In his first novel since 2014's Beautiful You, Chuck Palahniuk takes the United States' divided politics to an extreme conclusion and proves along the way that his gift for social satire has only sharpened with time.

In the Before Times--approximately now--an impending war churned up by elderly politicians to purge the surplus of young men leads to a new American revolution. This revolt begins online with a crowdsourced list of potential assassination targets. On its own, the List might have failed, but every social uprising has a text to justify its actions; in this instance, it's a book--whose blue/black cover stands out "like a shaved head"--by the mysterious Talbott Reynolds. When Adjustment Day comes, Reynolds's followers murder the List's most up-voted nominees, cutting off their ears to prove their kills and thus securing a place in the new social hierarchy. The U.S. then divides into the segregated zones of Blacktopia, Gaysia and Caucasia, and deports all but black and white citizens.

Palahniuk has a field day skewering both the ruling classes and the proletariat, caricaturing politicians, the intelligentsia, the media and middle America with devilish glee. Readers attempting to pinpoint which side the author stands on will discover he owes allegiance to no one, including himself: at one point, Talbott Reynolds dismisses both Palahniuk and Fight Club as unequal to his vision.

The specter of Project Mayhem drifts by at times as a metafictive conceit, as do stray phantoms of dystopian and literary classics. This pitch-black comedy achieves the aim of any great satirical work: it amuses, unsettles and leaves the reader slightly less sure of the boundaries of reality. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Set in Colombia, The Farm by Héctor Abad is a lush story told in three alternating voices. Antonio, Eva and Pilar are siblings who have inherited La Oculta, the family farm, after the death of their mother. Their story documents how one family came to live and work at La Oculta, and Abad embellishes it with violence, intrigue, suspense, traditions and Colombian culture. Although Antonio lives in New York City with his husband, Jon, he returns to the farm several times a year and takes it upon himself to gather the family's genealogical history. Pilar is the most tradition-bound of the three, content to marry the first man she falls in love with and have many children. Meanwhile, Eva is the free spirit constantly searching for new adventures and relationships.

Abad beautifully intertwines these three distinct personalities against the backdrop of La Oculta and the people who work for the family. He is expert in his ability to describe the feelings the siblings have for one another, for their parents and friends. His descriptions of the land make the reader fall in love with the place, creating a sense of nostalgia for a fictional site filled with mountains, a lake, fruit trees and an old house stuffed with memories. When conflict arises among the siblings and La Oculta is threatened, readers viscerally share in the pain they experience as the story reaches its moving conclusion. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Catherine Isaac is the pen name for British author Jane Costello (Summer Nights at the Moonlight Hotel), who chose a pseudonym for her American debut, You Me Everything. In Manchester, England, 22-year-old Jess is deep in labor. While facing the agony of childbirth with her mum at her side, Jess is furious that her boyfriend, Adam--a man whom Jess fell in love with in college, who is the baby's father--is markedly absent. By the time Jess cradles son William in her arms, Adam surfaces, reeking of stale booze and another woman's perfume.

The timeline then leaps ahead 10 years. Jess, a teacher of creative writing at a local college, is a single mother. Adam--never wanting a child or to settle down--lives luxuriously, managing a beautiful hotel in the hills of Southwestern France. He is "not a neglectful father," Jess says. "He pays his maintenance on time, remembers William's birthday and Skypes when he says he will. But our son is no more than a small piece in the jigsaw of Adam's colorful life."

It is Jess's mother who insists that William needs to have a more substantial relationship with his father. Mother and son then make the long journey to Château de Roussignol, Adam's stomping ground. There she hopes free-spirited, fun-loving Adam and inquisitive, bright William will finally form a tighter bond. What ensues is a tender and reflective story that covers a span of five weeks.

This is a multi-layered, heartbreaking story of abiding love. Isaac's graceful, nuanced storytelling gains an unexpected depth and clarity readers are sure to find riveting. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Lisa Jewell (I Found You; The Girls in the Garden) gets more riveting and twisty with every book she writes. Then She Was Gone is the electrifying story of 15-year-old Ellie, who headed off to the library to study for her A-levels, and vanished, never to be seen again. Ellie's mother, Laurel, has spent the decade since the disappearance walking a fine line between hoping for a miracle and mourning the loss of her daughter.

Laurel's marriage fell apart in the aftermath of losing Ellie. Now she is attempting to reconnect with her two adult children, whose needs slipped through the cracks during all the chaos of the disappearance and divorce. When Laurel meets Floyd, who is funny and charming, she is swept off her feet. Happy for the first time in years, she revels in this new love. But then Floyd takes her home to meet his daughter, Poppy, and Laurel is unnerved by how strongly Poppy reminds her of Ellie. All of Laurel's unanswered questions come flooding back, as she grapples with her relationship with Floyd and Poppy's presence in her life.

Told in alternating chapters that slowly reveal Ellie's story a decade before, and Laurel's present day, Then She Was Gone is completely absorbing. Fast-paced, well-written and with a shocking ending that will keep readers guessing, Then She Was Gone is a nearly pitch-perfect thriller. Fans of Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins and Ruth Ware are sure to adore this haunting novel. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

As political debates and news reports on immigration proliferate, rare is empathetic reportage of the actual experiences and desperation these migrants face. French novelist Bessora and illustrator Barroux's graphic novel Alpha: Abidjan to Paris (winner of the English PEN Promotes Award) is that compassionate link, depicting how people risk life and limb in search of limited opportunities.

Unable to secure a visa to Paris despite his grandfather's World War II service for France, Alpha Coulibaly, an impoverished cabinet-maker, leaves Côte d'Ivoire to join his wife and son. They left for Paris two months prior and have not been heard from since. Alpha faces a bleak future if he stays. He sells his business and home to finance the initial leg of his journey to neighboring Mali. To avoid falling into despair, he and his fellow travelers call themselves "adventurers" instead of migrants or refugees. Alpha commits to backbreaking labor and secures passage to the barbed wire fences at Spain's "Little Berlin Wall" border by way of refugee camps, human traffickers and a treacherous crossing by sea.

Bessora conveys Alpha's emotional state with matter-of-fact, clinical efficiency that heightens the despair he comes to regard as part of his soul-sucking journey. Barroux's charcoal drawings, then, offer faint glimmers of hope with rare splotches of red, green and yellow.

"You can't wash away the dust," Bessora writes. "It's not just in the streets--the dust has settled in people's hearts." Alpha: Abidjan to Paris draws a refugee with empathy and compassion, in an effort to lift the dust people's hearts. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Time has been a friend to Jimmy Carter. As pivotal events of his administration have faded from the public's collective memory, they have been replaced by a greater appreciation for Carter's presidency--and, indeed, for the man himself.

Stuart E. Eizenstat served as chief domestic policy adviser to the president and, in President Carter: The White House Years, acknowledges that he considers Carter's presidency as "one of the most consequential in modern history." Eizenstat posits that had Carter been re-elected, he currently would be regarded as a great chief executive because many benefits of the administration's policies did not come to fruition until after Carter left office. These included his innovative changes to energy resources, his handling of the economy, increases to the defense budget after years of neglect and deregulation of the nation's transportation industries. Eizenstat meticulously documents Carter's work on Middle East peace and the Iranian hostage crisis, as well as his demand that human rights be a component of U.S. foreign policy.

Had the public seen the rewards of these first-term policies during a second term, Carter might have left the White House in 1985 with a significantly different reputation. Ironically, Eizenstat argues, Carter's willingness to tackle issues regardless of their effect on his political standing made him a one-term president.
 
President Carter: The White House Years adds tremendously to the growing historiography of the Carter presidency and deserves consideration as the seminal text for historians seeking to understand fully the tumultuous years of 1977-1981. --William H. Firman Jr., historian and writer

Although the 1980 cult film Caddyshack is now a beloved antiestablishment comedy, its path to the screen was a bumpy one. As in cocaine bumps. Cocaine "seemed to be the fuel that kept the film running," writes Entertainment Weekly film critic Chris Nashawaty. Most of the cast and crew were friends, having worked together at National Lampoon magazine, Second City, Saturday Night Live or Animal House. But camaraderie turned into competition and "curdled into a toxic stew of bitter compromises, bruised feelings, and bare-knuckle power plays," writes Nashawaty. "The drugs certainly hadn't helped."

First-time director and (co-screenwriter) Harold Ramis was often revising the script hours before scenes were to be filmed--or tossing out pages and encouraging his cast to improvise. Bill Murray ad-libbed his entire performance, playing a character not in the script. Improvisations by Rodney Dangerfield and Chevy Chase added laughs but left the film so disjointed that the producers had to add $500,000 to the budget for reshoots. (The animatronic gopher that ties the film together wasn't added until reshoots.)

Nashawaty's entertaining and insightful book is filled with deliciously juicy gossip and bad behavior. There is poignancy, however, in detailing producer and co-screenwriter Douglas Kenney's increasing depression and accelerated drug use. Kenney died at age 33, a month after the film was released. Nashawaty's interviews with Murray, Chase, Ramis, producer Jon Peters and the film's supporting cast (including Michael O'Keefe and Peter Berkrot) add a freshness and intimacy to his well-researched salute to a troubled production that became an iconic comedy classic. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Somewhere between the opening poem, "I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise," and the concluding "I Climbed Out of a Painting Called Paradise," the narrator of the lyrical, lusty, art-centric Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl breaks away from the comfort of a Midwestern pastoral. She trades in milkweeds, hollyhocks and honeybees "to climb over the edge and plummet into whatever is beyond it.... Some say it is hell, and some say just another bolder paradise."

In a medley of structure, cadence and syntax, Pulitzer finalist Diane Seuss (Four-Legged Girl) leads her narrator through a museum of still-life paintings from the masters (Van Gogh, Dürer and the Rembrandt of the book's title) and the less well-known Gijsbrechts and Galizia, with stops at the more modern work of Warhol and Pollock (likening the work of the latter to a Walmart parking lot: "Frozen Coke splatter.... Vomit-arc. Winding loops of coal tar sealant.") In a string of self-portrait poems, Seuss reflects on the scrapes and stumbles of youth and the premature deaths of parents, poets and rock stars like Amy Winehouse ("the spitting image of my aesthetic as expressed in my approach to eyeliner").

If escaping into art is the driving motif of Seuss's new collection, she breaks the gallery walk sequences with a run of innovative unrhymed sonnets, a modified sestina and prose poems as colloquial as a like-filled teen conversation about cancer or a factory girl's celebration of a pregnancy ("we hire a party bus and all us girls go out on the town, barbeque, bowling, and a Black Sabbath tribute band"). Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is as much about running as it is about standing still, and as much about confronting death as it is about rediscovering life. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In Polly Diamond and the Magic Book, Alice Kuipers expands her range beyond YA novels and picture books into beginning chapter books.

When Polly receives a package marked "Special Delivery from the Writing and Spelling Department," she knows nothing about the powerful magic held within. She opens the package and finds a journal with "A Writing and Spelling Book for Polly Diamond" written on the first page. Polly, with her love of "writing stories," has very big ideas for this journal!

Polly's multiracial family--depicted by Diana Toledano in lively grayscale, spot illustrations--is expecting another child and, when Mom goes into labor, Polly curls up with her brand-new journal. It takes Polly a while to catch on to her book's talents: when she writes about painting her room, she realizes that strange things begin happening. She writes, "I'm going to pile up the stacks of books in my room like a ladder," and then notices that her actual books have flown into the air, forming a ladder. She adds, "The walls of my bedroom are painted Aquarium Blue, like an aquarium" and goes downstairs. When she returns, the room is filled with fish swimming around the walls. "What else can you do?" Polly asks the journal. "Anything you can imagine," it responds in text. However, when Polly wants to solve a global issue to gain fame (and show how "kind and thoughtful" she is), the book writes back "I can't make world peace happen." As can be guessed, things quickly get out of hand and Polly learns that she has to control her wishing. Fans will eagerly await the second in this new series to see more of Polly's writing adventures. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance reviewer