So much ink continues to be spilled about William Shakespeare that often it takes a novel perspective to bring out something strikingly new about the Bard. In Fools and Mortals, Bernard Cornwell finds that perspective in the form of a sibling, Richard. The author of the Sharpe and Saxon Tales series uses the somewhat devilish younger Shakespeare as a vehicle for a fun, amusing caper about the writing and first production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

While a part of William's theater company, Richard is barely on speaking terms with his brother. Playing women's parts (ladies were banned from being actors at that time), but quickly growing too old for those roles, Richard craves a greater place in his brother's world. When a play written for the wedding of a patron's granddaughter is announced, he jumps at a chance to play a man, and is accidentally thrust into a conspiracy to steal the play and ruin his brother's career.

Fools and Mortals is silly fun, a thrill ride through Elizabethan England where actors were knaves and puritanical mores were on the rise. In his acknowledgements, Cornwell notes that much of the book is fictitious, and that's the best way to read it. Those looking for a historical record of Shakespeare should head to the biographies, but for anyone wanting to read about the Bard dueling with swords and wooing bar-maidens, Fools and Mortals is a good bet. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

In an ambitious second novel, Tim Wirkus (City of Brick and Shadow) opens with a foreword introducing himself as the messenger. He knew narrator Danny Lazlo, Wirkus tells the reader, as an enigmatic classmate at Brigham Young University. The two were briefly reacquainted when Danny gave Wirkus a manuscript by obscure Brazilian science fiction writer Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie entitled The Infinite Future.

Danny first hears about Salgado-MacKenzie during a research trip to São Paulo, while working on a flailing attempt at the Great American Mormon Novel for the highly suspect Young Religious Novelist Grant. Librarian Sergio Antunes, Danny's liaison, introduces him to Salgado-MacKenzie's stories of spaceship captain Irena Sertorian and her valiant crew, who travel the universe facing deadly peril and ethical dilemmas in the style of classic Star Trek. Sergio, a lifelong fan, also shows Danny a book proposal indicating the existence of an unpublished Salgado-MacKenzie novel. Soon, however, Sergio renews contact, claiming to have found a lead on Salgado-MacKenzie's whereabouts through Dr. Harriet Kimball. The feminist scholar was excommunicated from the Church of Latter-Day Saints and once translated some of Salgado-MacKenzie's work. She regrets never finding out whether he was "a raving crank or one of the greatest minds of his generation." Together, the three undertake a journey to find the man at the heart of the mystery and seek out The Infinite Future in the most unlikely of places.

As Wirkus the character muses, "any story that creates a more potent and delightful version of itself in the reader's memory" has pulled off a magical metamorphosis, and Wirkus the author has given us just such a story. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Did he jump or was he pushed? Northumbria's Detective Sergeant Matthew Ryan frequently fields this question, but it's never been more pressing. Ryan's boss and friend Detective Inspector Jack Fenwick has been accused of harboring illegal firearms, and is caught on camera fleeing the prison van that was taking him to jail. Fenwick appears to be escaping, but Ryan is convinced his friend was abducted.

Ryan intends to aid in the investigation; instead, Professional Standards' John Maguire, acting on a personal grudge, suspends Ryan on the grounds that he was AWOL when Fenwick disappeared. Maguire's fair-minded boss Eloise O'Neil supports the suspension, feeling obliged to consider the possibility that Ryan is Fenwick's co-conspirator.

Determined to find Fenwick's missing notebooks and clear his friend's name, Ryan is hamstrung by his lack of access to the police station's incident room. Fortunately, Fenwick has earned loyalties beyond Ryan's: their retired colleague Grace Ellis volunteers her home as a base of operation; it was once a police house, and when she bought the place, the incident room's hardwiring was still connected. Her ex-lover, a former MI5 operative, rounds out the undercover team, presiding over the resurrection of what Grace calls the "silent room."

The first stand-alone thriller from 2017 Dagger in the Library Award-winner Mari Hannah, The Silent Room balances a crime novel's obligation to be spine-tingling with a literary novel's acute sense of place. Readers get to know Northumbria and its environs, as well as Norway, where things get really dicey, especially for Ryan and O'Neil. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and author

Hawker Fare: Stories and Recipes from a Refugee Chef's Isan Thai and Lao Roots is a vivid, inspiring collage of chef James Syhabout's life, family and the flavors of his youth.

Syhabout earned two Michelin stars for his Oakland, Calif., restaurant Commis, but his debut cookbook sets out to instead highlight dishes he serves at his restaurant Hawker Fare--the Lao and Thai dishes he grew up eating.

Sticky rice and padaek, fermented fish sauce, provide the foundation for many. Syhabout builds on these with myriad colorful and flavorful recipes for snacks, tum som, noodles and soups, laap and goi, meats, aws and moks, sauces and condiments, as well as desserts. Standouts include Lao Green Papaya Salad, Khao Mun Gai (Poached Chicken and Rice) and Aromatic Fish Salad Laap.

An introduction by Anthony Bourdain cements Syhabout's celebrity, but his work sparkles on its own. Expletives pepper his writing, also seasoned with creative verbs. On his Coconut Milk and Tapioca Soup with Melon and Crushed Ice, he writes that his mom would "freestyle it." He includes advice on preferred brands for prepared ingredients, and where to find fresh produce and meat. Some can be difficult to get in Western markets, he admits, like buffalo skin ("Honestly, even I have a hard time sourcing this stuff"), while others are easy, such as lemon grass ("easy to find these days at all Asian markets [or] Whole Foods"). Ultimately, he says, "If the label says Thailand or Vietnam, it's probably legit." As legit, no doubt, as Hawker Fare. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer

Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner's Modern Loss follows the encouraging success of their online movement of the same name, a much-needed forum for people to engage in open, authentic dialogues about grief. In this eclectic collection of essays, more than 40 contributors share their insights on bereavement with a respectful balance of humor and honesty that focuses on the loss one actually feels instead of what society expects one to feel. The message comes across loud and clear: grief should be experienced in whatever way feels genuine and right, whether or not it is conventionally acceptable.

Modern Loss is divided into sections highlighting topics related to the grieving process. In the section "Data," Soffer coins the phrase "emotional digital sneak attack": seeing an image on Google Earth of one's deceased father mowing the lawn of one's childhood home, for example. Such "digital dust" sometimes can cause anguish, as when Soffer received an e-mail from her deceased mother offering to bake her favorite chicken dish. The message somehow landed in her inbox a year after her mother's death. At the same time, though, having access to such history of a deceased loved one can be comforting and precious.

Soffer and Birkner's easy conversational tone encourages the reader to explore what it means to build happy, healthy and resilient lives despite the repeated shattering of normalcy that is part and parcel of bereavement. To read these stories is to appreciate the relief that comes with sharing experiences and their attendant emotions with others on the same journey. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and reviewer

Liam Drew's first book, I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals, is an infectiously enthusiastic introduction to mammalian biology. Drew takes the reader along on an idiosyncratic survey of the various attributes and unusual physical features--live birth and the scrotum, for example--that, taken together, help to define why mammals are mammals. Far from a dry list of mammalian characteristics, I, Mammal looks to Drew's personal life, especially his experience of fatherhood, to show how all of our lives are shaped by these distinctive features.

Helpfully, Drew also possesses abundant wit and a sly sense of humor. On the question of why mammals developed scrotums, Drew writes: "It's like a bank deciding against a vault and keeping its money in a tent on the pavement." That Drew then goes on to debate the merits of the long-popular and somewhat technical "cooling hypothesis" is emblematic of the author's approach. Drew is an entertaining writer that never gives short shrift to his complex subject matter.

Behind Drew's occasional silliness lies a serious, awe-filled appreciation for unlikely products of evolution, especially the platypus. The author's delight in sharing bizarre facts about humans and our evolutionary cousins is tempered by his insistence that "what we define as individual traits are always bound together, and it is within these bonds that a meaningful notion of mammalianness can be found." I, Mammal positions human beings within a vast, incredible family tree. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C.

As a young pre-veterinary college student, John Fowler applied for and was accepted into a year-long research assistantship with Dr. Dian Fossey at Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda. Fowler knew little about Fossey at the time but was enticed by the rare opportunity intimately to study the mountain gorilla in its African habitat. When he left the United States in January 1980, he anticipated exciting adventures and priceless education, but what he found instead was a hostile environment led by an alcoholic struggling to keep her position before her murder in 1985. 

A Forest in the Clouds is Fowler's firsthand account of life in Fossey's research camp, nestled among the Virunga Volcanoes. It paints a dramatically different picture from the acclaimed primatologist's articles in National Geographic or her book, Gorillas in the Mist. It also illustrates an amazing corner of the world and a spectacular species only a few DNA chain links away from humans.

Fowler's raw honesty, his awe and respect for the natural world and his talent for storytelling make A Forest in the Clouds both mesmerizing and terrifying. Humorous anecdotes, like Fowler's experience having a gorilla pee on him in the night, balance the grim realities of wildlife--and human life--he must face. Readers will feel transported to the wilds of Africa, where Fowler educates them on raising a baby gorilla, camp cuisine and surviving the greatest challenge, Dian Fossey. A Forest in the Clouds is a brave and beautiful memoir any animal lover will devour. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

A boisterous collection of poems both formal and free, rhymed and dissonant, Pray Me Stay Eager is a wise and whimsical tribute to aging with lust and wonder. Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, Ellen Doré Watson (Dogged Hearts) addresses subjects as diverse as flushing intrusive ladybugs down the toilet and fantasizing romance with a fellow airplane passenger in the poem "LAX to BDL" ("I only see us with our clothes on--real lust lately/ gone underground from lack of habit & hope... I hang back as we deplane, and here he/ comes, looking rumpled, sluggish, kind of watery, just like me"). Her narrators are mothers, ex-wives, daughters and lovers musing on the earthy roots of the abstract and the abiding verities of the mundane.

The source of the collection's title, the disjunctive poem "Not a Thing" captures the prayerful nature of its several odes and what she calls "field guides." It begins with a cautionary declaration: "I haven't been known     to address the Lord... it's a human wow I'm after    the shiver-spank/ of a Zulu choir." Watson's supplicatory poems not only "pray for eager," but also advise us as we age to "praise longing, it's what keeps us un-/ finished" and accept that "maybe we'll never again be the selves/ we remember, but isn't complication fun? ...who knows/ the wonders to come of our rack and ruin." In "Ode to Awe," the fitting final poem of this vibrant collection, Watson optimistically twists the definition of the abstraction awe from "outsized excitement" to "outside" and concludes: "If I ever see God,/ it'll be out of doors./ I turn the mat around/ --it says Welcome/ as I leave." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

This charming and silly picture book begins by announcing that "[t]he Lago family's couch was very well-loved." But now, after playing host to many cozy activities, including "snuggling... fort building, and hiding and seeking," it's clear that the couch has seen better days. The family decides it's time to replace it. After trying a couch that is "too big" and one that is "too small," the Lago family happily finds a replacement that is "JUST RIGHT." They pack their perfect new couch on top of their car and head home. Unfortunately, before they get there, the new couch flies off the car and into a field, where it lands at the feet of a rather startled llama.

Llama is intrigued. He sniffs and brays and tries to share his lunch, but the couch doesn't say anything or seem very hungry. It doesn't taste good either, so Llama concludes the couch is useless. But, just as the Lago family discovers their couch is missing, Llama realizes his new couch is not as boring as it seems.

The illustrations showing Llama making friends with the couch are not to be missed. Llama has a big round belly and teeny-tiny legs, making his jumping and twirling very comical indeed. He exudes plenty of emotion, moving from a "stubborn, couch-loving kind of llama" to a dejected, couch-less llama in a jiffy as the family takes away his "smooshy-mooshy, fluffy-puffy cushions" that he "completely" loves. A Couch for Llama manages to be both tender and action packed, and shows the rewards of spreading the happiness around. It's a thoroughly entertaining read, especially while ensconced on a suitably comfortable couch of one's own. --Lynn Becker, blogger and host of Book Talk, a monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI

Mei Lu is a 17-year-old Taiwanese-American freshman at MIT. According to her parents, her life is all planned out: she will become a doctor and marry a Taiwanese Ivy League graduate. But what they don't know is that she's a germophobe ("bacteria-ridden patients" make her "skin crawl") who feels more at home in a dance studio than an operating room. She also has a crush on a "nerd-hot" Japanese-American boy. Straddling two worlds without fully belonging to either of them, Mei attempts to navigate her new independence while still trying to respect her immigrant parents' hopes and dreams.

In American Panda, Gloria Chao skillfully and effectively puts the reader in Mei's shoes, highlighting how it feels to be a first-generation American. One notable way she does this is through transcripts of voicemails from Mei's mom, aunt and grandmother that include gossip ("I heard from Mrs. Tian who heard from Mrs. Lin..."), guilt trips ("Why you never pick up? I know you're not in class!") and health and beauty tips ("I read about these spoons that fight fat.... Your belly needs it!"). Sprinkled between chapters, these snippets simulate what it's like to be on the receiving end of constant criticism and advice, albeit well-meaning. Additionally, the Mandarin words that are scattered throughout--constant reminders that children of immigrant parents are living in two worlds--further cement the reader in Mei's experience.

Between embarrassingly funny scenes of Mei's mother fussing over her and emotionally charged, tense familial interactions, there's a sweet narrative about Mei falling in love and coming into her own through dance. It's in these in-between moments, when Mei's true self shines, that Chao does some of her best work. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader