Peter Rock's previous fiction has always been a bit strange, like the story of a medical test subject (The Ambidextrist) or the one about a father and daughter who secretly live in a huge park in Portland, Oregon (My Abandoment). The Shelter Cycle continues the trend.

It's about a real-life religious cult, the Church Universal and Triumphant, whose adherents believed the world was going to end in the 1980s. Before writing the novel, Rock talked with some of the church's members, strengthening his ability to make us believe in their world of Ascended Masters, the Messenger, Elementals, Undines and Sylphs.

In one narrative thread, "letters" written by young Francine describe her life in the church and what she and others believe. Francine lives with her family and close friend Colville in a Montana fort/shelter established by church members, now honeycombed with underground houses. "People would live inside them," she writes, "once the world all around us was no longer there."

The novel's other story is set near Boise, Idaho, and concerns a missing nine-year old girl. Wells Davidson and Francine, now married and pregnant, have been helping look for her. Colville's surprise appearance complicates everything. Rock does an excellent job of letting the two "stories" feed off each other, revealing more and more about these characters, their relationships and their beliefs--then and now. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

It's 1999, and after working nonstop for seven years, Clementine Evans is finally about to make partner at her New York law firm. Clemmie's been so focused on her job she hasn't spent much time with her family; at her Granny Addie's 99th birthday party, Clemmie is shocked to realize how frail her grandmother has become. She's even more confused when Addie mistakes Clemmie for a woman named Bea--a woman Clemmie has never heard of, but whose name distresses both her mother and aunt.

Lauren Willig's The Ashford Affair sends Clemmie on a voyage of discovery back to her grandmother's life as a Kenyan coffee farmer in the 1920s and 1930s, then even further back to her grandmother's childhood at Ashford Park, home of the Earls of Gillecote. The stories of Addie's upbringing, and her complicated relationship with her cousin Bea, are all new to Clemmie, who is staggered to realize that her beloved grandmother has been hiding secrets for 70 years.

Willig (the Pink Carnation series) skillfully intertwines three separate story lines--New York at the end of the 20th century, London during the Great War and Kenya in the 1920s--as she tells the stories of Addie, Bea and Clemmie. Clemmie's modern stresses interweave seamlessly with Addie's wartime worries to create a fascinating, yet believable, Bridget Jones meets Downton Abbey atmosphere. Fans of Willig's other books or of Kate Morton's family sagas will enjoy The Ashford Affair. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

As Allison Amend's A Nearly Perfect Copy opens in 2007, the art market is on fire, and Elmira "Elm" Howells is the pre-20th-century acquisitions and authentication expert at Tinsley, a small New York auction house founded by her great-grandfather. Her boss (who is also her cousin) is unhappy with her division's sales, though; two years after the death of her son, Ronan, in the South Asian tsunami, Elm is still reeling. Meanwhile, Gabriel Connois, the great-great-grandson of a critically admired minor impressionist artist, is living in a Paris hostel. His original artwork finds no market, but an antiquities broker pays cash for his accomplished sketches, on period-appropriate paper, in the manner of his ancestor's studio.

When Elm contracts with a French human cloning firm in hopes of a successful embryo implant of Ronan's DNA, her need for financial resources leads her to the Paris broker peddling Gabriel's forgeries. She knows they are suspect, but her need trumps her professional integrity. In the convergent paths of these two troubled lives, Amend builds a story of international intrigue and personal dissolution set against the shaky infrastructure of the frenzied, often opaque, pre-Great Recession art market.

Even as an art insider, Amend (author of the story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novel Stations West), notes, "Elm often felt like she was working inside a burlap sack--light filtered in, but not enough to see by." Though it's driven by a somewhat farfetched plot, A Nearly Perfect Copy adeptly explores the ways in which deception often masks the authentic in desperate pursuit of personal ambition--whether financial, artistic or familial. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Josephine Tey, one of the leading authors of Britain's Golden Age of crime writing, stars in Fear in the Sunlight. It's the fourth in Nicola Upson's series of novels (starting with An Expert in Murder) featuring Tey and Scotland Yard inspector Archie Penrose, whose feelings for the novelist may not be completely unrequited.

This time around, Upson pairs Tey with another great Brit--Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock arrives in the resort village of Portmeirion, Wales, where Tey is celebrating her 40th birthday with friends, hoping to convince her to allow him to make a movie of her novel A Shilling for Candles. Upson introduces a gaggle of supporting characters, each with a huge load of baggage. The story includes family estrangements, sibling hatred, the disappearance of a three-year-old child, Tey's love for her friend Marta (who is already involved with another woman), Penrose's rediscovery of a past love--and more.

Hitch has arranged this weekend, complete with his trademark pranks and practical jokes, but the joke is on him, when there are suddenly two murders and a suicide to contend with. Penrose is bruited about by Portmeirion's local constabulary and leaves the town unsatisfied with the quick disposition of the case. Several years later, when another murder is tied to a Hitchcock movie, Penrose returns to the scene of the original crimes to sort it all out.

Upson has written an atmospheric and taut tale about lies, betrayals and revenge. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Gordon Ramsay is known for profanity, explosive anger, arrogance--and Michelin-starred restaurants. In Home Cooking, he proclaims "the best thing you can have in a kitchen is confidence... that's what separates good cooks from the mediocre ones." At the same time, he believes cooking is a craft that requires a certain set of rules to be mastered before experimentation and creativity can be successful and, he states, "I'm going to show you how to cook yourself into a better cook."

Ramsay believes preparation is 90% of the battle toward becoming a better cook and requires much less than most think--a good set of knives and pans are sufficient. Otherwise, he recommends buying tools as needed to ensure everything will be used at least once.

After discussing the "absolute basics" of mise-en-place, he addresses classic dishes, believing the best way to develop skills is to build on the familiar, introducing new ingredients and trusting our palates because cooking is intuitive and "often comes down to building up layers of the five basic tastes--sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami." Then he moves on to spices, preparing fish and meat, cooking for one or for many, baking and much more. Tempting recipes abound, representing a wide range of cuisines and cultural influences; examples include miso salmon; a bacon, pea and goat cheese frittata; and coconut pancakes with mango slices and lime syrup. With Ramsay's help, novice cooks will learn to love Home Cooking. --Kristen Galles, blogger at Book Club Classics

I Love New York grew out of an ongoing conversation between Daniel Humm and Will Guidara (the team behind Manhattan's famed Eleven Madison Park restaurant) as they tried to identify New York City's cuisine. Their struggle, they recount, stemmed from New York's status as an edible melting pot; with so many international options to choose from, the city often loses sight of the food available right in its backyard. Their attempt to answer the question of New York's culinary culture proves a tribute to the city's rich agricultural past--and present.

The recipes are organized alphabetically by key ingredient, a list that includes every local-to-New York ingredient one could imagine--from apples and berries to beef and venison to beer and cheese. Each chapter starts with a profile of a local New York farm before diving into recipes featuring the farm's main offerings. These recipes are simple to follow (if not always simple to execute), and there are even recommendations for how to use and store leftover components of some of the more complicated dishes. From a breakfast of baked eggs to New York Sour cocktails and beef tartare to maple sundaes for dessert, Humm and Guidara shy away from no dish. Stunning photography of farms and New York City punctuate each chapter, and the striking contrast between the rural environments that give us these ingredients and urban surroundings in which Humm and Guidara celebrate them proves a lasting tribute to oft-overlooked--but incredibly rich--local cuisine of New York City. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Laura Bates's Shakespeare Saved My Life touches on the search for meaning in life, the struggles that complicate the path to triumph and the salvation that can be found in literature's great works. Bates, a professor at Indiana State, is the creator of a program that introduces Shakespeare's works to prisoners, specifically those in long-term solitary confinement (known as supermax). Larry Newton, sentenced at the age of 17 to life with no possibility of parole, has spent 10 years in isolation.

When Bates brought her Shakespeare in Shackles program to Newton's supermax prison, his unexpected interest and understanding of the plays quickly became evident. In his initial assignment, in which he was asked to comment on a speech from Richard II, Newton expressed a sophisticated awareness of the play's philosophical themes and multiple interpretations--not bad for a fifth-grade drop-out who didn't know who Shakespeare was when the program started. Moving through each of the plays, Newton continued to show extraordinary insight--and made changes in his own personal outlook and behavior. Bates, meanwhile, found surprising satisfaction in working with students who, in solitary confinement, had great stretches of time available for reading and subsequent interpretation.

Shakespeare Saved My Life traces Newton's advancements into the world of Shakespeare while documenting Bates's stalled path to tenure despite her groundbreaking prison work. In the end, though, the book's title holds true for both Newton and Bates--just as it might for the reader, too. --Roni K. Devlin, owner, Literary Life Bookstore

Caricatures have long been looked down upon by cultured journalists and practitioners of the "high arts." They inspire fear in politicians, provoke death threats from religious fundamentalists and can change public policy with their emotionally charged, voiceless rhetoric. Former Nation editor Victor Navasky's The Art of Controversy is a thought-provoking and intriguing discussion of how the "low art" of caricature got its bite.

Navasky takes a professorial approach in delineating the significance of the caricature and exploring how political content and imagery merge metaphorically in the brain to trigger a primal, emotional response. He cites the works of great artists from Thomas Nast to Ralph Steadman while advancing his own philosophical discernment of caricature's enduring power: "Perhaps the distortions and leanness with which most caricatures are rendered," he writes, "combine to form a hyper-charged, streamlined delivery vehicle for the ideas, arguments, narratives and associations they contain."

The delivery can be so effective that a Danish caricaturist who drew the prophet Muhammed was subject to mass condemnation and calls for censorship, even though most of his attackers had not seen the actual drawings. From this case, Navasky  (Naming Names) argues eloquently and convincingly as to why censorship of caricature artists amounts to an assault on individual free speech.

The Art of Controversy is an amazing historical document from a political journalist all too familiar with caricature's intuitive and divisive power. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Amid an explosion of bully books, Meg Medina's (The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind) novel stands out for its honesty about girl-on-girl violence and its intelligent, insightful narrator.

The title message is delivered to 15-year-old Piddy in the novel's opening line, by one of Yaqui's lackeys. Piddy, new to the school and the neighborhood, doesn't even know who Yaqui Delgado is. Someone who purports to be Piddy's friend, drama-loving Darlene, sits with Piddy at lunch and fills in the details with relish: "Yaqui Delgado hates you.... She wants to know who the hell you think you are, shaking your ass the way you do." Medina tackles the issue of envy between girls, when one develops faster than another. Piddy was a late bloomer ("planchadita--ironed out and hipless"), but suddenly her derriere "seems to have a mind of its own."

Medina brilliantly captures the sense of foreboding that envelops bully victims. We see little of Yaqui except for one brutal attack, yet she is omnipresent. Piddy's academic work plummets. She alienates the few people she felt close to, and skips school. When several events spur her to fess up and face her life, Piddy realizes that only she can answer the challenge posed by her mother, "The important question now is: Who are you going to be?" Medina does not force a neat ending but rather demonstrates that Piddy has the tools to stand up for herself. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness