As harrowing and bleak as war and violence are, it takes a masterful writer to mine such an environment for hope. In The Orchard of Lost Souls, the Oxford-educated Somali native Nadifa Mohamed (Black Mamba Boy) does just that, broaching a real tragedy with fictional artifice and enlivening a cast of characters so full and lifelike the reader might be sad to lose their company at the novel's close.

Mohamed's rendering of a country on the brink hits readers like a piece of reportage: she spares no details describing the homelessness, violence and famine than ran rampant in Somalia during the late 1980s. Despite it all, the novel finds balance in its characters' humanity. The three women at the heart of the story weave into and out of each other's lives like ants trapped in the same maze. Deqo, a nine-year-old orphan, seeks family in the confines of a brothel; Filsan, a 30-something government soldier, tries to climb the professional ranks and shed her past; Kawsar, a 50-something widow, clings to the friendships and way of life that seems to slip through her hands, little by little.

Through all three stories, Mohamed's use of color is salient, a landscape painted in aqua blues, desert oranges and wine-red dyes whose geography is as vibrant as its culture. The language is one of the novel's major draws, but you'll keep reading for the women at the center--three compelling and evocative characters whose humanity persists in the face of inhuman tragedy. --Linnie Greene, bookseller at Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C., and freelance writer

Disgruntled commuters everywhere will rejoice over Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time. The novel, based on British journalist Dominic Utton's own experiences, centers on "Dan the man," a husband and new father who moves to the English countryside and commutes, via train, to his job at the Globe newspaper. Fed up with 14 months of chronic delays, Dan, a writer, tracks down the e-mail address of the railroad director, Martin Harbottle, and fires off an e-mail expressing his frustration: "My boss was annoyed with me when I arrived in London; my wife will be annoyed with me when I arrive home again in Oxford. And none of it's my fault. It's your fault." 

The goal of each subsequent letter--99 e-mails in all--reflects, in tone and length, the duration of Dan's daily inconveniences due to chronic railroad service delays. Dan believes that if his time has to be wasted, so, too, should the director's, who sporadically writes back to Dan with cautious reserve. What begins as an electronic gripe session spirals into a largely one-sided memoir, where Dan opens up about his life, sharing his tastes in music, his impressions of fellow commuters, scandalous current events and politics at his newspaper, the challenges of his home life (especially his wife's post-natal depression) and the temptations of alcohol and a potential extra-marital entanglement. All of this adds up to form a wholly original--and very entertaining--modern epistolary novel. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Novels set during Great Britain's Regency are often romantic, glossing over the difficult nature of life in the early 19th century. Not so C.S. Harris's mysteries. Her Sebastian St. Cyr series--of which Why Kings Confess is the ninth novel--offer a glimpse into the seamy side of Regency life, complete with high infant mortality, brutal living conditions and vicious crimes.

St. Cyr, only surviving son of the Earl of Hendon, can't help getting involved when a Frenchwoman is found wounded in an alley near the body of a Frenchman whose heart was cut from his chest. Though his wife, Hero, is mere days from delivering a breech baby, Sebastian is determined to find out who attacked Alexi Sauvage and murdered Damion Pelletan. He soon realizes Alexi is hiding something, and that they've met before. She was a doctor in the Peninsular War and has no reason to trust him, a former British soldier. Even more interestingly, he discovers Pelletan was in London with a secret delegation sent to broker a peace deal between Britain and Napoleon's France.

Harris brings the politics of the French and British to life, inviting the reader to analyze the real historical figures and to sympathize with both the Bourbons and Napoleon's supporters. In addition to the accurate history and the intriguing mystery, longtime fans of the series will be happy to see new developments in the personal lives of Sebastian and his friends. Why Kings Confess is historical mystery at its finest. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Sissy Roberts is the girl everyone tells their problems to, whether she likes it or not. But, as she says to the reader on the opening page of Frances Washburn's The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band, "no one so far has confessed to me that they killed Buffalo Ames at the Scenic Fourth of July Rodeo." The novel, despite being framed around Buffalo's murder and the subsequent FBI investigation (which mostly consists of bothering Sissy for answers), is entirely Sissy's story.

Though the FBI man sent to her corner of the reservation doesn't believe in her ignorance, Sissy really doesn't know who killed Buffalo that night--and she doesn't know what she's going to do to get out of this town and off the rez. Her interest in solving the murder is half-hearted; she is more concerned with solving the mystery of her own future and ducking lackluster marriage proposals from the shallow pool of men on the rez. But the two will prove to be interconnected.

The strengths of this slim, quirky novel are Sissy's strange mix of tenderness and sass, and Washburn's grasp of the rez and its sense of inertia. For all the frustration that Sissy and the other diverse, well-wrought characters experience, however, the final result is moderately uplifting, like the music Sissy delights in throughout. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Michele Scicolone (The Sopranos Family Cookbook, The Italian Slow Cooker) describes The Italian Vegetable Cookbook as an homage to her formative influences that "took a lifetime to write." Although Italy is known mostly for pasta, Scicolone believes fruits and vegetables have always been at the heart of Italian cooking. Historically, Italy was often impoverished, with meat reserved for special occasions, leaving room for the bounty of the fertile land and long growing season. While Scicolone's recipes feature vegetables and fruits in starring roles, this is not a vegetarian cookbook--anchovies, pancetta and chicken stock often add a splash of flavor--though many of the recipes are so substantial, meat will not be missed.

Cooks of all experience levels will be comfortable. Unlike French cooking, Italian recipes are not restrained by strict rules and readers are invited to make substitutions whenever desired. Scicolone includes a helpful section on storing produce, including how to wash greens and which fruits should be stored at room temperature. Tips on what to look for when buying, including why frozen peas are usually necessary and which canned tomatoes are best, round out the introductory section before she reveals her cornucopia of recipes--from truffle Parmesan bigne and herbed hoat cheese-ricotta crostini, to mushroom ravioli with pine nut, butter and sage sauce or beet and ricotta gnocchi with gorgonzola sauce, plus delectable desserts like hazelnut cake with chocolate-espresso sauce. The Italian Vegetable Cookbook would be a welcome addition to any kitchen. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

When Dan Jenkins was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, only the third writer to be so honored, he said he'd been covering sports, especially golf, "for the last 60 years, and I guess I'll keep doing it until I topple over." First, though, he needed to write his autobiography. His Ownself is pure Jenkins: lively, sarcastic, funny, chock-full of stories and anecdotes and opinions, lots of them. He's old school--bars, smokes and dames; it's all nostalgic, the past a "kindler, gentle day."

Jenkins grew up in Fort Worth, Tex., during the Depression, but his family did well and he was insulated from it: "Sometimes, I envy my own childhood." He cut his writing teeth on the likes of Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. He's written primarily for newspapers, along with Playboy, Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest. Of his successful football novel, Semi-Tough, he says, "I had the title before I had the novel." He's from the Howard Cosell school of sports journalism--say it like it is. Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer are more important to him than Tiger Woods; he labels the comparison of Woods's "comeback" to Hogan's as "nonsense." Babe Zaharias, the "greatest female athlete in history," could tell as many "unprintable jokes as Sam Snead." Tennis anyone? Jenkins yearns for the years when Wimbledon was alive and well, the days of McEnroe vs. Borg or Navratilova vs. Evert--"before tennis died, in other words." His "semi-memoir" is great fun for sports fans. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Sigrid Rausing spent a year on a collective farm on the west coast of Estonia in the mid-1990s, doing fieldwork for her Ph.D. in social anthropology. Her time there yielded an academic book, History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm. "Much as [that book] excluded the personal," she writes, Everything Is Wonderful "excludes the academic," containing Rausing's remembrances, after nearly 20 years, of time spent in an unusual cultural landscape and the questions that remain with her.

The tone of this slim memoir is quiet and unobtrusive; engaging in participation observation is the anthropologist's aim. Rausing contemplates the legacies of the Soviet Union in Estonia as a country and a culture, and in the village she lived in. As a parallel, she considers her own cultural identity as a Swede living in England who finds herself at home in a place where Estonian Swedes once made up a sizable and powerful minority, before the Nazis sent them to Sweden in a "perhaps overly collaborative" evacuation.

Rausing's subjects include the everyday tedium and alcoholism of a small village in a deeply depressed region; they include dream interpretations, and loving descriptions of natural settings, despite the monochromatic winter that occupies most of the year. Interactions with her neighbors and friends are rendered with an eye for irony. Yet for all its bleak detail, Rausing's work resonates with nostalgia as well. "I was tired, and often hungry," she recalls, "but even now, twenty years later, I miss those long quiet walks in that melancholy and restful landscape." --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In The Fishing Fleet, Anne de Courcy (The Viceroy's Daughters) takes on the Raj--a period lasting from 1858, when the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the crown, until 1947. During that time, women as young as 16 were packed off to India because, as de Courcy explains, "the gently born, softly brought up middle-class woman... was ill-equipped to support herself" and the pool of potential husbands at home was dwindling. The alternative was eternal spinsterhood.

De Courcy draws on reams of letters, memoirs and diaries, in addition to a comprehensive bibliography of all matters Raj. This embarrassment of riches at times threatens to overwhelm her narrative, which can get repetitive with details of finery and merrymaking. The most compelling parts of The Fishing Fleet focus on the trip out and the anecdotal reminiscences. Despite the inconveniences of sea travel, waves of women continued to arrive in India, where the ratio of men to women was 4 to 1. If a girl wanted a husband, she could find one, or he would find her. If the man was in a hurry to get back to his plantation, an acquaintance might lead to a proposal in less than two weeks.

Then, the miseries really began. Wives were often stuck in isolated outposts, with the nearest woman five miles away. Disease was rampant, sometimes striking in the morning and causing death by evening. Despite all, these stalwart English girls stuck it out and came to love India. Perhaps this is one of the reasons there will always be an England. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

How fitting that the man who preached self-reliance would feel most at home in his own house. The team behind Those Rebels, John and Tom once again introduces young readers to a figure who helped shape American thought: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882).

On the endpapers, quotes from the poet and essayist encourage both an inner life ("Insist on yourself; never imitate") and a life looking beyond oneself ("Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape"). Mr. Emerson greets readers at the front door of his house, inviting them in. Next, he stands at the window of his study, his children and wife nearby, looking out at the town he held dear: "More than anywhere else, Ralph Waldo Emerson loved his home in Concord, Massachusetts." Though the audience may not be familiar with the man at the forefront of the Transcendentalist movement, they will relate to his dedication to doing the things he adored. In college, he enjoyed reading and writing and wondered, "Could he build a life around these things he loved?"

Kerley and Fotheringham emphasize Emerson's internal journey and its outward manifestation: "Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world.... Build therefore your own world." He read, wrote and lectured, and also served as volunteer fireman, and, in an especially humorous depiction, was appointed "hog reeve, rounding up wayward hogs." His dedication to his community is repaid tenfold during a house fire, when his neighbors rescue books, journals and other valuables. Copious endnotes provide opportunities for further research. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Elise Broach's transitional reader about the stars of her longer novel Masterpiece is just right. It's long enough for children to feel accomplished at its completion without feeling overwhelmed; it hits the right balance of text and illustrations, and it deals with a common dilemma that seven- and eight-year-olds face.

James Pompaday is going away with his family on vacation. Will he still care about Marvin (a beetle) as much when he returns? And what will Marvin do while James is away? The book centers on Marvin, who helps James pack by crossing things off the boy's list, and makes sure James does not forget his book:  "Marvin can't read, but he is good at crossing things off." Marvin misses James, but his mother suggests that Marvin team up with his cousin Elaine. Kelly Murphy's humorous drawings depict the beetles seeking adventure in Mr. Pompaday's pencil sharpener, diving into a soft bed of wooden shavings, and narrowly escaping when a pencil blocks their exit. When Marvin overhears Mr. Pompaday say that he's glad James is making friends, he fears that the boy has forgotten all about him. Yet James returns, saying, "I wish you could have gone with me." James and Marvin are happiest when they're together--and don't mind admitting it.

This wise and funny book will provide much-needed reassurance to children facing a vacation spent apart from their BFFs, and will likely lead them on to James and Marvin's further adventures in Masterpiece. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness