Middle age is a time for reflection. But for Jocelyne Guerbette, the 47-year-old owner of a haberdashery in Arras, France, the stakes grow higher when she wins an $18-million lottery jackpot. For more than 20 years, Jocelyne has lived an uneventful life in "a dreary town, no airport, a grey place." She has endured the loss of a child and marital ups and downs to a handsome man, now sober, who works for Häagen-Dazs and whom Jocelyne imagines dreams of driving a Porsche and being married to a younger, thinner wife. She loves her two adult children, but they clearly have lives of their own. Tending to the shop, cultivating lighthearted friendships and caring for an infirm and much-adored father have sustained her, along with maintaining a successful blog that has enough "unique visitors" that advertisers now want space.

Jocelyne narrates Gregoire Delacourt's compressed, evocative My Wish List in short, revelatory chapters, infused with an unexpected twist that speaks volumes about the nature of truth, love and happiness. When Jocelyne learns of her lottery win, she is faced with a choice: share the news or hide the truth? As Jocelyne reassesses her life--and everything and everyone in it--she compiles lists of what she might do with the winnings. Should she buy a potato peeler? A flat-screen TV? Or maybe a home by the sea? Or would the money wreck the however imperfect life that Jocelyne comes to believe she deeply loves? --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Discover: Winning the lottery forces a middle-aged Frenchwoman to face startling truths about the realities of her life.

In a small Pennsylvania mill town haunted by World War II, two young boys lie awake each night discussing the ghosts in their room. They are Ethan and Jeremiah Mueller, and it is through their eyes that we discover the fantastical world of Dennis Must's The World's Smallest Bible.

Lacking the diversions of television or formal hobbies, the boys concoct spirits and stories. At first, these are informed mainly by their strict Christian upbringing, but as they're exposed to more--the Nazis' nightmarish tactics, the eerie carnival lurking on the outskirts of town--these details are incorporated into their game, blurring the line between the real and the imagined.

Theirs is a world in which every idea and person seems constantly called into question. Preachers are taunted by lurid temptations and the ranting of amateur philosophers. Their lustful father stands in stark opposition to their pious mother. And as time goes on, even their mother is revealed to be a duality, encompassing chaos and order, darkness and light. Which side is stronger at any given moment is unclear.

Fans of historical fiction will enjoy the jaunty midcentury dialogue, as expressed in colorful phrases such as "the rowdies and their chickadees," "you're the mooncalf," and "Papa warbled for dames." The voice keeps the novel upbeat even when the subject matter is dark. --Annie Atherton

Discover: A fantastical novel about two brothers growing up in a Pennsylvania mill town during World War II.

George Herbert, a Welsh-born Anglican priest in the 17th century, led a quiet life as a country parson. It was only after his death, at age 39, that his poetry came to light. In this biography, John Drury (also a minister) invites us in to see how Herbert lived and created some of the greatest religious poetry in the English language.

Like John Donne (Herbert's friend), he's probably one of those metaphysical poets you studied in school and have forgotten. Drury reads the poetry for today, demystifying its Anglican, devotional lyricism to highlight the way many of the poems are about love--love of God, yes, but love of others, of nature, too, making the poems more "universal," less "scriptural." He notes that Simone Weil, the French philosopher/mystic and political activist, thought Herbert's poem "Love III" the "most beautiful poem in the world": "Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back."

Drury is good at demonstrating the significance of Herbert's playful and delightful use of new poetic forms, with some shaped as birds' wings or an altar. He points out that today, many popular church hymns draw their lyrics from Herbert poems, like "King of Glory, King of Peace." Composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten have set his poems to music. Join Dickinson, Emerson, Hopkins, Eliot, Auden and Bishop--all of whom appreciate the parson's work--in enjoying Herbert's poetry. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Discover: A welcoming, rich and illuminating biography about the great poet and Anglican minister.

J.D. McClatchy is an architect of the poetic form. He builds structural wonders with words and fills these structures with thought and reflection. The author of six poetry collections, McClatchy also teaches at Yale University and edits the Yale Review, in addition to poetry compilations for Vintage and the Everyman's Library. Plundered Hearts is a definitive collection of some of his finest poems from the past 30 years.

Following in the rich tradition of such luminaries as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, McClatchy explores the recesses of desire, revealing what touches our hearts and what breaks them. In "Proust in Bed" he writes, "For the next forbidden fruit--the taste/ Of apricots and ripe gruyere is on the hand/ He licks--the next wide-open mouth/ To slip his tongue into the communion/ Wafer." In "Late Night Ode," he laments, "Some nights I've laughed so hard the tears/ Won't stop. Look at me now. Why now?/ I long ago gave up pretending to believe/ Anyone's memory will give as good as it gets."

His poems are like gleaming glass skyscrapers--formal, sparkling and spare. Inside the polished exteriors are the intricate, sometimes dark workings that make us who we are. And shimmer the poems do, reflecting not only the life of the author, but the life of the reader as well. We're built, McClatchy seems to say, with the same materials, just not in the same ways. His life's work highlights our differences and our similarities. --Jonathan Shipley, freelance writer

Discover: Passionate and intricate poems from an American architect of words.

William Trowbridge's newest collection of poetry can be distilled in the opening lines of "Kong Meets Godzilla," a lunch date between the famous movie monsters: "I was eating lunchware at the commissary/ when he called me over to his table/ and offered a seat." Trowbridge's poems aren't sacramental enigmas that one has to decipher. They're funny. They're strange. They're approachable. This is poetry that's warm and welcoming.

Poet Laureate of Missouri, Trowbridge has published five other poetry collections (Ship of Fool, Enter Dark Stranger). With Put This On, Please, he's included work from all those collections plus new ones. Peppered with pop-culture references, his poems might seem slight or unimportant, but they aren't. He easily captures the rhythm and hum of everyday life. Discussing Buster Keaton or Chuck Berry, King Kong or Wile E. Coyote, Trowbridge wittily explores our need for fulfillment and our failures in finding it.

Examining the human condition using Tilt-A-Whirls, The Maltese Falcon and James Dean is no easy feat. Trowbridge succeeds--making readers smile while plumbing something deeper than a giggle. "So here we stand, crossed up in time's unfunny/ funhouse, exclaiming, shaking hands," he writes in "Encounter at an Out-of-Town Bar."

Plainspoken Trowbridge extends his hand to readers with this collection. You'd do well to take him up on his offer. --Jonathan Shipley, freelance writer

Discover: Poetry that can be fun, approachable and thought-provoking.

Charles Darwin described tears as that "special expression of man's," and it is still widely held that we are the only species that cries in grief or sorrow. The father-and-son team of Anthony and Ben Holden partner with Amnesty International to gather Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, an extraordinary anthology of famous men telling us about the one poem that can make them cry, along with the poems themselves.

The 100 grown men the Holdens call upon are quite a group, from John le Carré, Stanley Tucci, Kenneth Branagh and Chris Cooper to Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, James Earl Jones and Patrick Stewart. British verse is strongly represented: Auden is the most tear-inducing poet, with five poems; Housman, Hardy and Larkin are close behind, with three each. Five contributors even selected the same poems (including Christina Rossetti's "Remember" and Housman's "Last Poems XI"). Billy Collins tears up at Victoria Redel's "Bedecked," while J.J. Abrams sniffles at Collins's "The Lanyard," which "gripped me in a way that poetry never had before."

This collection is about the emotional power of art, and the Holdens cast aside any accusations of sentimentality or mawkishness. Anyone who reads Poems That Make Grown Men Cry will be roused, disturbed and exalted by the poems selected. As Seamus Heaney says of his Thomas Hardy selection: "The tear ducts do congest when I read 'The Voice.' " Sentimentality, indeed. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Discover: An anthology full of surprises, as famous men tell us why certain poems make them cry.

In Jump Soul, Georgia-born writer Charlie Smith's new poems are a mature vision of the considerable promise and pleasures of his earlier work, the best of which are included here. They are fierce, lyrical and fully accommodate the opposites held in each moment.

Smith's impact as a young poet was immediate: his first collection, Red Roads, was a National Poetry Series selection, and George Plimpton once introduced him as a young William Faulkner. His early themes--family, the failures to erase the distance between the people one loves, the power of memory, the inevitability of loss--are the stuff of life and of poetry, but Smith wakes them up with explosions of words and images.

Many of Smith's selections are longer, confessional works. In "As for Trees," his character remembers his boyhood to count "the stupendous oaks and hickories I climbed,/ catafalques and monuments, broken-down harassed, improvident trees,/ unconnected, poorly constructed unsought after trees...." Later in the poem, as the trees shift meaning and become symbols for the people he's lost, the word pleasure remains. This recognition of the paradox of loss in the midst of life's fullness is especially pronounced in the new selections, many of which are among Smith's best.

Smith's ability to make these connections--between the dark and the light, between seemingly unrelated images--to allow us to see something new marks him as a major poet. The kinetic energy of his words and the concrete and grounded imagery make this volume a pleasure to read. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Discover: Charlie Smith's new poems (and the best from his eight previous collections) give a fresh look at universal truths.

National Book Award finalist and PEN Open Award winner Kevin Young's new poetry collection is a work of great emotional power and beauty. Circling around the themes of grief (the loss of his father) and new life (the birth of his child), Young has crafted a rare work of art that is both immediately accessible and deeply philosophical.

Young's poetry is capable of enchanting the ear and stimulating the mind in the space of a few short lines: "These the things the waves want/ thieves--kiss/ the coursing sand, lick/ the coarse shore smooth/ as stone." There are wonderful poems of familial bliss, even when the child is still safely ensconced in the mother's womb: "Between your mother and me/ it seems we are only one soul/ sleeping--one of us awake/ while the train cradles/ the other into dreams."

Regarding his father's death and the grief that followed, Young both shakes a fist at the heavens and accepts the down-in-the-dirt fate we all share: "I hunted heaven/ for him./ No Dice./ Too uppity,/ it was. Not enough/ music, or dark dirt." In the long-sustained last section--"Book of Hours," from which the collection takes its title--Young fully embraces the dichotomies of this dance with death and birth. His language achieves an almost zen-like simplicity, wise with the blues of life.

Book of Hours is a major work by an important writer at the top of his game, a rewarding and impressive collection, that may catapult Young to the forefront of American poetry. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

Discover: A powerful collection of poetry on grief and new life by National Book Award finalist and PEN Open Award winner Kevin Young.

After many years, many books and many prestigious awards, Charles Wright seems to be asking himself in Caribou if there's anything left to say. The beautiful black-and-white cover design certainly has something to say, with its caribou antlers and their shadows laid over a plain background, looking like elegant fingers reaching up for something--but what? Do the poems provide an answer?

The 55 poems of Caribou are arranged in three sections, each full of feelings, thoughts and ideas. These are quiet and reflective poems, subtle and suggestive, carefully crafted, mostly short. Some of the titles ("Ancient of Days," "Long Ago and Far Away," "The Last Word," "I've Been Sitting Here Thinking Back over My Life") point to the book's underlying theme, while the last poem, "Translations from a Forgotten Tongue," confronts time, a night sky, the "other side," with a question:

"Under the push of our footprints,
the earth is ready for us.
Who knows how long this will go on?"

Wright tells us these are poems "written by someone who's spent his life/ Looking for the truth." He also tells us there isn't one "truth." Rather, these poems rejoice in a setting sun, autumn, the simple things of nature, a "slight wrinkle on the pond." As he writes in "So Long It's Been Good to Know You":

"The bat swoops over, listening for food.
It's starting to rain and I got to go home.
Be good,
See that my grave is kept clean."
                 --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Discover: A profound and thoughtful collection of poems from one of our finest poets--"an old man's poetry," looking, always looking.

Epic yet intimate, Dan Chiasson's fourth poetry collection evokes Milton and Blake with its nuanced states of innocence and experience. The title poem depicts Chiasson as a five-year-old boy, hoisted onto his neighbor's shoulders to watch the 1976 bicentennial festivities in Boston. From this vantage point, he imagines seeing his absentee father--who fled to South Korea with a new wife and a Taiwanese reggae band--dancing down the street "with his brand-new family." In "One on One," the poet cheekily chides this father, who also trekked to Alaska to teach English to the Inuits: "The choice is to stick around on a slender chance/ a person's son turns into a canonical writer./ The point is not to shiver on the horizon/ And correct an Inuit's prepositions."

While Chiasson's questing father represents the unreliable past, the unrevealed future can be comforting. The poet, now also a father, tells his children, "All of history, even the Romans/ they happen later, tonight sleep tight." Although Chiasson claims he never knew his father, the older man's features "idle inside/ And thicken my sons' cheekbones."

In "Star Catcher," the poet's reference to Thurman Munson--the New York Yankees player who died in 1979 while practicing landing his Cessna--brings to mind the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. Throughout, Chiasson's main motif is the Ferris wheel; like Yeats's widening gyre, it spins forward and backward in time. Bicentennial is both tragic and comic, exploring the tension between past and present, tradition and progress, colonization and independence. --Thuy Dinh, editor, Da Mau magazine

Discover: Elegiac, deeply affecting poems on fate and free will, fathers and sons, public and private histories.

Going Over, the newest novel from Beth Kephart, like her Small Damages, reveals the unseen scars of war.

Set in early 1983, it's the romantic, gut-wrenching story of Ada and Stefan, teens living on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall, who alternate as narrators. The deep friendship between their grandmothers, Omi and Grossmutter, dating back to World War II, means graffiti artist Ada has known Stefan since she was two years old and "loved him since the day I turned 12." With her grandmother Omi, Ada makes the journey across the Wall to Stefan's East Berlin several times a year. As Ada nears her 16th birthday, she is desperate for Stefan to do the unthinkable: cross the Wall. While Stefan weighs the consequences, Ada finds herself entangled in another struggle when Savas, a young Turkish boy from the daycare center she works for, goes missing. Kephart shows the struggles of life on both sides of a divided Berlin. Beautiful characters bring to light the power of love in its various facets. From rebellious Arabella and her American suitor to Ada's mother's new artist boyfriend, who may or may not abandon her, to the decades-long friendship of Omi and Grossmutter, love abounds in Kephart's novel.

Going Over carefully balances love and heartbreak, propelling readers through the story, constantly wondering about the fate of Savas and whether Stefan will be able to cross over. The dangers and consequences Kephart portrays are as real as the victories and joys. --Kyla Paterno, trade book buyer and blogger, Garfield Book Company at PLU

Discover: Two teens live on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall: Will one risk death so they can be together?

Tracey Fern (Barnum's Bones) and Caldecott Medalist Emily McCully (Mirette on the High Wire) team up for the true story of a 19th-century girl who dreamed of following in her sea captain father's footsteps.

Ellen Prentiss's father taught his daughter how to hoist a sail, splice a rope and hold a sextant: "[H]e taught her something that most sailors and even some captains never learned. He taught her how to navigate." Soon Ellen has practiced enough to race the fishing fleet across Massachusetts Bay. Her father tells her to slow down: "A true navigator must have the caution to read the sea, as well as the courage to dare the wind." This advice later served Ellen well as she embarked on a journey on the Flying Cloud, with her husband, Perkins Creesy. Perkins served as captain of the ship, Ellen as navigator. On the ship's maiden voyage, they sailed a 15,000-mile route from New York around Cape Horn and up to San Francisco, ferrying people to the Gold Rush.

This suspenseful picture book will keep readers riveted as Ellen, Perkins and their crew race to outsail the other ships. They deal with a broken mainmast, "the doldrums" (mysterious areas of calm near the equator) and must navigate treacherous shoals off the coast of Brazil. McCully's action-packed watercolor seascapes give readers a flavor of the turbulent ride, while also highlighting Ellen's sense of calm when faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges. A map shows the 15,000-mile route. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: The inspiring story of Ellen Prentiss, who navigated a 15,000-mile ocean journey during the 19th-century Gold Rush.