Deep in the Yorkshire woods, Daniel is learning the beautiful and brutal nuances of life from his father, John, and older sister, Cathy. John, a man of gargantuan proportions, is a gentle soul who wants to be left alone with his children. Cathy, tiny and intense, is viciously protective, but keeps a calm façade. After a landowner comes to claim the territory, John is forced into increasingly dangerous situations that threaten the well-being of his family. As the inevitability of violence looms, Daniel stares ever harder at the father and sister who comprise his entire world, but who cannot protect him forever.

Elmet's power derives from its expert illustration of a world built on contradictions. The atmosphere is both lush and austere, the writing lyrical and simplistic, the characters violent and tender. Fiona Mozley captures the serenity of her setting while still acknowledging its jagged edges and the darkness shifting among the trees. Crafted like a series of connected short stories, the narrative maintains a hidden tension that simmers beneath the surface until it overwhelms the reader in its final, catastrophic sequence. This debut novel is notable, however, not for the shock of its climaxes, but for its focus on small moments. Its emotion resides in a scene's shuddering pauses, the quivering of a character's lip, the exhale after an intake of breath. Elmet, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is a backwoods gothic that knows better than most how to be explosive in stillness. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Born in Iceland, raised in England and living alone in New York City, Magnus Conyngham, the narrator of Olaf Olafsson's brainy novel One Station Away, is neuroscientist working in a well-funded lab in Connecticut. His days are filled with coffee, commuting and navigating the egos of his department chair, his lab assistants and the chairs of the two European academic centers collaborating on his research project. Although focused on his study of the brain function of comatose patients, Magnus is frequently preoccupied with his Buenos Aires-born, ballet dancer lover, Malena, and her sudden death from a motor neuron disease--a disease he failed to detect in his exuberant infatuation with her.

In self-imposed exile, Magnus hardly understands anyone around him--until he takes on a new research subject in a coma after a New Mexico motorcycle crash. A Latina Jane Doe, she fails to show any MRI brain response to his rote questions until he begins to sit with her, talking, playing music and reading to her in Spanish from One Hundred Years of Solitude. Finally, she blinks, her scans light up and she is able to answer yes and no questions. Is it a scientific breakthrough, a sociable dialogue or a call for help?

A Time Warner executive born in Iceland, Olafsson (Restoration) methodically immerses readers in the mind of the contemplative, sensitive and self-doubting Magnus. Olafsson's smooth and deliberate narrative gradually reveals the deceptive complexity of his characters. Even as they move in the professional worlds of the artist and scientist, they are as prone to detachment as the rest of us. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Michael Parker's slim volume of flash fiction conveys more in a few pages than some authors do with doorstop novels. These stories--23 of them in fewer than 100 pages--contain a vivid sense of place, mostly working-class communities in the rural South. The worlds are rich but brief, as if viewed from a tiny window. Consider a line from "Never Mind": "The sun had burned off the clouds but was setting now pinkly over the ridge, each tree visible like the hair on the overgrown ears of his grandfather just before he died." Parker knows his characters, their voices and homes, and his empathy and evocative prose are reminiscent of Brian Doyle. Reminiscent of Stand by Me, "Work Camp" follows three boys who speak with inmates through the fence of a local prison, in an examination of who we are as children, who we become as adults, and whether that's who we're supposed to be. "Typingpool" begins with a bizarre wedding gift and goes on to wonder about truth in relationships.

Everything, Then and Since is a lesson in the economy of language, using as few words as necessary to create an entirely real person, home and philosophy. Though the book could be a quick read, these pieces, like poetry, benefit from reflection and stillness before moving onto the next, and each conclusion feels both shocking and inevitable. One after another, these stories leave the reader breathless, sated, but still wanting more. --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer and publicist

Celebrated American intellectual Susan Sontag was known as a master essayist and novelist, but this short story collection aims to widen readers' view of her work. From the autobiographical to dabbling in science fiction, the pieces in this collection (edited by Benjamin Taylor) show a writer always thinking of new ways to tackle questions of identity, loss and language.

Taylor eases the reader into Debriefing by putting a piece of memoir at the beginning. "Pilgrimage" recounts a journey by the awkward teenage Sontag to visit the famous German author Thomas Mann while he was living in California. Told in a funny, self-deprecating style, the story expertly depicts her influences and concerns, all of which will reappear in the following pages. Debriefing is never so close to the author again, but readers will keep that first impression as they move forward through the collected stories.

The standout "Doctor Jekyll" reimagines Robert Louis Stevenson's novella in modern New York, recasting the titular hero as a man in midlife crisis before taking the story in directions the original never dared. The final story, "The Way We Live Now," is a tragic, if often funny, look at how AIDS impacted communities. Told in a strange style where every sentence is run-on and full of hearsay, Sontag mimics the feeling of a group discussion, where the topic at the center (in this case a very sick friend) is less important than the interactions between the speakers. Fans of Sontag and new readers alike will find plenty of enjoyable material in this lovely collection. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

In Artemis, Andy Weir showcases the same combination of space, suspense, science and humor that made his first novel, The Martian, such a big hit. The setting this time is Artemis, the first colony on the moon, in the near future.

Jasmine Bashara--Jazz to her friends--moved to the moon with her father at age six. She now works as a porter, but that barely pays the rent on her tiny bunk (a "coffin" in the local parlance). Jazz really makes her living as a smuggler, though she wishes she could earn extra money faster so she could pay back her father and rent a decent place to live.

Even though Jazz is strictly a small-time criminal, she agrees to take on a job that is way beyond the law because the expected payoff is the answer to her dreams. Her initial misgivings grow as she comes to realize there is far more to this job (and the story behind it) than meets the eye.

Jazz is drawn deeper and deeper into a criminal world she didn't even know existed. Through Jazz, Weir details the intricate science behind pulling off a crime in a vacuum and in low gravity. As the tension continues to build, Jazz cracks jokes to keep from completely losing it. The result is a moon-set caper that's witty, taut and a whole lot of fun. --Suzan L. Jackson, freelance writer and author of Book by Book blog

The outrageous, audacious and hilarious Jenifer Lewis earned the nickname "Mother of Black Hollywood" from playing movie and TV roles as mother to Angela Bassett (What's Love Got to Do with It?), Whitney Houston (Preacher's Wife), Tupac Shakur (Poetic Justice), Anthony Anderson (Black-ish) and others. Musing on her never-aired talk show for Disney, she writes, "To make a long story short, I was basically incapable of asking other people about their lives without going on and on and on about my own." Fortunately, this trait is ideal for a memoirist--Lewis's tales are acerbic, entertaining and brutally honest.

Born in Missouri, the youngest of seven children, Lewis always knew she'd be a star. Her career took off immediately. One day after graduating from college, she moved to New York City, and 10 days later made her debut on Broadway in Eubie! with Gregory Hines. She played Effie in the workshop production of the musical Dreamgirls, but lost the role to Jennifer Holliday when it moved to Broadway. Touring as a backup singer to Bette Midler, she forged a friendship but realized she couldn't sing in anyone's shadow.

Her manic behavior, spending binges, crying jags and the reliance on alcohol and sex to numb her feelings were later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. The second half of Lewis's memoir delves deeply into her therapy, a troubled relationship with her mother and her fear that mood-stabilizing drugs might dilute her persona. This outstanding, no-holds-barred memoir is captivating, thoughtful, disarmingly frank and unforgettable. The book, like its author, is a treasure. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

French translator Mireille Gansel won the 2016 French Voices Award and the 2017 English PEN Translation Award for this elegant, extended essay that muses on humanistic approaches to translation. Her reflections are based on her personal and professional experience. As survivors of the Jewish internment camps of World War II, Gansel's family avoided speaking German--it represented the "barbed-wire fences and watchtowers of history." As an adult, Gansel learned to appreciate the underlying beauty and lyricism of her family's native tongue through the happy prewar memories of an aunt.

Gansel discovered that intimate involvement--living, breathing and talking poetry with the people creating it--in the process of translation provided "the clay from which I could fashion my own interior language." While studying and working with poet and translator Reiner Kunze, Gansel learned how exile affected the language of expression. This played a role in how she interpreted the works of Nelly Sachs, a German Jewish exile whose experience of Nazism provoked her to write eloquently of the pain and suffering of the Jewish people. While using an ethnologist's approach in translating the poetry of the mountain people of Vietnam, Gansel gained a deeper emotional understanding of the language's musicality of expression, absorbing its rhythms, cadences and registers.

In applying such humanistic approaches, Gansel found that translation transcends language to offer universalities of meaning. And Ros Schwartz's English translation of Gansel serves to bear out the poet's (or in this case, the translator's) vision: "I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other." --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

The late Italian literary icon Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) casts a wide net in his collection of essays Chronicles of a Liquid Society.

Eco, who died in 2016, was famous for both his novels and essays. Collected and translated here are columns he wrote for the Italian newspaper L'Espresso. Spanning the early aughts to the second decade of the millennium, the pieces are arranged thematically. Many focus on history and globalization and how technology is changing culture and politics. Nation-states, political parties and ideological structures have collapsed "into a sort of liquidity," Eco argues. In this new, decentralized world that lacks traditional points of reference, individual conspicuousness becomes the ultimate value.

Eco is a critical thinker, a philosopher and theorist, but he writes with refreshing clarity, sometimes sardonically but almost always to the point. These columns are pithy in the way they address complex ideas, and this itself is ironic as Eco often criticizes "disastrous journalistic simplifications" of complex truths. That Eco can be precise in his writing while respecting complexity and resisting dogmatism is a testament to his intellect. A philosopher of language, he understands the fluidity of semantics and the dangers of political fundamentalism, reminding us that between two poles "there are countless shades." Though critiquing an increasingly unpredictable society, Eco's last reflections are strangely forward-looking and sensible. Chronicles of a Liquid Society forms a map of sorts with which to navigate the modern world. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset

School is "a molasses eternity, a nightmare ravel of bubble sheets and unkind whispers unfurled in slow motion" for 16-year-old Lily Michaels-Ryan, who goes on and off her attention deficit meds "because they made [her] puke randomly and caused [her] head to ring like an empty bell at night." But when she connects with a boy named Abelard Mitchell, she is overtaken by "a wave of golden happiness... like a drug strong enough to counteract the late-day letdown of... ADHD meds." Abelard is also neurodivergent--he has Asperger's--and even though their brains manifest themselves in almost opposite ways, they are drawn to each other. They communicate mostly through texting, quoting heavily from The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, the 12th-century collection of letters between a French philosopher and his student. Finding the perfect quotations to move their own relationship deeper becomes a thrilling joint undertaking. But life is still a daily challenge for Lily. She and Abelard are each faced with potentially life-changing prospects as they move toward adulthood, and even their beloved Middle Ages romantic heroes can't produce the answers they need.

The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily is Laura Creedle's exquisite debut novel. Readers will fall in love with the eponymous characters, squirming at clever Lily's propensity for putting her foot in her mouth and laughing at their delight in each other's differences: Lily babbles; Abelard finds it hard to speak when overwhelmed with feelings. Who can't relate? --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

A tall stranger mysteriously appears in the home of seven-year-old twins Jude and Taryn, "as if stepping between one shadow and the next." He proceeds to murder their parents in front of them, then whisks away the twins and their older sister, Vivi, to live with him in Faerie. Although the twins are human, Vivi is the stranger's heir, fathered when the girls' mother was his wife.

Now Jude is 17, and being raised like "a trueborn child of Faerie." She is frequently reminded by the fey servants how fortunate she is that her adoptive father, Madoc, treats all three sisters as Gentry, because to most of the Folk she will always be "a bastard daughter of a faithless wife, a human without a drop of faerie blood." Determined to win a place at Court through skill rather than marriage, she hones her bladesmanship. She aims to be granted a knighthood, and with it a place in one of the royals' personal guards. But Madoc denies Jude the right to try for a knighthood, leaving her with a desperate need to prove she's not weak. When she is recruited to spy for third-born Prince Dain, she takes the opportunity to prove herself and is drawn into dangerous games of Faerie power and intrigue.

Holly Black (The Coldest Girl in Coldtown; The Darkest Part of the Forest) works her magic with this story, effortlessly giving all things fey a thoroughly modern sensibility. With The Cruel Prince, she introduces a stunning new series, full of all the glamour and brutality that Faerie can deliver. Secret strategies, twisted loyalties, love, lust and betrayal all come into play as Jude struggles to find her way among the Folk. --Lynn Becker, blogger and host of Book Talk, a monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI