Sarah Pearse's scenic thriller The Sanatorium is set in a tuberculosis sanatorium turned five-star hotel in the Swiss Alps resort of Crans-Montana. Thanks to Pearse's descriptive powers and taste for the macabre, her debut will give readers the impression of looking through a design magazine guest edited by Vincent Price.

Elin Warner and her boyfriend, Will, are at Le Sommet for an engagement party for Elin's brother, Isaac, and Elin's childhood friend Laure, who works at the newly opened hotel. Will, an architect, is smitten with the place, whose decor includes glass cases displaying medical artifacts from the former sanatorium. Elin isn't sold: "This juxtaposition... it's chilling. Institution butting up against beauty." Her uneasiness grows when Isaac tells her that the hotel's principal architect went missing several years earlier, and her misgivings are flat-out validated the next morning, when Isaac announces that Laure has vanished. Elin, a British police detective on leave following a traumatic case, gets sleuthing--something made all the more difficult when a snowstorm traps everyone at the hotel.

When it's not calling to mind Architectural Digest, The Sanatorium can read like an issue of Psychology Today. Pearse's characters doggedly explore the interpersonal dynamics that she has constructed for them, especially a long-unresolved issue between Elin and Isaac. There's also the anguishing matter of whether the panic-attack-prone Elin should return to her job. The novel's psychologically focused passages can be dense, but readers coming out the other side will savor the intricate plotting, idiosyncratic set dressing and snow-covered suspense. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

In actor and writer Ethan Hawke's thoughtful and atmospheric A Bright Ray of Darkness, a man struggles to come to terms with his crumbling marriage, fatherhood and his own desires. William Harding, Hawke's 21-year-old protagonist from his debut novel, The Hottest State (1996), returns as a 32-year-old actor about to make his Broadway debut as Hotspur in Henry IV. Meanwhile, his marriage is undergoing a public implosion as his wife leaves him in the wake of his infidelity. While William grapples with his persistent (and fruitless) hope that his wife will return to him, he satisfies his impulses for sex and female comfort with one-night stands and half-realized affairs. Meanwhile, Henry IV and William's eccentric fellow actors become his center of gravity as he seeks solace through the transportive power of acting.

From the start, Hawke's narrative voice creates a compelling atmosphere of disaffected self-assuredness that barely conceals his protagonist's actual but submerged despair. William's first-person voice keeps the story of his life seeming simple and obvious, even when he tumbles into self-loathing and hopeless fantasies. The book becomes a reflection of William's "blissful state of melancholy" while allowing the reader to see beyond William's self-delusions. Nevertheless, it is Hawke's descriptions of being an embodied actor transcending himself that truly shine. In William's scenes onstage, readers can forget the plot's tribulations and glimpse how acting, like reading, can allow one to slip into the bodies, voices and feelings of others. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Syed M. Masood's boldly entertaining second novel, The Bad Muslim Discount, is a fresh, animated addition to post-9/11 literature exploring Islam and Muslims in the U.S. Set in San Francisco in 2016, the story centers on the intriguing dynamic between dual narrators as it explores the ways individuals and communities use religion to exert control over one another.

Anvar is a free-spirited Pakistani-American lawyer with an irreverence toward religion and other serious topics that drives his mother to distraction. For Azza, an illegal alien from Baghdad, her father's Islam is a straitjacket. She is forced to wear a burka covering all but her stunning green eyes and is pursued by a violent suitor named Qaiz, whose exaggerated piety impresses her father. Neighbors in the same apartment complex, Azza initiates a sexually charged relationship with Anvar. When the pressure to marry Qaiz becomes unbearable, she unleashes a poorly thought-out plan of revenge against him that inadvertently leads to officers from Homeland Security knocking on Anvar's door.

Masood (More than Just a Pretty Face) cleverly deploys comic relief to offset some of the darker themes uncovered by his absorbing, fast-paced plot. The diverse supporting cast includes a jolly landlord who offers legally dubious rent rebates to those deemed to be "good Muslims"; a grandmother who dispenses life advice during marathon games of checkers; and the beautiful Zuha, Anvar's true love.

Exploring Islamic norms across the geographical spectrum, The Bad Muslim Discount offers readers multidimensional insight into the plurality of Muslims who contribute a textural richness to the American tapestry. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer

The fourth world-weary Cold War spy novel from Paul Vidich, set in the unstable Soviet Union of the mid-1980s, isn't the macho, techno-thriller adventure one might expect of a book called The Mercenary. Instead, it's a tense and pained study of the loneliness of spycraft, the toll of maintaining dual identities and the terror of living a life where everyone around you might secretly be playing the same game. Vidich's Cold War echoes that of Alan Furst or even John le Carré, a shifting labyrinth of dangers both violent and existential.

Vidich's mercenary is a Russian-born and KGB-trained American dispatched by the CIA to Moscow to exfiltrate a Soviet military officer. Readers expecting the usual drop points, double crosses and veiled chatter with enemies at embassy soirees will be satisfied. The story sprawls out to include an uncertain romance, transfers of power in the Kremlin, secret court proceedings, rumors of moles on both sides and--inevitably--a border crossing that's almost unbearably suspenseful.

But Vidich's tight plotting and focused, polished prose keeps The Mercenary, like its predecessors The Coldest Warrior and The Good Assassin, concise and quick moving, despite the complexity of the story. His attentiveness to the disorienting misery of undercover work, the divided loyalties and threats to identity, power the narrative rather than slow it down. His hero's every interaction is fraught with danger that movie-style violent heroics would only make worse. Vidich dramatizes that dread and that humanity with elegance. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor

Lumberjanes co-author Kat Leyh maroons three mermaids on land with messy, hilarious results in her graphic novel Thirsty Mermaids.

Eez, Tooth and Pearl just want to drink some human liquor they found in a sunken ship, but that proves difficult under the sea, so they decide on a whim to let Eez turn them all into humans temporarily. After stumbling around like a day-drunk Little Mermaid, they steal some clothes and a credit card and achieve their goal at an aptly named bar--the Thirsty Mermaid.

The next morning brings new meaning to dehydration as the friends discover the horrors of hangovers and realize that Eez doesn't know how to turn them back into mermaids. Luckily, they're rescued by their bartender from the previous night, Vivi. Though baffled by their inability to act like normal humans, she takes them in. It's not until her sister reminds Vivi of her tendency to let people walk all over her that Vivi tells the three mermaids they need to earn their keep, a mandate that sets off a new series of misadventures.

The graphic novel is broken roughly into five parts, with headings like "The Hangover" and "Y'all Need Jobs," but it's one smooth narrative, even if the characters wreak near-constant havoc. Thirsty Mermaids is full of profanity, bawdy jokes and commentary on capitalism, but it's also a very queer story about the power of acceptance and finding family, however that may happen. A diverse LGBTQ+ cast, a distinctive art style and a bighearted message make this book a standout. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels

Jeremy Atherton Lin brings a wise, wry voice to his masterful Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. This thoughtful study is part memoir, part research project, part travelogue and a large part classic essay-as-assay, seeking answers on the page. His subtitle indicates a wondering: Why did we go out? The answers are various; they change over time and of course are personal for Lin, but he progresses toward an understanding of what the gay bar really was, is and might be. "The question arises as to what distinguishes an enclave from a quarantine, and whether either is any longer necessary." If gay no longer needs a bar, is this a victory, or a loss?

Gay Bar is a personal history and a history in the traditional, researched sense: it relates Lin's coming-of-age as well as a world of gay bars, from the scintillating to the sordid, dating back hundreds of years. Seven sections are devoted to locations--bars or neighborhoods--and represent epochs, both in Lin's life and in the lifetime of the gay bar. Lin's writing is consistently intriguing, descriptive and lovely: "the cranes and glassy high rises hover like chaperones." As narrator he is by turns pensive, funny, self-deprecating, exasperated and reverent; he can be delightfully suggestive. "A pipe spilled chlorinated water. The brickwork had grown mossy down the length of its trajectory, like a viridescent trail-to-adventure on the building's belly." Gay Bar is enriched by the voices of others--thinkers in history, philosophy, literature and queer theory--but Lin never loses his own. This exploration is personal, deeply researched, smart and essential. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Buddhist teacher Cuong Lu opens Wait: A Love Letter to Those in Despair with his memory of witnessing a man being shot as he and his family left Vietnam. The experience opened him up to the violence in the world, and to the suffering at the heart of the violence and the individuals who perpetrate it. Lu emphasizes that hatred and anger do not just lead to actions that harm others; they harm people who cause violence as well. Wait is short, but powerful and provocative throughout. Lu suggests that the way to end violence is to first end violence within the self, and to live with more understanding for others--and for oneself, as "the moment the violence stops, peace is possible."

Wait is composed of short meditations for chapters with poetry interspersed, and it invites readers to try to experience a new way of living by understanding themselves as not alone, but part of a much greater world and society. Lu does not ask his readers to ignore pain and suffering but instead to see how suffering can open the individual to a more connected existence, in celebration of the connection life has to offer. This book is a gift for a new year, an inspiration to take the hardships of 2020 and not recast them, but use those moments of pain, and others, to find renewal through individual experiences of despair. Most importantly, Lu offers, to those who need it, the knowledge that pain and despair are not the end, but there can be something waiting on the other side. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Trained as an anesthesiologist, Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen, now a member of the Faculty of Main Medicine at the Royal College of Anesthetists in London, is an expert in pain. With An Anatomy of Pain, he thoughtfully illuminates how little is known about how it is experienced, understood and treated in modern medicine. Lalkhen focuses on how the misunderstandings of pain's inner workings, by both medical professionals and people experiencing it, have shaped various treatments of it, including patterns in prescriptions and accidental solutions that might cause relief, but are not always a cure.

Lalkhen overall seeks to reform readers' understanding of pain. It is not always due to singular or acute experiences, but rather "a warning system" for the body that people can learn and relearn to respond to. It is, moreover, "a complex experience and not one over which we have mastery, neither when it has been triggered due to injury nor when it has become chronic pain." His text takes readers through histories of the conceptualization of pain in different cultures, various categorizations of pain and approaches to their treatments, and treatments including opiates, injected treatments and spinal cord stimulators. Overall, Lalkhen advocates for a multipronged approach that relies less on direct, singular interventions, and more on approaches that combine physiotherapeutical, medical and psychological treatments. As he writes, pain is, after all, "both a sensory and an emotional experience.... It is only by addressing the complete experience of pain that we can hope to manage pain and alleviate suffering." --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

The younger-sibling lament "I miss all the fun" gets a fresh, visually flourishing workup in Kallie George and Elly MacKay's The Secret Fawn, in which a girl finds a way to redress the perceived injustice of having been born second.

"This morning, Mama saw a deer. Dad and Sara saw it too./ But I didn't.... I always miss everything." It's a bitter pill for a kid who wasn't tall enough to pick the first apple from a tree--her older sister had that honor. And guess which sister was robbed of the chance to see some shooting stars because of her early bedtime?

Determined to spot that deer, the narrator heads outside and starts looking. After several false alarms--she sees a flash of brown, but it's only a dog, and so on--she plunks down on the grass and waits. Her patience is rewarded with a sight more meaningful than a deer: "A fawn.... Quiet as a whisper. Little like me."

George (Wings of Olympus) imbues The Secret Fawn with an air of enchantment, and yet to create her dazzling art, MacKay (Red Sky at Night) turns to media no more mystical than ink on paper. The book's sun-kissed earth tones seem to sit on the page in three dimensions, practically inviting the reader to touch, say, a whorl of dog fur. The pixie-dusted mood lingers when the girl returns home, where her mother asks if she has seen the deer. The girl shakes her head--"Because I didn't," she thinks. "I saw its fawn." Forsaking bragging rights: Isn't that a mark of maturity? --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

Relationships are the cornerstone of Crystal Maldonado's uplifting YA debut, but it's the bond with self that makes 16-year-old Charlie Vega an authentically drawn, charismatic protagonist.

"As a family," Charlie recalls, "we were fat, and maybe we didn't love that... but we accepted it." Then, when Charlie was 13, her proudly Puerto Rican father died. By 14, her white mother, who had previously delighted in cooking Puerto Rican-fare better than Charlie's father, "shrank"--and Charlie didn't. The rift that had always been present between the two widened as her mother dove into meal-replacement shakes and Charlie immersed herself in online writing communities, feminism and the fat acceptance movement. Charlie desperately wants to accept herself as is but finds it difficult to move past the perfect ideal of thinness. Her best friend, Amelia, "is the walking embodiment of Black excellence" and Charlie feels "anxious and insecure" next to her. It doesn't help that boys keep trying to use Charlie to get to Amelia. On top of her feelings of loss and low self-esteem, Charlie has also never been kissed. And so, when a young man who likes her enters the scene, she throws herself wholly into the relationship, to the detriment of others.

Maldonado created such a realistic teenager by, in her words, "highlighting examples of how the world treats Charlie so that readers aren't just hearing the internal pressure that Charlie is applying to herself, but also seeing the external pressure." Charlie's doubts, frustrations, fears, joys, excitements... all are graphically detailed to allow readers a painfully clear view of her experience. Fat Chance, Charlie Vega is an utterly heartwarming story of love--of friends, of family, of romance and, most importantly, of oneself. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness