Monsters real and imagined haunt the household at the center of Shaun Hamill's debut, A Cosmology of Monsters. After learning his family history later in life, Noah, the youngest of three siblings, narrates this eerie story. He begins in the 1960s, when his parents first meet. His mother, Margaret, turns down a rich suitor to marry Noah's father, Harry, a bookish but financially strapped young man with a penchant for Lovecraft. Flash forward to the early 1980s, and the couple has two daughters, Sydney and Eunice. Money is still hard to come by, but the family agrees to spend what little they have on Harry's dream to build a haunted house. As the project nears completion, Harry's behavior grows increasingly erratic. He dies from an apparent brain tumor mere days before the haunted house opens and weeks after Margaret informs him she's pregnant with their third child.

By time Noah is born, Harry is gone, and the haunted house has become the stuff of family lore. But when Noah starts hearing a strange scratching on his window at night, the boy begins to wonder if something supernatural had inspired his father's obsession with monsters. The rest of the novel unfolds in psychologically rich detail. Motives rooted in real life drive every character, even as the supernatural envelops Noah. Scary and moving in equal measure, A Cosmology of Monsters is an adept mash-up of horror and family drama that treats both genres with great care. --Amy Brady, freelance editor and writer

In her second story collection, False Bingo, Jac Jemc delivers 20 compact, disquieting stories that are starkly realistic yet tinged with a sense of otherworldly menace. Her first collection, A Different Bed Every Time, blurred the lines between reality and fantasy in short, unconventional tales. False Bingo continues this exploration of the intersection between tangible danger and unknown fears.

"Any Other," the first entry, acts as a warning to readers that they should be careful about believing what they read. An encounter in a coffee shop between a man and a woman leads to the kind of unexpected plot switch of which O. Henry would approve. "The Principal's Ashes," dark and funny, takes place in a Catholic elementary school. Mrs. Sayer, a second-grade teacher, begins her year by predicting which of her students will kill the class frog. She teaches Alan Ginsberg's Howl, and has the students re-create part of Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. Her goal is "to expose them to experience and knowledge beyond their years" in order to prevent their purity from delivering her the same fate that befell the principal.

Jemc's ability to build an undercurrent of threat in mundane situations is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson. She displays dexterity with characters and precision with words and sentences, creating small worlds that satisfy even as they disturb. Fans of Daisy Johnson and Helen Oyeyemi will relish these stories of mistrust, danger and regrets. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

Jasmine Guillory (The Proposal) steps away from California and heads to England in Royal Holiday. As always, Guillory's writing explores love from a humorous perspective. Popular stylist Maddie Forest, heroine of The Wedding Party, is heading to England to work with a duchess for Christmas, and she talks her mother, Vivian, into coming along. That way Vivian can leave the country for only the second time in her 50-something years.

Much to Vivian's surprise, she loves Sandringham, the royal estate where the duchess is staying for Christmas. And she's even more attracted to Malcolm Hudson, a member of the royal staff, who is tall, handsome and has a fantastic accent. Malcolm, the first black private secretary to the queen, is drawn out of his typical reserve and into conversation with the beautiful, lively Vivian.

Sweet and sexy, Royal Holiday is a charmingly festive romance, full of vivid details of London tourist spots like Westminster Abbey and the Victoria and Albert Museum. It's refreshing to read a romance novel with a strong, older woman at its center, and readers are sure to fall for Malcolm's charm as easily as Vivian does. With lovely descriptions of the frigid English countryside and the delicious meals that Vivian and Malcolm share, Royal Holiday is the perfect tale of courtship to cozy up to with cup of tea. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

In the 1980s, two boys from a London suburb dominated the world with outrageously catchy pop songs like "Careless Whisper" and "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." Wham! was the brainchild of Andrew Ridgeley and Georgios Panayiotou (known to Andrew as Yog and to the rest of us as the late George Michael). Best friends since high school, they shared a passion for music that evolved from wearing out records by Elton John and Led Zeppelin into a yearning to craft hits of their own.

The stakes were high for the sons of immigrant fathers (Andrew's from Egypt and George's from Cyprus), for whom a steady job meant far more than silly ambitions of fame. But with a bit of cajoling and several second chances, an outgoing young Andrew convinced a shy, strait-laced George to pursue music. And thank goodness! Their early setbacks only served to push them further along, and the duo formed a bond that set the foundation for their decades-long friendship as well as their explosion into fame.

Ridgeley narrates his memoir, Wham! George Michael & Me, with such heart and generosity, it's nearly impossible to emerge on the other side without a few tear-stained pages. Even through moments of frustration, like when songwriting shifted fully onto George and set him on a path to solo superstardom, Ridgeley brushes aside any hint of bitterness. Instead, he marvels with sincerity at his friend's prodigious talent. This book is more than simply the history for one of the most powerful forces in pop music; it is a dazzling portrait of a friendship weathering the unpredictable nature of fame. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Covering almost 400 years of world history, Crusaders is exhaustive yet rewarding. Dan Jones focuses on how the Crusades affected the world, from Pope Urban's call for holy war in 1099 to the decline of conflicts by the end of the 15th century. The book's insight into the people, motivations and often violent events of this period will delight history fans, even as casual readers may need to take their time with the sheer onslaught of information contained within these pages. 

As he did in his previous book Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty, Jones writes with absolute clarity. He covers historical players like Saladin and Bohemond and shows how religious ideals played a serious part in the Crusades--but so did realpolitik. The Christians and Muslims who fought over Jerusalem were often atoning for their sins, but also desired the wealth of the Middle Eastern cities in order to expand their empires (and their purses). In compelling detail, the book puts into focus the pragmatism and spiritual fervor that made kings and knights alike travel to far-off lands. 

Ultimately even if Crusaders is a dense read, the author's skill as a storyteller makes this an engrossing work for those with an interest in medieval history. There may never be a single definitive text on the Crusades, but this is a fine primer for readers in the 21st century. Crusaders is a satisfying and perceptive offering from Jones. --C.M. Crockford, freelance reviewer

Lloyd Spencer Davis is an acclaimed photographer, filmmaker and author, in great part thanks to his work as a biologist specializing in the mating habits of penguins. Thus, it came as quite a surprise when, 35 years into his career, he discovered that he was not the first to make groundbreaking observations about the sexual proclivities--homosexuality, promiscuity and more--of these birds. He was instead following in the footsteps of George Murray Levick, the physician on Robert Falcon Scott's failed Antarctic expedition in 1910 and the world's first penguin researcher. Not only did Levick make the same rather startling observations, but he later prevented them from becoming public knowledge. Davis needed to find out why.

In A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins, Davis's 12th book, he combines a biography of Levick with a travelogue of both past and present-day expeditions. Davis also offers a natural history of the sexual habits of the birds themselves, including 16 pages of full-color photographs. Following in Levick's literal and scientific footsteps, Davis uncovers a man constrained by his Victorian upbringing. That upbringing resulted in Levick's judgment of penguins' sexual habits as immoral, and led him to bury his scientific evidence. Thanks to Davis's conscientious and more open-minded research, many years later, the truth is revealed in this insightful book. --BrocheAroe Fabian, owner, River Dog Book Co., Beaver Dam, Wis.

"Are you insane?" he was asked. Professional adventurer Adam Shoalts wanted to do something "that hadn't already been done" in celebration of Canada's sesquicentennial. What he came up with combined his passion for paddling wild lakes and rivers with his desire for a challenge that would raise awareness about our vanishing wild places. His plan was "unlikely to succeed" and questions regarding his sanity were many, even with respect to the "easy" parts.

Beyond the Trees is the result of Shoalts surviving a months-long, 2,500-mile trek across the Canadian Arctic with nothing but his canoe, a backpack and two barrels crammed with rations (more than 170 pounds of dead weight). He faced down grizzly bears and muskox (sometimes right at his tent opening) and battled severe winds, chunks of ice drifting like jigsaw-puzzle pieces and hordes of blood-sucking insects. Most remarkable (and perilous) was that to chase the ice melt, Shoalts's route required he travel upstream, against the flow of rapids that generally called for parties of six to 12 to travel down safely.

Shoalts approaches the many dangers with smarts and aplomb, while also transmitting the tension in his recounting. Despite the risks Shoalts conveys, Beyond the Trees is an earnest love story to one of the last portions of the Earth that remains undeveloped and where large animals still roam free. Peppered with Shoalts's corny humor and legends of lone trappers' unspeakable deeds, this white-knuckle affair is a travelogue, adventure story and horror-movie-in-waiting that sparks an urge to get out and go. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

"I must have turned a thousand tricks over those six years, you name it, I've done it, the perfect whore, young-looking so the men buzzed around me like bees on honey, you have no idea how many men see working girls for a quick blowjob in the car after work before going home." This is the opening of "XXX," the first of 67 entries in Fresh Pack of Smokes by Cassandra Blanchard.

Fresh Pack of Smokes is a gritty, riveting, poetical memoir chronicling a horrendous crack addiction and sex worker's street life. Blanchard doesn't use periods except at the end of each raw entry, to serve a stream-of-conscious telling of a cyclical, drug-addled madness: performing sex for money, buying drugs, getting high, sex for money, more drugs, etc. Her life was a quest to stay high. A brief stint in jail without drugs made her finally smell the urine, see the rats swarming the garbage and feel the punches and slaps of those she loved and those she pretended to love for her next fix. An addict is never fully cured, and she struggles with her demons, but Blanchard survived to tell her story with strikingly harsh, brutally blunt and occasionally wry observations: about a fellow addict ("Candy's hair was her resume"), a bad encounter with a john ("I'm pretty sure he had done things to children") and beatings ("so much blood you swallow the chunks like dark red liver"). Blanchard's writing in Fresh Pack of Smokes is blisteringly immersive. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer

Ukrainian illustrators Andriy Lesiv and Romana Romanyshyn pay homage to the beauty of math in Stars and Poppy Seeds, about a young girl who aspires to count all the stars in the sky.

"Flora loved to count more than anything else." She "counted all of the animals in the world"--even the sea cows, elephants and platypuses. Counting the stars, however, poses a dilemma: "there were so many stars in the night sky that not even all of the numbers she knew would be enough to count them." Disappointed that her "complicated formulae and equations" prove unfit for the task, Flora's mathematician mother urges her to stay optimistic, reminding her that "every task, even the most complicated, begins... with one step."

Lesiv and Romanyshyn cleverly show the ways in which numbers play a vital role in Flora's life: a portrait of her bunny, Pythagoras, is made out of 65 "tiny poppy seeds"; on walks, Flora counts leaves, dandelions and the "buttons on the coats of passers-by." The authors' distinctive art style mesmerizes; the muted, neutral-color illustrations are accented with a red that pops from the page. Each spread illustrates the text's ideas in an abstract yet identifiable arrangement, such as the Milky Way depicted inside the form of a young girl. Though Lesiv and Romanyshyn's art is filled with math concepts that may be foreign to the target age group (such as equations, puzzles and maps), associating them now with the joy of story time will start young readers on the road to a positive relationship with the oft-dreaded subject matter. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

In her debut young adult novel, Slay, Brittney Morris tackles the difficulties of code-switching and community building through the experiences of 17-year-old black American Kiera Johnson.

Kiera exists in two worlds. In the real world, she is one of only two black girls at a predominantly white high school and is thus vigilant about policing her hair, body, language and tone to avoid being coded as a stereotype. Inside SLAY, the game she's created, the beauty and nuance of the African diaspora is on full display and Kiera is the "Nubian goddess" Emerald. Black-identified players from all over the globe create avatars with skin shades from "Zendaya to Lupita" and rock "dashikis, Mursi lip plates" and "Marley twists" as they reign over diverse regions like the Desert, Tundra and Swamp (a nod to the presence of black people everywhere). Players compete in duels using inspired cards with cultural references from across different experiences, like "Michael Jackson's glove" or the Gabby Douglas card, which enhances the gymnastic abilities of a player. But, when a teen is murdered over coin in the game, Kiera's secret life as the creator of SLAY is exposed. As her real and virtual worlds collide, Kiera's plans for college, love and SLAY are upended.

While late in the novel, some explorations of gender dynamics feel underdeveloped and out of place, Slay grants readers perspective into experiences of black people from all over the world as they gather, connect and grieve deeply, showcasing their power--even with time and space separating them--to respond with compassion to any trial. --Breanna J. McDaniel, freelance reviewer