The title of Alice LaPlante's third novel, Coming of Age at the End of Days, succinctly describes its plot. At the beginning, Anna Franklin is 16 and terribly depressed, fixated on death. Therapy and medication do nothing to bring her out of it. Her anti-religious mother begins reading to her from the Bible, just to have time together and to introduce Anna to literary references; this does not lighten Anna's world, but instead gives its darkness meaning, as Revelations resonates with her mood. What finally causes her depression to break is a new family in the neighborhood. Lars and his parents introduce Anna to their church, where it is preached that the Tribulation at the End of Days is coming. There will be blood, violence and suffering. Her heart sings at the news.

At the center of Anna's story--and of all these characters' stories--are obsessions. "Images. Sounds. The Red Heifer. Bosch's depiction of hell. A rock hitting a tree." Anna's mother is a deeply devoted pianist; her father is an earthquake nut, eagerly awaiting The Big One, in a secular obsession not unlike his daughter's. LaPlante (Turn of Mind) masterfully weaves a distressing plot in which complex, sympathetic characters, each with a complete and absorbing past, are brought to the brink of destruction and then seemingly asked: What kind of life, and death, will you choose? The reader's imagination will be won by this brilliant, thought-provoking and memorable novel. It perfectly captures the dynamics of family relationships and friendships, loyalties and priorities, and the nuanced workings of an unusual mind. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In Gabriel Urza's first novel, three narrators tell a nuanced story that meanders over three events in Spanish Basque political history. It centers on the fictional north coast town of Muriga, rocked in the 1930s by the violence of the Spanish Civil War, when Francisco Franco's Falangists assassinated local Republican supporters. In the late '90s, a local Muriga councilman was kidnapped and killed by young students affiliated with the separatist Euskadi Ta Askatasuna organization. In 2004, when All That Followed begins, 190 commuters have just been killed and 1,800 wounded in the Madrid Atocha train station bombing, initially rumored to be the work of the ETA but then attributed to al-Qaeda.

Muriga, where road signs are written in both Basque and Spanish and close-knit citizens keep their politics to themselves, is a town with secrets--both political and personal. Against this rich historical background, Urza's novel focuses on the effect that political violence has personally on those caught in its turmoil. It's the story of the world as it seems now--fragmented, politically unstable, violent--and the ways people find to cope.

Urza--Nevada public defender, Ohio State MFA graduate and descendent of a Spanish Basque family--writes clean prose, scattering Spanish and Basque words as he goes. All That Followed positions today's young generation in a place where the future can't outrun the past, and the present--with all its tangled loyalties, politics, attachments and detachments--is all there is. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

"Death smashes a crater into your life, and you're left alone to sort through the rubble," says Isabel "Iz" Applebaum Moore, the 43-year-old, witty, self-aware heroine who narrates Days of Awe, an insightful novel by Lauren Fox that explores how grief can make every arena of life feel suddenly disorienting.

The book opens at the funeral of Josie Abrams--Iz's best friend and coworker, a fun-loving, whimsical art teacher at the local middle school--who was killed when her rusty Toyota skidded off an icy road and crashed into a guardrail. Josie's death is shocking and devastating for all who loved her, including her husband, Mark, as well as for Isabel and her husband, Chris. The four were close friends who shared many experiences and good times together. Josie's death soon becomes a force that begins to unravel all of their lives. Isabel's 15-year marriage to Chris frays and their 10-year-old daughter, Hannah, who considered Josie an "honorary aunt," becomes plagued with insomnia and moodiness.

Humor brings levity to Fox's frank, thought-provoking story that adds surprising depth and meaning, layer upon layer, page by page. As in Fox's other novels, Still Life with Husband and Friends Like Us, she presents scenes of seemingly mundane life that resonate with much larger and deeper dramatic implications. By employing a wry, likable narrator to chronicle the aching, pull-and-tug of grief and the joys and perils of domestic life, Fox once again explores, with a smart and refreshing perspective, the underside of friendships, marriage, love and loss--and the range of emotions that can burden and liberate the human heart. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In Edinburgh, Scotland, there was once a neighborhood called Comely Bank, whose denizens included some eccentrics, with stories that warrant telling. Hinted at, just out of the reader's line of sight, is the calamitous event that wiped it out, and Edinburgh, and all of Western Europe and beyond. This catastrophe motivates the unnamed narrator's storytelling, told almost entirely in flashback.

Following a brief and ominous opening in which Comely Bank's destruction is promised, the daily lives of local residents form the focus of Nick Holdstock's debut novel, The Casualties. Sam Clark is a very curious man. He runs the charity bookshop in the neighborhood, where he carefully sifts and sorts through donated books looking for the ephemera tucked forgotten between their pages: he's after photographs, letters, airline tickets, notes and cards that shed light on the lives of strangers. He carefully observes the people around him, seeking their stories. The reader won't learn what he's really looking for until well into Holdstock's meticulously ordered narrative.

Holdstock vividly presents his odd and varied characters, and places them in a world that is at once both colorful and recognizably everyday. The protagonists' personalities and actions are quirky but believable, and given added weight by their place in time: The Casualties is a twist on the post-apocalyptic novel in that it reexamines the world just before its end. This perspective, and the continuing mystery of the narrator's identity, nudge the reader into asking uncomfortable questions about life and its length and meaning. Strong characterization and a creative plot, both familiar and bizarre, give this novel enduring allure. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Ruth Ware's chilling, atmospheric thriller In a Dark, Dark Wood is her first novel and the inaugural title published by Simon & Schuster's new imprint, Scout Press.

Nora is a writer of crime novels, a loner who buys her groceries online and appreciates her solitude. But when she gets an invitation to a hen party being thrown for a woman she hasn't spoken to in 10 years, her carefully structured life is disrupted. Against her instincts, she agrees to attend, and the party's setting serves as a disturbing beginning: an isolated castle of steel and glass set deep in the English woods, populated for the weekend by nervous guests, each apparently with secrets to keep.

In the novel's disjointed timeline, Nora later wakes up in the hospital with fractured memories of being covered in blood, running through dark woods with a sense of urgency; the police are waiting outside her door. What happened to her? Or... what has she done? As the narrative switches between Nora's confusion in her hospital bed and the events leading up to her hospitalization, she and the reader together begin to wonder: Can she really not remember, or does she not want to? Both timelines accelerate with building suspense toward the big reveal, and eventually Nora will have to go back and recall events from her past that she'd rather leave forgotten.

In a Dark, Dark Wood is peopled by mysterious characters set to a classically spooky backdrop and culminating in blood, broken glass and memory loss. Readers who appreciate being unnerved will be charmed. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Lauren Willig (That Summer; The Other Daughter) has wrapped up her enjoyable Pink Carnation series with another excellent entry.

In The Lure of the Moonflower, which finishes the story begun 12 books earlier in The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, the intrepid British agent Pink Carnation (otherwise known as Miss Jane Wooliston), finally gets a love story of her own.

Jane is in Portugal, desperately attempting to find the queen, who was spirited away when the rest of the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil as Napoleon's troops invaded. In spite of all her other espionage-related talents, the Pink Carnation doesn't speak Portuguese. She turns for assistance to the notorious Moonflower, aka Jack Reid. Jack is an Anglo-Indian turned French agent, then turned back into British spy, and Jane can only hope that his assistance is reliable.

With a dour and wintry Portuguese setting, The Lure of the Moonflower isn't quite as frothy as some of the other books in the series. But it includes Willig's characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor, and the framing modern story, which continues the shenanigans of Eloise, academic researcher of early 19th-century espionage, is sure to make readers laugh out loud. Something like Bridget Jones meets The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Lure of the Moonflower is a must-read for lovers of chick lit and historical fiction. With tidy conclusions to Eloise's modern-day romance and to Jane's escapades nearly two centuries earlier, The Lure of the Moonflower is a fitting finale for a fun series. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Today, Helen "Joy" Davidman is known primarily as the wife of C.S. Lewis. But before she became the cherished companion of one of the 20th century's leading theologians and writers, she had worked hard to build her own writing career. A poet, critic, onetime ardent Communist and lifelong spiritual seeker, Joy was a brilliant but difficult woman. Abigail Santamaria explores the many facets of Joy's life and career in her new biography, titled simply Joy.

Intellectually curious yet hungry for a cause she could follow, Joy believed in the Communist Party, and her association with the Party helped her career to flourish for a time, as did several summers she spent writing at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. In time, however, Joy became disillusioned with the Party. She also had several experiences of what she called "moments of grace," which set her on a journey toward the Christianity she would later embrace.

Frustrated by professional setbacks and the failure of her first marriage, Joy uprooted her life--and that of her two young sons--to travel to England in 1952. She had struck up a flourishing correspondence with Lewis, and she set out to woo her literary lion. Santamaria chronicles the difficulties of Joy's life in England and Lewis's reaction to her arrival, but shows that, in the end, they did fall deeply in love. As Joy's health began to fail, her relationship with Lewis flourished, and their last few years together were blissful.

A clear-eyed, insightful portrait of a fascinating woman, Santamaria's biography adds important depth and richness to the popular image of Joy Davidman. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

British journalist Charlotte Higgins (It's All Greek to Me) has always been fascinated by the classical world, but that fascination didn't extend to Roman Britain. She thought of Britain as an unglamorous outpost on the edge of the Roman Empire--an opinion shared by most Romans of the time. A visit to Hadrian's Wall changed her mind. Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain is the story of her search to understand Rome's 360-year occupation of Britain and its influence on the British sense of history and identity.

Higgins travels across Britain in an unreliable camper van, searching out traces of ancient Rome. She walks the tourist-friendly Hadrian's Wall, and tracks down the ruins of Londinium through modern London with the help of a map published by the Museum of London. She visits small museums, major museums and a tourist trap called Iceni Village. She interviews archeologists, museum curators, farmers-turned-innkeepers near Hadrian's Wall, and a full-time Roman centurion who appears at museum events and school programs. She considers the unexpected cache of Roman "postcards" known as the Vindolanda tablets; an influential 18th-century forgery of a Roman text; and re-imaginings of Roman Britain by later generations of British antiquarians, poets, military engineers and composers, including Benjamin Britten's soulful Roman Wall Blues, composed for a radio play by W.H. Auden.

Under Another Sky weaves Britain's history and contemporary landscape together into a complex and fascinating account that is part travelogue, part history and wholly charming. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Travis Nichols (Matthew Meets the Man) serves up a graphic novel–picture book hybrid brimming with idioms and wordplay, starring a host of creature detectives in the Gumshoe Zoo.

When Quentin, the goat on duty, gets a call from Mr. Hound about a broken store window, he sends out an alert to his colleagues. Nichols paints the goat as the hub, with arrows stretching like the spokes of a wheel (to Mike, a bull in a china shop; Steve the monkey in a barrel; and Morgan the chicken, counting eggs before they hatch--to name a few). The creatures find it nearly impossible not to insult a teammate as they announce their findings. Josie the fish admits "there is some definite monkey business at hand," then apologizes to Steve. Josie the rat "suspect[s] foul play," then apologizes to feathered friend Morgan ("No need, Josie. That was F-O-U-L. I'm a chicken. That's F-O-W-L," says he). Sharon the duck finds the telltale clue that leads to the mystery's solution. Offbeat colors such as eggplant, burnt orange and forest green give the book a retro feel, and an ending announcing the threat of a "beast of oxymoronic proportions" promises another case for the Gumshoe Zoo.

For best results, give this to a kid who enjoys puzzles and witty turns of phrase. Helpful endnotes explain the term "idiom" and the book's most prominent examples of them. Readers will be clamoring to solve the next installment. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

This winning picture book trumpets the merits of hard work and loyalty.

Teresa Bateman (Keeper of Soles) unspools her tale with a storyteller's command of language and pacing: "An old farm dog plodded down a dirt road--paws sore and stomach empty." The pooch marches right up to a farmer and asks, "Do you need a dog?" The farmer declines: "Dogs just eat and don't give anything back," unlike cows, horses and chickens. "Do you have an opening for a cow?" asks the dog. Chris Sheban's (Catching the Moon) watercolor, graphite and colored pencil illustrations depict a modest yet thriving farm. The dog returns before dawn, herds the cows into place, and the farmer does his milking "in jig time." Even so, the man tells the dog there's no job for him at the farm. In what becomes a can-do refrain, Bateman writes, "The dog was disappointed but not discouraged." The pup does the same with the horses (leading them along with the promise of carrots) and the farmer again turns him away ("the dog was disappointed but not discouraged"). Three's the charm when the dog tries to fill an opening for a chicken. Sheban takes the perspective of the fowls, looking out from inside the dark coop into the light-filled farmyard where the furry fellow stands (he tidies up the coop and chases out a fox). At last, the farmer finds just the right job for his canine applicant.

This pooch is a model of the power of persistence. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness