Small moments in ordinary life often escalate into something much larger and unexpected in novels by Jill Ciment (Heroic Measures). In Act of God, the story grows from the discovery of a tiny mushroom that identical twin sisters--64 years old, neither married nor with children--find sprouting in the closet of their deceased mother's rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y. The fungus is of grave concern, but so, too, is the closet, as it houses a precious archive of letters their mother wrote for a once-popular syndicated advice column, "Consultations with Dr. Mimi," now being compiled to submit for exhibition at the Smithsonian.

Rich, quirky characterizations, witty insights into human nature and cruel twists of fate turn the initial absurdity of the narrative into a profound, suspenseful story. The virulent fungus gains strength as calamity spreads beyond the apartment. Ill-equipped hazmat teams try to quell citywide pandemonium while the growing plague wreaks havoc and claims lives.

The story examines how larger-than-life events can strip human beings--especially those steeped in the trappings of the modern world--of everything in order to fill their souls with empathy, compassion and the healing powers of love and forgiveness. Insurance companies ultimately declare the devastating toll of the fungus as an "act of God," and perhaps a higher power had a hand, too, in the unexpected personal transformations of those inhabiting this thoroughly entertaining and unforgettable microcosm that reflects the realities of life. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Discover: A mysterious, virulent fungus originating from the closet of a Brooklyn apartment building becomes a calamitous, life-changing force.

In her debut novel, The Bookseller, Cynthia Swanson answers the age-old query "what if" with a dream. In 1962, Kitty Miller is a 30-something, single woman who co-owns a small Denver bookstore. Many women Kitty's age are married and raising families, but Kitty believes she is content and doesn't need anything more.

Then one night she dreams of an alternate version of her life, the life she would have had if one phone call had lasted just a few minutes longer. Here Kitty, known as Katharyn, is married with children and no longer works in the bookstore. The lives of Kitty and Katharyn alternate as she continues to dream of this parallel universe, and a once-content woman explores what could have been.

Many strong themes wind through Swanson's mid-century story. The role of women in society and their struggles to find a fulfilling equilibrium are superbly developed and reflected in everything from fashion to child rearing. The timeless topic of change, indicated by suburban sprawl and its effects, influences the plot, and Swanson's overarching message--to appreciate what one has, foibles and all--is enduring as well.

A mid-century modern designer, Swanson infuses the setting with strikingly authentic backdrops built from her knowledge of the period's architecture, while her meticulous research subtly illuminates language, behavior, Denver neighborhoods, even books. The Bookseller will delight bibliophiles with regular literary references.  

The astute reader will likely anticipate various plot twists, but The Bookseller isn't meant to be a surprising thriller. This is the story of a woman coming to terms with who she is; both woman and novel are beautiful. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Discover: The butterfly effect on one woman's life through a series of dreams depicting her as a completely different person.

In vast Delhi, India, the intertwining lives of millions shine through the intrepid lens of She Will Build Him a City, a curious novel by Raj Kamal Jha (The Blue Bedspread). As though indicating a relationship between anonymity and unanimity, Jha names his three main characters Woman, Man and Orphan, effectively broadening their experiences into a universal sense of humanity. He braids together these three and unveils their secret connections in a story full of love and violence, lies and the powerful buoyancy of hope.

Woman tells her daughter a bedtime fable of a 12-foot-tall woman who comes to care for them, and she eventually rhapsodizes about how she both loved and betrayed the girl's father. Meanwhile, in the city lurks a troubled Man, surrounded by darkness as he runs to and from the violence clouding his heart. In the teeming streets, he discovers a little girl with a red balloon, with whom he falls maniacally in love. All the while, Orphan, with a talking dog as his only guardian, is perplexingly abandoned at an orphanage whose director "has never seen a 'normal male infant' being left on his doorstep." Who, after all, lets go of a boy in India?

This novel thrills and mystifies as the characters fumble about Delhi toward an elusive sense of belonging. Jha's prose is wondrous: regarding her daughter's birth, Woman observes, "Along with you, I have also been born, as a mother, and, very much like you, I am clueless in the dark." She Will Build Him a City exhibits myth-making of an impeccable order. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: Startling wonders and skulking dangers dart through the streets of Delhi.

Nothing much seems to be going on with Francis Falbo, the narrator of Adam Rapp's Know Your Beholder, set in downstate Pollard, Ill. Former rhythm guitar player and songwriter for Third Policeman, his defunct "well-aged, anti-industry psychedelic semi-jam band," Francis lives alone. After only three years of marriage, Francis's wife left him for a square-jawed New York pharma salesman. Francis, withdrawn and agoraphobic, sees himself as "the human equivalent of a cold rainy day... a brown puddle in the middle of a dead-end street, with maybe a Popsicle stick or two floating in my dank, dog-slobbered water."

Francis intermittently writes and sketches a journal tentatively called "Know Your Beholder," after track two of his band's only album, searching for a reason not to sit around and "drink consecutive bourbons and play Minnesota-based, mid-nineties slowcore music." He finds that reason in the oddball collection of tenants in his building: his ex-wife's reclusive, weird brother; a former circus trapeze artist couple; an artist who paints well-endowed nude black men; an overweight, retired schoolteacher widower; and a former first alternate on the U.S. Olympic luge team.

Rapp has a theatrical flair for dialogue, a talent for defining characters by their clothes and music, and a relentless sense of humor. It's no surprise that a man who sketches his ex-wife's body and is obsessed with sex finds redemption in a woman. The daughter of the retired schoolteacher comes to visit, recognizes Francis as "an averagely handsome guy who looks slightly better while playing electric guitar," and accepts him for that. God bless understanding women and rock 'n' roll. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Discover: A funny, poignant story of a down-on-his-luck, agoraphobic former rock band guitarist in search of a new gig.

Suitcase City by Sterling Watson (Weep No More My Brother) opens with an extended flashback to protagonist Jimmy Teach's time in small-town Florida. Back then, Teach had just finished a brief career in professional football and was back in the game of smuggling drugs, or in his words, operating as a "maritime consultant." When a business deal with Guatemalans went sour, Teach competently cleaned up the mess, and moved on.

The bulk of Teach's story then takes place nearly 20 years later, in late 1990s Tampa, Fla., where a rundown neighborhood called Suitcase City gives the novel its name. Teach is reformed, more or less: he's vice-president of sales at a pharmaceutical company and has rebuilt a relationship with his teenaged daughter after his wife's (her mother's) death. But a little incident inside a bar one Friday afternoon--a tiny mistake, a single piece of rotten luck--and suddenly Teach finds himself worried about losing his house, his job, the relationship he's built with his daughter and maybe his own life. 

Watson's magic is in pacing and taut prose, in the details that make his Florida setting so compelling--boats and bilge, lobsters and golf--and in a father's love for his daughter. Diverse characters enliven Teach's world, including his charming daughter, a pushy reporter and a colorful pair of police detectives who represent a range of competence and demeanor. In the end, Teach is flawed but likable, and Suitcase City is an absorbing thriller, a vivid adventure in a bright, humid, perilous underworld. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Discover: A reformed drug dealer is pulled back into the game in this tense, bloody thriller set in Florida.

Political subterfuge and the nascent Cold War in 1949 is at the center of Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon (Istanbul Passage). Alex Meier escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to the U.S. and now writes novels in Hollywood. When the McCarthy witch hunts target him, he strikes a bargain with the CIA, agreeing to return to his native Berlin as a spy to prove his loyalty to the United States. But what awaits him in Berlin defies even his imagination as a writer: a botched kidnapping, the murder of an East German agent and encounters with friends from his past thrust him into danger and intrigue.

Blockaded West Berlin survives on daily airlifted supplies, while espionage and the black market rule the East. The German Kulturbund welcomes Meier, on resident visa, as a returning artist to East Germany, which allows him to make connections without arousing suspicion.

A likable hero, Meier despairs at the rubble of his home and city and faces reminders of his family's annihilation. His assignment is poignant and painful: to spy on his first love, Irene, whose survival depends on liaisons and whose current "friend" is a Soviet State Security officer. When Irene's POW brother escapes from laboring in Soviet uranium mines and arrives in Berlin, Meier ponders moral ambiguities as he determines whom to trust and how far he will go to help old friends while assuring his own survival.

A historically detailed, fast-paced thriller and a passionate love story, Leaving Berlin is also a grim reminder of how the Cold War tore at a Germany still reeling from years of Nazi power and war. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Discover: A Cold War thriller set in 1949 Berlin, where an American writer--a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany--quickly learns his role as a CIA spy.

Adrian McKinty's (In the Morning I'll Be Gone) remarkably clever new police procedural, Gun Street Girl, takes place in Belfast during the "Troubles." It's 1985, and Unionists and Nationalists are constantly fighting, making it a dangerous time to be a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Force (RUC), especially for Detective Sean Duffy, the only Catholic on the mostly Unionist force. Duffy is a contradictory man: a savvy detective, a nice neighbor and a good cop, who occasionally can't resist nailing a line of coke "so pure it was like being yelled at by God."

The RUC is investigating the murders of a rich couple, apparently shot by their son before he jumped off a cliff. Duffy isn't convinced that Michael Kelly's death was a suicide, but his work on the case is repeatedly interrupted by bomb threats and attacks from both Catholic and Protestant sides, forcing the "peelers" to stop investigating in order to work the riot lines. Being an officer in a war zone is always a tricky business, but it gets even stranger for Duffy when MI5 and a mysterious American agent with a fake identity get involved in the RUC's inquiry.

Written in a darkly funny, laconic style, Gun Street Girl is riveting. The noir ambiance is irresistible, and the Belfast setting is disturbingly vivid, a reminder of how dangerous Northern Ireland was recently. Fourth in a series, Gun Street Girl is sure to inspire readers to go back and catch up on more of McKinty's superb writing. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Discover: An excellent noir thriller set in 1985 Belfast, featuring the lone Catholic detective on the Royal Ulster Constabulary force.

Flavors, fragrances and the experience of re-creating family traditions in the kitchen make food a gateway to memory, but when food writer Sasha Martin decided to "cook [her] way around the world," she was looking forward, not back. A well-traveled graduate of the Culinary Institute of America settling into life as a mother and wife in Tulsa, Okla., Martin challenged herself to broaden the tastes of her young daughter and picky-eater husband by preparing a meal from a different country every week, which she documented on her blog, Global Table Adventure. She didn't anticipate that this four-year project would bring her to reexamine her own past and reconcile what "family" truly meant to her, leading to Life from Scratch: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Forgiveness.

Martin's Boston childhood was defined by the creative cooking of her mother, whose erratic behavior brought Sasha and her brother, Michael, to the attention of the foster care system. After several difficult years, her mother placed Sasha and Michael in the care of family friends, who moved the children across the country, soon relocated to Europe and kept Sasha out of their kitchen. Years later, returned from abroad, Sasha actively pursued food and cooking as a means to make peace with her life.

Life from Scratch features nearly 30 recipes--some from the Global Table Adventure blog and others for dishes that Martin grew up with. While there are no photos included, the recipes are written in clear and conversational detail; a "glug" of olive oil isn't a precise measurement, but most home cooks will understand exactly what Martin means. And even if they're not home cooks, many readers will relate to the ways that Life from Scratch connects food and family. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's Blog: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

Discover: This book focuses on foods from around the world that helped a woman make peace with her past and expand her family's future.

British poet and naturalist Helen Macdonald, inconsolable after her father's sudden death, had a recurring memory of a goshawk she'd seen while working at a bird-of-prey center. In H Is for Hawk, she shares her decision to adopt one, Mabel, and her months-long dedication to training this fiercest of creatures. "The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life."

Macdonald juxtaposes the tale of her healing and the grueling protocols of falconry with the parallels--and differences--between her relationship with Mabel and writer T.H. White's relationship with his hawk, Gos, as recorded in his 1951 book The Goshawk. Reading this work by the author of Once and Future King at eight fascinated and puzzled her: "Gos was comprehensible, even if the writer was utterly beyond understanding." Macdonald's sympathetic portrayal of White's brutal childhood and his lifelong self-doubt tempers her depiction of how ineptly he treated his goshawk. As a historian, her research of White is thorough and his personality fascinating, but it's a pleasure when she returns to her own story.

She learned to observe from her photojournalist father, and as a "watcher" all her life, Macdonald could imagine herself in the hawk's mind. She vividly portrays the English countryside and her dear Mabel: "Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleek, café-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-colored teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai." A memoir of loss and healing, a biography and a goshawk primer, H Is for Hawk is heartfelt and poetic. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Discover: A lyrical memoir of a woman who coped with bereavement by immersing herself in training a fierce goshawk.

Dr. H. Gilbert Welch (Overdiagnosed) is a professor at Dartmouth Medical School as well as a recognized expert on the effects of health screening. In Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care, he tempers his extensive experience and knowledge with a self-deprecating sense of humor and readily accessible writing style. Welch's premise is that "too much medical care has too little value" and causes people to worry about diseases they will most likely never experience--troublesome since "health" is as much a state of mind as a physical state. As a medical care epidemiologist, Welch studies the patterns, causes and effects of diseases and health concerns; as a teacher, he is able to present this information in an engaging and understandable manner.

Welch's primary goal is for his readers to think critically about medical care and then act accordingly. To that end, Welch presents seven commonly held assumptions that should be challenged, including "sooner is always better" and "action is always better than inaction." He believes the human body has the remarkable ability to heal itself and hospital visits can result in infections and consequent health complications. In addition, rather than believing "newer is always better," Welch recommends we wait until a new drug or procedure has been time-tested, not just FDA approved. Welch believes health screenings detect abnormalities that are harmless and strike unnecessary fear in healthy individuals. He believes medical care ultimately follows a U-shaped curve, similar to blood sugar or blood pressure, where too little or too much can be harmful. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

Discover: An examination of how more medicine often does not contribute to better health (and how entertaining reading about health care concerns can be!).

David Arnold's accomplished debut novel is not your average road trip story. Readers will immediately take to 16-year-old narrator Mary Iris Malone and to the seamless mix of humor and pathos in this moving tale of her quest to save her mother.

In the first chapter, Mim overhears her father and his new wife telling her principal that Mim's mother will "beat this disease." "Disease?" Mim thinks, then flees the school for the Greyhound station in Jackson, Miss. (aka Mosquitoland), to board the next bus to her mother in Ohio. Between the letters Mim writes to her father's sister, Isabel, and the details she confides to her kindly elderly seatmate, readers learn that Mim's parents' divorce has been final for three months, and that her father married Kathy six weeks ago. Flashbacks provide key clues to Mim's motives and current circumstances. For one thing, she's been prescribed Abilitol, "this mutant word, this tragic portmanteau, the unnatural marriage of two roots as different as different could be," Mim thinks. "And do you, Ability, take Vitriol to be your lawfully wedded suffix?" Readers learn that Mim's family has a history of psychosis, and Abilitol is a common prescription to treat psychotic conditions. When Mim discovers letters from her mother hidden inside a coffee can, Mim wonders if Kathy is purposely keeping her from her mother.

Arnold skillfully sets up doubts in readers' minds about how reliable Mim's impressions are, even as her razor-sharp humor and intelligence make us want to believe her. David Arnold is a writer to watch. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: A moving debut novel about a teen's quest to save her mother, written with a seamless blend of humor and pathos.

Crafting spring flowers as unusual as snowflakes, Carin Berger (Stardines) introduces youngest readers to the harbingers of a long-awaited season.

It's Maurice the cub's first spring, and he can't wait to find out more about it. While his mother hunkers down to hibernate and falls asleep, her cub wanders out to satisfy his curiosity. Squirrel, Rabbit, Deer and Robin counsel patience, explaining that it's not quite time for spring yet. But is it any wonder that, in a forest of tall pines, Maurice mistakes a snowflake for spring? Berger crafts meticulous snowflakes in a three-dimensional blizzard that young readers will almost believe they could enter into along with Maurice. The innocent cub collects the flakes in a ball, thinking he's captured spring, then settles in beside his mother. When he wakes at last, his snowball memento is gone, but something of greater moment has arrived.

Young children will savor knowing more about spring than the hero does and will pour over Berger's compositions. She incorporates nature's glories as dioramas, with her cutout components casting shadows that emphasize elements of the big wondrous world little Maurice investigates. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: A symphony of three-dimensional collages chart the changing seasons, as a young cub awaits spring.

Jorey Hurley follows up her astonishing picture book Nest, about a robin's life cycle, with a joyful investigation of a dog at play.

Once again, Hurley's use of a limited palette and just one word per scene keep the focus on the animal star, in this case, a Labrador retriever. The canine's sandy-colored coat contrasts perfectly with the ocean blue, into which the unseen owner throws the red ball. Readers will spy the floating red circle before the dog does ("search," reads the text). "Splash" indicates the dog has spotted the ball, ears on alert and tail up, braving the waves in pursuit of its trophy. An image that begs readers to turn the book vertically ("swim") shows the depth of the waters the dog braves in order to retrieve the ball; meanwhile, a school of clownfish match the ball and unite the composition. Other sea creatures (seals, dolphins, a shark in pursuit of prey) join the salty adventure. And at the end, dog and owner are reunited.

Although this picture book doesn't operate on quite as many levels as Nest did (the seasons, nature's life cycles, words with double meanings), children will appreciate experiencing the ocean from a dog's perspective, and the beauty the pooch takes for granted. Most of all, they will readily identify with the pet's sense of play. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: A playful follow-up about a dog's day at the beach, from the creator of Nest.