Two cats living disparate lives in modern Beijing narrate Pallavi Aiyar's imaginative Chinese Whiskers. Soyabean is a male "only kitten" smothered by the love of his mother and by Nai Nai, a widowed 80-year-old and the eldest member of the middle-class Xu household, which is undergoing a multigenerational tug-of-war. "All that is good in China and noble about being Chinese they reject," Nai Nai complains, referring to her son's and grandson's mockery of great poets, the Peking Opera and even calligraphy. After Soyabean is sold to wealthy foreigners who fawn over his beauty, Nai Nai's spoiled adult grandson hatches a get-rich-quick scheme whereby Soyabean becomes a model for a gourmet cat food company.

In a parallel plot, Tofu, a female kitten, "a dustbin cat," is one of five siblings roughing it on the streets of Beijing. Tofu's family once lived with a Manchu nobleman who served their suppers on silver plates. The communist revolution destroyed the nobleman's wealth and, ultimately, the cats became strays. When a woman from the Cat Protection Society rescues skinny, street-smart Tofu, she places her with the wealthy foreigners who adopted Soyabean.

The paired house cats come to share a loving, pampered existence until their domestic bliss is complicated by the SARS virus epidemic, a tainted pet-food scandal and Tofu's sudden disappearance. Sketched illustrations and regional language references enrich Aiyar's suspense-filled novel, a gentle morality tale about "Old China" versus "New China." --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

"There are different kinds of prisons," Carla Buckley writes, "some with walls and floors and doors, and others built even more sturdily out of things you can't see--love and hope and fear."

Dana Carlson escaped the prison of her small hometown, Black Bear, Minn., or so she thought. She made a life of bringing down buildings when she became part owner of a demolition company. Despite all the literal freedom in her life, her past and the walls she created in her family continue to imprison Dana. So when her niece calls to say Dana's sister is dying of kidney disease, Dana isn't sure if she has dynamite powerful enough to free herself and those she loves, figuratively speaking.

Like Buckley's debut novel, The Things That Keep Us Here, Invisible offers readers haunting questions without right or wrong answers. Buckley's ability to create fully realized characters with whom readers easily empathize makes the ethical dilemmas the characters encounter frighteningly powerful. Additionally, Buckley's obvious understanding of the science included in the plot--biological and chemical--intensifies the novel's suspense and will likely have readers scrutinizing the ingredients in everything they buy.

The complexity of Invisible creates a satisfying reading experience, but it's Buckley's careful and purposeful depiction of the characters' relationships that cements everything together, allowing readers to envision their own prisons built of "love and hope and fear." Invisible is simultaneously terrifying and encouraging. What more should a great read be? --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Chinese children who lie a lot are called "powboys," but the 20-year-old narrator of Mo Yan's Pow! assures you he's telling the truth. He's come to the crumbling temple of the Horse Spirit to tell the Wise Monk there what happened when he was 10 years old in Slaughterhouse Village, where the farmers became rich by infusing meat with water to increase the weight.

Blessed with a powerful digestive system, a perpetual hunger for meat and the ability to hear meat speaking, the boy revolutionizes the village's meatpacking industry and becomes immortalized in a statue that arrives 10 years later at the temple where he is seeking refuge, at the height of the Carnivore Festival, for inclusion in the opera From Meat Boy to Meat God.

Packing his novel with dozens of colorful characters, from gangsters to nuns, from butchers to movie stars, the endearing Mo Yan is a master of goofy comedy, a Nobel Prize winner who can't resist pratfalls and slapstick, with stampeding ostriches and windblown toupees. Never going where you expect, his plot constantly loops into backstories and teases with flash-forwards, building to a climax with shocker revelations and a grand guignol murder, leaping and bounding to its berserk ending in an over-the-top, cinematic 41-mortar salvo, as the 12-year-old hero demolishes the settings one by one in which the novel has unfolded, in pursuit of the corrupt but kindly village head who may or may not be the mastermind behind this delightful epic's tragic plot. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle

The world of Zook Country feels authentic: Bill Swears's time in the military informs every page, especially the sections in which the main character, Jake Chestnut, is on patrol killing zooks--superfast and super deadly not-quite-zombies. (Only a handful of talented zook hunters have the necessary reflexes to see even the blur of activity that gives away a zook position.) Humanity lives behind barriers in tightly secured enclaves, protecting themselves from the zook and the ghasten, a ghostly variation on zooks. Though unconcerned with humans, ghasten do attract zook, so teams of ghasten hunters, with their own sets of skills, are also available for hire. Jake and his partner, Gary, get the well-paid opportunity of a lifetime clearing out what used to be a country club. Jake hires a full platoon of other zook and ghasten specialists to combat the undead threat, but finds much more than he bargained for underneath the grounds of the former rich men's playground.

Jake is a man's man, through and through, and comes up flustered time and again as his pretty yet overly qualified secretary saves the company, the day and his heart. The gentle patriarchal tone of some of these passages may grate on some readers, but it's all in good fun for the most part. What surprises about Zook Country isn't the action sequences, which are all clearly written, nor the consistently well-done worldbuilding. Rather, it's the amount of self-awareness and downright introspective nature of the main character, who wears his heart--and his assault rifle--on his sleeve. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

The Folly of the World bounces around its 15th-century Flemish setting at first, with two prologues: a mysterious pair row a boat over a flooded village in the springtime; come the fall, the condemned Sander Himbrecht escapes a hanging and dives into a river. Soon, though, Jesse Bullington settles into a narrative groove, as a con man named Jan Tieselen encounters Jolanda, a rebellious teenage girl, along a coastal road. Discovering her to be an excellent swimmer, Jan buys Jo from her father and takes her to Rotterdam, where--unexpectedly reunited with Sander--he reveals his scheme. The three will go back to that flooded village, and Jolanda will dive into the sunken house of Jan's illegitimate father to find a family heirloom that will enable him to claim the Tieselen title and fortune. Of course, things don't work out as planned....

Bullington's mashup of late medieval setting and hardboiled plot is exquisite. The conniving Jan, violently paranoid Sander and fast-learning Jo make a perfect noir team, barely able to hold itself together. There's a rough-hewn authenticity to every aspect of the novel, from the period details to Jo's surreptitious observation of Jan and Sander's sexual relationship. Although it's billed as a fantasy, The Folly of the World wears that mantle lightly, as the truly weird stuff--like just what happened to Sander in that river--is never fully explained. But that just makes the story even more deliciously unsettling. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

Subtitled "Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London," Lisa Hilton's The Horror of Love tells the dramatic story of the relationship between the successful novelist and the Free French commander who became one of the most influential politicians in post-war Europe. The title comes from a statement Mitford made to her sister, Diana Mosley, when she saw Palewski, looking happy, with another woman. "So dreadful to prefer the loved one to be unhappy," she said. "Oh, the horror of love."

It is hard to think of any of the sensational Mitford sisters without mentioning all of them: Diana, the beautiful fascist; Unity, the ardent Nazi; Jessica, the lifelong Communist; the quite unconventional Deborah; Pamela, referred to as "the rural one"; and, of course, Nancy--the eldest sister, an author and fashion maven with famously bad taste in men.

Nancy, married to a crashing bore and philanderer, moved to Paris after the war to be with Palewski, one of Charles DeGaulle's right-hand men. Although Palewski told Nancy that he was not madly in love with her, she couldn't stay away from him, living for the few moments of time he could spare for her. He finally married someone else, leaving her devastated. She patterned Fabrice in her novel The Pursuit of Love after Palewski.

Hilton has captured the time and the affair in an entertaining and arch look at Nancy, founder of the concept of "U and non-U," and Gaston, halitosis and all. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Poet Melanie Challenger (Galatea) was alarmed to note that while she knew both her grandmother's and her mother's favorite wildflower, she did not have a favorite because she didn't know enough wildflowers from which to choose. In On Extinction, she travels to places that embody the history of human connections to nature and muses on our growing estrangement from our environment.

The title suggests Challenger's initial focus on extinctions: not only of plants and animals, but of cultures, languages and industries. She quickly discovers a growing secondary interest in nostalgia, like our attraction to extinctions, which makes the dodo bird the subject of so much curiosity. In her travels through the Arctic and the Antarctic, England, South America and Canada, she attempts to reunite with nature and find her own favorite wildflower. She also asks: Can humans live productively in this world without destroying it? She is made hopeful by our reverence for the past and for natural beauty.

Challenger brings a loving sense of wonder to the natural world, realizing how little she knows and relishing the process of learning. She looks backwards with the intent of remaking our future relationship with the planet. She does, as one might expect, discuss Muir and Thoreau, but she also turns to Locke, J.S. Mill, Rousseau and especially Darwin, seeking a philosophy of the natural world and our place in it. Highly literate with a lovely, almost reverent tone, On Extinction notes human threats to our environment but ultimately remains hopeful that we can reestablish a healthy relationship with the Earth. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at Pages of Julia

A war novel lives or dies by its narrator. In the audiobook version of Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds, Holter Graham does a superb job of giving voice to Private John Bartle, a young soldier with an old soul who describes the surreal details of rooftop and orchard combat in Iraq and the flayed state of his psyche after he returns home. As the novel shuttles among scenes in Iraq, Fort Dix, Virginia and Germany, the adjustments Graham makes to the emotional timbre of his voice, along with location- and year-stamped chapter announcements, help the listener follow the novel's shrapnel perspective.

Powers embeds plenty of recounted dialogue and landscape description into Bartle's first-person monologue. Graham does equally well performing the lines of the naïve young enlistees and their caustically realistic sergeant. The author's MFA in poetry underpins Bartle's minimally syllabled yet resonant descriptions of terrain and combat; Graham reads those passages in a gritty declarative rhythm that keeps the lyricism safely under the razor wire. Most crucially, Graham's performance of Bartle's postwar chapters is a powerfully calibrated alloy of revivification and disassociation.

The Yellow Birds burns with the authenticity of experience, from drops of Tabasco in a sleepy soldier's eyes and the omnipresence of dust to talismanic bargains with fate. Unavoidably, there are sensory details of combat and death that are difficult to hear, but Powers's judiciously beautiful prose and Graham's fully committed performance combine to create a testimony of war that illuminates more than it strafes. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

A heart-pounding prologue kicks off this page-turning tale: two sisters kidnap a baby tied to a prophecy, kill her mother using magic, and then the older sister, Sabina, kills her younger sister.

Next, the author introduces readers to three kingdoms. In the first, Paelsia, an illegitimate noble from the kingdom of Auronos with a chip on his shoulder kills the son of Paelsia's most gifted winemaker after attempting to cheat his father of a fair price. The killer, Aron, is the presumed match for Cleo, daughter of King Corwin Bellos, leader of Auronos, a lush kingdom where the royals live in luxury. Meanwhile, in the neighboring kingdom of Limeros, Sabina resides as mistress of its leader, King Gaios. His son, Magnus, heir to the Limeros throne, is developing "unnatural" feelings toward his sister, Lucia (whom we soon suspect is actually the kidnapped baby, now 16).

The prose may be a bit flabby (certain events are retold from a number of characters' perspectives with no new details added), but the plot moves like the wind, and even with these revelations early on, readers will be anxious to see how the various love triangles and the jockeying for position among the royals play out. Unlike The Hunger Games and Kristin Cashore's Graceling series, this first book in a planned quartet ends on a cliffhanger. The second book, Rebel Spring, is due out in fall 2013. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

As the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King Arthur, Henry Alfred Grummorson has a big legacy to live up to in this humorous twist on a quest tale.

Henry wakes up on his sixth birthday and takes his "trusty donkey," Knuckles, out in search of adventure. First he challenges a fire-breathing Dragon to "a fight to the uttermost!" First-time author-illustrator Kenneth Kraegel creates a perfect circle, with Henry holding out his sword, nearly touching the Dragon's nose, while the mythical creature encircles its tail as if to touch Henry's back. Flecks of green and gold in the Dragon's scales pull in the colors of the hillside and golden sun. The critter blows out smoke rings and suggests, "If rough adventure is what you seek, maybe you should try the Cyclops." The Cyclops, too, avoids bloodshed, instead suggesting a staring contest.

Henry is similarly redirected by a Gryphon and Leviathan. In each case, Kraegel makes the enemy benign, even laughably congenial, yet he never takes away from Henry's seriousness of purpose. Instead, Henry learns that it's connection rather than conflict he seeks. Charming. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness