With White Tears, Hari Kunzru (Gods Without Men) bends time when two audiophiles happen upon a storied old blues track. Seth is a socially inept weirdo. He builds his own sound equipment and wanders Manhattan, recording the ambient noises of the city. His only friend is Carter, a brooding record collector and producer obsessed with black music. They are rising stars in the music industry. When Seth unwittingly picks up a man's voice singing an entrancing blues song, Carter fixates on it. With a little studio magic, they isolate the song, add a bit of old-timey patina and arbitrarily name it "Graveyard Blues" by Charlie Shaw. Carter posts it to collector forums. If they can pass off a recording from last week as a rare 1928 blues single, what can't these white boys do?

That act of hubris launches the duo into a dangerous slipstream, however, when a mysterious collector demands to know where they found the record--and what the B-side is. After their ruse is exposed, Carter is seriously injured and hospitalized, and Seth must confront the possibility that Charlie Shaw may be more than just a fabrication.

A gifted surrealist, Kunzru twists together a gripping story about obsession, musicology, race and the pathology of white guilt. He blurs distinctions between several first-person narrators as Seth, trapped in an alarming fugue state, seeks absolution. White Tears is a slippery, daring novel that raises provocative questions about appropriation and reparations. Kunzru conjures a Faustian bargain for the boys who "really did feel that our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness." --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: Amid an increasingly distorted sense of reality, an old blues track haunts the two music nerds who thought they had created it.

When a knockout mystery is the least fabulous element of a novel, something exceptional is afoot. Celine by Peter Heller (The Dog Stars) gives us an intriguing protagonist in a suspenseful thriller.

Born into American aristocracy, Celine Watkins is as comfortable in Jackie O sunglasses as a Glock shoulder holster. She's a 69-year-old recovering alcoholic with emphysema and a mysterious history in government work. The epitome of an old-school movie dame, she's wickedly sharp and does not suffer fools.

A private investigator with a soft spot for lost causes, she specializes in reuniting families. One day a stranger named Gabriela shares the story of her beloved father, long believed dead. Celine and Pete, her perfect counterweight of a husband, are sufficiently intrigued to set out in a borrowed camper to investigate.

The inquiry serves as backdrop for larger themes about art, despair, loyalty, obligation and privilege, illuminating Celine's colorful history and deeper motivations along the way. Heller's writing is smart and clever, the depth and vitality of his characters second to none.

When a novel like Heller's Celine unfurls page after page--when the characters are so rich one doesn't want to break the bond by turning the last one--it's an honor to have inhabited its world. Pete summarizes it best: when one moves through the world with Celine, it's simply more fun. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Discover: A tough PI and her husband hit the road to investigate the decades-old disappearance of an artist who's long been assumed dead.

When the famous Chef Anton--Anne Morgan's boyfriend and boss--tells her he's in love with someone else, she's both devastated and suddenly in need of a job. Anne's always worked in professional kitchens, but, on a whim, she applies for the position of housekeeper for her idol Emma Helmsley, a lifestyle guru who is essentially the English Martha Stewart.

Soon Anne is practically the fifth member of the illustrious Helmsley family--enjoying working in their home and getting to know Emma; her husband, Rob, a prominent television personality and academic; and their two charming children, Jake and Lily. But she's surprised to discover that all is not as it seems on the surface and, as the months go by and Anne learns more of the Helmsleys' dirty secrets, her future becomes increasingly entwined with theirs. Meanwhile, shocking truths about Anne's own past come to light, with repercussions for all of them.

Suellen Dainty (After Everything) has created a detailed and slowly paced (yet completely addicting) story in The Housekeeper. Anne's repressed personality and the gilded Helmsley family don't seem to mesh at first glance, but as the novel unfolds and the Helmsleys' emotional vagaries play out, the reader will be frantic to know how it ends. Somewhere between chick lit and tense psychological thriller, The Housekeeper is a tantalizing glimpse into the everyday lives of the rich and famous--and the people who work for them. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Discover: A housekeeper discovers the dark secrets her rich employers are hiding.

Sarah Gilchrist, the tenacious protagonist of Kaite Welsh's gripping debut thriller, The Wages of Sin, knows how seedy Edinburgh, Scotland can get--and she learned it the hard way. In 1882, when few women worked as doctors, Sarah has enrolled in Edinburgh's medical school, where male classmates harass her mercilessly. Between trying to study and finding her resolve to stay in school, she volunteers at an infirmary. There she meets Lucy, a young prostitute carrying an unwanted baby. A few days later, Lucy reappears in Sarah's life--as a corpse on her school's examination table. No one except Sarah has noticed the signs of murder on the dead woman's body, and she is determined to find the killer.

What follows is an exhilarating and atmospheric mystery set mostly in the gas-lit streets of Edinburgh. Welsh adroitly captures details of the time--the cobbled streets, a whalebone corset--while making space for Sarah's more contemporary sensibilities. Indeed, Sarah, with her radical (for the time) notion that women like Lucy deserve police protection, reads as a spokesperson for modern-day feminism. In the hands of a lesser writer, Sarah's anachronistic qualities would clang with inauthenticity. But here, Welsh, who is also a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, balances her protagonist's progressive inclinations with a self-awareness that enables her to play the roles (good niece, demure dinner guest) that the era demands. The result is a layered, provocative and riveting mystery about Victorian dynamics and womanhood. --Amy Brady, freelance writer and editor

Discover: In Victorian Edinburgh, a medical student risks her life and rejects the gender norms of the day to solve a murder mystery.

V. Sanjay Kumar (Artist, Undone) delivers dark literary noir in his strange yet hard-hitting crime novel The Third Squad.

Set in Mumbai, the novel follows the secret and deadly work of a police sharpshooter named Karan. Diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, Karan is recruited into an elite police squad that carries out extrajudicial killings of the city's burgeoning gangster population. With these unusual elements, as well as surrealist descriptions and aphoristic dialogue, Kumar produces an eerie postmodern atmosphere of urban chaos and moral ambiguity. Karan is haunted by his inability to feel and process the killings normally; Kumar skillfully ties this mood to the shape-shifting city itself. His Mumbai embodies the vagaries of globalization, where an emerging middle class must contend with chronic poverty and a vicious criminal underbelly. Kaleidoscopic shifts in point-of-view further evoke this fragmentation of civil life and a blurring of right and wrong.

Kumar's understated, deadpan style cloaks his wit, poetic intelligence and impressive perceptiveness. Beneath the novel's anomie and shadowy atmospherics is a humanist inquiry into the worth and dignity of life. "I am a person, not a puzzle," Karan repeats throughout, as if trying to affirm his own humanity. The Third Squad ends with an emotional wallop, making it stand out among crime novels. It has the chiaroscuro effects of classic noir, but also the philosophical depth of highbrow literary fiction. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist and fiction author

Discover: Mumbai teems with lurid intrigue in this smart and affecting work of postmodern noir.

In the third installment in Samantha Shannon's projected seven-book Bone Season series, the motley crew of clairvoyants are surrounded by adversaries. The government is determined to hunt them down using a dangerous new technology while panic leads to vicious infighting.

In the near-future realm of Scion (an alternate-universe version of England and eight other European nations), the ScionIDE military is poised to seek out and quarantine the so-called "unnaturals," people with psychic gifts. Though a prejudicial human bureaucracy fronts Scion, the strings are pulled by ethereal entities called the Rephaim, who exploit the clairvoyant captives as an expendable force against their enemies. Following the events of The Mime Order, 19-year-old dreamwalker and seventh-level clairvoyant Paige Mahoney now rules the London voyant underground as Underqueen and co-leads the Mime Order (which aims to overthrow Scion). When rumors reach her of a coming portable Senshield scanner, Paige gathers her closest confederates, intent to destroy its power source for good.

Series newbies would do well to begin with The Bone Season, though the author's blog contains detailed recaps. Paige shines as she finally gets the chance to take the fight to Scion, but also realizes that straightforward revolutions where "the world stands with you in your fight... [exist] only in daydreams." Shannon's hybridized world combines sci-fi and fantasy as the perfect backdrop for a human rights thriller. While many issues remain unresolved, including romantic subplots, readers who sign on for the series will appreciate the amount of meat on the bone for future adventures. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Discover: In the third book in the Bone Season series, clairvoyant Paige Mahoney faces hard choices and dangerous missions as the Underqueen of London.

On April 4, 2013, 47-year-old Christopher Thomas Knight was arrested during a break-in at a summer camp for the disabled in the woods of central Maine. What made that otherwise unremarkable apprehension of a petty thief extraordinary was the identity of the perpetrator--someone who had spent 27 years in those woods, intentionally cut off from any human contact. The Stranger in the Woods is journalist Michael Finkel's intimate account of Knight's long sojourn, one man's singular response when the tension of living in society became unbearable.

After Knight left his job installing home and vehicle alarm systems in 1986, he made his way to an area about 25 miles north of Augusta, where he settled for the duration of his time in the woods. He supported himself through periodic raids on the nearby camp and seasonally occupied cabins. One of the most striking aspects of Knight's isolation was the fact that his elaborate hiding place lay about a three-minute walk from the nearest cabin. And yet, in all those years, his only human encounter was a brief one with a passing hiker in the 1990s.

Finkel (True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa) adroitly connects Knight's story to accounts of other hermits. In the fast-moving 200 pages of The Stranger in the Woods, Finkel takes pains not to deify or demonize him. He does offer an undeniably sympathetic portrait of his subject, a "refugee from the human race." His account will appeal to readers who enjoy stories of encounters with both the natural world and the natures within. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Discover: Journalist Michael Finkel offers a fascinating look at one man's 27 years as a hermit in the Maine woods.

The Mercedes-Benz 770K W150 was a monstrous limousine used by monstrous men. These bulletproof behemoths carried high-ranking Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, around the Third Reich. Famous photos of crowds hailing the Fuhrer showcase the sheer menace of these machines, with hoods as long as some whole cars, seating for eight and grilles that look like something off of a battleship. After Germany's defeat, 770Ks became coveted war trophies. Several of them were brought to the United States in the years after the war. These vehicles, with little or no evidence, were often touted as Hitler's personal car, ignoring the fact that he had a whole motorpool of Mercedes.

In The Devil's Mercedes, Robert Klara (The Hidden White House; FDR's Funeral Train) tracks the winding provenance of two 770Ks and the eccentric cast of characters who possessed them. The first is a Mercedes used as payment, in lieu of hard currency, from Sweden to a Chicago businessman. The second is captured by an American soldier in Bavaria, borrowed by a general for his personal ride, then shipped home. Klara follows the roads taken by these cars under various ownerships, through record-setting auctions and fund-raising tours, storage in warehouses and museums, and back to their original riders, whose real identities are a rewarding surprise. The Devil's Mercedes is an engrossing mystery with thematic depth, a look at how cars, admittedly impressive ones, became symbols of Nazi horror, and what those symbols have meant for generations of Americans. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Discover: Two monstrous Mercedes limos used by the Nazis undergo a peculiar exchange of hands.

Douglas Coupland (Generation X) is a media theorist, artist, writer and designer. He's also wickedly funny, which makes his thoughts on modernity all the more biting and enjoyable. Bit Rot, a collection of essays, short fiction and pieces that are best described as miscellanea, shows off all sides of Coupland's work without ever losing his sardonic edge. Because few pieces go over five pages, the book feels like an ongoing conversation with a hilarious, intelligent friend.

Bit Rot is mostly made up of essays that both skewer and defend contemporary existence. Coupland is upfront about his own susceptibility to nostalgia, but also has little patience for anyone who believes that the world is somehow worse off due to the Internet, smartphones and the like. One might assume Coupland is a misanthropist, given his sense of humor, but he's nothing of the sort. In the piece "Stuffed," he explores hoarding from prehistoric times to the present, showing how our need for "stuff" is both pathological and simply a way of being human.

The short works of fiction dotted throughout Bit Rot provide a nice change of pace without losing sight of Coupland's arguments. By placing them alongside the essays, he's able to present his topics in different modes of discourse. This is especially welcome since he sometimes has the tendency to repeat himself in the essays (which, to be fair, should be somewhat expected in a 400-page collection). Even with that minor quibble, Bit Rot remains an engaging, thought-provoking look at the modern age through the thoughts of one smart, funny man. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

Discover: This collection by Douglas Coupland helps make sense of the modern condition.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (Handbook of Emotions) is a psychologist, neuroscientist and the director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University. In How Emotions Are Made, she explains a new theory of emotion that may be counterintuitive for many people but has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of almost every aspect of life.

Most of us probably take for granted what Barrett calls "the classical view of emotion"--emotions as universal, irrational, reflexive responses to our experiences. However, she says, if scientists ignore the classical view and look only at the data, they find that emotions are not hardwired, or universal, or triggered by external events: "You are not a passive receiver of sensory input, but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action." We create our emotional realities, which means we also have the power to change them intentionally.

This is a well-structured, enjoyable book, written in a conversational style and augmented by four appendixes, thorough notes, an extensive bibliography and links to more information online. Barrett summarizes the history of emotional science and the current state of the field, and explains how biology and culture work together to form the concepts that create our emotions. She also describes how this new understanding of emotion may be practically applied to balance our emotional health, rewire our emotional responses and transform our approaches to social issues, health care, other species and law enforcement. --Sara Catterall

Discover: A neuroscientist offers an enjoyable guide to a revolutionary scientific theory of emotion and its practical applications.

The year is 1974 and Armstrong and Charlie are both 11, both good arm wrestlers and both dreading sixth grade at Wonderland Avenue School. But it's their differences that they notice first. Armstrong is in one of the first cohorts of black kids being bused to formerly all-white schools in Los Angeles. "[T]he Supreme Court has said it's time for black and white to blend," Armstrong's dad tells him. Armstrong is not so sure: "I don't see why. It's not like we're going to rub off on them." Smart, mouthy and hot-tempered, Armstrong enters Wonderland with a chip on his shoulder. Charlie, who is white and whose brother recently died, is obsessed with death statistics and rigid about following rules. He's promptly dubbed Rules Boy by Armstrong, thus setting the stage for a long, antagonistic school year. But the fights gradually morph into pranks, then transform again into competitiveness, grudging acceptance and, finally, friendship.

Steven B. Frank's debut middle grade novel, inspired by his own sixth grade year at Wonderland, is one part comedy, one part poignant drama and one part food for thought. The boys' alternating voices provide a context to their lives that isn't always apparent in first--or subsequent--meetings. Occasional interjections in the form of hilariously deadpan playground incident reports by Yard Supervisor Edwina Gaines give a wider picture of events. With an undercurrent of the tension and racism accompanying the era, Armstrong and Charlie also captures the awkward coming-of-age of two boys who learn that sometimes one must leave something behind in order to move forward. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

Discover: In 1974, two 11-year-old boys, one white and one black, learn that their differences don't have to keep them from becoming friends in this funny and moving middle-grade novel.

Cao Wenxuan is one of China's most beloved children's authors and winner of the 2016 Hans Christian Andersen Award. His lyrical middle-grade novel Bronze and Sunflower brings to life two devoted siblings: Bronze, the mysterious, mute young son of impoverished farmers in a remote Chinese village, and Sunflower, the seven-year-old city girl who comes to the country with her artist father after he is consigned to forced labor and reeducation during the harsh years of the Cultural Revolution. When her father drowns, Sunflower is adopted by Bronze's loving parents. The family struggles together, each sacrificing to help the others. Bronze walks miles to the nearest town in freezing weather so he can sell shoes woven from river reeds to pay for Sunflower's schooling. Sunflower steals away on a boat so she can scavenge valuable ginkgo nuts at a distant plantation to raise funds for her grandmother's medical care.

The author, who grew up amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, faces the hardships of village life head-on. Children are tied to trees and beaten for misbehavior, and when starvation takes hold, people grow so desperate they think "about gnawing on stones." Despite privations, small pleasures--like riding to school on the back of a water buffalo or creating a sparkling necklace out of icicles--make life beautiful. Cao shows English-speaking readers a foreign world where time is measured in the seasonal comings and goings of the swallows, but also a familiar one where the fabric of family is woven from shared hopes and unexpected acts of kindness. --Ann Shaffer, freelance writer and editor

Discover: This graceful story of a girl growing up in a poor village during China's Cultural Revolution introduces English-speaking readers to the work of Cao Wenxuan.