Reminiscent of Anne Tyler, Denting the Bosch, Teresa Link's incisive debut novel, examines the trials and tribulations of three middle-aged married couples in San Diego. When their friend Sylvia's husband announces he's leaving her for his secretary, Adele and Maggie feel stirrings of doubt about the solidity of their own marriages. Even after many happy years with Paul, Maggie still wonders what became of her first love, the political activist she was rebounding from when she met her future husband. Adele and her husband are locking horns over making their home in San Diego; Drew sees it as paradise, while Adele pines for New York. During a fight, Adele throws a coffee cup at her husband and instead hits their expensive stainless steel dishwasher. "You dented the Bosch," Drew exclaims, creating a metaphor for the fragility of their carefully constructed relationship.

In each of the three marriages, truth will out, forcing difficult choices and straining the wives' camaraderie. In the end, all six spouses must decide which transgressions can and cannot be forgiven.

While she maintains a wry humor, Link's exploration of her characters' lives is no light and frothy experience. She takes a frank and realistic look at all-too-real problems such as marital infidelity, economic instability and the ennui that can set in after year upon year of a stable relationship. However, the warmth and resilience of her three heroines is a tribute to the power of the female spirit and will leave readers ultimately hopeful and satisfied. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger, Infinite Reads

When a baby appears on the doorstep of Bianca and Fidele Stilamore, they name him Renato--Italian for "reborn"--and he grows up to become an artist whose fine work has failed to receive the accolades it deserves. (The same might also be said of Mirabelli himself.)

This sequel to earlier Mirabelli novels The Passion of Teri Heart and The Goddess in Love with a Horse is a lusty, bawdy, hilarious romp through life as recounted by Renato in his old age. As a boy, Renato enjoyed reading one of the few books in the Italian immigrant family's home: Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography. As he grows up, his love of girls, then women, then drawing and painting, grows stronger and stronger until he feels he must devote his life to all of them. He marries, but that doesn't go well. Still, he loves his wife deeply and they remain close to each other, on opposite sides of Boston's Charles River.

Later, a young woman, Avalon, the daughter of a close and dear friend, comes along with her son Kim. Renato just wants to help her out, but their relationship gradually evolves into something tender and beautiful.

"Looking back, I'm baffled that I haven't done better," Renato reflects. "I don't mean painting; I've done all right painting even if nobody knows it. But I could have given more time to my friends, could have listened more and complained less, could have been more generous to everyone." Renato has done well, has lived and loved, and has served his mentor Cellini very well indeed. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Thomas Kell, the protagonist of Charles Cumming's A Foreign Country, is no James Bond. Forced out of MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, to protect his superiors from the embarrassment of his allegedly botched last mission, he gets a call when the organization is once again threatened with international scandal. They need his bulldog tenacity for an off-the-books assignment to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Amelia Levene, MI6's incoming (and first female) director. Kell is on the skids: "a forty-two-year-old man, estranged from his forty-three-year-old wife, with a hangover comparable in range and intensity to the reproduction Jackson Pollock hanging on the wall of his temporary bedroom." Nonetheless, he knows only one life--espionage--and so is happy to pack up his spy gear and get back to work.

Cumming, once a candidate for MI6 himself, has written well about the clandestine world of British espionage (most notably in 2011's The Trinity Six). His morally complex, "superannuated spook" Kell recruits "two borderline geriatric retreads who hadn't been in the game since the fall of the Berlin Wall" and leads them through the hot and shadowy streets of Tunis and Marseilles. They have to work difficult tag-team surveillance operations, hopping trains between France and England, as the investigation uncovers a shady French scheme to discredit the British and regain influence in North Africa. Of course, nothing and no one are as they seem. Cumming's finely developed characters and intricately tangled plot make for an entertaining return to a world that le Carré and Fleming left years ago. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Bad Little Falls, Paul Doiron's third Mike Bowditch mystery (after The Poacher's Son and Trespasser), is chilling in multiple ways. Having stepped on too many toes, Mike finds himself packed off to a new game warden assignment in eastern Maine's Washington County, a rural area where his supervisors believe he won't make trouble. Unfortunately, trouble has a way of finding Mike, in the form of resentful locals and coworkers familiar with his reputation; a beautiful but damaged recovering addict named Jamie; and a murdered man found buried during a blizzard--who happens to be Jamie's ex-lover and her brother's partner in drug dealing.

Law enforcement believes Jamie's brother committed the crime, but Mike's not so sure. Jamie swears her brother would never hurt his friend. Her jealous ex-husband has more motive. Driven by stubborn curiosity and a growing attraction to Jamie, Mike begins his own investigation. Instead of a simple crime of passion, he finds a twisted trail leading back to the fatal overdose of a college student, a suspect list that includes one of his few friends in Washington County and a shocking revelation about Jamie's brilliant but troubled young son.

Filled with frigid winter scenes, dark deeds and tightly constructed character dynamics, Bad Little Falls sees Mike struggling to choose between desire and his better judgment in a labyrinth of dark small-town secrets. The ease with which readers will relate to this headstrong sleuth may prove an even bigger draw than the high stakes of the plot. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger, Infinite Reads

In Charles Dickens and the Great Theater of the World, Simon Callow explores Charles Dickens's life not just as a novelist but as a storyteller in a much larger sense of the word. From reading tours and theatrical productions to his innate talent for mimicry, Dickens led a life full of performance. The primary focus of Callow's biography is on the symbiotic relationship between novelist and performer, beautifully underscoring the myriad of ways in which Dickens's writing was informed by his instinctive sense of drama and delivery. Excerpts from the novels (and from personal correspondence) appear frequently, giving us brilliant flashes of truly Dickensian wit.

Callow--an actor and director who has also written biographies of Charles Laughton and Orson Welles, as well as the memoir My Life in Pieces--is unusually qualified to tackle this topic, having played the role of Dickens on several occasions. He also brings to bear an obvious appreciation for the complexity and extravagance of his subject, both as a person and as an artist. While Callow is well equipped with enthusiasm, however, he cannot be called overly scholarly in his execution. There are no footnotes and very little citation, and only cursory introductions given to quotations. Yet this intimate, informal style, coupled with Callow's obvious familiarity with and affection for Dickens, infects the reader. --Judie Evans, librarian

Generals Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan are considered the triumphant triumvirate of the Civil War, Union army leaders whose radical tactics and bold action hastened the Confederacy's defeat. Yet Sheridan is often overlooked by biographers and historians--thanks in large part to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed all of his wartime documents--but Joseph Wheelan (Jefferson's War) has reconstructed the general's life in Terrible Swift Sword.

Much of the book is dedicated to Sheridan's meteoric rise from West Point graduate to general. The battlefield prose is a whirlwind of corps numbers, troop formations and officer names, yet Wheelan never loses focus on Sheridan, his men and their personal struggles. Sheridan's unusual place in military history comes from his role as cavalry commander. Wheelan describes Sheridan's use of cavalry with infantry support, an early--and very successful--type of combined arms warfare. He was also a practitioner of "total war," burning much of the Shenandoah Valley and holding local civilians partially responsible for guerrilla attacks. (After the war, during a visit to Prussia, he would discuss both of these tactical strategies with Otto von Bismarck.)

Sheridan's military career continued through Reconstruction and several Indian Wars, ending, somewhat surprisingly, with his role as an advocate for Yellowstone National Park. Wheelan's greatest success is in chronicling the complexity of postwar Sheridan, a man who endorsed the extermination of all buffalo (to deprive rogue Indian warriors of sustenance) while using military troops to defend the wildlife in Yellowstone. History buffs, biography aficionados and even readers without vast Civil War knowledge will appreciate this book. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

More than a century after the Spanish-American War, the U.S. military has not left Cuba. As most Americans know, day-to-day life at Guantánamo Bay carries unsettling implications for both Cuba and the United States. William Craig, whose great-grandfather fought the Spanish in 1898, travels to Cuba to unravel the complicated history of the U.S. presence there, and to determine whether his ancestor, famous for outsized lies, was telling the truth about his triumphant charge up San Juan Hill.

Craig evokes the chaotic, crowded, sweaty yet seductive ethos of Cuba, from extortion at the airport to cups of strong, sweet coffee at a friend's casa. He walks the streets of Havana and Santiago de Cuba, weaving his journey into the larger story of Cuba's long struggle for true independence. American readers will find dozens of unfamiliar names, anecdotes and facts, but Craig is a patient narrator, introducing a paean of cubano heroes while emphasizing his main point: most Americans are dangerously uninformed about their neighbor to the south. While the U.S. government clings to its small piece of Cuba, American citizens view the island with fear and distrust, if they consider it at all. As Craig approaches Guantánamo, he wonders what lies ahead for the two countries locked in a twisted, often toxic relationship.

From beisbol games to scarred war monuments, from intoxicating contrabajista music to a tense interrogation at Guantánamo, Yankee Come Home provides a complex but fascinating look at a vibrant country often overlooked by Americans. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing goes against the grain of conventional classroom theory to embrace the simultaneity of creativity, thought, structure and grammar in shaping the writer's craft. "Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn't useful to you and pay attention to what is," Klinkenborg advises. Learning to write involves learning to form sentences--trusting instinct and personal reflection to develop a style and cadence that reflects the personal wisdom within.

Orthodoxy and dogma, he argues, have stunted the growth of creativity and poetic mastery of the language. Returning to a purity of sentence structure requires forsaking what one has learned, ditching the mix of "half-truths, myths and assumptions" of the classroom for experiential learning from the world around writers. Writing also requires a mastery of all aspects of language, such that one can converse with authority to the reader and trust the reader to follow. Writing is work that demands persistent practice, clarity of meaning and development of style, a chore best understood when considered from the point of view of a reader, who must interpret the author's prose to derive his or her own meaning. "Prose is the residue, the consequence, of the writer's choices," Klinkenborg says, "choices about the shape of each sentence. And how each sentence shapes the others."

Klinkenborg's book is meant to be read, savored and digested until thought and process become one--and from this, he says, successful writing will come from saying what one means and meaning what one says. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer

The Magician's Apprentice reads like a tale from The Arabian Nights, in which wise men wander desert sands that conceal wonders and villainy alike.

Baz's turn had finally come. He'd watch his brothers go off one by one to learn a trade and see the world, and now, as the stranger approached across the desert--seemingly out of nowhere--Baz knew someone had finally come for him. "[T]he promise became a sort of roaming vision to Baz, a mysterious open door, imbued with the power to propel him into the future, to see himself as something more than he was." For all his anticipation, 16-year-old Baz soon sees that there is more to life than work. His fate becomes entwined with that of a traveling magician, and he begins to probe the mysteries of life and to cut through illusion, to discover his true self.

This is not a story of action, however, so do not expect any spell-flinging showdowns. Rather, it is a meditative novel that draws readers in with its Zen-like, hypnotic quality. It is as much an inner journey as a physical one, and will appeal to reflective readers who enjoy tackling life's "big questions." Throughout, Kate Banks's (The Baby) language is simple and luscious--and at times enigmatic--as she paints her landscape of desert and mountains, and show us the people who reside there. Peter Sís's (The Wall; Tibet Through the Red Box) illustrations further add to the pages' beauty and deepen the mystical quality of the tale. --Julia Smith, blogger and children's bookseller emerita