Jodi Picoult is best known for fiction that blends courtroom and human drama surrounding controversial topics. While some of her novels have deviated from that template (The Storyteller, Leaving Time), she returns to it in Small Great Things, which depicts the trial of a nurse accused of the wrongful death of a patient through the lens of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ruth Jefferson, the only black labor-and-delivery nurse at a small Connecticut hospital, is stunned when two white supremacists demand that she be kept away from their newborn son. Despite those orders, Ruth becomes deeply involved when the infant goes into cardiac arrest. And when the baby doesn't survive, the grieving parents place blame on her, and press criminal charges. To Ruth, the matter is literally black and white--that is, she's been accused of killing a white baby because she is black--and even as the case attracts the attention of prominent black activists, she's confused by her attorney's insistence on building a defense that addresses race as little as possible.

Small Great Things is narrated in the voices of Ruth, the accused nurse; Turk, the baby's father; and Kennedy, Ruth's (white) public defender. While Turk's presentation of the white supremacist worldview is deeply unsettling, the relationship between Ruth and Kennedy evokes a more complicated discomfort, as it becomes an ongoing dialogue about race, privilege and intention. Small Great Things is in the tradition of Picoult's best topical fiction (My Sister's Keeper; Nineteen Minutes)--engrossing, provocative and timely. It's sure to spur discussions that mirror those taking place between her characters. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

It's easy to sympathize with Felix Phillips, the Prospero figure in Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood's clever version of The Tempest, the latest in the Hogarth series of Shakespeare works reimagined by acclaimed novelists. In 2001, he's the celebrated avant-garde artistic director of Canada's Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, but life is far from perfect. His wife died in childbirth three years earlier, and now his daughter, Miranda, has died from meningitis. One can understand, therefore, why he doesn't care if audiences are baffled by his decision to stage Pericles with extraterrestrials. Then, another cruel blow: his "Machiavellian foot-licker" subordinate gets the festival board to oust him before he can stage his dream version of The Tempest, and Felix drops out of society and is reduced to applying adhesive to his dentures in his abandoned hillside shack.

Several years later, he sees his chance for redemption: he becomes a literacy skills teacher at the Fletcher County Correctional Institute. Rather than follow the syllabus, Felix stages one Shakespeare play a year with inmates as cast members. In 2013, he uses The Tempest as a means to get revenge on his usurpers, two of whom are now government officials running for higher office. Atwood (Stone Mattress) has great fun creating parallels between the tale of Caliban and Ariel and the life of inmates with nicknames like Bent Pencil and SnakeEye. And what's not to enjoy about a novel in which prisoners can use only Shakespearean swears, a limitation that leads to such lines as, "What the pied ninny is this?" --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Disappointment, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Kait Heacock, publicist at Feminist Press, explores its vast chasm in her debut story collection, Siblings and Other Disappointments. Sad in myriad ways, these stories dissect disenchantment from a variety of viewpoints--between husbands and wives, parents and offspring, siblings, neighbors, crewmates and, often most excruciatingly, within oneself.

Heacock writes about difficult subjects with a smooth grace that acts like a salve, taking some of the sting out of recognizing and relating to them. Living, often simply existing, is painful:

"Peter was an agoraphobic. He couldn't explain what that was a year ago, but he could describe now what it was like to stand by the front door and feel the heat radiate off the knob, so sure it could burn you if you touched it.... He never would have guessed when he rented this one-bedroom basement apartment that it could become his waking coffin, that he would let her death bury him alive."

Heacock sometimes balances the hurt with slivers of salvation. Peter finds solace in the peregrinations of his insomniac upstairs neighbor. An artistic young man finds a small mercy on the fishing boat where he's sent to toughen up. As in life, however, not every story includes an emotional Band-Aid, and Heacock doesn't hesitate to wield her words like a knife. To be human is to wound and be wounded, and the 12 gritty stories in Siblings and Other Disappointments cut to the core. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Music serves as a vivid and tactile metaphor for the universality of language and human emotion in Bae Suah's haunting novel of memories and regret over lost love. A Greater Music focuses on a Korean writer recalling a road trip in the German countryside with her sickly lover M, a woman who tutored the writer in German and whose twin loves of music and literature matched her own interests.

The story weaves between her memories of M and two future moments: one when the writer has nearly drowned in an icy lake, and the other when she has abandoned M and is cohabiting with Joachim--an on-again, off-again, penny-pinching boyfriend who is quick to blame the writer for the slightest perceived grievances. Joachim leaves the writer to take an apprenticeship as a welder, and the writer is left alone to wander the streets of Berlin and ruminate over her failed relationship with M. She indulges in digressions about the artistic superiority of composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Bernd Alois Zimmermann and writer Jakob Hein; she contrasts them with what she perceives as the banality of conventional interests and "mental shallowness, poverty of thought" among the masses--until she comes to realize her painful role in "the greater music" of M's heartache.

Suah, a celebrated Korean writer whose first English-translated novel, Nowhere to Be Found, was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize, writes with a floating, lyrical complexity that resembles the sharpness and ambivalence of a Shostakovich symphony, while maintaining the aura of emotional detachment, self-blame and soul-searching that is characteristic of the best Dostoevsky and Orwell stories. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

In journalist David Lida's first novel, One Life, two lives are featured, although only one is apparently threatened.

Richard is a mitigation specialist. A gringo based in Mexico City, he investigates the backgrounds of Mexican nationals accused of capital offenses in the United States, hoping to dig up enough ugliness and trauma for the courts to consider a lesser sentence--like life without parole. Esperanza came to south Louisiana for the rumored bounty of well-paid jobs cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina. She now faces the death penalty for killing her infant daughter. Richard has always maintained walls between the tragedies he studies professionally and his own life; he is expert at enjoying what he thinks of as stolen moments of happiness. But as he learns about Esperanza's background, living in a dusty village to the rough side of Ciudad Juarez, her stoicism and mystery destroy his detached calm.

One Life's perspective shifts between a third-person view of Esperanza's life and Richard's first-person voice, speaking from a murky future. The reader therefore knows more than either protagonist, although the novel's central secret is reserved for the final pages. Neither a mystery nor a thriller, this story is briskly paced but not rushed: there is time for Richard to mull the emotional holes in his own life, and for Esperanza and secondary characters to consider and reconsider their limited options. Poignant and exquisitely detailed, One Life brings nuance and a personal voice to a deeply tragic story. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

The indefatigable Lady Frances Ffolkes is up to shenanigans again, much to the disapproval of her older brother, the Marquess of Seaforth. Two of Lady Frances's suffragist friends have been receiving threats about their "unnatural" relationship, and Lady Frances is determined to get to the bottom of it. She accompanies Tommie and Gwen to Kestrel's Eyrie, Gwen's ancestral home, and finds Gwen's father, an important English diplomat, stabbed to death with a ruby dagger.

Kestrel's Eyrie is housing French, Turkish and American guests, all of whom are clearly hiding things. But are they merely trying to keep sensitive diplomatic secrets under wraps, or do they know more about Sir Calleford's death than they're admitting? Determined to protect Gwen and Tommie, and to prove that women can sleuth as well as men can, Lady Frances and her redoubtable maid, Mallow, will do anything to solve the crime, even if it means getting on the wrong side of the provincial police inspector. Luckily Lady Frances's handsome beau, Hal Wheaton, is an excellent solicitor, and is quite willing to support her unusual quest.

A charming Edwardian mystery with a delightfully unconventional heroine and her plucky maid as sidekick, Death Among Rubies is an enjoyable follow-up to R.J. Koreto's first novel, Death on the Sapphire. Fans of Rhys Bowen, Charles Todd and Jacqueline Winspear are sure to enjoy the historical details in this series, and readers who love a strong heroine will appreciate Lady Frances. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

More than most sports, fly-fishing seems to turn its practitioners into reverent acolytes. Poet and Montana fishing guide Chris Dombrowski (Earth Again) was inspired to write by Norman Maclean's elegiac A River Runs Through It. Dombrowski's Body of Water is an poetic paean to the art of stalking bonefish on the flats along the mangrove shores of Grand Bahama Island. He claims that the cagey bonefish is the Holy Grail of piscine prey, "due largely to its fickle manner and unsurpassed acceleration... the fish is built for departure." At the Deep Water Cay Club ("the most famous bonefishing destination in the world"), Dombrowski meets the club's original guide, David Pinder, Sr., whose knack for finding "tailing bone" brought anglers from all over the world to what began as a private fishing refuge.

Body of Water is Pinder's story and that of his family of 11 children and 48 grandchildren--three generations of guides. It is also a metaphor-laced meditation on the art and practice of fly-fishing, the social and economic history of the Bahamas, the evolution of archipelago geology and the chronicle of Dombrowski's personal struggle to juggle his fishing and poetry obsessions against the financial needs of his own family. The fishing part is clear: find 'em, hook 'em, play 'em and land 'em--the world back home, not so much. In Body of Water, Dombrowski explores the zen-like balance he experiences while bonefishing and makes a good case that out on a skiff in the Bahama flats "we enter the prayerful closet of the senses and close the door." Fly-fishing mysticism at its best. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Oscar-nominated actress Taraji P. Henson's Around the Way Girl is a rarity among celebrity memoirs: it's a highly nuanced and deeply introspective story told with emotion and perspective. Raised by a divorced mother and loving but absentee father in "one of the most troubled areas of a city where poverty and hopelessness made neighbor prey on neighbor," Henson learned to become fearless. "Fear is a liar. I make a point of calling its bluff," she writes.

Henson was 17 when she met her "forever love," Mark. Six years later (while attending Howard University as an acting major), she gave birth to their son, Marcell. Henson and co-author Denene Millner (who wrote several books with Steve Harvey) write with aching tenderness and clarity about the relationship ("Youth, inexperience, environment, and the lack of relationship role models made my union with Mark a recipe for disaster") and raising a black son alone in a still-racist world ("The whole world loves a sweet little chubby brown boy. Until they don't").

When her acting career gains momentum (Hustle & Flow, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, TV's Empire), Henson grapples with consequences of choosing financial security for her family's future over her personal relationships. Unlike some actresses who work to gain fame, Henson truly loves acting and creating characters, and readers get fascinating details on how she finds those characters on and off the script's pages. Henson's memoir is an inspiring account of overcoming adversity and a quest for self-discovery, written with vitality and enthusiasm. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

A thick, black-and-white line drawing of a caterpillar gazing up at a butterfly is juxtaposed with the word "change." A lone slice of pizza sits in an open pizza box: "only." Three extraterrestrials grin out of a spaceship: "them." A leafy bit is lodged in between two teeth: "something." Illustrator, graphic designer and animator Christoph Niemann's (The Police Cloud; The Pet Dragon; Subway) playful, illustrated dictionary of 300-plus words challenges its readers to think about the nature of communication, both verbal and visual. He could be a global Pictionary champion, nailing his artistic representations of tricky words such as "both" (two feet sticking out of one pant leg) and "without" (a man in a suit with no pants).

Those who remember Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard's The Important Book know the delights of distilling words to their essence: "But the important thing about rain is that it is wet." What sits at the core of the words "change" or "only" or "them?" Some of the artist's depictions are straightforward, such as those for "car" and "tree," but Niemann also has fun with homonyms ("bowl" and "bowl"), facing pages that interact cleverly, and images like a fish riding a bicycle: "never." Words is a book for browsers, poets and storytellers; a possible guessing game; and an engaging launch pad for all sorts of wordplay. "Check." "It." "Out." --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

It's a bold move to write a picture book in a made-up language, but Carson Ellis (Home) aces it in Du Iz Tak?, which probably means "What is that?"

As a green plant begins to push its way out of the ground, a vaudevillian, man-faced caterpillar examines it silently. A couple of stylishly accessorized winged insects cautiously approach the unfurling green frond. "Du iz tak?" asks one. "Ma nazoot," responds the other, which might mean, "I don't know." Meanwhile, the man-faced caterpillar has climbed a nearby branch to metamorphose into a cocoon: "Ta ta!" As the sprout grows, more and more insects investigate, uttering initially indecipherable comments such as "Ru badda unk ribble." "Su," says another. "Bore inkin Icky," says another. By the next page readers will figure out that "Icky" is a pillbug who lives inside a log (he comes out when called) and "ribble" is a ladder that they need to climb the ever-growing plant. The excitement of figuring out the bugs' language is unexpectedly thrilling. Now we know "Ru" is "we," "badda" is "need," "unk" is "a" and "ribble" is ladder! We're learning bug language!

High drama ensues in the clean, odd, beautiful pages ahead. The insects decide to build an elaborate, multi-level, pirate-flagged "furt" in the plant--excellent for luxuriating with a fruity drink--but the perils of nature (big spider, swooping spider-eating bird, the change of seasons) all take their toll on the plant and inevitably, their splendid furt. Snow blankets the previously festive scene, but on the next spread a crop of new green sprouts appears: "Du iz tak?" A marvel. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness