Janie Ryan is born with all the elements of a tough life: poverty, an absent father, a home in the roughest part of Aberdeen, Scotland, and a young, rebellious mother who runs from one dangerous person to another. Eventually, one of these people sticks around Janie's life for too long, threatening to weaken the tight bond between fiery mother and hyper-observant daughter. So begins Kerry Hudson's first novel, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma.

Despite their bleak circumstances, the Ryans' lives are never without crass jokes and heated opinions. Iris is a mother readers will gawk at and root for as she trudges repeatedly through abusive relationships, drug use, drug selling and squandered state support. What ultimately makes her likable is her refusal to be pitied. Even her vicious temper can be strangely uplifting, as though her willingness to fight is the one thing that assures us she will somehow make it as a mother. On the day of her daughter's birth, she snaps at a nurse: "My lassie can cry as long as she wants tae, anyway, it was probably yer ugly mug that set her off!"

Hudson was born in Aberdeen, and the detail with which she describes the region and its people breathes familiarity into every landlord or chip shop owner. To those unfamiliar with Scottish slang, the quips and expressions add a punchiness to even the most serious dialogue. --Annie Atherton

In The Consequences, the sequel to 2013's The Affair, Colette Freedman picks through the bloody aftermath of a discovered liaison. There are three players--the wife, the husband and the mistress--and each has a chance to tell his or her side of the story.

When we last left this dysfunctional trio, they were reeling from a humiliating confrontation as Kathy affirmed her love for her cheating husband, Robert; he insisted he wanted her back; and the devastated mistress, Stephanie, took the high road, agreeing to give Robert up. For many readers, the story could simply end there, but Freedman takes it a step further.

As Richard and Kathy struggle to rebuild a marriage where there is no trust, Stephanie learns she is pregnant. This proves to be the making (and undoing) of all of them. Freedman fleshes out her characters thoroughly, giving readers a chance to identify with each one. There are no villains here... and no angels, either.

What's so refreshing about The Consequences is that Freedman doesn't pigeonhole Kathy as a pampered ice queen or Stephanie as a calculating slut. Both are fine women who've made mistakes; both are portrayed sympathetically (though the lonely, anxiety-ridden Robert gets shorter shrift as he struggles to do what's right). Just deserts will be served before the tale's shocking conclusion, leaving readers in suspense as they puzzle over which woman Robert will ultimately choose. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

In the first story of April Wilder's This Is Not an Accident, a nervous young woman doesn't have an accident. In fact, she's so preoccupied by the fact that she hasn't had a car accident that she finds herself compulsively driving four hours to Iowa just to be sure she didn't have an accident on her first trip. She blacks out, then comes to hours later, combing the shoulder of the highway for evidence of the accident she's almost sure she didn't have.

Other stories in this collection feature a man in the midst of a divorce who, stood up by his soon-to-be-ex-wife, ends the evening triumphantly devouring a raw steak in front of an angry, horrified master chef, and a woman who wins an argument and loses her boyfriend at a tailgate party as a giant roast pig looks on. At first, Wilder's stories seem to have a dystopian edge. The remedial driver's education that compels the first character to endless commuting, for example, hints at Orwellian doublespeak and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Nevertheless, it quickly becomes clear This Is Not an Accident is far from futuristic. Wilder's characters are on the edge of everyday breakdowns, fighting the eternal absurdity of marriage, traffic and other familiar hells. Almost all of them are appealingly sympathetic, making Wilder's view of the world amused rather than bitter. These are odd stories that resist the urge to become fantastical, because Wilder understands that life is strange enough as it is. --Emma Page, bookseller at Island Books, Mercer Island, Wash.

Emylia Hall's The Swiss Affair is part romance, part coming-of-age tale. Hadley Dunn hasn't had a very exciting life, but that all changes when the 19-year-old literature student decides to study abroad in Lausanne, Switzerland, for a year. Hadley is amazed by all she sees in Lausanne, and quickly comes to love the city for its physical beauty and its stories evocative of Hemingway's novels. She becomes close friends with Kristina, a Danish girl who lives next to her in the student housing, and thinks she might be falling in love with her tutor, Joel Wilson.

Hall's (The Book of Summers) central themes of love and connection are grounded by the novel's strong sense of place. Lausanne is more than just the setting; it's like another character. Hadley's relationships with Kristina, Joel and Lausanne change and grow as the months go by.
Life in Lausanne is fresh and exciting for Hadley--until an unimaginable tragedy occurs.

Hadley's determination to find the answers--both in her own life, and in Kristina's life--make her doggedly likable. She refuses to give up and is unafraid to seek out the truth, even at the cost of her own happiness. The Swiss Affair is an appealing love story with an even more alluring setting. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Still Life with Breadcrumbs, Anna Quindlen's seventh novel, is an enjoyable read that explores the themes of aging, the capricious nature of fame and the relationship between art and identity--all in the guise of a romance.

At 60, Rebecca Winter, once famous for a series of black-and-white photos that captured quotidian domesticity, is facing a stark reversal of fortune. She is now divorced, with a negligible bank account balance and all-but-vanished art sales, while still supporting an aging mother. She sublets her sprawling pre-war Manhattan apartment and rents a run-down cabin in the country. When she calls local roofer Jim Bates with an emergency, she becomes drawn into the town and its characters, and the stage for romance is set.

Of course, there are obstacles: Jim is 20 years her junior and responsible for his manic-depressive sister. The two have profound cultural differences, as well, including Jim's belief that Rebecca's new series of photographs of locally found objects is exploitative.

Some of the novel's secondary characters are limited in their emotional range and can seem one-dimensional, but Quindlen tells her story with warmth, humor and particularly close social observations. Still Life with Bread Crumbs adds the comfort of a popular story line to a consideration of the arbitrary material value of fame and art--and the importance of a deeply lived life. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Any contemporary dystopian science fiction novel will inevitably draw comparisons to The Hunger Games or Divergent, but Pierce Brown's Red Rising fully deserves to stand beside them. It's a bone-crunching story of revenge, full of clever plot twists and characters worth rooting for.

Darrow is a young miner on a terraformed Mars, married to the beautiful and ethereal Eo. Life as a miner is brutal and short; the mines are worked by the Reds, who are ruled by the Golds--genetically and socially engineered brutes who kill those beneath them for the slightest infraction. Darrow and Eo end up on the wrong side of this equation with tragic results, setting off a labyrinthine journey of revenge.

Each scene comes alive as Brown captures the emotions of lost love and the yearning for something greater. The scenes of Darrow's genetic manipulation as he is transformed into a Gold are harrowing, and his constant struggle for survival--during which he seems in as much danger of losing pieces of his soul as his life--is reminiscent of the Battle School in Ender's Game. Like Hunger Games, Brown's vision of a criminally stratified future society offers a commentary on our contemporary excesses of materialism and youth worship. Red Rising is the rare book that delivers everything it promises; it deserves all the hype. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

Georgia was so desperate to dig its way out of poverty and destitution in the 1930s that it elected E.D. Rivers as governor because he supported FDR's New Deal. What the state got, however, was a Klansman whose corruption and racism knew no bounds. David Beasley's fastidiously researched Without Mercy tells the story of a justice system that was anything but just.

Georgia set a record on December 9, 1938, when it executed six black men in 81 minutes; for some of them, the entire process from arrest to electric chair took less than three months. As Beasley recounts their crimes, he also provides details of the murder convictions of white men during the same period. The stark contrast between their trials, appeals and sentences is fodder for a horror story. Beasley also highlights additional levels of corruption in Rivers's Georgia by examining the prisons and chain gangs, the Ku Klux Klan's infiltration of the state government and the buying and selling of pardons.

Beasley provides a "Cast of Characters" at the onset, but his meticulous treatment of each person makes Without Mercy easy to follow. Much like a nightmare or a heart-pounding action movie, this is a story one doesn't easily forget. Without Mercy is history, but its shadows and echoes are still very much alive today in the unsettling and eye-opening reality of capital punishment. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Tom Zoellner has written an eclectic mix of books on topics ranging from diamonds and uranium to the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. In Train, he tackles the history and allure of locomotives, what he considers to be the world's first "true machine ever put on wide public display."

"America is a nation of lost train dreams," Zoellner writes. "Some perceive them as nostalgic playthings," but he fervently believes that trains also serve "unromantic needs and unyielding economies." He documents the impact of the locomotive as an "underappreciated marvel" that has modernized societies across the globe, offering solutions to issues of trade, traffic and energy.

Zoellner shares his personal train experiences (mostly riding long-distance rail lines) and offers fascinating stories of people he meets in his travels. He's journeyed through Britain, the birthplace of the steam engine, crossing from the north of Scotland to the southwestern corner in Cornwall; from New Delhi to Varanasi in India; New York to Los Angeles, including passage on the Amtrak Southwest Chief; the longest train route, the Trans-Siberian Railway in Russia; the highest railway, on the Tibetan Plateau in China; and "a corkscrewing path through the Andes" in Peru. His adventures conclude in Spain, riding its remarkably efficient high-speed rail line. Along the way, there are also discussions on an array of topics from environmental benefits to the enduring symbolism of railroads. By blending train history and heritage with memoir elements, Zoellner builds a case for the resurgence of trains in the future. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

This arresting debut fantasy, inspired by Beauty and the Beast and set against a backdrop of Greek myths, stars 17-year-old Nyx, who has been raised to marry and kill the prince of demons.

Although the citizens disagree about what left Tartarus vulnerable, the kingdom fell into the hands of the Gentle Lord, Ignifex, who cut them off from the rest of the world. Nyx's father, Leonidas, bargained with the Gentle Lord to allow his wife to conceive twin girls. In exchange, one daughter would be betrothed to Ignifex when she turned 17. Leonidas trained Nyx to inscribe nullifying sigils of the four elements throughout the Gentle Lord's castle in order to free their homeland. Meanwhile, Nyx's aunt taught her to seduce her new husband ("[D]o whatever it takes to make him trust you," she says). But nothing prepares Nyx for the transformation she will undergo in the Gentle Lord's company. Shade, the living shadow servant of the Gentle Lord, adds to an ensemble of well-layered characters as he defies his master to help Nyx carry out her plan. The mystery of Shade's true identity is sure to keep readers engaged.

Hodge's ambitious debut is well executed, with grand prose and a fully realized world with a system of magic that even well-versed fantasy readers will find refreshing. Nyx's call of duty and desire to survive keeps her from surrendering completely to her dark marriage, but those seeking romance will be plenty satisfied with her interactions between the Gentle Lord and Shade. A captivating read. --Adam Silvera, children's bookseller