a web of dramatic irony all the more impressive because it's never obvious. The result is like a watercolor half filled in, a psychological landscape made more real by the spaces left blank. The Very Thought of You is a fine first novel from a keenly perceptive writer. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at Intractable Bibliophilia

London 1960: Jennifer Stirling wakes in a hospital to learn that she has survived a terrible car accident. She is the wife of a wealthy business magnate who provides Jennifer with a life some women only dream of. The problem is, Jennifer can't recall who she is or who she was--until she discovers a heartfelt love letter signed with the letter "B," asking her for forgiveness and to leave her husband. It proves to be just the jolt Jennifer's memory needs in reconstructing the past and a love affair she only half-remembers.

JoJo Moyes (Sheltering Rain; The Peacock Emporium) structures this captivating romance in chapters named for the months surrounding the fateful accident in 1960, and weaves a tale that ultimately unravels in 2003. A modern-day journalist, Ellie, caught in a complicated love affair of her own, discovers love letters misfiled in a newspaper archive. Searching for meaning in her own life and a story that might save her career, she sets out to find and reunite the lovers immortalized on the page. But is it too late?

At times, the shifts of chronology might make the reader feel as off-balance as Jennifer in does piecing together the facts that resulted in the accident and its tragic aftermath. But Moyes is an intelligent, engaging storyteller who lures the reader through the complexities of the narrative via dramatic twists and turns of missed opportunities, glitches that keep lovers apart and cliff-hangers that build up reader expectation only to deliver the unexpected. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In her ambitious novel about 19th-century Puerto Rico, bestselling memoirist Esmeralda Santiago (When I Was Puerto Rican) creates a bumper crop of characters in conflict. The plot of Conquistadora rides on the trajectory of Ana Larragoity Cubillas, a small, unwanted daughter of Spain whose deficit of riches, aristocratic looks and demure inclinations stunt her prospects in 1800s Sevilla. Ana bucks under the constraints of her convent school and revels in lightly supervised summers at her grandfather's farm, where she finishes off her suitability for mantilla matronhood by becoming entranced by the conquistadordiaries of a 16th-century ancestor who served under Ponce de León. Ana rails that she was born the wrong sex and 300 years too late, but she spies her chance when the twin brothers of a beloved classmate inherit a sugarcane plantation on the wilder coast of Puerto Rico.

Eighteen-year-old Ana launches her personal conquista plan of marriage, expatriation, moral fungibility and arduous work on the brothers' plantation in the Caribbean. It's Ana who has la buena cabeza for business, but her entire annexed family pays the price of her ambition, and four decades of economic and human strife based on slavery ensue. Like its heroine, the novel's prose exhibits more swagger than finesse, with some inelegant racy bits and chunks of dialogue that fail to evoke a 19th-century tonality, but overall Conquistadora is a satisfying and informative big read that delivers a powerful ending. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

"This is the way pop ends," acclaimed music critic Simon Reynolds writes, "not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pixies or Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university." The phenomenon in recent culture--evident in art, food, film, advertising, fashion, toys, but especially music--to revive, retool and re-live our immediate past has haunted Reynolds throughout his laudable career. Part pop-music history, part philosophical treatise, part memoir, Retromania explores, among other things, this causality dilemma: "Is nostalgia stopping our culture's ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward?"

Whether describing a New York Dolls concert, philosophizing on the difference between vinyl and digital or tracing the history of post-punk, Reynolds is scathing and articulate, relevant and ever critical. He recounts his "visceral" discomfort at the introduction of the iPod and rails against mash-ups, which came back "like a badly digested dinner" in the work of Girl Talk. With astounding thoroughness, expertise and maybe a tinge of doomsday-calling, Reynolds analyzes how the instant accessibility made possible by the Internet has changed the ways in which we collect and experience music. Encyclopedic in scope yet focused in theme, Retromania is a brainy examination of the recycled zeitgeist that defines our time in terms of times that have come before. --Claire Fuqua Anderson, fiction writer

Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist and a devout Muslim with a compelling argument for reconciling Islam with the values of secular societies. Islam Without Extremes is an accessible, informative book that's both a crash course in Islamic history and a case for Islam's uncorrupted, freedom-friendly future.

It is Turkey, Mustafa argues, that provides us with a symbol of what that future could look like. "Turkey cannot alone shape the future of the Muslim world," Akyol writes. "But what it can and does do is present an example of a synthesis of Islam, democracy, and capitalism."

Rooting this assertion in bases both Qur'anic and historical, Akyol uses clear, straightforward language to make his case. He traces the "war of ideas" between rationalist and traditionalist schools in Islam that have characterized the religion for centuries and draws out the economic and political motivations behind them. This foundation in Islam leads to a thorough examination of Ottoman and Turkish history, in which Akyol explains how the economic and political climate of his home country creates the conditions for a society that is both Islamic and democratic.

A large part of his argument relies on drawing a striking parallel between rigidly dogmatic religious extremists and the equally rigid and totalitarian secularist (as opposed to secular) powers that ruled Turkey by turn. Akyol convincingly argues that a liberal, secular state, in which its citizens are free to practice (or not practice) the religion of their choosing, is the only state in which Islam can flourish as it is truly intended. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice

What a helpful, hopeful book Lama Surya Das offers to anyone who finds life overwhelming! His encouraging, steadying and compassionate voice shows us how the "conveniences" of modern living--especially the electronic--far from being time-savers, alienate us from our connection to the real world and from ourselves: "...we are cutting time up into thinner and thinner slices until it slips through our fingers." Working with easy meditations and exercises, the reader comes to see the reality of two "times": that of the clock and the absolute time-less-ness of Now, what he calls Buddha Standard Time. A mundane example of this is the experience of being "in the Zone"--clock time no longer has any relation to the amount perfectly accomplished by one in that Zone.

While lama training is well beyond most of us, what we can do is begin with Lama Surya Das' meditations and become familiar with the vast Space within ourselves. This Space is always there, is always perfect and is always accessible. It begins with simple, mindful breathing; with gazing up into the night sky; with listening to the ongoing songs of your own body, blood, breathing. There are no cushions to buy, no incense to light (unless you wish to); all you need is with you now. With this comforting beginning, Lama Surya Das leads the reader deeper and deeper into Sacred Time, and finally to understand that "every home is a temple, and this earth is like an altar upon which we walk in the splendor of our renewed vision of expansive time and space." --Judith Hawkins-Tillirson, proprietress, Wyrdhoard Books, and blogger at Still Working for Books

The Beekeeper's Lament is a deceptively calm rendering of the history of the honey bee in the United States. Nordhous instructs her readers in the bee's biology, but most importantly, in the pathogens and pests assaulting the honey bee. The creature is susceptible to a frightening array of diseases, like foulbrood, known to the ancients, to the more modern attacks of the Arroa and other mites, to "multiple viral, bacterial... and fungal infections" and, most alarming of all, to syndromes such as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which the entire hive vanishes. Nordhous follows "bee guy" John Miller in his seasonal endeavors, from everyday hive maintenance to the challenges of shifting thousands of hives, insuring a seamless alignment of bee proximity to the plant flowerings, which are dependent upon them.

Geneticists and bee guys alike are working feverishly to find sustainable solutions to the honey bees' problems; most agree that agricultural monoculture, with pesticide use, exacerbates the difficulties facing the bee. This urgency is not merely about loss of honey for consumers or livelihoods of thousands; even though the famous statement attributed to Einstein--"If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live"--is not his, the fact remains that it is true and posits a very different future for us. Most likely, no one solution will emerge to help the honey bee, but there is some small degree of comfort in knowing that researchers and beekeepers are tireless in their pursuit of any avenue that may bring them closer to restoring the bees' health. --Judith Hawkins-Tillirson, proprietress, Wyrdhoard books, and blogger at Still Working for Books

Two teens come together in this taut psychological novel to explore the question of whether or not there is an afterlife. Marcus Sedgwick (Revolver) hauntingly juxtaposes their contemporary stories with that of a pastor in the 18th century. They share in common the town of Winterfold, on the Suffolk coast of England. Once a thriving town with 12 churches, Winterfold is gradually disappearing into the sea. A high point in the novel occurs when native townsgirl Ferelith wins over the summering Rebecca by taking her to Winterfold's sole remaining church at dusk. With the church's eastern-facing wall claimed by the ocean, it is now, in Ferelith's words, "a temple to the sea."

The story unfolds through the diaries of the 18th-century parson, Ferelith's first-person account and an omniscient narrator who describes the developments in beautiful Rebecca's and goth-girl Ferelith's tenuous friendship. Through his development of these three narrative threads, the author delivers some chilling twists and terrifying surprises, all the while underscoring the timeless human preoccupation of what comes after death. Like Ferelith, the parson becomes involved with a newcomer, Dr. Barrieux. A man to rival Sweeney Todd in more ways than one, the doctor survived France's Reign of Terror, and he invites the pastor along on a "voyage to the unknown" from which they will "return with the truth." The pastor gradually reveals the dark undercurrents of that "voyage," and the two teens unwittingly get swept up in it as well. Sedgwick takes readers on a gripping ride to uncover what lies beyond this life. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Sixteen-year-old Lacey Anne Byer loves her small town, her lifelong friends, her loving parents and her close-knit church, where her father serves as the youth pastor. For the first time, she's old enough to have a meaningful part in the annual "Hell House" production, a dramatic presentation of sin and redemption intended to bring people to God. Each scene depicts a sin--domestic abuse, gay marriage, drunk driving, suicide--and its corresponding punishment, both in this life and the next. Lacey longs for the part of "Abortion Girl," a character who dies a gruesome death in an abortion clinic, but only after repenting. Initially Lacey's best friend's sister, Tessa, is cast in the coveted role. But when Tessa tells her family and the congregation that she is pregnant, Lacey gets the part. She throws herself into the role, but as her friends' lives unravel and she begins to fall for a former classmate with a dark past, Lacey experiences an epiphany of her own. She comes to realize that, well meaning as they may be, her parents' rigid way perhaps isn't hers, and that compassion for others in spite of their failings may be more Christ-like.

Well-drawn, three-dimensional characters who grapple with faith and doubt, confusion and conviction and with painful secrets help make this an unforgettable novel. Readers will find no easy answers here, whether they believe the tenets of Lacey's church to be repellent or comforting. Perhaps Lacey's question "Is it okay to not know what I believe?" is really the best answer of all. --Jane Henriksen Baird, public librarian in Alaska