"Hope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummy discount brands," Dellarobia Turnbow thinks as she hikes up the Tennessee mountain behind her ranch house one autumn day, "and the heart had just one instruction left: run." What happens next, in Barbara Kingsolver's eighth novel, Flight Behavior, alters Dellarobia's life, with ripples extending far beyond the valley.

Like Dellarobia, fleeing into the unknown, thousands of monarch butterflies hang from the trees, a spectacle like "a lake of fire" foreign to this hardscrabble sheep farm. She takes it as a sign and hurries home, awed by her discovery--but soon learns about her father-in-law's agreement with a logging company to clear-cut the mountain. News of the butterfly influx spreads, drawing an entomologist from New Mexico who invites Dellarobia to help research the phenomenon and encourages her intellect, suppressed since her hasty marriage to Cub at 17.

Wintering butterflies are just one oddity this year; it rained all summer and December feels like "the season of burst and leaky clouds." Climate change is the newest in a lifetime of struggles for these Appalachian folks, and Kingsolver brings them vividly to life: upbeat best friend Dovey, with her texted church signs ("Get right or get left!"); hapless Cub, still obeying his domineering parents; Bobby, the charismatic "no-hell" young preacher; and especially Dellarobia, smart and good-humored, loving and determined, who eventually charts a new flight plan of her own. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller

Prosperous Friends is a beautifully painted picture of a very ugly couple. The ugliness isn't physical. In fact, Ned and Isabel Bourne are both attractive; they are young, they are writers, they are of indeterminate means and they travel the world. But the Bournes' outwardly glamorous life is rotted--beautifully, elegantly, descriptively rotted--by their yawning emotional emptiness and destructive disregard for one another.

The progressively nasty implosion of the Bournes' marriage is presented by Christine Schutt (All Souls), an author known for the strange poetry and intimacy of her writing. In her hands, what could have been a frankly tiresome novel about self-involved, self-loathing, undeservedly affluent people and the ways they hurt each other daily becomes a compelling, almost voyeuristic, study of two complicated relationships.

The second, older couple is Clive and Dinah Harris, who grant the Bournes use of their empty house in coastal Maine. Clive is a celebrated, arrogant painter with whom Isabel has had a strange and unsatisfying affair; Dinah is a poet who, in all her underappreciated graciousness, may be the book's only appealing character. The four of them seem to lack connection, but Clive and Dinah's marriage appears to work--while Ned and Isabel are just doomed.

Written in a dreamy, fragmented style highlighted by frequent shifts in perspective, this is not a book to read if you seek sympathetic characters or a satisfying, conventional plot. But if you want to get lost in writing rich with ringing, sensual descriptions--and observe superficially successful lives you won't envy--drop in on Prosperous Friends. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice

Peter Mayle is part tour guide and part food critic. In The Marseille Caper, he weaves a plausible plot around sleuth Sam Levitt (introduced in Anything Considered) and the gorgeous Elena Morales.

Ultra-wealthy Francis Reboul has called Sam from Los Angeles to help him win the bid on a hotly contested piece of waterfront real estate in Marseille. The catch? Reboul's involvement must remain secret because Patrimonio, the man who heads the committee that will decide the winner, is not a friend of Reboul. After the dummy corporation set up with Sam as its representative wins the contract, Reboul explains, it will somehow mysteriously fall upon bad financial times and he'll swoop in and bail it out. By that time, his presence--and his money--will not be disputed. Sam's group contends for the property against Lord Wapping, who needs this contract to continue his gilded lifestyle.

Reboul's plan--terraced low-rise apartments, retail and a marina--is intended for locals, not tourists. Lord Wapping, on the other hand, envisions a glass and steel high-rise. The committee favors Reboul's plan, endangering Patrimonio's lucrative relationship with Lord Wapping, to whom he has promised success.

Wapping can see the development project slipping away from him, so he puts both money and thugs into play. Danger and intrigue proliferate as Wapping becomes more and more desperate. Before the satisfying conclusion, we have had a Mayle-led tour and history lesson through Marseille and the surrounding area, dined fashionably and simply, sampled grand vintages and eschewed, with Elena, a delicacy made of sheep's intestines. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

When the film version of Dashiell Hammett's first and only Nick and Nora Charles novel, The Thin Man, became a hit for MGM, the studio begged him for more. The contract they offered was substantial enough (in the post-Depression late 1930s) that Hammett stopped drinking long enough to write two novellas, After the Thin Man (1935) and Another Thin Man (1938).

These stories, which remained unpublished for nearly three-quarters of a century, are only slightly more substantial than pure screenplay or play, consisting primarily of dialogue, sets, some descriptions and very little reflective prose. But his trademark tight, intriguing plots and sharp dialogue did the trick. Hammett had broken new ground with The Thin Man by mixing comedy with intrigue and social fiction with crime fiction, with a hedonistic hero who was also a disciplined detective.

Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett do a very good job of describing how Hammett's original stories were changed and altered to suit the screen. They also include one more story outline, but it's a weak effort that clearly shows how fed up Hammett was by then; as he himself once said of Nick and Nora, "nobody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters." Nevertheless, Thin Man fans will find these recovered stories welcome reading. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Caitlin Stansbury and Heidi Shink's witty Wineocology opens with a promise to use wine as "a catalyst to sharpen and enhance the way you use your senses... heightening the way you experience everything that brings you pleasure." Then Stansbury, a sommelier with more than 20 years' experience, confirms that the "mercurial and transporting experience" of wine is about much more than taste. In fact, Wineocology won't address the taste of wine until well after the other four senses have been thoroughly dissected.

Even before that, though, a fascinating history lesson on the Erasian Vitis vinifera grape (the source of 99.998% of all wine) leads to a discussion of how "terroir" (earth, climate and topography) affect the color, aroma, taste and feel of the wine, and from there to the process of vinification--including why grapes were crushed underfoot for so long and why one bottle of wine can hold so many disparate scents.

However, the heart of Wineocology is Stansbury's "Simple Sommelier System," a "workout regimen for your eyes, nose, and mouth" that brings a zen-like attention to each sense, from how a wine's color, clarity and cling reveal how much time the grapes spent in the sun to what the nose imparts about its condition, concentration and complexity, as well as how texture, temperature and taste reveal the balance of sugar, acid, tannins and alcohol in each vintage.

Wineocology would be an entertaining and informative gift for any oenophile. --Kristen Galles blogger at Book Club Classics

Meet Anna Goldfarb: 30-something, grad school-educated, unemployed and living with her parents. While all of her friends are getting jobs, getting married and generally getting on with the business of adulthood, Goldfarb can't seem to nail down a job or even a direction. Not one to let an empty bank account and family interventions get her down, Anna simultaneously exercises her two greatest talents--dating short men and dissecting said dating process in hilariously excruciating detail--on the Shmitten Kitten blog and now in Clearly, I Didn't Think This Through.

Goldfarb's preferences don't stop at height (or rather lack of it; suitors above 5'10" need not apply); while her mother would love to see her settled with a Jewish doctor, Goldfarb is more impressed by a man's ability to recite sitcom theme song lyrics or justify a choice of favorite dinosaur over his personality or career choice. The result is a never-ending train wreck of man-children, commitmentphobes and garden-variety jerks that leaves the reader helplessly cackling at Goldfarb's dating trench anecdotes and spot-on analyses of her beaus and herself.

While the reader will occasionally wish for the opportunity to sit Goldfarb down and have a serious discussion about her life choices, beneath her comedic mishaps lies the voice of a generation. Like many young people, she faces the dilemma of what do when the advised route of getting a higher education yields no results. Chatty, funny and timely, her memoir is sure to amuse and touch an audience beyond her regular blog readers. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads

Larry McMurtry is best known for his fascinating stories of the American West. In Custer, he draws on an extensive personal collection of memorabilia and other references as he delves into the life of General George Armstrong Custer, and his famous last stand at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Although he was reluctant at first to tackle yet another look at "Long Hair" (as the Cheyenne called Custer), given so many books on the subject already, McMurtry's expertise is evident in this short biography of the stubborn and complex man. From Custer's dismal record at West Point and his ambitious rise through the ranks during the Civil War to the final moments (or what is known of them) at the Little Big Horn, McMurtry offers readers a well-defined life study--richly illustrated with many paintings and newspaper clippings. Two hundred and sixty men died as a result of tactical mistakes brought on by Custer's ambition--yet he still became larger than life after his death, thanks in part to the rapid spread of the news via telegraph.

Little Big Horn was "really the beginning of the end for Native American culture, while at least allowing them [the Indians] one last surge of native pride," McMurty writes. "Long Hair casually underestimated them, and, by golly, they showed him." As McMurtry adeptly shows, Custer may have the last laugh, as his name is still recalled while those of the Cheyenne and Sioux at the battle have all but disappeared. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

In 2011, Tim Crothers wrote about Phiona Mutesi, a teenage girl from the largest slum in Kampala, Uganda's capital city, who was ranked second among the nation's women chess players, for ESPN the Magazine. She is, he said, "the ultimate underdog. To be African is to be an underdog in the world. To be Ugandan is to be an underdog in Africa. To be from Katwe is to be an underdog in Uganda. To be a girl is to be an underdog in Katwe."

The Queen of Katwe expands that article to book length, enabling Crothers to probe into Phiona's background family. He also tells us about Phiona's mentor, Robert Katende, an evangelical missionary who started a youth outreach in Katwe.

Phiona followed her brother to the chess club and became fascinated by the game, emerging as one of the group's fiercest players. She was sent to the women's national tournament to gain experience competing against highly skilled players; she qualified for international competition and could have been the Ugandan champion if she hadn't given away a victory to help a teammate.

Chess has shown Phiona a world beyond Katwe--where one person can have an entire mattress to herself--but it hasn't provided her with a full escape. Returning home after winning her first tournament in another country, the young champion's main concern was whether her family would have enough food for breakfast the next morning. By the end of The Queen of Katwe, you'll join the ranks of those rooting for her success. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

The Barbarous Years is the third volume in historian Bernard Bailyn's account of the growth of British North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, which includes the Pulitzer-winning Voyagers to the West. In this book, Bailyn sets the settlement of British North America within the context of both the Native American cultures and political tensions in Europe. He gives as much importance to Powhattan's expansionist policies in Virginia as to the Dutch rebellion against Spain, the Thirty Years War and England's subjugation of Ireland. The resulting "conflict of civilizations" occurs on many fronts over nearly a century of brutal encounters not just between European settlers and native peoples, but among the Europeans themselves.

In addition to what Bailyn argues is a "single, continuous Euro-Indian war" from 1607 through the 1670s, settlers suffered continuous and destabilizing conflicts within and between the colonies. British settlers found themselves at odds with the Dutch, Finns, Swedes, Walloons, Germans, Danes and French Huguenots over religion, culture and commerce. Large-scale landowners of all nationalities competed with both small planters and land-poor freedmen.

Bailyn's style is a successful balancing act between erudition and storytelling, large-scale history and telling detail. The general framework and many of the characters in Bailyn's stories are well known to anyone with a basic knowledge of early American history; the details are not. Poised as a refutation of what Bailyn describes as "gentrified" histories of the early colonies, The Barbarous Years is a blood-soaked--and illuminating--version of a familiar story. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Alison Pace has walked the canine storyline through several novels, but this doesn't detract from her first book of essays, which once again rely on dog tales. Readers met Carlie, a West Highland white terrier, in City Dog; now, Pace's autobiographical stories reveal how the real Carlie came into her life in You Tell Your Dog First.

From the prologue, in which Pace lovingly describes her family pets from the day she was born through the present, it's obvious she's a dog person in need of a dog. In New York City, though, the first step to dog ownership is a dog-friendly apartment, and even a non-city-dweller can relate to Pace's house hunting stories. At last, she meets and claims Carlie, and begins to live the maxim her father offers: "It's wonderful, isn't it, the way that dogs connect you to the world."

Carlie and Allison make friends in their daily Central Park outings; one Westie turns out to be Carlie's half-brother, one dog walker becomes the author's therapist. Romance might blossom with a fellow dog-lover--or not. Pace unself-consciously describes her date with the obsessive master of two Chinese Cresteds ("Do I talk to Carlie like that?" she wonders), while Carlie, who bares her teeth at another date, shows good instincts ("You were right all along!" Pace tells her).

Heartwarming and funny, these 18 essays reflect Pace's optimism, and zip by as fast as an off-leash Westie. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller

Young animal lovers and science fans will glom onto this paper-over-board information book, brimming with facts and humor.

An inviting design allows readers to dip in and out or read straight through the profiles of 50 fascinating creatures, which appear in alphabetical order. Each creature's treatment gives the scientific name, the Kingdom, Phylum, Class, etc., a map of its habitat, a brief description and fun factoid, plus a picture of the creature with a scale of inches or feet. The factoids might be his "short poem" tributes to animals of land, sea and sky (the bilby, blobfish, dugong, etc.), or it might be more visual--such as mapping out a process exclusive to the creature. A series of images depicts the regeneration of the axolotl's tail, for instance. For the Chinese giant salamander, which can measure up to six feet, Hearst delivers a playful "Pop Quiz," and for the platypus he lists "Platyfacts" (e.g., "The platypus bill is rubbery and flexible. It is not recyclable"). Jelmer Noordeman's artwork illustrates each animal with scientific accuracy, while playing up its unusual feature, such as the blobfish at rest on land, when gravity pulls its jellylike features into a decrepit-old-man grimace.

Hearst brings extreme situations into a child's realm, such as his comparison of a pair of male giraffe-necked weevils fighting to "two excavator construction vehicles at war." With its quirky facts and creatures and the sense of a world waiting to be revealed, this book may well inspire a new generation of budding scientists. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

The cover image of a parrot snake about to strike is just one of the stunning photographs in this breathtaking volume from veteran Nic Bishop. These pictures together with brief blocks of meaty facts set this book about reptiles a cut above the rest.

From the cozy curled-up green tree python, looking quite benign at rest (and found primarily in Australia), to the venomous feathered bush viper of Africa with huge light green scales, these reptiles' looks are as diverse as their wide-ranging habitats. A gorgeous photo of a yellow anaconda, slinking through the water, makes a sharp contrast to the Asian sand viper hiding on the desert floor, yet both lie in wait to ambush their prey. One striking photo of an African egg-eating snake depicts the creature after the egg has just cleared its mouth. (A closing author's note says this was Nic Bishop's most challenging photograph to take; he had to try four different snakes.) Many snakes eat only a few times a year.

Bishop uses a sunset image of a king snake from North America, with its hundreds of touch sensors under the skin, and an emerald tree boa about to prey upon an opossum, which it located through heat-seeking pits in its mouth, to demonstrate different ways snakes compensate for poor vision. Children will pick up this book for the striking photographs and stay for the fascinating facts. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Debut author Fiona Paul transports readers to Renaissance Venice to witness a mystery both sensational and dangerous in this launch to the Secrets of the Eternal Rose series.
When Cassandra Caravello visits the crypt of Liviana, a contessa from one of Venice's most prominent families, she finds her fair-haired friend's body is missing. In its place is a raven-haired corpse with an X carved over her heart. Cass also finds Falco inside the crypt, an artist who sleeps in graveyards and claims to disturb the dead to learn more about life. The two spend their nights traveling through canals into Venice, a city of human madness, to investigate these murders before the predator can get his hands on Cass.

Cass has been promised to Luca da Peraga for marriage, but the fiancé she never loved has been away for three years. So she gives in to the excitement of Falco. Falco gestures to paint an entire chapel inspired by Cass, and readers will become rapturous whenever the two are on the same page. Their exploits take them through Venetian graveyards, districts with courtesans, a masquerade ball and canals where "evil flows silently among us like venom," all described with lavish prose.

Fiona Paul stocks her historical thriller with red herrings to divert readers from unmasking the villain, right up until the bold conclusion, which hints at a secret order in the sequel, Belladonna, due out next July. --Adam Silvera, reviewer and former bookseller