A first-rate satire, this fiction debut from writer, photographer, and visual consultant Kevin Kwan (I Was Cuba) manages to skewer the habits of both the discreetly and the conspicuously wealthy while posing serious questions about class divides and infusing the narrative with the trials and romanticism of young love. This hilarious send-up of the Asian jet set features good guys and gold-diggers, steely matriarchs and ruthless socialites, all with a heaping cup of opulence and a soupçon of Austenian sensibility.

Meeting your significant other's family for the first time is often a nerve-wracking experience, but for Rachel Chu, a down-to-earth ABC (American Born Chinese) career girl, it’s the shock of her life. Nick comes from one of the wealthiest old-money families in Singapore, and is considered heir apparent to the family fortune. Like any prince, Nick is expected to marry a girl of a certain class, and Rachel finds herself in a viper's nest of resentful young socialites and disdainful female relations.

Meanwhile, Nick's fashion-plate cousin Astrid, the It Girl of Singapore, has her own struggles with the class divide after marrying middle-class Michael, who may be having an affair.

Amid distastefully extravagant stag and hen parties, razor-sharp catty insults, and untold extremes of class snobbery as Rachel and Astrid's worlds spin out of control, disastrous revelations arise that will change the way both women view themselves, their families and their relationships with the men they love.

Kwan has created a stylish and intricate piece of comedy with a tender heart and the habit-forming tendencies of a soap opera. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger, Infinite Reads

Discover: Excessive consumerist culture and the genuine joys and struggles of young couples in love clash in a first-rate satire of first-class life.

Elliott Holt's You Are One of Them opens in 1980s Washington, D.C. Sarah Zuckerman is a troubled child, haunted by those who have left her behind. Her mother, obsessed with the threat of nuclear war, never leaves the house; her father has moved back to England and remarried. When Jenny Jones moves in across the street, Sarah is enchanted: the Joneses are a perfect American family, loving and happy, and Jenny is the perfect best friend. It's Sarah's idea to write a letter to the Soviet premier, asking for peace, but it's Jenny's letter that gets published and answered with an invitation to visit the Soviet Union. After the Joneses return, world-famous Jenny doesn't have time for Sarah any more. Then Jenny is killed in a plane crash, her body never recovered.

Ten years later, as Sarah graduates from college, she gets a letter from a Russian woman who suggests she may know something about Jenny's eventual fate. Their correspondence prompts Sarah to move to Moscow, and as she makes new friends in this strange foreign city, it seems that everyone has possible ties to the KGB. Could Jenny really be among these mysterious Russian women? And how far is Sarah willing to go to reclaim her friendship?

You Are One of Them is part thriller, part elegy, part study of place, as Moscow comes alive and Holt explores themes of lost and missing loves, within its echoes of the real-life story of Samantha Smith and the broader mystique and paranoia of the nuclear era. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Discover: A haunting debut novel that combines a young girl's coming-of-age, a lost friendship and the chill of the Cold War.

Theodora Grace Overman, aka "Teddi," the narrator of Beth Hoffman's Looking for Me, always loved restoring old furniture. As a teenager, this farm girl with a big dream rebelled against her mother's push for secretarial school and ran away from her rural Kentucky home, setting off to Charleston, S.C., where she eventually opens a shop dedicated to the refurbishing of antiques.

"Old furniture speaks to me," says Teddi. "The older it is, the more it has to say." Such is the case with Teddi's life. When the workaholic finds herself successful but still single at the age of 36, she begins to reflect on the lost years while trying to understand the people she left behind: a mother who never understood her daughter's aspirations; a father who returned from war a completely changed man; and an enigmatic younger brother, Josh, whose love of nature and rescuing animals may have led to his mysterious disappearance and a final letter he left behind that read, "Don't come looking for me." 

When Teddi's mother takes ill, Teddi returns home, and strange occurrences indicate Josh might still be alive. Hoffman flashes back to events from Teddi's childhood in the 1960s and '70s, delving into the past in order to shape the contours of these interconnected, yet sadly detached, lives. As in Hoffman's debut novel, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, Southern wit, charm and down-home characters add levity to a story of loss and broken hearts that are ultimately restored with love, hope and remembering. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Discover: A woman confronts the haunted mysteries of her past when she returns to her rural Kentucky home.

Any author who combines wildly disparate topics in one plot takes a risk. The resultant effect is either that of flint and tinder or that of oil and water. Eli Brown (The Great Days) combines a swashbuckling piratical adventure with gourmet cooking, and his risk pays off--the two go together like filet mignon and red burgundy for a scrumptiously entertaining romp on the high seas in the year 1819.

When renowned chef Owen Wedgwood accompanies his longtime employer Lord Ramsey to a business meeting at a seaside summer home, his greatest worry is the condition of the pantry inventory at their destination and his lack of support staff. Although Wedgwood manages to create a fine feast as usual, it turns out to be his master's last: pirates crash the dinner, murder Ramsey at table and take Wedgwood captive. Although he vows to escape, Wedgwood knows how desperate his situation truly is, for his captors are not just any pirates but the crew of the Flying Rose, captained by the ruthless pirate queen Mad Hannah Mabbot. While beautiful, flame-haired Mabbot possesses untold charisma, she rules her crew with an iron hand and a predilection for bloodshed. Furthermore, she will allow Wedgwood to remain alive on one highly specific condition: he must whip up a delicious meal for her every Sunday. Like Scheherazade's stories, each meal will buy Wedgwood more time on this earth. Unfortunately, the Flying Rose's galley has little in common with the well-stocked pantry Wedgwood needs. Weevil-infested flour and hardtack aren't the stuff of gourmet meals. With his life at stake, Wedgwood must draw on his own resourcefulness and the few fresh ingredients he can gather from the sea or the ship's infrequent ventures into port. With little chance of escape, his greatest hope for rescue is Laroche, a privateer hell-bent on blowing Mabbot out of the water.

But Wedgwood slowly learns Captain Mabbot's murderous actions aren't without purpose. Lord Ramsey owed his wealth to a large stake in the Pendleton Trading Company, a tea empire akin to the East India Company, which owes much of its profits to the opium trade choking the life out of China. Mabbot yearns to bring the company down, but first she must catch up to the elusive professional thief known as the Brass Fox, a difficult prospect even when one isn't being pursued by English warships. To make matters worse, the Flying Rose has a saboteur aboard. While he's glad for her troubles at the outset, the more time Wedgwood--whom Mabbot takes to calling "Wedge"--spends with the eccentric captain, the more he comes to understand and sympathize with her. He also begins to forge alliances with her oddball but effective crew: Mr. Apples, an enormous, gruff warrior and devotee of the manly art of knitting; Feng and Bai, Mabbot's twin martial artist bodyguards; and Joshua, the deaf cabin boy who becomes Wedgwood's surrogate son. Eventually, Wedge must choose whose side he's really on: that of a society contributing to the suffering of millions of people, or that of the lawless pirate with whom he's falling in love.

Brown's culinary/piratical epic is meant to be savored like--and if possible, with--a rich meal and a fine bottle of wine. Admittedly "obsessed with food" himself, Brown creates an engrossing first-person narrative as Wedgwood stretches his prowess in the kitchen not merely to stay alive, but because of a deep and enduring passion for the profession of nourishing the body with delicious, wholesome food. The prose particularly shines during Wedgwood's descriptions of his successful meals, such as "basil-beef consomme... with its rainbow sheen of delicate oils trembling on the surface and a flavor that turned the tongue into the very sunlit hill where the bulls snorted and swung their heavy heads." Wedgwood and Mabbot's relationship is nurtured by his respect for her love of food: "When she ate, I saw in her a radiant life, a deep hunger, and an almost pious reflection on each moment." Readers hungrier for action than romance will find plenty to satisfy their appetites as well, with bloody battles, narrow escapes and gunplay galore.

For pure escapist pleasure, Cinnamon and Gunpowder has no match. A word of counsel, though: with passages such as "The saffron warmed all together as sunlight through stained glass blesses a congregation, while the shrimp sauce waved its harlot's kerchief from the periphery," you'll want to have a napkin on hand so you can dab your watering mouth. --Jaclyn Fulwood

As espionage writers go, Charles McCarry (Old Boys, Second Sight) is right up there with the best, and The Shanghai Factor does not disappoint. It keeps the reader wondering: Would the solution have been more apparent if she had been more attentive? McCarry doesn't cheat, though; all the clues are there.

A young American spy is sent to live in Shanghai to work on his Mandarin, absorb the culture and learn to "fit in." He is in the employ of "HQ," a murky U.S. intelligence agency. In a meet-cute bicycle accident, the sexy, mysterious Mei enters his life. That's probably not her real name, and where she goes when she isn't with "Dude," as she calls him, is a mystery--though she's probably related to someone high up in the deadly Guoanbu, the Chinese equivalent of the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security rolled into one.

The enigmatic head of HQ, Luther Burbank (yes, that's really his name), finally gives the rookie spy an assignment, and it's a dandy: go undercover in a massive Chinese conglomerate and learn the secrets of their powerful CEO, Chen Qi, whom HQ believes to be a front man for Guoanbu. The danse macabre among Chinese thugs, Chen Qi, Dude, Mei and various players for both sides is fascinating and puzzling. Many flights between Washington and China, coded meetings, midnight rambles and cat-and-mouse games finally bring understanding to what is really going on, what is at stake and just how fungible the players are. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Discover: McCarry, a master at espionage thrillers, uses Shanghai as a backdrop for the need-to-know activities of intelligence agencies in both China and the United States.

Craig Johnson goes on his ninth trip to the rodeo with Walt Longmire in A Serpent's Tooth. Taking his title from a line in King Lear, Johnson sets Walt off in search of a "thankless child"--Sarah Tisdale--whose teenage son, Cord, has shown up in Durant, Wyo. Sarah left her home in Short Drop to join the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God, a polygamous group that's set up a compound in Walt's home state.

An enormously large cult leader, a man claiming to be the 19th-century lawman Orrin Porter Rockwell and a deadly poet all cross Walt's path in his efforts to reunite Sarah and Cord. And when his search uncovers a high-priced weapons cache as well as a stolen drill bit worth three quarters of a million dollars, Walt's certain this is more than just a "lost boy" case.

While devoted fans of this series wouldn't dream of missing an installment, each book in the Walt Longmire series can easily be read and appreciated independently of the others; A Serpent's Tooth is no different. Johnson employs his trademark humor, many literary allusions, a cast readers can't help but love and Johnson's obvious love of the land he's writing about. Readers will experience the West in all its grandeur while Walt battles the evils trying to encroach upon his beloved county.

Blending the literary novel with the western and the mystery, Craig Johnson continues to deliver exceptional reads. He's not just staying on the bull for eight seconds, Johnson's winning the whole rodeo. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts 

Discover: Walt Longmire and team investigate a suspect polygamous sect in an effort to find a missing woman.

Jussi Adler-Olsen's Danish detective Carl Mørck and his Syrian assistant, Assad, are back with their third Department Q case in A Conspiracy of Faith, taking on an old mystery involving a message in a bottle. The note was written in blood in 1996, and the heading clearly says, "Help," but time and exposure to the elements have obscured the rest.

Mørck, Assad and the department's temporary assistant Yrsa slowly piece together the message. They track down the author's family, but the parents refuse to talk about their son or even confirm whether he is alive.

Despite their silence, the Department Q team discovers a serial killer who preys on the fears of certain religious sects to get away with murder. Mørck and Assad put their lives on the line to confront this cruel and violent man, but will they be in time to save his latest victims?

Adler-Olsen is well known for creating hideous villains, then giving them a background that makes readers almost sympathetic. The killer here is no different, with a horrific childhood that gives his crimes a strong motive. He's not just evil for evil's sake.

The main plot of A Conspiracy of Faith has holes--and several of the subplots seem unnecessary--but Mørck and Assad remain an engaging duo, trying to help sympathetic victims in a disturbing case that's timely in its portraiture of people who use religion to inflict unutterable grief on others. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, writer/editor blogging at Pop Culture Nerd

Discover: A disturbing Danish mystery examines religious zealotry and the psychological ruin it can cause.

Ace Atkins's Quinn Colson novels have been exceptional from the start, but Atkins is finding his groove with the third offering, The Broken Places. He has found that quintessential balance in his portrayal of Sheriff Colson, allowing readers to easily forgive his transgressions because they lead to justice when the law cannot.

Colson has his hands full when three escaped convicts show up in Tibbehah County, Mississippi, to collect stolen money and exact revenge on the man who betrayed them. His predicament becomes personal when he learns the cons are pursuing Jamey Dixon, recently--and questionably--pardoned from his murder conviction. (Dixon also happens to be dating Colson's sister.) As federal agents and a tornado bear down on Tibbehah County, the sheriff races to protect his family and his jurisdiction from impending disaster.

The Broken Places gets its title from Hemingway: "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places." Atkins merges this theme flawlessly with his uses of faith and nature. He simultaneously respects and questions both through the eyes of his hardened and oft-broken hero, Colson, and through Jason, Colson's uncorrupted five-year-old nephew. Whether readers are new to the series or fans from the start, The Broken Places will touch them the way all great novels do, profoundly. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Discover: Ace Atkins throws criminals, lawmen and clergy together in his exceptional third novel featuring Sheriff Quinn Colson.

When a sentient 400-year-old artificial intelligence named Cohen kills himself, scattering variously complete copies ("ghosts") into the void of space/time, it's up to his human wife to do the same. Catherine Li scattercasts herself across the known universe, and her various copies wake up in all sorts of places, each of them hoping to reunite with the consciousness, ultimately and incomprehensibly alien, that consumed her life until his death.

Chris Moriarty sets Ghost Spin in the same hard SF universe as his previous two books (Spin Control; Spin State), telling an intriguing story of artificial intelligence--a drama that's also an exploration of the ethics and social dynamics of a society that must contend with vast distances, astro-physical paradoxes and speculative technological marvels.

One version of Li ends up with a space pirate who is host to one of the more fully realized Cohen fragments; she ends up not just in his crew, but in his bed as well. Another version is reassembled from her constituent molecules on the mining planet where she was born. There, Li takes up her old name, Caitlyn, while connecting with the local law enforcement to find out more than she might have wanted to about the true nature of Cohen--and her own identity as a human being. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer & editor

Discover: A hard SF novel with a depth of speculative insight into the far future potential of humankind, with plot twists and character-driven drama to satisfy all comers.

Sheri Booker knows a thing or two about death. After witnessing her Aunt Mary's death at the age of 15, seeking an avenue for her grief, she took a job as an administrative assistant in an inner-city funeral home, remaining there for the next nine years. Her experiences within this atmosphere of death and decay form the basis for her poignant and uplifting memoir, Nine Years Under.

Booker's tenure at the Wylie Funeral Home serves as the backdrop for the bigger issues haunting Baltimore's crime-ridden streets. She has a front-row seat to the casualties that result from problems of the 1990s--AIDS, gang violence and the war on drugs. The mortuary becomes a second home, an escape from the heartbreak and despair that lies in wait at home--and a sanctuary for her budding interest in the business of death and for her artistic aspirations. Meanwhile, the mortuary's director serves as a surrogate father and Wylie's son her first adolescent crush.

The faces of death in all their incarnations force Booker to come to terms with her own feelings and fears about the Great Beyond. Her darker moments also become the most poignant; the people around her breathe life into a universe filled with a reality that never seems too far away. "I see dead people" gets new meaning in this engrossing Six Feet Under-meets-The Wire drama that heralds the arrival of a fresh, new storytelling talent. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Discover: A teenager's darkly humorous adventures in the business of death, set against the backdrop of Baltimore's crime-ridden streets.

When Alysia Abbott was two years old, her mother was killed in a car accident. Her father, Steve, moved her across the country to raise her alone as a gay man and single father in 1970s San Francisco--a pioneer in several senses. Alysia's childhood and teen years took place against the backdrop of a magical Haight-Ashbury district filled with creative, adventurous people like her father (a poet and political activist), recreational drugs and minimal supervision.

Their father-daughter relationship was loving but rocky. When Steve develops AIDS and his health begins to plummet, he calls 20-year-old Alysia home from her studies in Paris and New York City to nurse him, a full-circle caretaking demand that she resents at the time.

Fairyland is foremost a daughter's memoir of a much-loved parent. She continues to become acquainted with him through her research, most notably in reading copious notebooks filled with his poetry and journal entries. She colorfully renders an iconic epoch in San Francisco, together with the city's gay culture and politics, and the early days of the nationwide gay rights movement. Alongside beautiful characterizations (often morphing into eulogies), Alysia paints a stark image of the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan administration's non-response to it. As a personal story and as a portrayal of an era, Fairyland is powerful, loving, authentic, and contains Steve's artistic legacy in its lyricism. It acknowledges Steve's impact on Alysia--and both their shortcomings--with gratitude and grace. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Discover: A daughter's tender memoir of her father's life as a single gay man in 1970s Haight-Ashbury.

Newbery medalist Cynthia Kadohata's (Kira-Kira) moving novel of an intergenerational family unfolds through the eyes of 12-year-old Summer Miyamoto.

Her parents have gone to Japan to care for three dying elderly relatives. But it's harvest time, when the family makes the majority of their income working the wheat fields of the Midwest. So Summer, her 10-year-old brother, Jaz, and her Obaachan (grandmother) and Jiichan (grandfather) head off to work as "wheaties." Her brother (who "wouldn't be Jaz if he weren't obsessed with something") has been diagnosed with ADHD, PDD-NOS and OCD, depending on which doctor you ask. But his biggest fear is that he'll never have a friend. Summer's kindness toward him wins out over her impatience with him. A recent bout of malaria has given Summer a maturity beyond her years.

Kadohata's novel is a love letter to the flatlands of the Midwest. Summer connects with its beauty and shares her fascination with how the wheat gets from field to table, and her interest is infectious. Nature and mealtimes govern the rhythms of their daily lives. Summer's grandparents play a large role in the shaping of Summer's conscience and outlook. Her accumulation of wisdom through the harvest season results in an ending that sneaks up on readers in its impact and poignancy. Kadohota's novel opens a window into a multigenerational family that honors its own culture while also planting a firm foundation in America. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: Newbery Medalist Kadohata's love letter to the Midwest, as 12-year-old Summer and her intergenerational family harvest its wheat fields.

Debut author Smith's precise and vivid narration of Kiri's life will appeal to readers who enjoy being inside a protagonist's head.

Kiri Byrd's brother was supposed to stay with her during the six weeks their parents were gone on an anniversary trip, but instead she's home alone. An excellent pianist, Kiri doesn't plan to do anything besides focus on her music--until she gets a mysterious phone call: "At the name Sukey, my attention snaps back to the phone. Sukey's my sister. My dead sister. The one we never, ever talk about."

Kiri desperately tries to discover what happened to her sister, all while slowly spiraling into a bad mind space. In addition to unraveling the mystery of Sukey, Kiri plays in a band that's attempting to make it big. Her decisions and thoughts are not those of a typical protagonist, as she straddles reality and madness. But through her actions and thought processes, she will come across to readers as an extremely genuine character.

Smith's beautiful language allows an immersive experience and will resonate with those interested in how the book got its impressively appropriate title. --Shanyn Day, blogger at Chick Loves Lit

Discover: A girl slowly losing herself faces reality enough to solve the mystery of what happened to her sister.

This first entry in the new Franklin School Friends trilogy is that rare book that can appeal to both reluctant and voracious readers.

Voracious readers will understand Kelsey in a heartbeat: she is one of the best readers in the third grade, except perhaps for Simon Ellis, and when Franklin School's principal announces a reading competition, she is determined to read more than anybody in the school. Given her mom's annoying habit of forcing her to attend family activities, this turns out to be harder than she thought, and Simon soon takes the lead. Kelsey is convinced he's cheating and enlists her friends to help her prove it.

Reluctant readers will be more attracted to another character: Cody. He hates reading, much to Kelsey's dismay, because she's hoping she and Simon's page counts combined will lift their class into the lead. Kelsey is torn between trying to help him see the glory of reading, and trying to win. Between that and a surprising revelation about Simon, she soon realizes that there is more than one way to love reading--and that not everyone has to.

Mills's writing is quick and readable without being simple, and the story is pleasingly complex. This combination makes the book a good fit for readers of varying reading levels, and the story will appeal to all of them as well. Readers will snap it up and look forward to the next two books in the series, about Kelsey's partners in crime: Annika Riz, Math Whiz, and Izzy Barr, Running Star. --Stephanie Anderson, head of readers' advisory at Darien Library and blogger

Discover: The first in a promising new series of early chapter books for readers of all stripes.