Côte d'Ivoire author Véronique Tadjo (Far from My Father) could not have known how prescient her novel, originally published in France in 2017, would be just a few years later when it was translated for English readers. In the Company of Men gives polyphonic voice to those affected by the 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak that ravaged populations in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

In an unnamed village, a girl is sent away to the city with her father's ominous warning, "Don't ever come back here," which proves to be both a death sentence and the chance to be her family's sole survivor. Just a month before, "two mischievous young boys"--her brothers--went hunting, shot and roasted their prey, not realizing the consequences of eating bats infected with an insatiable virus. Disease spreads, and the whispering tree--the "Baobab, the first tree, the everlasting tree"--observes as it has done for centuries, bearing witness to humans' history of need and joy, celebration and rage, greed and kindness, birth and death. As Ebola rages, the tree watches the horrific devastation, with the promise, "I want to tell their stories."

Tadjo highlights healers, the sickened, parents, orphans, pariahs. Most die, but some survive; in these most desperate situations, some retain their humanity, others do not. Beyond "the company of men," Tadjo allows even the virus itself, the contagion-carrying bats and, once more, the whispering tree to speak. She interweaves history, myth and poetry with real life-inspired testimony. While her novel might be light in page count, its lingering significance highlights the human(e) reactions in the face of impossible, fatal situations. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

In an engrossing novel that subverts all preconceptions of feminism, ambition and success, Jen Silverman (The Island Dwellers) masterfully steers a flawed narrator to a revelatory conclusion--one that, miraculously, never bends to tropes.

In We Play Ourselves, Cass is the Next Big Thing in the theater world, a young queer playwright on the cusp of enormous success. After winning the prestigious--and well-paying--Lansing Award, all she needs is a good review in the New York Times for her absurdist feminist play to soar. But putting together an Off-Broadway show proves more spellbinding than she'd anticipated, and she falls in love with not only her co-creator but also with the glimmer of power her career has finally unearthed. When the Times review comes out and it's blistering, Cass finds herself embroiled in a bitter and humiliating scandal, and she runs away to Los Angeles to hide out till things cool off. Instead, she meets filmmaker Caroline, whose upcoming quasi-documentary on a female fight club might just be Cass's ticket back into the spotlight. But as Cass gets to know the girls at the heart of the film, she starts to understand the cost of success--and the strength of starting over. When one of the girls disappears, she can no longer ignore her moral obligation to the truth.

We Play Ourselves ends with a tremendous redemption scene, one so bizarre and brilliant it will leave readers puzzling over it for weeks. This is a funny, heart-warming, yet deeply unexpected story that deserves attention. --Lauren Puckett, freelance writer

The Power Couple by Alex Berenson is an intriguing marriage drama embedded within an international thriller. It spotlights the kidnapping of an FBI agent's daughter in Barcelona by a handsome French stranger with possible connections to the Russians.

Rebecca and Brian Unsworth, married for 20 rocky years, both fantasize about terminating their turbulent union while keeping up appearances for the sake of their teenage children, Kira and Toby. Rebecca's all-consuming job as a counterterrorism agent for the FBI gives her more financial clout in the marriage until Brian, working as a coder for the National Security Administration, sells his casino app for $2 million. The windfall irons out some of the creases in their relationship, but the real test comes when Kira is abducted during a family vacation in Barcelona. In their efforts to find Kira--an international operation involving Spain's intelligence agency--the Unsworths worry that their high-profile jobs have left their children vulnerable to malevolent foreign actors. The truth will challenge them beyond anything they could have imagined.

A celebrated veteran of the thriller genre, Berenson (The Shadow Patrol; The Deceivers) is masterful at shifting the story's narration between Rebecca, Brian and Kira, building tantalizing suspense amid observations of how a promising marriage became weighed down by secrets and hostility. The chapters narrated by Kira capture her terrifying days in captivity with fast-paced, heart-thumping energy.

Bursting with tension, The Power Couple picks up speed and hurtles toward a shocking conclusion. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer

Award-winning novelist Elizabeth Knox's 17th title is genre-bending, full of action and sometimes hard to pin down, but, ultimately, The Absolute Book is an epic fantasy for the current moment, crossing continents and worlds.

The story opens with the murder of Taryn Cornick's sister and a mysterious revenge, and follows Taryn--now the author of an esteemed book about threats to libraries and the things they hold--on a journey to track down a mysterious scroll box known as the Firestarter, blamed for many library fires, including one in her own grandparents' library. But Taryn never dreamed that the events set off by her grief and anger at losing her sister would lead her beyond the edges of the world itself.

With a cold case, an undiagnosable illness, several mysteries, a detective who cannot let past events stay in the past, and a strong but simultaneously subtle bent toward ecocriticism, Knox (The Vintner's Luck) presents a thriller hybrid, a cop drama woven through a literary and historical mystery. She threads the contemporary present into a new take on the world of the Sidhe with hints of Norse mythology, and a hodgepodge of other legends and stories thrown into the mix. Yet the power Knox plays with most is the idea of writing things down, of books, the inherent power in different kinds of knowledge, and who is allowed to speak through it. The Absolute Book is a layered, fascinating, alluring mediation in the genre of epic fantasy, crafted by a master storyteller. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

The Akashic Noir series, begun in 2004, collected noir short stories set in cities around the world. Now Akashic has launched a series of speculative fiction anthologies similarly set in specific cities, beginning with Speculative Los Angeles, edited by Denise Hamilton, author of the Eve Diamond series.

Each of the 14 stories in Speculative Los Angeles is based in a particular neighborhood, and the stories are organized around four themes: "Changelings, Ghosts, and Parallel Worlds," "Steampunks, Alchemists, and Memory Artists," "A Tear in the Fabric of Reality" and "Cops and Robots in the Future Ruins of LA." While the overall setting ties the collection together, the range of approaches is broad. In the first story, "Antonia and the Stranger Who Came to Rancho Los Feliz" by Lisa Morton, an idyllic, pastoral alternate-future L.A. is invaded by refugees from an apocalyptic high-tech parallel universe. In Aimee Bender's "Maintenance," the woolly mammoths displayed outside the La Brea Tar Pits mysteriously vanish. Of course, some stories riff on L.A.'s most iconic industry: in "Walk of Fame" by Duane Swierczynski, psychic terrorists target celebrities, and in "Peak TV" by Ben H. Winters, the showrunner of a controversial hit show about teenage suicide is the victim of ghostly revenge.

As with the Noir series, the stories have added resonance for readers familiar with the locations, but Los Angeles is a particularly appropriate and broadly appealing place to begin the series, given its outsized role in the American imagination. --Linda Lombardi, writer and editor

Bjorn Dihle was born and raised in the outdoors of Alaska, where he has worked for years as a brown (or grizzly) bear viewing guide. A Shape in the Dark: Living and Dying with Brown Bears is his lovely, thoughtful study of the relationship between humans and this evocative, storied species.

"There have been times I almost hated bears," he writes. "Like most feelings of hostility, mine were rooted in fear. Yet, there is no place I love more than grizzly country, and no animal has intrigued and challenged me more than the bear." Moving around in time, Dihle tells his own stories of encounters, from the first brown bear he ever saw--a carcass in a salmon stream when the author was four or five years old--through early trailside meetings and learning how to relate to bears, into his career seeking them out, especially on Alaska's Admiralty Island.

A Shape in the Dark is an appealing, accessible memoir and a history of the interplay of bears and humans in the American West. Dihle intersperses his own and his friends' bear encounters with those of Grizzly Adams and Teddy Roosevelt, outlining the evolution of attitudes and policy toward grizzlies. He writes of famous and less famous maulings, the complexities of bear hunting, the role of grizzly bears in native cultures and the impact of climate change on Alaska and its greatest predator.

Quiet, meditative, wise, well informed, A Shape in the Dark is memoir, history and philosophy in one. Dihle's love for his subject is contagious and beautifully conveyed. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, science journalist and science fiction novelist Annalee Newitz (The Future of Another Timeline) leads readers on a fascinating exploration of the rise and fall of cities that were abandoned by their inhabitants, focusing on four of the most spectacular examples: the Neolithic city of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey; Roman Pompeii; Angkor Wat in Cambodia; and the pre-Columbian city Cahokia in modern Illinois near the Mississippi River. In the process, Newitz considers why cities fall, the powerful trope of the "lost city," and what we can learn from the failure of these cities.

The exploration is literal: Newitz visits the ruins of the four cities and meets with archeologists involved in cutting-edge work related to each. Some of the most interesting sections of the book deal with archeologists using new technologies and asking new questions of familiar sources to look beyond the spectacular remains and the leaders who ordered their construction and study the lives of each city's general population.

Newitz makes a convincing argument that while the four cities were very different culturally, they shared common failures resulting from prolonged periods of political instability coupled with environmental crisis--failures that speak to our present. But Four Lost Cities is not a dystopian warning for an age of global warming. Instead, Newitz offers an appealing combination of travel account, historical narrative, hard science and hope. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Essayist, climate activist and nature philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore has spent three decades celebrating the natural world in her writing. Earth's Wild Music, a collection of vivid, lyrical essays, renders her love for nature in striking detail, and urgently calls for its protection against fossil fuels, overdevelopment and other ills.

Moore (Wild Comfort; Great Tide Rising) begins by quoting Mary Oliver, who wrote, "My work is loving the world." Moore notes that "loving the world became more complicated, and rejoicing got harder" as she witnessed the destruction of habitats and the disappearance of wildlife. But Moore, like Oliver, keeps on loving the world, and working for its preservation and flourishing. She divides her narrative into four sections: "Tremble," "Weep," "Awaken" and finally "Sing Out." Each section contains essays highlighting what she loves about marsh and lake and mountain, and elegies for those species or places that have faded out or been destroyed.

Having spent her life hiking, canoeing and otherwise enjoying the natural world, Moore has seen both gradual and sudden changes. She reports on climate change and wildfires, cold nights in sleeping bags, forest walks with her grandsons and years of adventures with her husband, Frank. Many of her essays pick up the theme of music from the book's title: not only birdsong, but ocean waves and glaciers melting and the songs of humpback whales.

Passionate and thoughtful, Moore's essays transport readers to the particular places she loves and urge them to pay attention. Hers is a thoughtful, insistent, necessary voice in the ongoing conversations about how to treat the natural world. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

In David Levithan's absorbing The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S., not only does 11-year-old Lucas not know where his older brother went, he doesn't know why Aidan disappeared at all. There have been no sibling quarrels, no instability in the home, no school bullying... Aidan just vanished.

And then the 12-year-old returns as mysteriously as he left. Lucas finds him in the attic of their home, passed out next to a dresser, with nothing amiss save for a single leaf in Aidan's hair--a leaf that is diamond-shaped, bright blue and surely not of this world. Lucas pockets it and says nothing. The police question the unharmed tween about his whereabouts and receive a baffling answer: Aidan felt a breeze coming from the dresser, peeked inside and found "somewhere else." The police make Narnia jokes, but Aidan is serious--it was another world, there were creatures and languages unfamiliar to him, and he was there about a month by their calendar (six days by ours). The more he's pushed, the more he's made fun of and the more Aidan doubles down on his story.

As with some of his earlier works (Every Day; Boy Meets Boy), Levithan masterfully puts a light speculative touch on this work of (mostly) realistic fiction. Aidan's having to retell his experience moves him to concoct more banal explanations, and his anguish is achingly palpable. But the parents and other adult characters that make up his earthly family are warm, loving and funny--no caricatures or clichés to be found in this portal fantasy set in our side of the portal. --Sarah Hannah Gómez, freelance critic and doctoral candidate, University of Arizona