Tatiana de Rosnay's The Other Story takes readers into a microcosm of dark family secrets and the quest for an individual's identity.

Nicholas Duhamel--internationally bestselling author, media sensation and 29-year-old heartthrob--takes a luxury vacation at a Tuscan resort, where he plans to spend time with his gorgeous girlfriend and work on his eagerly awaited second novel. The girlfriend, however, has grown increasingly sullen and jealous--and the novel doesn't exist, despite his assurances to his editor that it's well underway. Though his blockbuster debut came to him in a flash, Nicholas has no inspiration for another story. Instead of writing, he revels in his celebrity, obsesses over his social media presence and sexts a provocative fan in Berlin.

As he rests on his laurels, Nicholas slowly realizes that his most important relationships are crumbling due to his self-absorption. An unknown photographer begins posting photos of Nicholas to his Facebook page, leaving him feeling violated and exposed. As his life begins to spin out of control and the weight of his lies grows, Nicholas thinks back to the journey that inspired his life-altering book, a trip to Russia to search for the truth about his father, whom he lost under mysterious circumstances when he was a boy.

De Rosnay (The House I Loved; Sarah's Key) never shrinks from allowing Nicholas to make mistakes; she also skillfully underscores that Nicholas is a young man making a young man's mistakes. The tension of Nicholas's unsustainable half-truths and the gradual parceling out of his father's secrets will keep readers in de Rosnay's thrall, hoping redemption will come. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

In her new novel, Eleanor Moran (Breakfast in Bed) addresses the intense emotional complexity of a female friendship gone horribly wrong. Olivia "Livvy" Berrington has been estranged from Sally since a betrayal shattered their friendship in college. But that divide doesn't prevent Livvy's world from being turned upside-down when she's informed of Sally's death in a car accident.

At the funeral, Livvy meets Sally's husband and daughter. As she's drawn into their world, Livvy begins to get a sense of the erratic life her former best friend led. There are questions and inconsistencies, large debts and doubts about whether her death was actually an accident. As Livvy flashes back to her own troubled experiences with Sally and the unanswered questions she still has, her determination to find the answers intensifies--for herself and for the family Sally left behind.

The female friendship at the core of The Last Time I Saw You links to myriad other relationships. Like a spider's creation, Livvy's network is deceptively strong. Readers will likely identify with many of Livvy's bonds: to her dysfunctional family, to the roommate she's secretly loved since childhood, to her competitive coworkers and to the man she falls for despite knowing he's off limits. Moran depicts the believable strength of these relationships despite their flaws and problems. The Last Time I Saw You is the story of a broken friendship, but it's also a story of the healing power of love in all its many forms. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Pittsburgh is what Detroit could become after the auto business goes away and pro sports, hipsters, artists, academics, hospitals, banks and the residue of old money take over. In his first novel, The Bend of the World, Jacob Bacharach offers an imaginative tale of UFOs, exotic street drugs, Sasquatch, an international corporate takeover--and lots of parties.

Peter Morrison is a mid-level, cubicle-turfed, late-20-something underachiever; he is fond of his weed and Iron City beer but not so fond of parties, which he describes as "like foreign novels, interminable scenes of interactions between interchangeable personages with whom I was just familiar enough to be aware that I'd forgotten them." His childhood best friend, Johnny, is an often drug-addled gay blogger convinced a powerful "fourth river" flows beneath Pittsburgh's convergence of the Monongahela, Ohio and Allegheny. Peter has a half-hearted girlfriend whom he abandons for a beautiful depressed artist who can throw out phrases like "ontological difficulties," and then explain her erudition: "I went to art school. I learned to say a lot of things that I don't understand."

Peter gets fired; he sees a UFO. Peter could use more direction in his life and fewer psycho-pharmaceuticals. The glue that holds Bacharach's wit and general wackiness together is Pittsburgh itself. As if following a Google Maps satellite view, he takes us across the rivers, up the hills and down the alleys with a geographical precision that makes his twisted sci-fi-like story as real as the coke ovens and steel mills that once made Pittsburgh the Steel City. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

The poet's Baudelaire's work and life provide a rich, atmospheric background for Belgian novelist Bob Van Laerhoven's Baudelaire's Revenge--his first novel to be translated into English from his native Flemish and winner of the Hercule Poirot Prize for Best Crime Fiction (2007).

It's 1870. The Franco-Prussian War (which France eventually lost) has just broken out, and Paris is in chaos. Police inspector Paul Lefèvre, on his way to visit one of his favorite cocottes, hears a scream from a brothel. He finds the body of a man with an unusual tattoo; nearby is a sheet of paper with lines by Lefèvre's favorite poet, Charles Baudelaire--who himself died three years prior. Having once attended a reading by the "deathly pale poet," who signed a book for the detective, Lefèvre recognizes the handwriting as Baudelaire's own.

A second man, a writer, is found decapitated in a catacomb. The body was luridly, horrifically augmented after death to give it a female physical appearance. Another piece of paper with verse is found nearby--Baudelaire's handwriting again. When a third victim is found dead on Baudelaire's grave, Lefèvre has no choice but to believe the killer has a personal motive. Could the dead poet be seeking revenge?

Letters and journal entries inserted in the narrative help gradually fill in the gaps as Lefèvre closes in on the killer. This gritty, detail-rich historical mystery involves the reader in a subtle narrative web. Van Laerhoven weaves in some of this period's favorite supernatural elements--magic, exotic poisons, séances and ghosts--to create an eerie, fin-de-siècle atmosphere. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

The robots have risen and are taking over the world. This collection of short stories presents a very modern take on the robots-gone-wrong theme, proving that even though our definition of robotics is constantly changing to include things like distributed artificial intelligence systems (which power our smartphones, our televisions and even our refrigerators), we still worry about the potential dangers to humanity.

Nearly everything in our modern age is touched by automated robotic or computer technology in some way, and most people don't even blink at the amount of hardware and software that surrounds us. Each of these stories--by heavyweights including Cory Doctorow, Hugh Howey, Alastair Reynolds and Daniel H. Wilson himself--takes on a different viewpoint of how and when the robots will gain sentience, take humanity hostage, or just flat out kill us all.

We may not know it's happening until it's too late, as in Seanan McGuire's brilliant story of love and loss, "We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War," in which a young doctor must decide where her loyalty lies. In Alastair Reynolds's "Sleepover," a rich man awakens from suspended animation (sadly, no younger or less mortal than he was when he went in) to find a world gone horribly and dangerously wrong.

These stories, including a Dr. Moreau-like foray into nanotechnology by Wilson, all wrench the heart before they can warm it. Robot Uprisings is full of utterly human stories of loss, fear, bravery and revenge, set against an artificial and shiny future. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Sean Madigan Hoen is no Keith Richards, and Thoughts of Ionesco, his first band, are no Rolling Stones. In many ways, though, Hoen's tough and emotionally wrenching memoir Songs Only You Know could be the story Richards would have told had he spent the late 1990s in Detroit's punk scene.

Hoen loved the music, loved being the in-your-face front man, loved the booze and drugs. He wrote the songs and recruited bandmates as over-the-top as he was. "I sang what I could," he writes. "What I couldn't, I screamed. Until the sun came up. Until our fingers bled and our ears filled with wax." In synch with the punk ethos of the time, his mission was "to corrupt all traces of harmony. When notes felt too 'right,' we augmented with wrongness."

Songs Only You Know is more than a road trip through half-empty Midwestern bars in his band's corroded, impound-auction '85 Chevy van nicknamed "Orgasmatron," however. It's also the story of how Hoen's family was wrecked by his auto executive father's crack addiction and his sister's frequent bouts with depression--both of them ultimately dying of their diseases. Only his mother seems able to transcend the pain and disappointment of the family's downward spiral and stand by her son as he too fights the sirens of addiction and musical obsession. Now teaching creative writing at Columbia University, Hoen's come a long way from the "crack shacks" of west Detroit, a journey his memoir traces in an almost uplifting saga. Almost. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

The first volume of what may be the definitive biography of Mohandas Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha's Gandhi Before India covers the years from Gandhi's birth in 1869 through his departure from South Africa in July, 1914. Biographers have often treated Gandhi's earlier life--especially his two decades working in South Africa--as a mere warm-up for leading the struggle for Indian independence. Guha (India After Gandhi) gives this period serious and detailed attention, arguing that such attention is necessary if we are to understand both "how the Mahatma was made" and Gandhi's critical role in South African history.

Guha not only draws on Gandhi's own writings from and about this period, but also uses a wide range of contemporaneous sources, from Gandhi's childhood school reports to secret files kept by the South African government. By focusing on those records rather than retrospective accounts, he overturns some accepted "truths" and introduces new elements to a familiar story. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book are the side excursions that illuminate elements of Gandhi's life: among them, the history of vegetarianism in England and Johannesburg as a cultural and intellectual melting pot.

Gandhi Before India is a step-by-step account of how an uninspiring member of a Gujurati merchant caste transcended the conventions of his caste, class, religious and ethnic background to become one of the most important figures of the 20th century. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Like the roots of the trees Angela Pelster writes about--which at the time of their development "were an uncontainable force that drilled and crumbled the rock of the world"--these poetic essays on trees, humans and their interactions with nature are profound and beautiful. Pelster encourages the reader's imagination to stretch as she leaps among diverse subjects while still entwined with the life cycles of trees. We learn of the Tree That Owns Itself, a white oak legally deeded to itself by William Henry Jackson in the 1830s. In "Portrait of a Mango," Pelster draws connections among Johannes Vermeer's use of Indian yellow pigment in his paintings, which looks like the "flesh of a freshly sliced mango," mangoes themselves as "the fruit of paradise" and why the Buddha relinquished his possessions because of a barren mango tree. And though it was the only standing object for 400 kilometers, the Loneliest Tree in the World was hit by a truck; Pelster explores why a man built an arboreal statue to replace it.

Death, grief, pain, love and art mesh in the narratives: the lonely demise of a squirrel, a record made of the paper-thin slice of a tree trunk, the evocative and sexual shape of particular fruit. The complex web inexplicably and beautifully works. Mystical yet realistic, eccentric yet reflective, Pelster's ability to unearth the essence of nature is like the "first gasp in the world," a deep, oxygen-rich breath of the freshest air. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Dan Santat (Sidekicks) provides a clever twist to the idea of a child's relationship with an imaginary friend in this satisfying story of a first friendship.

The unnamed hero, a snowman-looking fellow with limbs and a gold crown, eagerly waits "to be imagined by a real child." Santat pictures him on an island where the rainbow ends, with sunny skies and plenty of other "imaginary" companions, each waiting to be "picked by a child and given a special name." One by one, the others get picked, and the crowned hero remains alone. "So rather than waiting... he did the unimaginable." He takes an overseas journey to "the real world," and lands in New York City. A humorous double-page spread features the hero's eye-view of busy city-dwellers in a series of vignettes: "The real world was a strange place. No kids were eating cake," he notes as two ladies share a chocolate slice. "No one stopped to hear the music," he observes as people rush past an accordionist on a subway platform, "and everyone needed naptime," he thinks as everyone in his subway car travels with eyes closed.

Finally, the stranger sees "something familiar." Attentive readers will connect the blue tail with a fellow island inhabitant, whom the hero follows, eventually leading him right to his child. A dozen comics-style time-lapse images show their awkward overtures ("Neither of them had made a friend before"). Finally, the girl introduces herself as Alice and also names the hero: "Beekle."

Santat's story reminds children that, with friends, they can accomplish "the unimaginable." Heartwarming. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

A blind British teenager embarks on a frightening mission to rescue her father in this artful thriller by the author of Midwinter Blood, the 2014 Michael L. Printz Award winner.

Sixteen-year-old narrator Laureth Peak's absent-minded author father is supposed to be doing research in Switzerland. But when she receives an e-mail from someone in Queens, N.Y., who has found Jack Peak's notebook, she secretly books a flight to New York City for herself and her seven-year-old brother, Benjamin, and sets out to find him. After getting the "Black Book" back, Laureth and Benjamin examine it for clues to their father's whereabouts and scour the boroughs of New York looking for him. Are the notes leading them to their father? Or are his scribblings about the nature of coincidences just a series of red herrings drawing them deeper into the unknown? When a strange man threatens the siblings at knifepoint, Laureth knows that time has run out. If her father doesn't turn up soon, she and Benjamin might not make it out of New York alive. Sedgwick solidly anchors the preposterous-sounding plot through his vivid rendering of Laureth's dark world.

Readers will be so riveted by Laureth's terrifying navigation of cities and airports with only her brother as her guide that they are unlikely to question some of the novel's more far-fetched aspects. But because Jack Peak is writing a book about coincidences, these unlikely synchronicities actually seem fitting. --Jennifer Hubert Swan, middle school librarian and library department chair at Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School