Mark Dunn (Ella Minnow Pea) delivers another high-concept, wildly inventive novel that tells a timeless story. We Five traces the tragic consequences of five sheltered young women responding to the amorous overtures of five young men with less than honorable intent.

The novel combines five versions of this basic story, moving around from Manchester, England, in 1859, to San Francisco, Calif., just before the earthquake of 1906; Sinclair Lewis's fictional town of Zenith, Winnemac, in 1923; London in 1940, during the Blitz; and small-town northern Mississippi in 1997. Jane, Maggie, Carrie, Ruth and Molly are the five women who populate each story. "Sisters of the heart," they gradually become aware of their would-be suitors' deceit and begin to resist. Their efforts are abetted and sometimes complicated by their web of relationships with their families and each other, through a series of increasingly disastrous events. All five versions collide in one apocalyptic climax, which gives way to a startling and triumphant conclusion.

Dunn's pyrotechnic storytelling has mixed effects, sometimes eclipsing the emotional heart of the story. And the nightmarish apex, with its glorious epilogue, is a hairpin turn, but it provides a satisfying conclusion and transforms We Five into something much more complex and interesting than another harrowing story about the injustice and hurt that men inflict on women. Ultimately, We Five is an exuberantly clever if uneven story with a fresh take on gender dynamics, female friendship and the universal search for love. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Some longtime Elizabeth George readers have been disappointed by a few of her recent books, ever since the shocking events of With No One as Witness. Although it is the 19th Inspector Lynley novel, A Banquet of Consequences harks back to earlier installments in the series and could serve as an excellent introduction to Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers's entertainingly odd teamwork for new readers. It is a superb psychological thriller, in which Inspector Lynley's suave, aristocratic style melds perfectly with Sergeant Havers's brusque working-class tactics.

The story opens "Thirty-Nine Months Before" with the complicated Goldacre family: mother Caroline, who works for famed feminist Clare Abbott; younger son Will, plagued by a Tourette syndrome-like condition; and elder son Charlie, a psychoanalyst estranged from his wife. Barbara Havers (who is in disgrace at Scotland Yard after the events of Just One Evil Act) coincidentally meets Caroline and Clare; Inspector Lynley attempts to lobby on Barbara's behalf with the Superintendent; and the Goldacre family faces a series of difficult events. Then, finally, someone dies, and Havers and Lynley are drawn into the investigation.

George's lengthy novels always draw detailed depictions of a wide range of characters, and A Banquet of Consequences is no exception. Lynley, Havers and the members of the Goldacre family are nuanced and complex, and the direction the case takes is inevitably dark and twisty. Sure to please any fan of British crime fiction, A Banquet of Consequence represents suspenseful mystery at its finest. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

French novelist Marcel Proust believed that a writer's genius was in the ability to distill life into a single, simple story. In his biography Proust: The Search, Benjamin Taylor observes that Proust's genius was not in the way he distilled life, but in how he was able to re-create every bit of minutiae.

It has long been known that Proust's seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, is largely autobiographical. In it, a nameless narrator, referred to only once as "Darling Marcel" in the fifth volume, recounts his entire life. Proust treats each passing moment, no matter how mundane or fabulous, with equal emotional weight, recounting details with poetic flourish, and rooting events in both French history and his own life.

In Proust: The Search, Taylor expertly deconstructs where the similarities between Proust's fictional self and real-life self begin and end. By combing through both In Search of Lost Time and Proust's personal history, Taylor discovers which events in Proust's own life were most important to the young genius's creative development. Taylor outlines how French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus affair affected the writer's Jewish identity and how Proust treated his semi-open homosexuality on the page.

Of a particular passage from In Search of Lost Time that was inspired by Proust's real love affair, Taylor writes that, "in the first blush of love for Reynaldo, Marcel did manage a premonitory truthfulness in which his mature understanding, if not the mature force of his style, may be glimpsed."

A deep analysis of Proust's masterpiece and a biography of Proust the man, Taylor proves, are one and the same. --Josh Potter

Readers from Generation X may remember Kevin Powell as an original cast member on The Real World, MTV's foray into reality television that paved the way for thousands of imitators in the following decades. But while that may be Powell's greatest claim to fame, it gets little attention in his autobiography, The Education of Kevin Powell. Instead, Powell focuses on his lower-class upbringing in New Jersey and his time as an activist at college and beyond.

The Education of Kevin Powell is anything but a "pulled up by one's bootstraps" narrative. Powell repeatedly underscores the support, and pressure, from his single mother as he made his way through school and into higher education. The book makes no apologies for exploring Powell's experience as a black man trying to navigate the still-racist education system, or his attempts to define himself in the face of absent or corrupt father figures. It is clear Powell wants his work to sit beside great African American books like Native Son or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It is not only an explanation of Powell's upbringing, but also an attempt at having a dialogue with anyone who does not understand the full weight of America's race problems. That attempt sometimes leads to problems of tone, especially when he discusses his past violence towards women with less self-awareness than one might expect. But these moments, flawed as they are, come from a place of self-reflection and an attempt always to be better. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

In a series of thoughtful, poignant personal essays that belie the somewhat humorous title and cover of this fine collection, Joey Franklin, assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, muses on life as a modern man.

The eponymous essay closes this slim volume with Franklin's consideration of the nature of love. He brings together a preacher's saccharine hyperbole about married bliss, his own love-at-first-sight relationship with his wife, and Shakespearean sonnets to illuminate the complexity and difficulty of romantic connections with other flawed human beings, meanwhile pointing out the inherent illogic of trying to tell any kind of "true" story.

After a lightly humorous essay on his journey to become a dancer as a young man--in which he discovers that perhaps he isn't destined to become the next Fred Astaire--Franklin drops in a personal piece about his own childhood. Using the remembrance of touch and his father's year in prison as focal points, he delivers a poetic, meditative treatise on the tenuous nature of memory, the fragility of relationship between parent and child, and how our own recollection of events can change over time as we gain new experiences.

As a title, My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married has the hollow ring of a bumper sticker or T-shirt. Luckily, the contents promise a much stronger, deeper resonance with thoughtful readers who may see themselves reflected in Franklin's often universally recognizable stories about childhood, children, growing up and adulthood. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Journalist, science scholar, bank executive, author (Genome, The Rational Optimist), Matt Ridley is also a British 5th Viscount and member of the House of Lords. These accolades matter little, according to the premise of his engaging new book, The Evolution of Everything. Debunking the whole infrastructure of "intelligent design," Ridley posits that "everything" important to our lives exists as a result of bottom-up evolutionary adaptation. His historic antecedents include the usual suspects, Darwin and Adam Smith, but also the work of Lucretius--excerpts from which introduce each chapter.

Ridley piles up examples of how his theory applies to the nuts and bolts of culture, economics, money, government, religion, the Internet--even the universe itself. His target is the "one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot... assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is." Whether he is describing the origins of common law ("a code of ethics that was written by nobody and everybody") or the evolution of a tree ("the whole structure can stand for hundreds or even thousands of years.... All this is achieved without a plan, let alone a planner"), Ridley quotes supporting authorities as complex as Richard Dawkins or as renegade as Julian Assange. His is a Wikipedia-like world where constant interactions and adjustments create things as they are and will become. Like a Malcolm Gladwell of philosophy, Ridley makes counterintuitive leaps that both entertain and enlighten. Readers may not walk away from The Evolution of Everything married to libertarianism or agnosticism, but they will at least have flirted with them a bit. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Lauren Redniss (Radioactive) offers a gorgeously rendered and singular piece of work with Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future. Her original artwork is stunning, dreamy and evocative, the perfect complement to facts about weather and carefully selected interview excerpts and quotations.

Redniss's "Note on the Art" describes her media: copper plate photogravure etchings and photopolymer process prints, hand-colored, and a few drawings in oil pastel. She comments on the artistic tradition that inspired her: artist/scientists whose devotion to precision and accuracy have historically paired with "a sensation of strangeness, wonder, terror." Her work is certainly worthy of that tradition; drawings of wildfires recall Picasso's Guernica, and the chapter entitled "Sky" contains only striking illustrations and no text. These drawings are both otherworldly and very much of our world.

Redniss's text, based on scientific research and cultural traditions, riffs on weather phenomena rather than offering a comprehensive study. Her chapters cover conditions (cold, rain, heat, fog) as well as concepts (dominion, war, profit), and span the planet and various peoples throughout history. She considers weather that has been blamed on witches or credited to gods; the use of cloud seeding as a weapon by the United States against Vietnam; and weather derivatives and insurance. Redniss's subjects are quirky and entertaining; her chapter "Forecast" is as concerned with the Old Farmer's Almanac as with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That tone of marvel and whimsy, plus exquisite illustrations, make Thunder & Lightning both remarkably beautiful and pleasingly informative. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Using the divisions established by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their theory of a recurring generational cycle in American history, as well as exhaustive research on vocabulary, Allan Metcalf (OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word) offers what he believes are each era's defining words in the American lexicon. From Skedaddle to Selfie ushers readers from 1742 to the present, correlating terms to the populations' characteristics, citing usage examples and etymology in support of the choices.

Metcalf acknowledges that his collection isn't exhaustive, but he does a thorough job of representing the cultural distinctiveness of each generation. Through his analysis, readers can see influences such as music, politics, fashion and technology on the people of the United States.

The words chosen for each generation are not necessarily the first time they've been used; rather, they're chosen because they're at the height of their use, such as self-esteem assigned to the Baby Boomers (1943-1960), or they attain their modern definition in that era, like boyfriend and girlfriend did in the G.I. Generation (1901-1924). And sometimes the words connect generations--for example the shortened language associated with texting isn't new to the Millennial Generation (1982-2004), but can be seen all the way back in the Transcendental Generation (1792-1821) with the manifestation of O.K.

Injecting humorous analogies and examples throughout, Allan Metcalf has compiled a fascinating look at the language of certain periods on the U.S. timeline. Readers will see the birth, evolution and, to some degree, the diminishment of terms. From Skedaddle to Selfie is sure to be a hit with any word lover. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

German author Cornelia Funke (Inkheart; The Thief Lord) brought madcap fantasy adventure to early readers with her illustrated chapter books Emma and the Blue Genie and The Pirate Pig. Ruffleclaw, a story about a furry red earth monster, is just as wild and woolly.

Ruffleclaw's burrow is hidden under an old toolshed. His home "smelled of earthworms and millipedes" but it's cozy... the floor is covered in soft sweaters. The bright windows of the nearby human house attract him to it... and that "horridly wonderful jingly-music" the humans play (the mother of the family is a piano teacher) makes "his knees go all wobbly." He likes to break into their home at night with his monster claws, roll around on their carpets and peer into their "un-furry" faces while they're sleeping. He likes it so much, he decides to move in with them. When Tommy, the human boy of the house, wakes up to Ruffleclaw's close-proximity snoring, the story erupts into a chaotic, culture-colliding comedy in which Ruffleclaw spits on the wall ("Why? Where do you spit?" he asks calmly when told to stop), bites the radio ("That wasn't music," he growls) and eats an eraser. The gross-out factor is high here, but Ruffleclaw's true passion for the piano and the lonely Tommy's nearly inexplicable affection for the greedy, non-promise-keeping monster elevate the actually somewhat sweet story.

Funke's own black-and-white illustrations reflect Ruffleclaw's over-the-top personality and add a dash of monster spice to an already zesty adventure. "Snail-slimifyingly good!" as Ruffleclaw would say. --Karin Snelson, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness