"In the fall of 1978, our father brought home a stack of books from the library on activities to do with kids as an attempt to get himself sober." Terrance Thurber educates Jamie, Lewis and Connor about the outdoors--listening to trees with stethoscopes and making casts of animal tracks, trying to teach them self-sufficiency. He's also getting them away from their mother, whose haunting sadness has a "firm grip on her ankles." When Terrance abandons the family, the betrayal permeates their futures with insecurities and doubt.

In Tiny Americans, Devin Murphy (The Boat Runner) charts the lives of the Thurbers in short, chronological excerpts from 1978 to 2018. Jamie, who sought solace in childhood trysts in the local cemetery, questions her marriage when her military husband is catastrophically injured. Lewis escapes to the steadfast routine of the navy. Connor struggles to connect with his risk-taking son, who is so reminiscent of Connor and Lewis at that age, with their efforts to numb themselves through brutal games of childhood football.

As his kids try to fill their adult lives with love and stability following their tumultuous upbringing, Terrence gets his act together and tries to reconnect with weekly letters. Though permeated with melancholy, the narrative is buoyed by exquisite details and the sense that forgiveness may be possible even if redemption is out of reach. A collection of vignettes more than a novel, the time gaps sometimes work against the deep story arcs, but the whole is a satisfying chronicle of fraught family dynamics. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Days by Moonlight follows Alfred Homer, a heartbroken botanist who's invited by family friend Professor Bruno Morgan on a Canadian road trip to discover the truth about reclusive poet John Skennen. The journey finds them among lycanthropes, fictional plants, witches and more, taking the pair into strange territory.

Like Neil Gaiman, André Alexis (Fifteen Dogs) uses mythology and folklore to probe deeper subjects, asking questions about the subjectivity of truth and happiness versus artistry, all in cool and beautiful prose. One can sense a Cheshire Cat grin in the writer's voice--how purely pleasurable it must have been to write this. There is pathos and tragedy here, especially in Skennen's story and Alfred's lost love. But black comedy and absurdity are there as well, and hang in uneasy balance with the sadder passages.

Then the fantastic tone shifts into a story of religion and divine experience. Up to a certain point Alexis nimbly plays with whether any of Alfred's encounters are objectively real, and the reason why is illuminated in the stunning final pages. But of course the best answer to "Is any of this true?" is another question, the perfect rebuke for those reaching for rationality: "Does it matter?" We tell falsehoods, stories, for many reasons and in so doing the stories become the truth. And in the tale of an at-first-average trip, Days by Moonlight finds a million other stories reconciling love and creation and divine gifts. --C.M. Crockford, freelance reviewer

Eithne Shortall (Love in Row 27) has created a poignant love story in Grace After Henry. Grace and Henry have been dating for several years, are happily in love, considering marriage and children and in the process of buying their dream home in Dublin. That is, until Henry is killed in a bicycle accident.

Reeling with grief, after a few weeks with her parents, Grace moves into their new home anyway and returns to her job as a chef. She's going through the motions of living, trying to fool her well-meaning friends and family into leaving her alone, but her heart is emptier than her new house. Until the day that Andy, a contractor, knocks at her door. Andy looks so much like Henry that at first Grace thinks she's losing her mind. But as she gets to know Andy, she sees the differences between the two men, and she's conflicted. Is she ready to let go of Henry? Is she really letting go of him if she moves on with someone who looks exactly like him?

Grace After Henry is bittersweet and charming, perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes. Grace's grief is all too understandable, as are her conflicted feelings about Andy's presence in her life. The story of Grace's progress is broken up with flashbacks to her life with Henry, offering the reader an emotional glimpse into their life together, including sweet moments, silly arguments and all the quotidian things that make up a relationship. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

The late-night talk show host at the center of Erin Somer's Stay Up with Hugo Best isn't a direct take on any particular celebrity, but an ingenious mish-mash of white male comedians past their prime in Hollywood. With Hugo Best, Somers deftly teases out the muddled and sometimes inappropriate relationship men like him have with fame, aging and the women who get caught in their wake.

June Bloom is one such woman, a writers' assistant on Hugo's show and a fan of his early work. Living in New York with very little money and even fewer prospects for success, June's world starts to fall apart when it is announced that Hugo is retiring from his decades-long show, Stay Up. After a chance encounter at a dingy comedy club, Hugo invites her to stay with him at his house over Memorial Day weekend. Out of desperation, curiosity or some combination of the two, June agrees, and for a short while gets a firsthand look at the strange, sad world of Hugo Best.

It's important that the novel is told from June's perspective. She is neither an ingénue nor vixen, but instead a broke, self-aware woman who realizes that a tryst with Hugo could open some doors for her, or at least give her a pretty good story to tell her friends. Somers does a great job balancing June's competing feelings, but Stay Up with Hugo Best itself never feels unsure: Somers knows exactly when both the laugh lines and the cringes should hit. --Noah Cruickshank, director of communications, Forefront, Chicago, Ill.

Prolific biographer Patrick McGilligan (Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light) offers a massive warts-and-all biography of writer/director/producer/actor Mel Brooks. Brooks is a member of the exclusive club of EGOT winners (those who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award), but his success and critical acclaim were hard-won. As a member of the writing team of the classic Sid Caesar TV series Your Show of Shows, Brooks was often dismissed as a gagman who tossed out funny lines rather than a comedy writer who constructed scenes. All his eventual screenplays were co-authored with others.

McGilligan skillfully profiles Brooks's two sides--the bullying, raging and credit-grabbing "Rude Crude Mel" and the "Nice Mel," who performed discreet and generous acts of kindness and was a lightning rod for laughter in public. "Behind his façade as a perpetual amusant were depths of self-loathing and a fury at the world," writes McGilligan. The behind-the-scenes tales of The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and other films show Brooks's need for collaboration at constant odds with his desire to control everything. Much like his relationship with critics: "Brooks desperately yearned for the approval of critics while at the same time resenting their power and opinions," writes McGilligan. Brooks joked, "Critics are like eunuchs at an orgy--they just don't get it." But he also quoted negative reviews verbatim decades later.

This fascinating and exhaustive biography presents a complicated and immensely talented man whose inner demons fed his hilarious output of films, TV series and albums. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

In May 1840, British aristocrat Lord William Russell was found dead in his bed, his throat slashed so violently that his head was nearly severed. All of London was swept up in the mystery of his murder, with Queen Victoria herself noting in her diary, "It is almost an unparalleled thing for a person of Ld William's rank, to be killed like that." But this is only half of the story that Claire Harman tells in Murder by the Book; she also explores the rise of "felon fiction" or "Newgate novels," which celebrated the wit and ingenuity of the common, working-class man, but glamorized crime and violence. The two threads of Harman's story come together in the eventual confession of Lord William's murderer, which cites Jack Sheppard, the most popular of the "Newgate novels" at the time, as inspiration for the crime.

Harman's work is authoritative and well researched, and she's able to build a surprising amount of tension, considering that the murderer is identified fairly early. She writes with an expressive and slightly old-fashioned language that suits and helps to develop her setting. Meanwhile, the concern shown by Victorian critics over the moral (or more accurately immoral) influence of contemporary media should be a familiar issue to most modern readers. With special appearances by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Edgar Allan Poe, this is an engrossing story of true crime, wrapped in a fascinating literary history. --Judie Evans, librarian

Growing up in small-town Texas, Christie Purifoy yearned for trees. Through her winding years as a newlywed, she and her husband, Jonathan, longed for a physical place to call their own. These days, they tend the ground and the trees (and their four children) near Maplehurst, an old brick farmhouse in southeast Pennsylvania. In her lyrical second memoir, Placemaker, Purifoy traces their family's geographical and spiritual journey, and asks questions about the ways human beings shape, and are shaped by, the places they inhabit.

Purifoy (Roots & Sky) centers each chapter on a different tree: citrus grove, honey locust, Norway maple, saucer magnolia. She tells of building a patio in a grad-student rental in Virginia, and meeting her neighbors in a Chicago apartment building. She draws in anecdotes about the history of each place she's lived, exploring the effects of decisions by city planners, colonists and homeowners on the land and its communities. Through her own experiences and those of others, she asks questions about grief, joy, community, loneliness and the ways placemaking interacts with all of those.

"Placemaking asks that we love a place with all of ourselves," Purifoy writes. But that love is rarely easy, nor does it lead to a guaranteed outcome. Like so much of life, placemaking "offers no protection from the many forms loss can take." Her memoir is a thoughtful meditation on choosing to pay attention to, and invest in, the places we live, and the often surprising rewards of doing so. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Who knew literary criticism could be so much fun? That's the impression that lingers after finishing novelist, memoirist and University of Virginia creative writing professor Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. It's Alison's impassioned brief against the dominance of the Aristotelian dramatic arc, the "one path through fiction we're most likely to travel," in which a "situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides." Instead, serving as an assured and entertaining guide through an assortment of narrative structures, she hopes more writers will follow her lead and not "feel oppressed by the arc, that they'll imagine visual aspects of narrative as well as temporal, that they'll discover ways to design, being conscious or playful with possibilities."

Alison (Nine Island) offers a well-stocked "museum of specimens," from the work of writers both widely known (Philip Roth, Raymond Carver and W.G. Sebald, one of her favorites) and less so (Marie Redonnet and Murray Bail). She meticulously but briskly unearths an impressive body of evidence to support her argument that the arc structure "makes sense for tragedy, but fiction can be wildly other."

Even for those reluctant to abandon the classical narrative arc for more adventuresome fare, Meander, Spiral, Explode is a joyous celebration of literature's robust shape-shifting qualities. At the very least, it's a book that will have open-minded readers viewing the next work of serious fiction they encounter with a more discerning eye, ear and mind. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Voices, David Elliott's second young adult novel in verse (Bull), uses concrete poetry and a variety of poetic forms--villanelles, sestinas, ballades, triolets--to tell a fictionalized account of Joan of Arc's last hours. Joan herself speaks often, walking the reader through her short life and how she came to be imprisoned: "Every life has its own story--/ not without a share of glory,/ and not without a share of grief./ I lived like a hero at seventeen./ At nineteen, I die like a thief." Also included are direct quotes from Joan's 1431 Trial of Condemnation and the 1455 Trial of Nullification, to give "the real Joan and her associates the opportunity to speak for themselves." These "associates"--her parents, Charles VII, Bishop Pierre Cauchon and more--are given their own poetic monologues. But others tell their tales, too: Saint Margaret, the warhorse Joan rode, the tower in which she was imprisoned, the stake that held her to the ground... even the fire. The fire, unlike the other characters, speaks directly to Joan throughout. It lusts after her, growing in ferocity and size, each appearance a longer poem than the one before: "I burn I burn I burn my darling/ I burn I burn I burn/ I yearn I yearn I yearn my darling/ I yearn I yearn I yearn."

Powerful and fierce, Voices focuses on and revels in the base impulses and overwhelming gynophobia that led to the martyring of the Maid of Orléans. The virginal Joan and her death are sexualized in such a way that there is an abiding sense of wrongness in addition to the enduring dread. The reading experience is unsettling yet entrancing, and likely to acquire many fans. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness