Returning to adult fiction after the success of their 2019 National Book Award finalist YA novel Pet, Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi brings readers a deep, tender look at a family unraveling around the tragic and early loss of someone they loved but never understood. 

"They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died," the first chapter says in its arresting entirety. Born to Chika and Kavita, with a starfish-shaped birthmark on his foot identical to a scar his grandmother had on hers, Vivek comes into the world "after death and into grief." As a tween, he suffers from inexplicable blackouts, and Chika considers him too sensitive. As an older teen, Vivek finds solace and love among friends who accept him and in his impossible yet undeniably passionate relationship with cousin Osita. When Vivek's fabric-wrapped corpse is left on his parents' doorstep without explanation, Kavita desperately searches for explanations about his life and death, while Osita grapples with how much of the truth he should tell. 

By turns raw and gentle, this gorgeous #ownvoices drama features a cast of diverse nationalities, sexual orientations and gender identities. The mixture of third- and first-person narration reconstructs a life, largely from secondhand accounts. Emezi (Freshwater) beautifully captures an ordinary family in all its loving, hurtful, messy glory, then thoughtfully demonstrates that pressure placed on one member can backfire and undermine the entire unit. A spot-on pick for thoughtful book club discussion, The Death of Vivek Oji wraps up heartache with hope. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Frances Macken's darkly complicated You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here follows three Irish girls as they aspire to escape their dead-end hometown of Glenbruff. Working-class Katie, pretty, rich girl Evelyn and hanger-on Maeve are introduced as happy 10-year-olds running free, imagining the local quarry, wet bogs and abandoned buildings as wondrous faraway habitats. They plan for bigger, better lives together elsewhere but, like all childhood friendships, this trio's loyalties ebb and flow with the tides of their personal dramas.

As teenagers, Katie and Evelyn have a pact to study art in Dublin and become famous artists, while Maeve is happy to take a local job. The plan falters when Katie is accepted to art school and Evelyn isn't. Infighting among the three girls turns incendiary when Aidan and Peadar, brothers the girls have crushes on, are more interested in Pamela Cooney, who recently moved from the big city.

Luckily for the lead trio, Pamela's moment in the spotlight is quickly snuffed out when she suddenly disappears. She obviously met with foul play, but what isn't clear is how much Katie, Evelyn and Maeve know about what happened to their rival.

Macken highlights every scrappy kid's desire to free him- or herself from small-town thinking and limited opportunities. The author shines brightest when depicting a friends-for-life camaraderie mixed with hurtful actions only real friends can forgive one another for. Readers are immersed so deeply in the day-to-day mini-dramas of these girls that it's surprisingly easy to dismiss their apathy toward Pamela's disappearance and wholeheartedly root for their escape from Glenbruff. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer

A journey to adopt a baby in a distant, northern European city tests a married couple in What Happens at Night, a menacing, suspenseful novel by Peter Cameron (Coral Glynn), its mood occasionally lightened by grim humor in the dialogue. Their journey from the United States had been difficult even before they arrive at their gloomily grandiose hotel. The wife is life-threateningly ill, which has made it nearly impossible for them to adopt. The nearby orphanage may be her last hope for a child before she dies, and to ensure her husband still has a family when she is gone. But there's another institution nearby that draws travelers to make the long train ride: a healer named Brother Emmanuel.

A vaguely surreal setting (the available food is either an elaborate meal with far too many courses or whatever can be scrounged from the bar; the room doors were salvaged from an old opera house) and fellow residents at the hotel who are either mysterious or too intimate by turns create a sense of unease. The atmosphere untethers the unnamed couple, leading them to doubt what they thought they knew about themselves and why they came there. Their lack of options beyond waiting and the absence of purpose in most of their day leaves them with little to do but question, and the novel will keep readers on tenterhooks, wondering how the tension will break. By the end, the couple will undergo changes far beyond the adoption of the child that brought them there. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

Pristine beaches, spectacular landscapes, cultural landmarks might have been the go-to tourist destinations once upon a time, but in Yun Ko-eun's sly, compelling novel, The Disaster Tourist, scenes of death and destruction are where people really want to go.

Jungle, where Yona Ko has been working for 10-plus years, is one of these travel providers, and her professional success makes her a personal target of Team Leader Kim's sexual abuse. She's not alone, but Human Resources offers nothing more than "This kind of incident happens all the time.... If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen." When Yona finally submits her resignation, Kim instead offers her a month-long break, assigning her to evaluate one of the company's less-popular packages.

Yona chooses "Desert Sinkhole," which promises "volcanoes, deserts and hot springs all in the same location." She arrives on the island nation of Mui and joins five others to explore vestiges of genocide, perilous hazards and continued misfortune. When it's time to go home, Yona gets separated from the group on the journey to the airport--without her passport, wallet, luggage and only her dying phone. She manages to return to the resort, where the manager eventually presents her with a marketing plan to boost Mui's disaster-desirability and thereby save the residents from obscure starvation. Yona can hardly refuse.

Yun's English-language debut arrives in an agile translation by Lizzie Buehler. This disturbing novel might initially feel far-fetched, but Yun skillfully exposes an insatiability both to create and to consume anomalous experiences at any cost. With deft ingenuity, she transforms seeming surreality into chilling reality. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

"Well, I'll be dashed.... It's a pigpen." Uttered by wily old fox George Lancaster, these words refer to something other than a mess. A cipher, to be exact--one that forces George to disclose long-held World War II secrets to his beloved granddaughter, genealogist Lucy Lancaster. To bust a murder scheme relating to an old espionage operation, they'll have to find the key and break the code before lives are lost.

Lineage Most Lethal is the second entry in S.C. Perkins's marvelous Ancestry Detective series, following 2019 Agatha Award nominee Murder Once Removed, and Perkins picks up the murderous magnetism right where it left off. Smarting from feeling ghosted by Harrison Ford-esque Special Agent Ben Turner, Lucy throws herself into her work for hotel heiress Pippa Sutton. Lucy is approached by an ailing, elderly man on the grounds of the Hotel Sutton. As he perishes, he presses a Montblanc pen against her hand and implores her to "keep them safe."

Charismatic Grandpa George comes to the rescue--as a collector of vintage Montblancs, he reveals to Lucy the special nature of the pen and its ties to a secret Allied mission. The messages held within uncover a plot for revenge that will embroil Lucy, George and the Sutton clan in a bitter grudge inherited through generations. Perkins's plots are thick with fascinating atmosphere, curios, history and family lore, but her humor and characters shine most brightly, holding readers in an embrace of warm and lethal Southern charm. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Harrow the Ninth has a tough act to follow in 2019's deranged, electrifyingly fun Gideon the Ninth, but the middle chapter in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb Trilogy is every bit as wild and weird as its delightful predecessor. Following the events of the first book, Muir shifts focus to the necromancer Harrowhark as she joins a cohort dedicated to assisting the godlike Emperor in fighting strange cosmic entities.

Muir has not lost her penchant for throwing readers in the deep end, and some incomprehension is to be expected on their part. In fact, Harrow the Ninth seems purposefully disorienting for fans of the first book: the novel bounces back and forth in time, retelling events from the first book with noticeable differences that grow more glaring over time. Whereas Gideon the Ninth welded the structure of a locked-room mystery to its saga of necromancers and their sword-wielding escorts in an ancient, crumbling space-tomb, Harrow the Ninth plunges confidently into a mind-bending puzzle box structure. There is plenty of satisfaction in piecing things together, but it's not just an exercise in cleverness: Muir has much to say about denial and the dangers of suppressing grief, building to an emotional conclusion that will melt the hardest of hearts.

Harrow the Ninth carries over all the strengths of its predecessor, including the verbal sparring and ever-entertaining insults: "you bursting organ, you wretched, self-regarding hypochondriac and half-fermented corpse with the nails still on." And it delves even deeper into the vulnerabilities of Muir's damaged characters. Few books can be this funny, sad and romantic all at the same time. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine

For 30 years, Jarvis Jay Masters has been a resident of San Quentin State Prison's death row, some two decades of them in solitary confinement. As one of 700 inmates currently in that grim status, his story would not be remarkable, but for the fact that during his long imprisonment he's become an esteemed Buddhist teacher, and a confidant of the well-known writer and teacher Pema Chödrön.

In The Buddhist on Death Row: How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place, journalist David Sheff (Beautiful Boy) renders Masters's story in highly sympathetic fashion, tracing his transformation and describing the efforts of Chödrön and a growing cadre of supporters to overturn what they believe is his unjust death sentence.

Though he seems to share a belief in Masters's innocence, Sheff is less concerned with the machinations of his subject's multiple (and so far unsuccessful) legal appeals than he is with the way Buddhist practices have helped him to cope with his dire circumstances. Through his deep engagement with these teachings, he explains, Masters has come to understand that "when his mind was free, he was free," and that many who live their lives outside the walls of a prison are themselves in chains.

For all its hardship and heartbreak, The Buddhist on Death Row is an inspiring story of one man's ability to surmount suffering by applying the power of his mind. Anyone who's been tempted to explore meditation and mindfulness but who hasn't taken the first step should find encouragement in Jarvis Masters's far more difficult journey. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

The popular image of an astronomer is a lone figure peering into a telescope, discovering brand-new stars or trying to make contact with aliens. Emily Levesque, astronomer and "weird star enthusiast," knows the reality is a little different. In her first nonfiction book, The Last Stargazers, Levesque charts a course through the rapidly evolving field of astronomy. With humor and heart, she explains the basics of what astronomers do while relating dozens of entertaining anecdotes about her chosen field. She also makes a strong case for why humans should continue to study the skies.

A dedicated backyard stargazer as a child, Levesque spent her undergraduate years at MIT, before earning her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii. Like many astronomers, she has spent time observing the night skies at some of the world's most powerful telescopes, tucked away in remote locations such as the mountains of Chile, rural New Mexico and Hawaii's Big Island. These observatories function as small ecosystems (human and scientific), and Levesque gives readers an insider's tour of their protocols and quirks.

Recent advances in telescope technology have allowed astronomers to observe the skies from the comfort of home and collect mind-boggling amounts of data, but the field still relies on human skills that can't be replicated by a machine. Perhaps more importantly, the study of the skies is predicated on wonder--and even the best telescopes can only note and demarcate data.

Warm, engaging and packed with highly accessible science, The Last Stargazers is thoroughly entertaining and an impetus for readers to take up a little stargazing of their own. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Ellie's Voice: or Trööömmmpffff abounds with music, and not just in terms of its subject matter. If illustrations could make noise, then Piret Raud's art would sing.

Ellie, a bird who lives by the sea, laments that she alone doesn't have a voice--"Even the rain sings when it falls." When the waves wash a horn ashore (it resembles an outsize shofar--at least at first), Ellie is elated. The noise that she makes with the horn, while non-euphonious (Trööömmmpffff!), summons appreciative animals from near and far.

Their cheers are interrupted by Albert the fish, who reports that the horn is missed by its rightful owner: "Duke Junior just isn't himself anymore without it!" Ellie is mortified: "Imagine that--Trööömmmpffff! wasn't her voice at all, but belonged to someone else!" After a long search, Ellie finds Duke Junior and gives him back his horn, which he proceeds to play marvelously: "The noise that Duke Junior made with the horn wasn't Trööömmmpffff, but was music" that "contained all the things Ellie thought and felt."

Ellie's Voice will likely give readers, too, the feels and something to think about. Estonian author/illustrator Raud's parable of self-acceptance, which features intricate black-and-white images of egg-shaped and otherwise oblong animals built with careful lines and pointillistic dots, harbors some applause-worthy sight gags. For one: the corpulent, big-eared and noseless Duke Junior isn't initially an identifiable creature; that he's an elephant becomes apparent only when he lifts the trunk-like horn to his face. No wonder he wasn't "himself" without it! --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author