Cormac James's North American debut is a stunning historical novel that deals with the ill-fated 1845 John Franklin expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. After the expedition's two ships weren't heard from for years, more were sent to find them. The Surfacing imagines the story of what happened to the men on one of the rescue ships.

Spring, 1850: The Impetus with six officers, one Greenlander, 10 other men and a boy has arrived at Disko Island, Greenland, to take on supplies. The island "looked like burned bog," no trees, no grass. Huts roofed with sod were dug into the hillside. While in port, Lieutenant Morgan enjoys a fling with the governor's sister, Kitty, one he thinks is safely behind him when his ship again sets sail in search of the Franklin expedition. Unbeknownst to Morgan, however, Kitty has stowed away, and it's too late to turn back when the lieutenant finds out.

Morgan follows rules and cares for his men, but Kitty, now pregnant, turns his world upside down. James delves deeply into Morgan's psyche to uncover what happens to a man when he learns he's to be a father--in a hostile, threatening environment. He portrays the daily drudgery of life on the ship and the frozen surroundings in the most exquisite prose. The ice pack "crackled like a burning log" and felt awake--"They listened to it fret." And later: "The ice had the cold conscience of pearl." James's novel is a chiseled, cool work of poetic brilliance. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins's debut novel, is strange and complicated and convoluted. But with a little trust in Hawkins's world-building, readers can acclimate to the book's fantastical elements. What emerges from the first chaotic scenes is a dark and philosophical novel about the nature of power and control, cruelty and humanity.

Carolyn has always lived in the same suburban development. After her parents were killed, she (along with other newly-orphaned children in the neighborhood) was taken in by a powerful man, Father, and the small group lived an isolated existence inside their community. Father lacked paternal instincts, but had a wealth of knowledge to offer: his vast learning, collected in the Library, gave him god-like powers, and each of his adopted children was assigned one catalogue within the Library to master. After years of study, each child has grown to a young adult, master of their catalogues (War, Death, Languages, etc.) but estranged from what normal life might look like. When Father goes missing, the Library--and all of the power that comes from it--is left unguarded. Carolyn draws on all of the knowledge she has amassed within her catalogue and outside of it to make the Library hers.

It sounds strange because it is: Hawkins has built a world within our own that is entirely foreign and yet, with a bit of effort, understandable. At times humorous, more often dark and frightening, and always fast-paced, The Library at Mount Char is an epic fantasy novel that is remarkable for its imagination and originality. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Best known as a master of horror, Stephen King's talent has never wholly lain in one genre. Finders Keepers is further proof that he's just as capable of writing a pulse-pounding crime novel as a story that gives readers the heebie jeebies. A sequel to 2014's Mr. Mercedes (though it's not necessary to have read that book to enjoy this one), Finders Keepers follows young Peter Saubers after he finds a buried chest filled with $20,000 in cash and the long-lost notebooks of a John Updike-like author named John Rothstein. Pretending the money is from an anonymous benefactor, Peter uses it to soften the effect of the Great Recession on his family, and in the meantime falls in love with Rothstein's work and keeps the writing to himself. But the man who killed Rothstein and buried the chest has returned and is hell-bent on finding the notebooks.

King's books all hit particular touchstones (young boys in peril, prominent characters who are writers or are fascinated by the written word, the casual indecency of adults to children), and Finders Keepers is no exception. But while the story is familiar, it doesn't feel like a retread, mostly because it's too propulsive. King never lets the tension drop from the very first scene, sending Peter toward a conclusion that, while not surprising, still manages to be thrilling. King may not be the dynamic storyteller he was in his first few novels, but Finders Keepers proves that he can still excite. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

People have always been attracted to the notion that a machine could be built to allow them to teleport through space, but so far, no projects have been successful. That is, until Mike Erickson, a high school English teacher from Maine with an extremely high IQ, is sent by a friend in the government to investigate the claims of a small group of government-funded scientists who have a machine they call the Albuquerque Door. Highly secretive, the clique of researchers refuses to tell Mike everything, claiming some details are too classified for his knowledge. They do say, "We take over six hundred pages of math and force-feed it to the universe through an electromagnetic funnel. We tell the universe 'I don't care what you think. I'm lifting my foot here and putting it down there.' " But after studying stacks of files filled with data on the hundreds of tests they've conducted, as well as observing several demonstrations of the machine's abilities, Mike is impressed, confused and not altogether sure "teleportation" is the correct term to use when discussing what the machine does really do.

Peter Clines (the Ex-Heroes series and 14) skillfully brings together just enough scientific research to give The Fold credibility--along with multi-faceted characters and a bit of romance--to create a fast-moving sci-fi thriller. As Mike tries to discover the Door's true purpose, what he learns has serious implications for everyone on Earth, leaving readers with the chilling sense that perhaps humans shouldn't meddle in the grand scale of the universe. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Christina McDowell's childhood was the stuff of fantasies: private jets, summers in Nantucket, a sprawling mansion in Virginia. It seemed a world impervious to suffering, so when her father was arrested for fraud while she was in college, she could not imagine the hellish chaos that would follow. He was a lawyer entangled with Jordan Belfort, the man whose story would inspire The Wolf of Wall Street. After Perfect is her story--the story of a daughter coping with her father's imprisonment, attempting to support herself as a cocktail waitress in Los Angeles's seedy nightclubs, and fighting her own downward spiral of denial and self-destruction.

Without sensationalizing her lifestyle (even after her father's arrest, her acquaintances included such celebrities as Emma Stone and Arianna Huffington), McDowell faces her past with an admirably rigorous level of criticism and self-awareness. She recalls how ill equipped for working she was, how crippled by shame. Only through connecting with fellow family members of the incarcerated did she eventually find the strength to move on and claim a new identity of her own.

In 2013, 10 years after her father's arrest, McDowell wrote an opinion piece for LA Weekly titled, "An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself." In it, she condemns the film for glossing over the suffering of those affected by crime--an issue she continues to be involved with in her community. She now volunteers with InsideOUT Writers, a nonprofit for children affected by the criminal justice system. --Annie Atherton

Despite her lifelong desire to disassociate herself from her father, a notorious dictator who was responsible for killing tens of millions of people, Svetlana Alliluyeva struggled to step out from the shadow of Joseph Stalin, even after his death.

Rosemary Sullivan's biography Stalin's Daughter reveals Svetlana to be, in many ways, a naïve and sweet girl who craved love she never received from her parents. Growing up in Soviet Russia under her father's regime, she personally suffered many losses, witnessing her own family and friends disappear without explanation. Her mother died, apparently a suicide, when Svetlana was six.

Disgusted with what her father had done and the oppression he brought to the Soviet Union, in 1967 Svetlana defected to the United States. She smuggled with her a memoir she wrote in secret, Twenty Letters to a Friend, which was published soon thereafter. She was hopeful her life in a new country would lead to a future free of her father's legacy, but negotiating American culture proved difficult, and she found she was never beyond her father's influence. No matter where she was or whom she was with, people never failed to associate her with Stalin.

Sullivan (Villa Air-Bel) writes a thoroughly researched and detailed depiction of Svetlana's life, from her childhood to her death in 2011, using archives of interviews, correspondence, letters and unpublished works. Many of the specifics Sullivan shares of Svetlana's life come from Svetlana's own correspondence and stories, affording readers an intimate and profound representation of her state of mind and understanding of the world. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

In The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, Dominic Tierney (How We Fight and Failing to Win) explains why most major American military operations since the Korean War have ended as stalemates or defeats. The "Golden Age" of war--with clear strategic goals against morally unambiguous enemies in uniform--is over. Tierney goes on to explain how conflicts that are either unwinnable without unacceptable costs, of dubious strategic value, or both, might be averted, bucking the trend of military fiascos that resemble the messy nation building and interference in civil strife as exemplified in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Considering the U.S. track record with these sorts of engagements, Tierney prepares a concise plan he calls "surge, talk, and leave," to prepare for inevitable future conflicts.

Once an operation becomes unwinnable (as in, the costs of decisive victory become too great to bear), a surge of troops, like those deployed in Iraq in 2007, can stabilize the situation. "Talk" refers to negotiations with the enemy, like the recent begrudging talks with the Taliban, to find a diplomatic solution. The leaving process includes immediate troop redeployment and the long-term stability of friendly regimes left behind.

The Right Way to Lose a War strips away lofty rhetoric and obfuscating moral judgments for a necessarily candid guide to salvaging messy entanglements abroad. Tierney's engaging style and thorough historical details have created a book as readable as it is thought provoking. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

On a cold February evening in 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland, a group of freethinking artists and poets put on a very strange performance. Three poets read the same poem simultaneously in three languages, and someone recited a Maori tribal spell while moving like a belly dancer. They called it Dada. Formed from the chaos of World War I, it was the "most revolutionary artistic movement of the twentieth century," Jed Rasula writes in Destruction Was My Beatrice. Romanian Tristan Tzara, one of the club's founders, said, "true dadas are against DADA." Favoring anti-art, they filled their movement with contradictions.

After Zürich, Dada showed up in war-torn Berlin. Here Max Ernst "leaped onto Dada like a hobo jumping a freight car." From there, "like a gunslinger in the Wild West," it showed up in Paris and drew the interest of André Breton, Jean Cocteau and Ezra Pound. The movement jumped to New York, attracting new artistic "hobos" like Marcel Duchamp, who was fond of turning everyday objects into art, and fellow visual artist Man Ray.

Rasula (This Compost) argues that Dada's irreverence has had an enduring influence, pointing to Charlie Chaplin (whom the Dadaists adored), the Marx Brothers and the early work of Robert Rauschenberg. Filled with fascinating details and memorable personalities, Rasula's history tells of a brief movement that spit in the eye of art yet captivated the world. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Margo Rabb (Kissing in America) paints a multi-layered portrait of the ways in which love makes human beings myopic.

Sixteen-year-old Eva's father died in a plane crash two years ago, and a wall went up between her and her mother. Eva needs to talk about him; her mother wants to pretend he didn't exist. Eva reads one romance novel after another; her mother is a professor of women's studies at Queens College ("That happiness only comes from romantic love is the biggest myth of our society," she tells Eva). Then real romance enters Eva's life. Will comes into the tutoring center for help and is assigned to Eva. "He had dark, wavy, unkempt hair like... all the wind-blown men on my romance novel covers." But he also carries books by Baldwin, Heller and Vonnegut. And always has a beautiful girl waiting for him after the tutoring sessions. Readers will get the picture before Eva does. But that doesn't stop her from plotting to travel to California when Will goes there to live with his father. Her ticket is her best friend, Annie, qualifying as a contestant for a California quiz show with a $200,000 prize.

Eva and Annie's banter carries the novel, along with their witty observations on their cross-country road trip. Eva's relationship with her mother's friend Lulu is also a high point. Rabb's ambitious novel takes a couple twists toward the end that feel rushed, but the conclusion offers hope for Eva and her mother to have a more open, honest relationship. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

The team behind Sheep in a Jeep delivers an original twist with this charming take on bedtime.

Blues and golds dominate the pages as the fluffy white heroes return to their shed: "Winking fireflies light the way,/ as sheep stroll home to hit the hay." The five sheep tuck under the straw in their cozy shed. Then "Screeches! Rustling! Noisy crickets!/ Sheep hear hoots from nearby thickets." Margot Apple draws the culprits in colored pencils--a pair of owls--plus a creeping skunk near the shed, and the shadow of another unknown four-legged critter. Luckily, the four legs belong to a "trusty" border collie ("Sheep bleet. Sheep sigh"). As the collie helps the sheep fall asleep, Nancy Shaw works in a bit of a math and grammar lesson. The collie's hug helps one sheep snore, and the dog fetches a drink for another (that one slumbers, too). "Another sheep begins to snore./ Two asleep! How many more?" Shaw uses "how many more?" as a refrain, to check in with readers after each sheep falls asleep. She also gets across, in context, that "sheep" can refer to one and also more than one. Author and artist vary the examples: the collie, sandwiched between two sheep, "calms the flock" when they "tap rhythm, hum, and rock" a lullaby. When the five well-rested sheep awake at sunrise, they find the devoted (exhausted) pooch still asleep.

Shaw's meter never falters, and Apple's drawings keep the woolly quintet (and their canine guardian) front and center. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness