Cameron Harris, the protagonist of Jonathan Miles's third novel (after Dear American Airlines and Want Not), is in need of a miracle. And Anatomy of a Miracle is the funny, clever, moving story of this Biloxi, Miss., vet who returns from Afghanistan paralyzed from the waist down.

On a trip to the Biz-E-Bee convenience store for cigarettes and beer under the watchful eye of his mouthy sister, Tanya, Cameron's four years in a wheelchair come to an abrupt end when a surge from within propels him upright and walking. Told in a long-journalism format, Anatomy of a Miracle reconstructs this inexplicable medical event from the before to the more bizarre after. It is a remarkable combination of medical mystery, satire and war story.

An odd place for a miracle, the rundown Mississippi Gulf resort town of Biloxi "doesn't mind the smell of fish guts." When word of Cameron's recovery spreads, the town is swarmed with religious kooks and pilgrims. While Miles can be canny and hilarious about the absurdities of all this miracle whoop-de-do, he also steps back to explore what it might mean if one's life were suddenly changed from hopeless dependency to the freedom to be "normal" again. Although he gets a miracle he never expected, Cameron finds that a return to normalcy is not all it's cracked up to be. After the laughs subside, Anatomy of a Miracle leaves one pondering all the "what ifs" in life. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In The Natashas, two seemingly disparate performers fall down a rabbit hole of sights and sounds that spotlight society's obsession with poisonous sexuality. César, an ambitious and talented Mexican actor, gets his big break by playing a serial killer, but his fascination with the killer's character grows dangerous. Meanwhile, the beautiful and lonely jazz singer Béatrice is captivated by a seductive, enigmatic woman named Polina, who may or may not exist completely within Béatrice's own mind. Reigning over them are the Natashas, a collection of sexually objectified mystery women who appear as both angels of meaning and harbingers of punishment.

Yelena Moskovich's debut novel reads like a montage of Kafka-esque visuals that both hypnotize and horrify their audience. While the plot rejects classic coherence, the atmosphere and tone vibrate in a reader's mind long after the story has ended. The novel isn't a detective story, per se, but the haunting images and pitch-perfect reverberations suggest a twisted noir fantasy that both unsettles and challenges the reader. The novel's most spellbinding moments, however, aren't the depictions of extravagant lust or garish physicality, but the unexpected sweetness that simple intimacy can have: for instance, when Béatrice's sister would "climb into her bed and pull her in close." Like a singer's "do-bee-do-bee-do" melody, these gentle notes soar above the piece's pointed screech. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

"By the time you read this, I'll be dead," writes teenager Wade Reed on his mom's Facebook page at the start of Alison Gaylin's If I Die Tonight. Wade continues, apologizing to his mom and his younger brother: he never meant to hurt them but at 17, he believes he's already lived too long. The post says Wade is in an undisclosed location, and the pills he swallowed have started taking effect. No one would find him in time.

Cut to five days earlier. A kid at Wade's school is killed in a hit-and-run on a rainy night, while trying to help a woman being carjacked. The woman turns out to be faded pop star Aimee En, and the dead teen, Liam Miller, is declared a hero, resulting in added publicity and pressure for the carjacker to be found. As the story leads up to Wade's Facebook post, his brother Connor remembers Wade sneaking into Connor's room, dripping wet, late on the night of the crime. Then Wade asks him to dispose of a bag while making Connor promise not to look inside or tell anyone about it. Is Wade the carjacker and Liam's accidental killer?

With alternating viewpoints, Gaylin weaves a story that's gripping on multiple levels. She keeps readers on the hook with the mystery surrounding Liam's death, but also explores timely issues such as bullying and persecution in the court of public opinion. Each character is complex and achingly human, as real as people you know, in person or on Facebook. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

The 11 stories in The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror reimagine classic bedtime tales in new (and sometimes twisted) ways. "Beauty and the Beast" is the clear inspiration for the title story, while threads of "The Little Mermaid" appear in "The Daughter Cells," and anthropomorphic characters from The Wind in the Willows and Frog and Toad Are Friends appear in "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Mr. Toad" and "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors."

These are not classic adaptations and retellings, however eerily familiar some parts of the stories may seem. Mallory Ortberg, co-founder of The Toast and author of Texts from Jane Eyre, combines these well-known tales with lesser-known stories, myths, prayers and other time-worn narratives in ways that are at once bizarre and delightful, horrific and compelling. Imbued with Ortberg's characteristic dry humor and sense of mischief managed, each piece in The Merry Spinster bends and twists to grapple with big questions: Do we own ourselves, or are we obligated to share ourselves with others? If the latter, what does that look like? How important is gender in our understanding of the stories we read? How do we force our expectations on the roles we see others play: spouse, lover, partner, parent, child, sibling, friend? The Merry Spinster is part of the great tradition of storytelling, updating classics in sometimes startling, always subversive ways that will make readers rethink how--and why--some stories are told again and again. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

In How to Taste, chef and cooking teacher Becky Selengut offers a guide to balancing flavors and transforming good--and even bad--food to great.

"If you've ever made a disaster of a dinner, been mystified by what the term 'season to taste' means, and had no bloody idea what went sideways," Selengut writes, "this book is for you." She walks the reader through the ways flavors interact and how to adjust them, and each of the 12 chapters covers one element of taste, including salt, sweet, aromatics, bite and texture. She explains how to tell when a dish needs something more and, miraculously, how to fix food that's overly salted, spiced, fatty or cloying. Every chapter concludes with an experiment to highlight her points in a real kitchen, resulting in practical understanding without wasting time or food--you're left with a carrot salad, toasted fennel or lightly sweetened cup of coffee. She also includes additional recipes and video links to see her methods in practice.

Selengut's irreverent and humorous voice makes How to Taste a joy to read. She explains food science without being esoteric, and recognizes that flavor is influenced by the eater's culture, memory, age, genetics and other factors. She encourages readers to taste intentionally and trust their senses in order to be in the moment, enjoy food more and make cooking less of a chore.

Novices and accomplished home cooks alike will find something helpful, perhaps game-changing, in How to Taste. Read it all the way through, then keep it in your kitchen as a quick reference. --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer, bookseller and publicist

Journalist Cherie Burns first laid eyes on the Boivin starfish at a book launch for her 2011 biography of the American heiress Millicent Rogers, hosted by the Fifth Avenue jeweler Verdura. Burns was shown a palm-size ruby-and-amethyst starfish pin and told that it had been owned by Rogers herself. When Burns returned to Verdura the next day to have another gander, she learned that her party's "honored guest" had already been whisked away by a London dealer.

Burns's enchantment with the piece and interest in its provenance leads to a multiyear quest that takes her to London and Paris, where the house of Boivin designed the starfish in the 1930s. She knows that the now-shuttered house made at least three starfish. Are there more? Where is the Rogers starfish now? And what's become of the one owned by the golden-age-of-Hollywood actress Claudette Colbert? Answers are closely guarded by what Burns, a neophyte to the jewelry world, comes to understand is "a business whose distinguishing feature is secrecy."

Burns has a jeweler's eye for detail when it comes to describing the eccentric characters who animate her detective story. To enjoy Diving for Starfish: The Jeweler, the Actress, the Heiress and One of the World's Most Alluring Pieces of Jewelry, one needn't have an interest in gems--just an appreciation for fine design and strongly held beliefs. Says one typically opinionated industry insider: "Boivin was a designer with a sense of design and good craftsmen. Cartier made junk." --Nell Beram, freelance writer and author

Journalist and filmmaker Robert Gordon has documented Memphis for decades. Born and raised there, he was submerged in the music scene as a kid, eventually devoting himself to tracking down lost stories of the town where rock-and-roll was born. Memphis Rent Party collects many of those stories, adding anecdotes and introductions to previously published work, along with pieces that haven't seen the light of day. In totality, the book is a sprawling look at Memphis old and new, examining the birth of rock and rockabilly, and the economy of music in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Using his own journey as a guide, Gordon weaves his way through 75 years of music, from the birth of Jerry Lee Lewis to the death of Alex Chilton (the musical powerhouse behind Big Star) in 2010. The only constants throughout these pieces are Gordon and the city of Memphis itself. Memphis Rent Party depicts pipe and drum hootenannies out in the middle of nowhere, avant-garde proto-punk shows and everything in between, showing how so much of modern music was influenced, if not downright born, in Tennessee.

Since each piece is short (most were originally intended for newspapers and magazines), readers won't find the kind of depth one sees in a biography. But as a whole, the works here form a larger tapestry, where one can easily glean the sheer volume of talent and creativity that moved through Memphis's streets--and still does, Gordon would likely say. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

Ruth Fitzmaurice's life changed drastically when her husband, Simon, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) in his early 30s. In the years since, Ruth has kept her sanity by chasing her five rambunctious children, wrangling a never-ending stream of nurses and caregivers, and jumping into the frigid Irish Sea with her two dear friends. Simon chronicled his experience of living with MND in his memoir, It's Not Yet Dark (2017). Now Ruth tells her own story of grief, motherhood and swimming in I Found My Tribe.

It unfolds in brief, luminous chapters: like the sea glass her son Arden gathers on the beach, they are fragmented, sometimes jagged, often lovely. And like her beloved waves, Ruth's narrative shifts back and forth: meeting Simon, childhood memories, early marriage, motherhood, any number of ordinary days. Interwoven is the story of the Tragic Wives' Swimming Club, Ruth's name for herself and her friends Michelle and Aifric. Nearly every day, they dive into the freezing water at Greystones, and Ruth writes about the fear and exhilaration, the way swimming gives her a brief flash of freedom from her life, and then the courage to face it.

"This is my cove and the sea is my salvation," Ruth declares. Later she admits, "The fear is still with me, but these days I jump anyway." I Found My Tribe is a slim, powerful testament to jumping in--whether to the sea or to life's crashing waves--and an urgent call to live with bravery and love. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

In Peter Brown's sequel to his bestselling middle-grade novel, The Wild Robot, Roz is delivered to Mr. Shareef, a recent widower and father of two, to help him on his dairy farm. Hilltop Farm's animals first see Roz as "a monster," but she quickly connects with them by speaking "to the cows in the language of the animals." She bonds with the farm animals and the Shareef children, but desperately misses her adopted son, a goose named Brightbill. After many months and much help from her friends, Roz is finally reunited with Brightbill, and the two set out to return home. As she runs away from the farm, though, she feels, not free, but "something more like fear" that she'll be captured and destroyed, or that her son will be hurt. Indeed, both Roz and Brightbill are not free--in order to have any chance of making it home, they will have to escape a society that doesn't understand them.

The Wild Robot Escapes has a broad appeal beyond the typical middle-grade audience. Brown's simple prose and illustrations, in combination with the story's complex themes, make The Wild Robot Escapes both accessible and thought-provoking. Roz observes and explores her world with open curiosity, and many of her conversations pose interesting questions to the reader. Black-and-white illustrations, drawn in Brown's expressive style, add visual context that will attract and aid any reader who's still building the ability to decode text. The book also works beautifully as a read-aloud, thanks to ultra-short chapters and third-person narration that often addresses the reader directly. For the sake of Roz's happiness, readers may hope this is her final adventure. Whether it is or isn't, Roz and her numerous families have given readers a book to mull over for many years. --Stephanie Anderson, assistant director of selection, BookOps