After his 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson's highly anticipated follow-up is the wildly diverse and stiflingly intense short story collection Fortune Smiles. The title is baldly ironic: not a single protagonist in the six long stories that make up the collection is living an enviable life. Two stories--"Nirvana" and "Interesting Facts"--depict the difficulty of maintaining relationships in the face of debilitating illness. "Hurricanes Anonymous" covers the fallout from the one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in Louisiana. "Dark Meadows" offers a brutal deep-dive into the psychology of a pedophile. And, finally, "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" and "Fortune Smiles" both return to the theme of totalitarian regimes, and the psychological wreckage they leave behind, so skillfully explored in Johnson's previous novel.

Fortune Smiles is no laugh-riot, but thankfully, Johnson peppers his stories with emotional release valves in the form of pitch-black humor and the same slightly absurdist streak that helped to leaven The Orphan Master's Son. In "Nirvana," a programmer creates a virtual simulacrum of a dead president to give him advice. "Fortune Smiles" features a surprisingly poignant scene where a North Korean defector attempts to airlift himself back over the DMZ by attaching balloons to a plastic chair. Johnson applies a familiar theme--institutional cruelty transmuting itself into absurdity (see: Kafka, anything Russian)--to life itself, implying that the human experience is just another exercise in institutional cruelty. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Robert Goolrick's novel The Fall of Princes has its roots more in his family memoir, The End of the World as We Know It, about his wealthy parents' life of ostentation, addiction and abuse, than in his first novel, A Reliable Wife, set in the early 20th century. The Fall of Princes is the story of Rooney, a high-flying Wall Street trader caught in the swirl of 1980s New York excess, and what he calls its "megawatts of greed and glory and rapaciousness... like a giant testosterone flambé." Rooney gives his account after the money, drugs, high-end hookers, Brioni suits, Bryn Mawr alumni wives and chauffeured Lincoln Town Cars have been replaced by his rat-infested West 35th Street apartment and a job in short sleeves and khakis at Barnes & Noble. Looking back on his brief run as what Tom Wolfe tagged a "Master of the Universe," Rooney concludes, "When you lose everything, you don't die. You just continue in ordinary pants with nothing in your pockets."

Goolrick's New York City in the '80s reflects a twinge of nostalgia, but the ravages of all that sex, drugs and money took their toll--AIDS, divorce and, in Rooney's case, "the slammer... four times, twice in rehab for various addictions, and twice to the loony bin." It finally takes the plaintive singing of an inexperienced young call girl, the unquestioning love of a transvestite streetwalker, a full reading of Proust's Á La Recherche du Temps Perdu and a bookstore job to cushion his dizzying descent. Given the height from which he fell, only a big cushion would do. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

The Admissions is Meg Mitchell Moore's (So Far Away) account of a very eventful autumn for the Hawthornes of Marin County, Calif. After years of academic and extracurricular preparation, eldest daughter Angela is submitting her application to Harvard, while 10-year-old Cecily is preparing to compete in the world championships with her Irish dance troupe, and Maya, the youngest, is entering second grade still unable to read on her own. Nora, their mother, on the verge of the biggest sale of her real estate career, is managing her high-maintenance clients, driving carpool, keeping tabs on Angela's crushing senior-year obligations, and searching for a reading tutor.

Nora has told no one why she blames herself for Maya's trouble with reading. While she pushes to close a challenging sale, she also tells no one that a lawsuit is brewing over another sale she made several years earlier. So close to realizing her dream of admission to Harvard, Angela tells no one that pills are helping her hold onto her spot at the top of her class. And while the whole family knows how much Harvard matters to Angela, only her father, Gabe, truly knows exactly why it matters--and he can't tell anyone.

The Admissions quickly establishes the Hawthornes as an upper-middle-class family dealing with severe pressure, community expectations and their own occasionally desperate decisions. There's plenty of drama--and a surprising amount of comedy--in the convergence of events that exposes all of the family secrets. But while Moore lets her characters unravel, she doesn't leave them in pieces. The Hawthornes may truly have learned from, and been changed by, experience. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

In The Reckoning, the gruesome murder of a Niceville family helps detective Nick Kavanaugh finally admit that there is a dark, supernatural presence in his town. Along with a group of confidants, Nick must confront the creature at its source before it fully takes over his foster son, Rainey Teague, allowing an evil relation from the past, Abel Teague, to become immortal.

The woman who lives in a strange limbo, inside Nick's antique mirror, takes in lost souls and has them fight the evil that has descended on Niceville. Together, these spirits chase down an evil sorcerer who seeks to live forever by inhabiting Rainey's body. But metaphysical villains are only part of the problem. Mob goons shacked up in a hotel suite face off with FBI surveillance camped out in the high-rise across the street, as the goons figure out what to do after the death of their boss.

Carsten Stroud (The Homecoming) takes readers back to Niceville in The Reckoning, the third installment of his series, a novel that tells a fascinatingly macabre story. Stroud seems more confident and playful in this novel, showing off with blackly humorous chapter titles like "Never Get Out of the Car," with a local policeman who investigates a haunted sewer, or "Tito Detects Stuff," in which a Mafia hitman takes out an informant. While the plot is complicated, the story rockets along, keeping readers engaged and looking for every next twist and turn. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Days before Christmas, St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City is seized by a hostage taker who threatens to kill the captives and blow up the landmark if his demands aren't met. The first demand: negotiations must be handled by Eve Rossi, an FBI agent who heads up a division made up of ex-cons.

The hostage taker wants Eve and her team to bring five specific people--who have no obvious links to each other--to the scene to witness an event the perpetrator has planned. The task must be completed within hours or the church and everyone inside will be lit up, but not by Christmas lights.

In Hostage Taker, her first contemporary thriller, Edgar Award-winner Stefanie Pintoff (In the Shadow of Gotham) pulls out the big guns, literally and figuratively, by taking aim at one of New York City's most iconic landmarks. Though several characters lean toward stereotypes (one of the five witnesses is an actress who behaves in a self-centered, spotlight-grabbing way), and the narrative occasionally states the obvious ("she saw the telltale red marks on his wrist. The sign of having been recently bound"), the suspense level is high as Eve and her unit race against the clock to prevent a catastrophe.

Eve's tactics offer an interesting glimpse into how a negotiator must walk the thin edge between placating and outwitting her opponent. And the hostage taker's motivation resonates, giving dimension to a character who, despite committing dastardly deeds, may not be completely heartless. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Pulitzer Prize-nominated and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award recipient Ted Rall (To Afghanistan and Back; 2024: A Graphic Novel) has created a compact, sympathetic profile of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor and Central Intelligence Agency employee who leaked classified information about the agencies' post-9/11 domestic surveillance program to the world. Using simple and unobtrusive illustrations as a background to his narrative, Rall demonstrates how George Orwell's 1984 became fact rather than fiction and how one man's conscience and pursuit of justice pushed him into political exile.

Rall analyzes Snowden's youth in his attempt to understand what prompted Snowden down the path of whistleblowing. For all intents and purposes, he was living the good life--a conscientious and trustworthy Boy Scout who grew up in the D.C. suburbs and earned his GED at 16, a lucky millennial who turned his love of technology into a lucrative career as a systems administrator for the NSA and CIA, mining personal data from millions of Americans in search of terrorism threats. A State Department assignment to Switzerland exposed Snowden to leftist European political views, opening his eyes to abuses of power and propelling him to a course of action branded as treasonous.

Rall interviews boyhood acquaintances, teachers and government whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake, and draws together his own political views in developing his portrait of Snowden. Rall imparts a humanity to the man who government and media outlets portrayed as a traitor, and he leaves no doubt where his own loyalties lie, as he ties in Snowden's fate with Orwell's Winston Smith. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

"I cannot untangle in my mind the scientific study of climate change and the death of my parents." M Jackson is a scientist, National Geographic Expert and glacier specialist, but her memoir While Glaciers Slept: Being Human in a Time of Climate Change rarely takes a scientific perspective and never claims objectivity. Rather, Jackson tells the story of losing both her parents when she was a young woman just embarking on life, and the trauma and extended grieving process that resulted.

Following a brief, lovely foreword by Bill McKibben, Jackson poetically conflates her loss with the slow and still mysterious effects of anthropogenic climate change. Her scientific background and explorations of fascinating places--Denali and Chena Hot Springs in Alaska, Zambia with the Peace Corps--inform her writing and yield striking images, as she runs on spongy Alaskan tundra or contemplates cryoconite holes atop glaciers. But it is the personal side of her narrative that allows Jackson to address society's psychological difficulties with climate change.

Each chapter of While Glaciers Slept is a finely braided essay, considering an aspect of her parents' lives or deaths alongside a facet of climate change's challenges. Jackson mourns her mother with the help of Joan Didion's writing; windmills offer possible "undulating answers" and comfort her on her drive home upon learning that her father is dying. She employs a disordered chronology that slightly disorients her reader, just as Jackson was disoriented. The effect is an evocative, lyrical work of musing and allegory rather than a scientific treatise. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

With Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes, Bernie Krause shares his delight in the sounds of the natural world and makes an impassioned case for the importance of such acoustics.

Krause is a soundscape ecologist who's been recording the noises of natural settings for nearly 50 years. As a pioneer in his field, he's acquired his knowledge the hard way, beginning with the technological challenges of recording with equipment designed for indoor use, and has seen changes as the field has grown. For example, the scientific establishment's emphasis on single-species recording is giving way to Krause's preference for capturing an entire biome.

Voices of the Wild is designed to educate laypeople on the existence and significance of soundscapes, and how to undertake amateur recordings. Krause introduces the terms "geophony" (non-biological sounds, as of wind and water), "biophony" (non-human biological sounds, like bird- and whalesong) and "anthropophony" (human-created sounds, from speech to traffic). He makes predictions about the future of soundscape ecology, including technologies that will change the field and its impact on various disciplines, from architecture (interior soundscapes have implications on education and psychology) to biology (in which soundscapes inform our understanding of biodiversity), and many more. The field has enormous scientific and cultural relevance, for example in comparing the therapeutic value of biophonies to that of music: the former "may be more beneficial, perhaps because they are culture neutral." Accompanied by recordings available online, Voices of the Wild offers a mildly academic but fascinating look at a little-known but potentially influential field. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Magic and reality spin and blur in this lyrical YA debut novel set in small-town Ireland. Irish author Moïra Fowley-Doyle weaves a deliciously dark story of a family who pads the kitchen-counter corners every time the "accident season" rolls around... because someone is bound to get hurt.

"Bones break, skin tears, bruises bloom": the accident season starts on October 1 and ends on Halloween. Sometimes someone just gets scratched up a little, but occasionally someone dies. Seventeen-year-old Cara walks around with "the vague aroma of echinacea and anxiety" following her "like a strange sad cloud," and her best friend, Bea, doesn't help with her gloomy tarot-card predictions of a particularly bad October. Seemingly on cue, Cara's older sister, Alice, has fallen down the stairs, and their paranoid, purple-haired mother has asked 89 times if she's okay. Uncertainty churns. Is the accident season real, or just... accidents? Why has a mousy forgotten friend named Elsie appeared in all of Cara's pictures for the last 17 years? And, most excruciating of all, how can Cara possibly not kiss her irresistible ex-stepbrother, Sam, even though it seems so taboo? The mysteries of the accident season are unveiled as awful family secrets spill out, and the electric energy of all the undercurrents crescendos into a wild, wine-soaked Halloween party in an old, abandoned house where guests are encouraged to "come as what you feel like on the inside."

Bones, bridges and hearts break in this literary, mesmerizingly sensual novel of flashbacks, dreams and Halloween surprises. --Karin Snelson, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

There's such anticipation for those long, lazy days of summer, but when it finally arrives, Zora, like countless children before her, grows bored. There are only so many times one can ride a bike in loopy circles around the neighborhood. So when Zora circles past the hardware store, she's delighted to spot a new sign that says FREE ZUCCHINI: "Free zoo-kee-nee... Z, like me." She fills her basket with zucchini plants and heads home to plant her treasure. Anyone who has set out more than one zucchini plant in a growing season can guess what happens next. When Zora's family (rendered sweetly in ink and watercolor, then digitally colored) can no longer keep up with her daily zuke harvest, Zora formulates a plan to team up with her zucchini-less (and tomato- and apricot-full) neighbors: a garden swap!

Katherine Pryor and Anna Raff’s second veggie collaboration, following Sylvia's Spinach, is full of the kinds of quiet details that make children return to a book again and again. Zora's orange tabby cat appears on nearly every page, although sometimes readers will have to search for him. See his paw swiping zucchini bread from the dinner table? See him worrying with Zora as she wonders if her "Garden Swap was a Garden Flop?" The book ends with an inspiring note about what to do with an overabundant harvest ("Donate it. Preserve it. Share it.").

Even if readers never plant anything in their lives, Zora's Zucchini satisfies every appetite with its clean, happy storyline and whimsical illustrations. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor