Jeff Vandermeer (the Southern Reach Trilogy) brings a delicate lyricism to science fiction. His characters fly over vast reaches of destroyed landscape and recalibrate themselves at a molecular level, but to read his work feels more like delving into something by James Joyce than Ray Bradbury. The Strange Bird, a novella taking place in the universe of his novel Borne, is no exception. Its lyrical powers make it worthy of existence, even as it needs its predecessor for stability.

Born (or perhaps more fittingly: created) in a lab with other animals, the Strange Bird is imbued with myriad powers and an internal compass that points her toward an unknown destination. Escaping from the lab, she takes to the sky to find what she believes will be her home, discovering landscapes of devastation after a human-caused (but otherwise unexplained) apocalypse. Attacked and captured by a survivor, she witnesses firsthand how her captor's trauma forces him to relive the terror of his life before the cataclysm. Eventually she lands in the middle of the events of Borne, witnessing it as (literally) an adornment of the Magician, one of the book's villains.

The Strange Bird is at its best before it runs into the tangential plotline; a quiet and elegiac look at what humans do to their surroundings and the lies they tell themselves to survive. Once the characters from Borne enter, The Strange Bird essentially becomes a sequel (although a highly interesting and moving one). This tender little novella shows Vandermeer's skills in prose and character. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

Few story collections in recent memory have been as simultaneously funny, sad and peculiar as Ramona Ausubel's breathtaking Awayland. Following the success of her 2016 novel Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (an NPR Best Book of the Year), the collection sings with Ausubel's offbeat wit and scrupulous prose. The stories are thematically linked by far-away places, both real and metaphorical. An American flies to Beirut to visit her mother, who is literally dissolving into thin air. An Earthling prepares to move to Mars, and a mayor of a dying small town dreams of creating a place worth visiting. Taken together, the stories form a rich tapestry of feelings, dreams and disappointments.

"You Can Find Love Now" is one of the more surreal offerings: a Cyclops searches for love on an Internet dating site. "What are your interests?" asks the online questionnaire. "I hand-sew my own shoes using a needle made from the fang of a wolf," writes the one-eyed monster. "Remedy" is another standout, in which a young woman, deep in love with a new beau, is convinced she's dying. Desperate to stay close to him even after death, she tries to convince him to have her hand surgically sewn on to his arm. What follows is a strange and tender account of their negotiation of the matter.

No two stories are alike, but every character feels a part of the same extraordinary world that Ausubel has created. Playful yet affecting, Awayland is the vibrant work of a gifted storyteller. --Amy Brady, freelance writer and editor

Happiness, Aminatta Forna's fourth novel, a follow-up to The Hired Man, is about love, trauma, immigration and the conflict between nature and civilization, among other things. The plot is built around the chance meeting of two outsiders in London: Jean, an American studying urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist in the city to give a keynote speech on trauma. Through their repeated meetings--Attila takes the position that coincidences "happen far too often to be considered extraordinary"--Jean and Attila gradually become insinuated in each other's lives.

The search for a missing young boy becomes the pretext for a variety of characters to bump into each other, from Jean and Attila to a lot of hotel doormen, security guards and even one man moonlighting as a "living statue." Many of the characters are immigrants--Forna pays particular attention to West African transplants to London. It would be reductive to refer to Happiness as a love story, but the bond that slowly develops between Jean and Attila is an obvious highlight.

Jean and her urban foxes struggle to adapt to abnormal circumstances. Her fierce love of animals and nature puts her in conflict with urban dwellers who fear and hate the wild creatures that intrude on their orderly world. Jean's wide-ranging empathy lies at odds with entire communities--like London--and even those close to her, as in her previous marriage. Happiness observes them building a new community, a found family composed of oddballs and outsiders. Forna's novel is unusual and engaging, heartfelt and ambitiously crafted. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C.

In Ezekiel Boone's Zero Day, the final book in the Hatching trilogy, nuclear bombs have been dropped on more than 30 cities in the U.S. The nation's highways have been destroyed, yet the advance of millions of extremely large black spiders from west to east continues. The flesh-eating, eight-legged creatures spread in other countries around the globe as well, threatening the existence of humankind. U.S. president Stephanie Pilgrim and her entourage have a command center onboard an aircraft carrier and are deliberating their next moves. If the scientists are right and the spiders work as a unit, then they need to find the controlling spider(s) and kill them. But if the scientists are wrong, as some in the government believe, and they don't continue to use nuclear force against the invaders, then the spiders win. 

Boone focuses on the multiple characters he's expertly created, who are searching for a method to destroy the queen spiders. A web of dissent and danger that rivals the arachnid destruction shows government officials and parts of the military defying the president and her orders. Boone carefully spins out his tale--including scary interactions with the alien invaders--as he leads readers to an explosive, knuckle-biting end that successfully ties up all the loose strands. Zero Day is a thriller of grand proportions that will ensure humans are scared of spiders for years to come. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

For the past 10 years, Alison Smith has built a new life in the Netherlands after leaving her home in Ireland. When two Garda detectives arrive at her door, they shatter her existence once again by saying their visit is about Will. As in Will Hurley, her former boyfriend at St. John's College in Dublin and current resident at the city's Central Psychiatric Hospital. Alison and Will were madly in love during their time at St. John's, until female students started turning up dead in the canal--and Will confessed to being the killer. Devastated, Alison fled the country, leaving her past and everything else behind.

Now another young woman's body has been found in the canal, a possible copycat killing. Will claims to have information that could help catch the killer, but he'll talk only to Alison. She agrees to meet with him, ostensibly to help prevent any additional murders, but realizes she must finally ask Will whether or not he's guilty--and if not, why he confessed.

With The Liar's Girl, Catherine Ryan Howard has written an even more sophisticated psychological thriller to follow her Dagger-nominated debut, Distress Signals. In alternating chapters taking place then and now, Howard's portrait of Alison as a bright girl full of hope starkly contrasts that of the woman whose light has been dimmed by tragedy. The exploration of the characters' inner lives--their jealousy, guilt, misguided chivalry--is as riveting as the crime. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

In 2017, the New York University School of Law launched the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, to create a home for scholars who study the complicated relationship between racial politics and legal structures in the U.S. To mark the center's inception, faculty director Anthony C. Thompson gathered a panel of brilliant African American thinkers and activists: NAACP Legal Defense Fund president Sherrilyn Ifill, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and NYU professor Bryan Stevenson. They held a candid conversation on systemic racism in the U.S, and A Perilous Path is the book that resulted from this sharp, insightful discussion, moderated by Thompson.

The panelists cover a range of topics: education, immigration, public housing, community policing, the gains of the civil rights movement, the benefits and backlash that resulted from the presidency of Barack Obama. They discuss public housing, the privatization of infrastructure and the necessity of using legal expertise to push for greater equality. Emphasis is placed on the importance of winning the "narrative battle": creating a culture that acknowledges the legacy of slavery and racism, while arguing for the inherent worth of every person. "I want to deal with this smog created by our history of racial inequality, so we can all breathe something healthy," Stevenson says. The conversation is sobering, but not without hope: indeed, as Stevenson asserts, "injustice prevails where hopelessness persists." In today's fraught moment, voices like these--undergirded by decades of scholarship, activism and deep personal experience--are more necessary than ever. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Common opinion has it that when the United States is no longer the big gorilla in the world economy, China will take its place. But Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Dinny McMahon may be on to something the rest of the opinion-makers have overlooked. China's Great Wall of Debt is his contrarian analysis of the fundamental instability of the massive credit octopus that underlies China's astounding economic growth.

With a balanced mix of anecdotal observation and statistical analysis, the book covers the complex system that creates "new money" debt to support the Chinese Communist Party's strategic objectives. McMahon interviews private business owners, former farmers, party bureaucrats and even a newly rich broker of vintage baijiu (the popular Chinese liquor Dan Rather called "liquid razor blades"). Untangling the balance sheets of banks, private and state-owned companies, and recent peer-to-peer Internet lenders, McMahon concludes that China is so awash in debt that any unanticipated hiccup could send it into an economic tailspin--a disaster similar to the United States "great recession" following the fall of Lehman Brothers.

In his travels, McMahon sees firsthand the Potemkin villages of empty apartment towers. He observes the world's largest stamping forge, now idle for lack of business, and bulldozed hills flattened to provide land for yet more unnecessary factories. While admitting that economic naysayers have been wrong about China before, McMahon nonetheless makes a convincing (and surprisingly entertaining) argument that China's day of reckoning may come sooner rather than later. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Big Deal examines Bob Fosse's four-decade career as one of the brightest lights in Broadway musical theater as a choreographer and director. Kevin Winkler, a former dancer and New York Public Library archivist, conducted interviews with dozens of dancers who worked with Fosse (1927-1987) on stage and screen. He also uses the personal papers of Fosse and wife Gwen Verdon to construct an amazingly exhaustive, intimate and riveting career biography of his subject.

As a teen, Fosse performed in vaudeville, nightclubs and burlesque houses. A film contract with MGM led to appearing in and choreographing musicals on Broadway. Winkler looks at all of Fosse's work on stage (including Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Sweet Charity, Chicago), film (Cabaret, All That Jazz) and TV specials. He assesses each musical number from each production and analyzes how Fosse's aesthetic changed over the decades. Big Deal focuses on the director's work life--and he was a true workaholic. In 1973, he won the show business triple crown: an Oscar for Cabaret, a Tony for Pippin and an Emmy for Liza with a Z. "The only salvation for me is work--just to keep rehearsing," Fosse said. "Only then do I experience absolute happiness." There's still plenty of juicy backstage gossip (Fosse's bitter battles with Pippin's composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz; his brief tenure directing Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl after producers fired Jerome Robbins).

Big Deal is an authoritative, passionately written and essential reference guide to all of Bob Fosse's musical numbers. Musical theater fans will tip their hats (Fosse-style) to this affectionate and energetic tribute. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

From the cover's ethereal heron to the stately red fox near the end of the book, the images of animals, insects and plants presented in English artist Helen Ahpornsiri's debut are enchanting. Drawn from Nature creates delicate and detailed pictures of scenes from nature out of "hundreds of leaves and flowers... preserved with traditional flower-pressing methods."

Ahpornsiri's visual delights are enhanced by the book's arrangement, using the year's cycle to introduce seasonal changes in plant growth as well as animal and insect development. Beginning with "The Spring Chorus" and finishing in winter with "Bare Branches" (followed by an author's note and a glossary), the text is an invitation to head outdoors and make direct observations. Children and adults will want to learn, explore and perhaps create their own designs based on this book's text and imagery. Though they do not include explicit directions, the illustrations--such as the "Forest Fungi" double-page spread of a fanciful arrangement of wild mushrooms in different colors and patterns--invite and inspire creative projects based on collecting natural materials. The illustrations are also simply a joy to behold: for example, the nocturnal owl, illustrated in shades of brown and white and depicted on a black background, is absolutely stunning.

While the text is written for an older audience (and will have to be read aloud to younger children), the connections between flora and fauna that develop in the different seasons are explicitly described, providing a framework for children to make their own discoveries. This small book, comfortable to hold and share, is a natural treasure. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance book reviewer