While carnival freaks may be an antiquated, even offensive, concept in the 21st century, Paddy O'Reilly (The Fine Color of Rust) explores what it would mean to be a "modern marvel." A producer brings together three peculiar individuals to form The Wonders: protagonist Leon, owner of a metal heart, finds himself plucked from his quiet life in Australia and thrust into the world of international celebrity once he's joined with Christos, who has surgically connected wings to his back, and Kathryn, whose skin is covered with wool. With money and fame come both the chance to rebuild Leon's fragile ego and increasingly dire threats against their lives from those who believe The Wonders are insults to humanity.

O'Reilly takes a very deliberate pace with The Wonders, following Leon and his comrades as they plan to put on their version of "the greatest show on earth." The behind-the-scenes aspects of the book are its most engaging parts, mixing fish-out-of-water comedy with the tension over whether or not Leon will succeed in his performance as the "Clockwork Man." But the stakes never really feel that high, until a rushed and tonally jarring ending places the main characters in mortal danger. It's one slight misstep, though, in an otherwise pleasurable book concerned with the (mechanical) workings of one man's heart. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

In suburban Chicago, Ill., two women work side by side as medical receptionists. Jillian, Halle Butler's debut novel, traces both the unraveling life of one of those women and the other woman's delight in her office partner's downfall. When wounds in each of their lives open, both women are bound together in a downward spiral of shame, regret and sorrow, eventually discovering renewal.

Jillian decides that the one thing missing in her life is a puppy for her son, but then her money problems worsen. Taking care of her son, her new pet and her career prove too much for her. Her strained relationships at church crumble when she calls in every favor she can. Lies she tells to maintain her image as a God-fearing Christian spin out of control. All of this excites Megan, who always loathed Jillian's naïve optimism, but Megan's boyfriend is uncomfortable with how much she enjoys the other woman's struggle. Megan's friends soon start to pull away from her spiteful vortex, and the lies she tells herself to cope with these betrayals begin to parallel Jillian's in unexpected ways.

Butler weaves together two very different lives, seamlessly volleying one character's successes off another's failures. In this spare book, the experiences of these women continue to bounce off one another until the distance between self-doubt and self-confidence is quickly diminished. Jillian's misplaced goodwill shines an uncomfortable light on Megan's unfulfilled life, while Megan's youth and opportunity, in turn, chip at Jillian's idealism. Finally, both realize that the hardest lies to maintain are the lies they tell themselves. --Joshua Potter

Love and romance reside at the heart of British author William Nicholson's work, be it in his screenplays (Shadowlands) or in his prose fiction (Motherland). In his historical novel, Amherst, he crafts two love stories--past and present--centered on the poet Emily Dickinson and her vivid impact on other lives.

Nicholson threads the needle of his intriguing, well-plotted narrative with Alice Dickinson, a contemporary 20-something London copywriter whose shared last name with the poet draws her to Emily's work. Alice travels to Amherst, Mass., to research a screenplay she's writing about the real 1880s love affair between Austin Dickinson, Emily's 50-year-old, unhappily married brother, and Mabel Loomis Todd, the 24-year-old wife of an Amherst College professor. Once Alice arrives in the U.S., she boards in the home of Nick Crocker, a handsome, married, charismatic English Literature academic in his 50s. Alice's research into the mysteries of love, fidelity and passion is soon complicated when she and Nick begin an affair that ultimately parallels the intense complexity found in Austin and Mabel's relationship, which was secretly consummated in the home that Emily Dickinson shared with her younger sister, Vinnie. 

These tender, revealing love stories are told via alternating chapters. Nicholson draws from historical texts and includes letters along with Dickinson's poems to re-create the longstanding affair between Austin and Mabel--and the significant role that Emily, an enigmatic spinster-recluse, played in their romance, as well as how Emily's ghost permeates the relationship between Alice and Nick. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

"The first time I walked into the room I turned back almost at once."

From this skillfully subtle opening line, the titular room is spotlighted as the crux of a strange and surreal tale. Björn, the first-person narrator of Jonas Karlsson's The Room, is odd from the first, but we take him at his word: he is good at his bureaucratic job, perhaps not well-liked by his fellows, but effective and ambitious.

On the other hand, there is the room. Björn discovers it by accident while looking for the toilet. It is a lovely space, a perfectly appointed, perfectly proportioned, old-fashioned, classy office. He catches sight of himself in the mirror, and is struck by how good he looks, despite not usually feeling that he is attractive, or even worrying about such things. Björn begins visiting the room regularly, and a problem arises. His coworkers see him standing in a particular spot, along the hallway on the way to the toilets. They don't see the room; the room doesn't exist on architectural plans or for anyone else.

There are several levels to the uncomfortable probing Karlsson undertakes throughout Björn's odd tale, sketching larger doubts about the subjectivity of reality, social graces and the importance of control over different aspects of our lives. Karlsson's prose and the inventiveness of Björn's surreal mental workings are often funny, but the overall impact is also deeply thought-provoking and profoundly disquieting, and the combination of the banal and the absurd results in a striking and singular read. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

When Nancy Harmon Jenkins (The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook) purchased an abandoned farm on a hillside in Tuscany in the late 1960s, she didn't realize she had embarked on a lifelong inquiry into one popular Mediterranean food. Virgin Territory: Exploring the World of Olive Oil is a fascinating compendium of all her hard-earned knowledge, distilled into manageable bites that cover every aspect of oil production and usage. Jenkins narrates the historical evolution of olive oil from pre-biblical times to the present, explains the process by which olives become oil, discusses the qualities of good and bad oils and includes interviews with oil producers.

She traveled the world visiting the various regions that grow olives to make oil, and includes more than 100 Mediterranean dishes that feature this unctuous staple. These include simple recipes--Sicilian fried almonds, epityrum (a sort of caper-free tapenade from ancient Rome) and oven-roasted kale--as well as more complex dishes, such as veal shoulder with caper-anchovy sauce and Lebanese lamb-and-bulgur meatballs.

Jenkins believes that olive oil can be used in almost any recipe that "calls for fat, whether butter, lard, coconut oil, or some more esoteric substance," and she provides conversion tips that allow readers to modify their own recipes to use extra-virgin olive oil in everything. But, she cautions, "regular olive oil, light olive oil, or--perish the thought--pomace oil has no place in any kitchen that is dedicated to creating healthful, delicious food. Only extra-virgin will do." After reading Jenkins's informative analysis and trying her recipes, readers will agree. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

The death of an elderly uncle prompts Alan Lightman (The Accidental Universe) to return to Memphis four decades after he headed north to college at Princeton, and the reminiscences that loss inspires are the foundation of his elegiac memoir, Screening Room: Family Pictures. Towering over this family story is the figure of the grandfather he idolized, Maurice Abraham Lightman, known as M.A., who built a chain of 63 movie theaters in seven Southern states while establishing himself as a world-class bridge player and womanizer. Lightman's depiction of his parents is a touching but honest one, capturing the pathos of two mismatched people who somehow endured a lengthy marriage. He movingly shares scenes with his 90-year-old father in the nursing home where his life draws to an end.

As much as this is a family story, it also deals frankly with Memphis's troubled racial past. Lightman grew up in the 1950s and '60s in a city that was every bit as benighted in its views on racial equality as any town in the deepest of the Deep South. He describes his father's role in quietly desegregating the family's Memphis movie theaters and offers a sympathetic portrait of the family's maid, Blanche, while confessing the bell he inherited that was "pure music" when it summoned her in his childhood now "cuts like a knife."

Lightman's memories flicker like the light from an old movie projector he meticulously describes in one of the book's many artfully constructed scenes. Like his incomparable novel Einstein's Dreams, this memoir is, at its core, a tender meditation on the passage of time. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Langston Hughes called himself "the world's worst letter writer," though according to the introduction of Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, he wrote enough of them to fill "almost 20 large volumes." Like many famous authors, he was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of correspondence. Letters stacked his tables, slid over his bed and commandeered his sock drawer.

Literary scholars Arnold Rampersad (The Life of Langston Hughes), David Roessel (In Byron's Shadow) and Christa Fratantoro have chosen a representative sample of Hughes' letters as "an epistolary companion to the life story Hughes tells in his autobiographical works." They are grouped in sections by decade, each with a concise biographical introduction. Here is bold, generous, open-minded Langston Hughes, from age 19 to 65, achieving spectacular literary success despite endless obstacles and setbacks. He is known for his part in the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, but that was one stage in his long and staggeringly prolific career.

Celebrities like Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston and Amiri Baraka appear throughout the collection. There are a handful of love letters and many intimate ones to friends, but business, leftist politics and shoptalk dominate. Hughes is charming, funny, passionate in his loves and his outrages, but always diplomatic and always serious about work. His younger letters show some insecurity, but it never slows him for long. He turns out groundbreaking work in nearly every literary form, pursues new relationships throughout his life and travels the world, charging through life with extraordinary confidence and optimism. --Sara Catterall

In Is Shame Necessary, Jennifer Jacquet argues that shame can be an effective tool to change harmful social, economic and environmental practices. Shame's effectiveness, she posits, relies on a number of factors, including audience, focus and implementation. But not everyone has the ability to wield this old tool; used poorly, it can be counter-productive.

Jacquet--a professor of environmental studies at New York University--provides many examples, among them a public shaming campaign against the tuna-fishing industry for the mass killings of dolphins in tuna nets. The voluntary "dolphin-safe" practices (better nets that reduced the number of dolphins caught and killed) put the focus of fixing the problem on individuals who could boycott tuna and only roundaboutly on the groups engaged in the damaging practice. Because the standards were voluntary, the impact was small until the later enactment of federal regulations mandating dolphin-friendly fishing.

When it comes to large-scale problems, Jacquet says, shame needs to come from a source of influence. A successful example was the state of California's threat to publish a list of the top 500 business tax delinquents. Those who paid their outstanding taxes were taken off the list before publication. The state has recovered approximately $301 million in unpaid taxes since 2007 as a result.

Jacquet offers guidelines to use shame as an instrument for good, and provides concrete examples for how American society can use public shaming to ensure it remains an effective tool. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

Endearing portraits of young children in animal attire will immediately win over readers in Mary Lundquist's debut tale of the ups and downs of friendship.

The endpapers introduce a cast of characters decked out as dinosaurs, quails, honeybees, giraffes and more (plus a cameo of a real kitten). At first, it's just Cat and Bunny, who "were born on the same day of the same month in the same year." The pencil-and-watercolor illustrations trace their bond from toddlerhood to tricycle-riding. Lundquist envisions a safe world of unsupervised play. Cat and Bunny pack up picnic lunches and make forts from bedsheets al fresco. "Friends forever!" says Bunny. "Just us!" cries Cat, as they transform into caped superheroes. In the park, they play "the Made-Up Game... and only they knew the rules to it." But one day, Quail asks, "Can I Play?" Bunny says yes, without consulting Cat, and a rift grows. As more children join in, Cat runs away. Lundquist's illustration captures Cat's disappointment as she discards a leaf and makes tracks. But the tables are turned when a kitten with a ball of yarn befriends Cat. Together they create their own "Made-Up Game," and soon others are asking Cat to join. "Of course!" says she.

Bunny brings Cat her leaf as a peace offering, and all is right with the world. Lundquist gets the dynamics of first friendship just right. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness