Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun, Under Magnolia) returns to the sensuous glories of Italy in her beautifully rendered and richly woven novel Women in Sunlight. Catherine "Kit" Raine is an American expat in her late 30s. She has lived and worked as a successful writer and poet nestled in the Tuscan hills of San Rocco for 12 years. Her current project is a biography of fellow American Margaret Merrill--an older woman, good friend and a writer whom Kit admired--who set down roots in Tuscany much earlier.

When Margaret died, she surprisingly bequeathed her estate to Kit. Their friendship was at times rocky and difficult. However, Margaret's posthumous generosity made a lasting impression on Kit. In trying to broaden the readership of Margaret's work--and better understand her enigmatic friend--Kit grapples with memories on the page that lead Kit to examine her own life and future.

Kit's quest deepens when three American women--and their unruly dog--move into the villa next door. The three women are new friends, all retired, who met at an orientation for a 55-and-over retirement community near their homes in Chapel Hill, N.C. The threesome are still vital and active enough to assert their independence.

Mayes's writing glimmers with masterful sensory descriptions. Readers can practically taste the white foam that tops cappuccinos, step into elongated shadows cast by cypress trees and feel the echoing cold retained amid old stone villas. Mayes delivers another intimate story, told in lively episodes, that details how unexpected friendships can lead to reinvention and bright new beginnings at any age. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

It's tough being a millennial in New York City. Just ask Elinor, the aspiring journalism grad of Rebecca Harrington's second novel, Sociable (after Penelope). Elinor works as a nanny to pay the bills and lives with her boyfriend, Mike, on a rollup foam bed in a kitchenless basement apartment. She obsesses about her appearance, her relationship, her poverty, her feminism and her lack of a writing career.

Elinor gets her chance at writing, though, with the trendy Journalism.ly, where she is a "viral trends editor." Her new boss, a downsized, middle-aged, Jersey newspaper guy, hires her with a shrug because "she could probably tweet and Snapchat and Instagram and make listicles." Welcome to the new journalism.

When the self-centered Mike leaves her to concentrate on his writing, she tanks. He predictably ghosts her pleading texts.

Harrington's got media-based youth culture down cold, with dialogue peppered with conversation-pausing likes and barhopping friends who are "nice girls. They're just very into their phones." Finally, Elinor finds some baby-step redemption when she posts a personal essay about her breakup and it goes viral. She even gets a brief cameo on a TV talk show about the perils of dating in the digital age. Maybe Elinor really can make it in the new journalism. Maybe she looks just fine. Who knows? Harrington's diverting Sociable ends ambiguously with that ubiquitous social media scream: "OMG." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In The Overstory, National Book Award-winner Richard Powers (Orfeo) skillfully interrogates a vital issue--the wanton destruction of our natural environment--without losing sight of the intimate human dimension of the story.

Nicholas Hoel is a descendant of a man who launched a 100-year time-lapse photography project of a single Iowa chestnut tree, the "redwood of the East," now nearly extinct. Adam Appich is a member of a family that plants a different species of tree with the birth of each child. Neelay Mehta--the designer of a computer game that evolves over two decades into an online role-playing colossus--draws inspiration from the trees on the Stanford campus. The intersection of their lives involves protests around clear-cutting of public lands, first in California and then at a site in the Pacific Northwest a group of protestors have named "The Free Bioregion of Cascadia." Nicholas and Olivia Vandergriff, a college dropout, rename themselves "Watchman" and "Maidenhair," and take up residence high in a 200-foot-tall redwood. Their fellow demonstrators engage in other acts of civil disobedience. But when those steps, buttressed by litigation, prove fruitless, Nicholas, Olivia, Adam and others initiate more dramatic action, with disastrous consequences.

Powers makes no secret that his sympathies lie with those trying to halt the destruction of old-growth timber, a process one character likens to "burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once." But he does so with deep sensitivity, not dogmatism, and with a clear-eyed recognition that sometimes advocacy and zealotry tragically become one. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Christine Mangan's first novel, Tangerine, offers suspense and lingering questions in a drama centered on the post-college relationship between two young women recently relocated to Morocco.

Lucy Mason and Alice Shipley were roommates at Bennington College in Vermont. They came from quite different circumstances: Alice was a well-off British orphan, whose guardian, Aunt Maude, is serious but somewhat unfeeling in her role. Lucy was a scholarship student, also an orphan, and this similarity is part of what led the pair to bond. They were terribly close in college--until the accident.

In alternating chapters, the reader encounters past and present through Lucy's and Alice's respective perspectives. An epilogue and prologue, with unnamed narrators, offer more mystery. The two women's accounts of past events differ only slightly, at first. But as the novel unfolds, it becomes complicated. Lucy's devotion is perhaps a bit too intense. Alice's agoraphobia is variously attributed to her parents' death, or to a more sinister cause. Eventually, their memories of their shared past diverge enough that the question can no longer be ignored. Is this gaslighting? Mental illness? Surreality? Are these the simple mistakes of memory or is there a more ominous force at work?

Tangerine is a novel of intrigue and shifting perspectives, starring two ultimately unreliable narrators. Its appeal lies in the lush, sensual setting; the metered release of information about the shadowy past; and especially in untangling the twisted mystery of the present. Suspense fans will be well satisfied. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Apollo 11 was the first Moon landing. Apollo 13 was the heroic rescue of a damaged ship. When asked what Apollo 8 did, many might be forgiven for needing a moment to think it over.
 
Apollo 8 marked the first time any human left the grip of Earth's gravity to venture to another world. This moonshot may not have left footprints in lunar regolith, but its mission was no less risky than Armstrong and Aldrin's walk. In fact, Apollo 8 was in some ways even more of a gamble than Apollo 11. It was originally a manned test of the Saturn V rocket and the Lunar Module/Command Module in Earth's orbit. But Soviet success in sending living creatures to the Moon and back, the ever-approaching deadline of JFK's "before the end of this decade" Moon landing deadline and the need for a morale boost at NASA turned Apollo 8 into a Moon mission on extremely short notice.

By the summer of 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders were training on a truncated schedule for a mission with near-zero failure acceptability (Lovell would go on to command Apollo 13, whose lunar lander proved a life raft that Apollo 8 went without). In Rocket Men, Robert Kurson (Shadow Divers, Pirate Hunters) tracks this daring, often overshadowed Apollo mission from its hurried inception through its thrilling execution, all amid the wider turmoil of 1968 America--for which Apollo 8's live broadcasts and famous Earthrise photograph proved something of a balm. Rocket Men makes for riveting reading. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Four years before her 2017 essay collection We Are Never Meeting in Real Life was a New York Times bestseller, blogger Samantha Irby published Meaty with a small press. Vintage has had the good sense to reissue it (with a bit of inconspicuous augmentation). Meaty is another series of devastatingly frank and frankly hilarious personal essays for people who like their writers stingy with sentiment and generous with cusswords.

For Irby, food is a persistent source of both joy and gastrointestinal havoc, and her essays are bundled into four recipe-spiked sections named for meals and eating experiences. Although the essays burble along without an obvious organizing principle, the book is front-loaded with tales of Irby's bleak suburban-Chicago youth (poverty, suicide attempt, disabled mother, alcoholic father). This provides a crucial backdrop for the personal trials that she goes on successfully to mine for copy. Spurs for invective include navigating black beauty standards, being overweight and not conventionally pretty, dealing with roommates and having Crohn's disease, which threatens any pleasure that she might hope to derive from eating and sex.

It may amuse fans of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life--which finds Irby married with (step)children--that toward Meaty's end, she seems to have betrothed herself to the single life; as she puts it, "If I wanted someone to nag and yell at all the time I'd have a goddamned baby." The reader can only envy her chosen family: life with Irby can't be dull. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Ethan Mordden (When Broadway Went to Hollywood), a prolific authority on the American musical, turns his attention to Bob Fosse's 1975 musical Chicago. The sardonic and dark Broadway production starring Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera had the misfortune of opening the same year as A Chorus Line, so it didn't win any Tony Awards and ran only two years. In 1996, the show was revived on Broadway to great acclaim as a stripped-down, minimalist production. More than two decades later, it's still running--making Chicago the longest-running American musical in Broadway history. Mordden traces the show's many theater and movie incarnations: beginning with the Maurine Watkins original 1926 Broadway comedic melodrama through the Oscar-winning 2002 film adaptation starring Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Watkins's successful play was turned into a 1927 silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille (who removed his name from the credits because his biblical epic The King of Kings was also playing in theaters at the time, and he felt audiences wouldn't want him depicting a crime drama so soon after seeing his life of Christ). In 1942, the play was remade again as Roxie Hart, starring Ginger Rogers. It wasn't until Fosse revived the story for his musical that the supporting character Velma Kelly became a co-lead.

Mordden is a chatty, enthusiastic and supremely knowledgeable guide. His song-by-song examination of John Kander and Fred Ebb's musical score is a master class on musical theater. All That Jazz is a treat for theater buffs. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Although she's a brilliant speller, India Wimple is filled with "trepidation (fear)" at the thought of an "endeavor (attempt)" to win the Stupendously Spectacular Spelling Bee in the "marvelous" Sydney Opera House. But with the support of "the thing that mattered most to her," her wacky, warmhearted family, and the loving community of Yungabilla, her small Australian town, she's going to give it a try.

India experiences many ups and downs on her road to Sydney. She is "terribly, horribly shy," and freezes in panic whenever attention lands on her. The idea of appearing in front of millions of people on TV is "daunting (intimidating)," to put it mildly. When her Yungabilla neighbors host a mock spelling bee in which every audience member wears animal costumes--chickens, pandas, frogs, peacocks--India relaxes briefly, but the nerves keep returning, even as she continues to win official rounds that bring her closer to the championship. And it's not only stage fright. She's also concerned about the mounting costs of the bees. And there's her very serious worry about her little brother, Boo, who suffers from severe asthma. As they all bump along toward the big event, the chances that India can make it through without "pass[ing] out or throw[ing] up" are "precarious (uncertain)."

Each chapter of Deborah Abela's The Stupendously Spectacular Spelling Bee starts with a spelling word and its definition, hinting at the events to come. Abela, whose previous books include the Spyforce series and the Max Remy Superspy series, gives her characters, who are depicted in simple black-and-white line drawings, a realistic and comforting depth. Anyone who has ever experienced anxiety due to their own ambition will understand exactly how India feels, right up to the "splendiferous (excellent)" conclusion. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor