Dana Reinhardt's entertaining debut, Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, features a high-strung, highly organized narrator. Jenna Carlson is a YA novelist struggling with writer's block; she's also a cancer survivor and mother to 16-year-old Clem. Deploying her meticulous planning skills, which border on the pathological, Jenna arranges a luxury vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to celebrate her husband Peter's 50th birthday.

The action begins as the Carlsons and their friends arrive at a stunning beach villa, their home for the next seven days. Next to a gorgeous, secluded beach and waited on by attentive staff, Jenna tries to let go and relax. While exploring the beach, she befriends Maria Josephina, a woman from a neighboring villa who quickly becomes a confidant. Jenna knows there is something suspicious about Maria Josephina's enchanted life but can't quite put her finger on it.

Despite her best efforts at planning a foolproof trip, things begin to go off-script for Reinhardt's anxious heroine, and bad weather is the least of it. Tomorrow There Will Be Sun reads like the satirical confessions of a control freak while simultaneously being utterly sympathetic. Although plush trappings provide their own sort of comfort, the true luxury of contentment and peace of mind are ultimately what our narrator finds so elusive. Fortunately, there is hope for Jenna, especially when matters beyond her control threaten to upend her carefully constructed life and Maria Josephina offers her a way out. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and reviewer

Alexander Starritt's translation of selected Kafka stories, The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man, seeks to undo some of the assumptions surrounding the author. His work is so striking and ubiquitous in the Western canon that the term "Kafkaesque" describes a situation both absurd and hopeless; even as required reading for many high school students, his stories are often written off as dour work, fodder for pretension.

While including famous pieces like "The Hunger Artist," Starritt nicely contextualizes those works by placing them side by side with comic parables and lesser-known work. Altogether, the collection serves as a reminder that Kafka, among other things, was excessively funny. "In the Penal Colony" is a perfect example, both deeply disturbing and also clearly a farce. There's a madcap energy to the whole tale that Starritt captures perfectly, even as it reaches its gruesome end.

Likewise, "A Report for an Academy," where a talking ape explains the story behind his ability to converse with humans, elegantly threads the needle between the horrifying and comedic. Kafka's best works reflect the extremes of life, the absurdity and confusion abutting moments of elation and decisive action. The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man nicely makes a case that readers should not forget Kafka's sly sense of humor and, of course, his humanity, when considering his impact on culture. --Noah Cruickshank, director of communications, Forefront, Chicago, Ill.

"What's the difference between a vigilante and a superhero?" Questions of superhero lore have historically been the subject of comics, graphic novels and movies--full of color, spandex suits and a deluge of action through imagery. In The Reign of the Kingfisher, T.J. Martinson novelizes the superhero comics form with such a meticulous yet fluid style, readers may forget there is no artwork.

Following the death of the Kingfisher, an enigmatic, larger-than-life sentinel who dealt with bad guys outside the confines of the law, Chicago's violent crime rate steadily increased. Thirty years later, the mystery of the Kingfisher is given new life via a ransom video. Disguised as a member of the hacker protest group Liber-teens, a man threatens to kill hostages until the cops release the Kingfisher's unpublished autopsy report and admit they helped fake his death.

Retired journalist Marcus Waters is brought in to view the video since he spent his career writing about the Kingfisher. When he provides a big clue the police seem less than anxious to pursue, Marcus's reporter gut and desire to save lives spur him to investigate, aided by a brilliant Liber-teen hacker and a disgraced cop.

In portraying a gripping race against time and into history, Martinson packs the narrative with details that set the stage minutely yet organically. On its face a breakneck thriller, Kingfisher also delves into themes of morality and vigilantism, corruption and justice. Martinson's debut is compelling, artistic and, quite simply, a blast. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Every century is shaped by a key event, writes Andrew Smith (Moondust) in the exhilarating Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle. For Smith, the 21st century was wrought by the "Dotcom Crash of March-April 2000." Not only did it signal the economic crash of 2008, it predicted the trouble with truth that seemed to characterize the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.

A key figure of the dotcom era, says Smith, was the enigmatic Josh Harris, one of the "first internet moguls" of the digital age and founder of the website Pseudo. When readers first meet Harris, he has inexplicably moved to Ethiopia. Smith catches a flight to interview him, and what follows is one of the most fascinating portraits of a startup founder in recent memory.

Harris spent his early years as an entrepreneur in New York City's high tech hub, Silicon Alley. He was the mastermind behind baffling experiments in crowd tolerance and voyeurism. One of them, called "Quiet," involved Harris convincing 100 people to stay under surveillance in a deserted warehouse in the city with all the food and drugs they could tolerate. The event was shut down by FEMA. Harris rode the tech wave to unimagined wealth before losing it all in 2000.

The present-day Harris is no less perplexing. Often Smith is left wondering whether the strange incidents that happen when he's in proximity of the man (gunshots, dogs howling) were in fact staged by Harris for reasons unknown. Totally Wired examines just how thin the line is between brilliance and madness. --Amy Brady, freelance writer and editor

"How do we become who we are in the world?" Pam Houston (Contents May Have Shifted) asks in Deep Creek, her contemplative memoir that explores nature's power to shape our sense of self. "We ask the world to teach us."

After the 1992 publication of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Houston drove throughout the American West, giving readings while searching for a place to call home. She found it in the remote town of Creede, Colo., on a $400,000 ranch that she purchased with $21,000 ("more money than I had ever imagined having") and a payment agreement with the previous owner.

Life on a 120-acre ranch, Houston learned, meant developing endurance to cope with a grueling travel schedule for work, losses of beloved animals and extreme weather conditions--in Creede, winter temperatures often plummet to 35 degrees below zero and summer brings raging wildfires that ravage the landscape.

"The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it, until and even after it is gone, no matter how much it hurts. If we don't, we are left with only a hollow chuckle, and our big brains who made this mess, our big brains that stopped believing a long time ago in beauty, in everything, in anything."

With reverent and moving prose, Deep Creek's observations of nature's resiliency in the aftermath of dramatic and destructive events are rooted in a personal strength gained from adversity. A survivor of childhood abuse, Houston shows the depth of her perspective while optimistically championing an environment that is continually threatened. --Melissa Firman, writer and blogger at melissafirman.com

The title of primatologist Frans de Waal's (Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?) captivating exploration into animal emotion comes from a touching event involving his former dissertation supervisor, Jan van Hooff, and a dying chimpanzee matriarch named Mama. In the video of their encounter, viewers see behaviors they can recognize as their own as Mama consoles and reassures the scientist. Using this story and others involving various mammals in the animal kingdom, de Waal makes his case that humans are not the only species that experiences emotions.

In addition to telling Mama's life story, de Waal discusses the differences between emotions and feelings--"We show our emotions, but we talk about our feelings"--and debunks the idea that most animals act strictly out of instinct: "Nothing could be less adaptive for an organism than to blindly follow its emotions." He examines laughter, empathy and guilt across mammal species, covers topics such as murder and free will, and shows parallels between human politics and animal power structures, ensuring readers are clear on the meanings of alpha male and alpha female. All the while he weaves in wonderfully humorous comments and observations, fascinating facts, study data and pertinent anecdotes. De Waal's vast experience with both captive and wild animals is readily apparent, as is his willingness to let the evidence drive his conclusions, rather than preconceived biases or beliefs. Regardless of whether one is an animal lover or not, Mama's Last Hug offers amazing insights you only need to be human to benefit from. Truly eye-opening. --Jen Forbus

Suzannah Lessard (The Architect of Desire) offers a broad cultural examination of place in The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape. The result is a work of great scope that's grounded by an interest in landscapes, the forces that shape them and how they in turn reshape us. Lessard chases big mysteries: "Always behind my readings of landscapes are the questions, Where are we...? and What is our relationship to our surroundings now?"

Lessard begins with a close description of "the village" where she lives near Albany, N.Y. She then travels outward, to visit a nearby friend and consider suburbophobia, and therefore the history of the suburbs--as foil to the city, as military defense concept, as commercial center, as "edge city." Having discussed terms like sprawl, metropolitan area, edgeless or stealth city and more, Lessard uses "atopia" to refer to landscapes "where contemporary development, directly expressing contemporary times, was unrestrained." She is also quite interested in "online" as a place, from its origins in Cold War strategy through the option it provides as escape from real places.

Lessard can speak from a place of economic comfort that may grate some readers, but the value of her decades of research is undeniable. The Absent Hand is often dense, as Lessard draws upon centuries of human history to make her arguments. In this ambitious work, place is examined, deconstructed and incrementally illuminated, even as our landscape changes anew. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Running, for Katie Arnold, has long been a means of solace: a way to escape anxiety and heartbreak, or at least to muffle the chorus of fear. Since moving to Santa Fe, N.Mex., in her 20s, Arnold (a long-time editor and writer for Outside magazine) has run and hiked through the nearby mountains. When her father was diagnosed with cancer, Arnold navigated her wrenching grief the only way she knew how: by running miles and miles and miles.

Arnold's memoir, Running Home, chronicles both her journey as a runner and the narrative of her close but complicated relationship with her dad, David. A National Geographic photographer with a restless soul, he left when Arnold was three, but remained a loving presence in her life, mostly through phone calls and summer visits. Arnold ran her first 10K at age seven, not on her own whim but his, and jumped into a frigid creek when he bet her she wouldn't. She explores her boundless craving for adventure, her need to push herself, as both something she inherited from him and as a way to make him proud. She becomes a marathoner, then an ultramarathoner, facing down her fears along with the blisters, injuries, sunburn and, ultimately, experiencing the pure joy of hours on the trail.

Blazingly candid and vulnerable, shot through with vivid imagery and interspersed with David Arnold's photographs, Running Home is a daughter's tribute to her father, a love letter to running and a powerful meditation on the stories we tell ourselves. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

"Noah spied it coming from afar. It started with a cloud peeping over the hill like a curious ghost." There's a storm brewing, and city child Noah responds like an old farmhand. While his father boards up the windows on their home, Noah bangs together an "ark" scaled for mice, salamanders and other outdoor critters. While his mother and sister stockpile provisions, Noah gathers berries and seeds for the creatures. And while his mom rounds up candles, Noah mounts a flashlight inside the ark. Following these parallel preparations, Kate Banks (How to Find an Elephant; The Magician's Apprentice) supplies the signature choreography from the Bible story that underpins Noah Builds an Ark: when the boy, who has just been summoned by his mom, calls the backyard denizens to the ark, they arrive in pairs. When the storm is over four days later, the animals exit the ark "two by two."

When the storm is in full swing, the paralleling continues, abetted by side-by-side illustrations from John Rocco, who does for rain in Noah Builds an Ark what he did for snow in the shiver-inducing Blizzard. While Noah and his family eat and play games by candlelight, the animals nosh and romp inside the ark. While Noah's dad tells stories to his kids, "each little creature [makes] a noise of its own."

Readers needn't be familiar with the Bible story to appreciate Noah Builds an Ark. They needn't even be animal lovers: they require only an appreciation for inspired tales of empathy and ingenuity. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author