Katie Ward's debut novel, Girl Reading, is better described as a collection of seven self-contained but intertwined stories drawn from nearly as many centuries and settings. Each story centers on the creation of a portrait of a girl, reading; each reveals a complex and profound relationship between reader, writer and artist.

The book begins in the 14th century and takes us to the year 2060. In between, a teenage orphan poses for Italian Renaissance master Simone Martini; a grieving countess commissions a portrait of her dead poetess lover; a man takes a picture of a young woman reading in a bar in modern London and adds it to his Flickr stream. The stories, though differing in character and circumstance, are threaded together by a deep sense of synchronicity and sparkling allusions to art and literature. In a testament to Ward's deft talent, every character is richly drawn, every chapter crisp with authenticity. When a cameo by Rembrandt and a reference to Flickr comfortably exist in the same book, you know the author has done her work.

Girl Reading's best quality, however, is also its flaw. Ward's tight control over seven centuries of vividly imagined stories is almost too good; the chapters often end too quickly and neatly, just short of satisfaction, lest they sprawl out into books of their own. But in a novel that celebrates the intimate, complicated bonds between women and their books--and each other--that is an easy fault to forgive. --Hannah Calkins, Unpunished Vice

Discover: An exquisitely rendered celebration of women and reading in seven portraits.

You don't have to read Yiddish to appreciate What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the new story collection from Nathan Englander (For the Relief of Unbearable Urges)--but it helps. While Englander's stories range across time and geography, his characters nearly all live under the cloud of the Shoah and the long Jewish history of migration, argument, suffering, survival... and always stories.

Englander's stories here have a broad reach. "Sister Hills" encapsulates the history of Israel while exploring the nature of loyalty, contracts and family ties. "Camp Sundown" describes a Berkshires summer camp for the elderly where a few of the more orthodox bridge players soon begin to harass a fellow camper whom they imagine to be a former guard from the "real camps"--a feud that ends with slander and violence. Although most of the stories center on Englander's clear interest in the role religion and history play on his characters' lives, they also transcend these narrow themes to address the universal with humor and subtle observation.

Perhaps the story most endearing to book people will be "The Reader," where an aging novelist makes a bookstore tour promoting his long-delayed novel only to find that he no longer has an audience--except for one dedicated fan who trails him to each store and insists that the old writer read, even if he is the only one there to listen. The unnamed "Author," a slow writer, reflects: "A book every ten years, it's like being a cicada. You spend all those years underground, busy staying alive. And when you finally burrow your way back out, you never know what world you will find... still one must stand by one's story.... how much richer could a writing life be than finding, even for one night, one true reader?" --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Discover: In his wide-ranging new collection, Englander masters the art of the short story with all its craft, humor and compassion.

Anne Rice made vampires cool, modern and downright sexy long before the likes of True Blood or Twilight. In The Wolf Gift, she turns her attention to another supernatural staple: the werewolf.

Young journalist Reuben Golding visits a spectacular mansion outside of San Francisco, where he meets a fascinating older woman, brimming with sexuality and old world charm. They bond over the house and the personal effects of her mysterious uncle, tragically disappeared of late. Later that same evening, the house is broken into, the woman is killed by robbers and Reuben is bitten and released by what he believes at first to be a large wolf-like animal. Rather than a curse, Reuben begins to see his transformation as a gift, giving him power and strength to seek out evil and right wrongs, a violent contrast to his writing as a reporter.

Anne Rice's take on werewolf mythology is written with a compelling modernity. While the dialogue at times feels archaic, The Wolf Gift is contemporary in a way that her Vampire Chronicles never was. This "man wolf," as Reuben dubs himself, is fully of the new world, using an iPhone, Twitter and Facebook with deftness and charm. Reuben's own perilous journey from a bewildered young adult to an increasingly self-assured man wolf is itself informed by our own common cultural knowledge of cinema and literature. The Wolf Gift is a strong--and welcome--return to the monster mythology that made Anne Rice famous in the first place. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Discover: A werewolf story that wins readers' attention with grace, charm, wit and hope for humanity.

When a popular, beautiful local girl is found brutally murdered on a towpath in idyllic Bath, the investigation team pursues the recommendation of the forensic psychologist: search for a teenage boy, one of her peers. Naturally, Harley-riding bad-girl police detective Zoe Benedict has something else in mind. She follows a more sinister lead toward amateur porn, strip clubs and unsavory characters--and is astonished to encounter her estranged sister, Sally, the good girl, reduced by divorce to cleaning rich people’s houses to support her daughter, at the center of the case. One of Sally's clients is a successful (and appropriately sleazy) pornographer; her daughter shares a history with the murdered girl; and her boyfriend has some inside knowledge that makes him especially afraid for Sally's safety. A dirty secret from Zoe's own past threatens to reveal itself, while Sally, struggling to defend her loved ones from harm, discovers new strength no one thought she possessed. And the sisters' relationship gets a second chance.

Mo Hayder's (Skin; Gone) tightly plotted Hanging Hill keeps the suspense taut, and the characters are realistic and multifaceted as well as (in most cases) sympathetic. Hayder delights in exposing the dark side--of domestic life, of family, of childhood and growing up--and her gritty, gruesome bits are not for the faint of heart. But there are love affairs, too, sweetly relieving the grimness. Hanging Hill is finely put together and entirely satisfying--at least until the terrifying ending, which uproots the safe feeling of resolution into which the reader was lulled. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pages of julia

Discover: A suspenseful, fast-paced thriller that reunites estranged sisters amidst a series of grisly events.

Elizabeth Weil opened her life up to millions of people in a New York Times Magazine cover story, "Married (Happily) with Issues," which she's expanded into No Cheating, No Dying. Since neither she nor her husband strayed or died in the first decade, Weil decides to use these monogamy and vitality milestones as a springboard from which to dive more deeply into what it means to be married. Marriage doesn't begin with the white dress and the party, she says; it happens over time.

Along with her brave husband, Dan Duane (also a writer), they meet with marriage counselors and attend self-help seminars and marriage education classes. Along the way, they tackle religion (she's Jewish, he's not); family (he's not crazy about hers); money (not much on either side); and food. Food turns out to be a biggie; Dan is obsessed with developing a culinary mastery of the obscure--think pig and lamb carcasses in the basement freezer.

Weil is a skilled writer, easily sharing intimate details and heartfelt emotions in a compelling, sometimes self-deprecating, manner without sinking into victimhood or judgment. Some of her marriage trials are hysterical, others painful, but she relates them all in equally clear, compelling, honest language. Much like Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed: A Love Story, though, you pretty much know the outcome; what hooks the reader is the enjoyable exploration of the many possibilities on the way to that ending. --Susan Weis-Bohlen, breathe books

Discover: One woman's irresistibly sincere quest to make a happy marriage even better.

A cocked beret over a tight Afro, a leather gloved fist held high, an M16 strapped across his back, Malcolm's or Mao's book in his back pocket and, oh, those cool shades... the Black Panther was the white man's nightmare for the 1960s. Eddie Joseph became one when he was 15, living in a Harlem apartment "surrounded by chicken bones, a wounded TV, and a poster of Che." In Panther Baby, he tells the story of how a light-skinned son of Cuban revolutionaries was handed off by his unwed black Latina mother to an older black couple who raised him in a North Bronx home equally comfortable with Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois and their local Baptist church. Joseph seemingly was born to fight.

In relatively short order, the 15-year-old, now renamed Jamal, set off on the rocky road of activism, crime, prison, drugs, politics and, finally, theater and the arts, to his present status as a family man, Oscar nominee and Columbia film school chair. Panther Baby dramatically marks the milestones of this journey. All the early Panther heavyweights are here--Huey, Rap, Stokely--as well as Joseph's childhood friends and, eventually, his godson Tupac, whom he tried to counsel and encourage in his last days.

As a former Black Liberation Army soldier intent on bringing "sixteen million armed black people... to disrupt the capitalist system," Joseph wisely concludes his autobiography on the steps of Columbia's Low Library with the words: "Maybe there's a future after all." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Discover: An orphan's journey from the Black Panthers to the Academy Awards.

It's hard to live in the United States and not be within a few hundred miles of a Native American Indian reservation, harder still to live on land that wasn't promised to one tribe or another in one treaty or another at some point. Yet most American citizens rarely see more of the reservations than the highway signs announcing their presence, if that. David Treuer (The Translation of Dr Arpelles) spent five years researching tribal histories and interviewing tribe members in order to bring us Rez Life, an authoritative and vastly entertaining book.

Treuer's Minnesota-centered Ojibwe tribe is the largest in North America; its difficult language has given English such wonderful words as moccasin, toboggan and wigwam. With a novelist's sense of narrative and character (and a refreshing sense of humor), he proudly tells how the Ojibwe defeated the Sioux--not that it matters now. "The Sioux hunt buffalo from horseback and we Ojibwe go out on snowshoes to snare rabbits," Treuer reflects. "The Sioux have cornered the market on Indian cool."

His history of the convoluted treaties among diverse tribes and various local, state, and U.S. governments is sadly reminiscent of the history of agreements, boundary disputes and wars in the Middle East. It's through the stories of today's reservation life, however, that Treuer debunks the stereotypes and delivers insights into the Indian people, their languages and cultures and their future. There may be no more accurate, more engaging, more thought-provoking book on contemporary Native American Indian life than this. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Discover: The history, complexity, rewards and struggles of Native American Indians and their lives on and off the reservations.

For those unfamiliar with the history of right-wing extremism in the U.S., Arthur Goldwag's The New Hate provides a useful primer on the nation's "long-standing penchant for conspiratorial thinking, its never-ending quest for scapegoats." Goldwag's (Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies) wide-ranging narrative hits most of the low points of American bias; one of the more intriguing chapters examines Henry Ford's virulent anti-Semitism and its roots in the notorious forged blueprint for Jewish world domination, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Anti-Jewish prejudice is just one example of what Goldwag describes as a "toxic brew of racial, religious, gender, and nationalistic chauvinism" that has targeted Catholics, Freemasons, non-whites and many others throughout American history. These bubbles of intolerance seem to reside permanently in our national bloodstream, often springing to life in periods of economic insecurity.

Though his thoroughness in exploring this subject is impressive, Goldwag has one habit that detracts from the force of his narrative, especially in its latter stages: he's fond of quoting at length from the writings or speeches of his sometimes obscure subjects, and as their tirades take on a more extreme tinge, you may find yourself skimming to avoid spending too much time in their company. If there's any comfort in this dispiriting account, it's that the conspiracy-minded have (largely) been confined to the margins of American political and cultural life. That's small consolation, though, when balanced against the unavoidable conclusion that the haters will always be with us or, as Goldwag puts it, the realization that "the New Hate is the same as the Old Hate--only now it's hiding in plain sight." --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Discover: Arthur Goldwag presents a comprehensive, if at times depressing, history of right-wing extremism and its intermittent incursions into mainstream American political culture.

Immortal Bird begins with a simple moment of parental unease: Doron Weber senses that his 12-year-old son, Damon, is overdue for a growth spurt. Weber cannot help being extra-vigilant about his firstborn, a "blue baby" whose heart lacked a second ventricle, requiring two open-heart surgeries by the age of four. His father's worry proves grounded: Damon has developed protein-losing enteropathy (PLE), a rare, poorly understood and life-threatening post-surgical condition that causes vital protein molecules to leak out of the digestive system.

Weber, a program director for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, intersperses family vignettes with doctor appointments and short, well-parsed explanations as he investigates Damon's options. Even as the urgency of Damon's PLE intensifies, Weber finds moments of family joy and admires his son's determination to keep the hospital part of his life in the background. Excerpts from Damon's blog bring the teenager's witty and tough-tender voice into the memoir, including notes on filming his cameo on Deadwood and musings on how his health challenges might limit his goals for high school.

Immortal Bird's momentum and the author's prose style peak in the last third of the memoir, as the Webers end up battling an overstretched hospital and a villainously cavalier doctor. In the dramatic and unforgettable debacle that ensues, Damon and his parents achieve moments of devastating grace. By writing Immortal Bird, Weber has transformed his family's experience of medical strife into a work of art that teaches us how to advocate, how to love and how to transcend the unthinkable. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

Discover: The compelling narrative of a father's quest to save his son; a memoir of family grace; and a profile of a teenager whose wit and stoicism transcend his illness.

Ireland's Blasket Islands are an uninhabited tourist destination of crumbled-down stone cottages. Before emigration and attrition dwindled their population to a handful--until a final evacuation ordered by the Irish government in 1953--the Blaskets had been a vibrant, nearly self-contained settlement of around 150 hardy, Irish-speaking souls. The still-Celtic Blaskets had long been romanticized, yet the people of the islands made their most lasting cultural contributions in the last decades before their own culture's demise. During that period, as Robert Kanigel recounts in On an Irish Island, a steady procession of writers and intellectuals visited the island, encouraging residents to put pen to paper. In his clear-eyed yet admiring chronicle of that fertile time, Kanigel  charms us with visions of this disappeared world, while raising intriguing questions about how even the most loving, respectful visitor can forever alter a remote destination.

Did the visitors, who came seeking linguistic research or sometimes personal edification, take more from the Blaskets than they gave in return? Did their coaxing of literary works from the residents of the Blaskets preserve a remnant of an already dying culture--or rush it out of existence by broadcasting it to the wider world? Kanigel turns his admirable trove of research into a surprisingly jaunty read, entertaining all these complicated and sometimes troubling possibilities with wisdom and no small amount of warmth. Readers will wish they would have been able to visit the inhabited Blaskets--yet perhaps also wish that no one had. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic

Discover: A bewitching portrait of the last few decades of civilization on Ireland’s Blasket Islands.

This debut novel probes a haunting mystery with an unforgettable protagonist.

Seventeen-year-old Penelope "Lo" Marin has collected beautiful things all her life, treasures from each town she's lived in (11 total). But since her brother, Oren, died, her hobby has evolved into an obsession. While wandering through a "sad, strange part of Cleveland"--Neverland, the city of lost children--Lo barely escapes gunfire intended for a stripper named Sapphire. The next day, Lo visits a flea market and comes across a butterfly pendant that had been among Sapphire's things and, with that, a commitment to find Sapphire's murderer takes hold.

Lo's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder distinguishes her narrative from other crime-solving protagonists. She's ruled by superstition about numbers ("The year I turned eight I wouldn't let Mom put eight candles on the birthday cake. Eight candles would have made it inedible"), and she's a kleptomaniac hoarder, trying to hold onto things forever, unlike Oren. Oren was Lo's only friend until Flynt, a street artist in a bear-eared hat, introduces himself and quickly becomes her tour guide in Neverland--friend, love interest and suspect in the very crime Lo has set out to solve.

Kate Ellison not only masterfully allows readers insight into the sufferings of OCD, but she explores the lives of Neverland's lost children, such as runaways and strippers, while remaining mindful of her teen audience. With bold storytelling, gritty characters and otherworldly locales, The Butterfly Clues marks a magnificent debut. --Adam Silvera, events assistant, Books of Wonder, New York City

Discover: A teenager with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder who chases down a murderer in Cleveland's underworld.

"Spread the love" could easily be an alternate title to this clever book that's ideal for Valentines of all ages.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal (Duck? Rabbit!) and Peter H. Reynolds (The Dot) each boast a long list of titles that demonstrate their fresh way of looking at the world. Here they combine their talents in a new twist on how affection takes root and spreads like tiger lilies. A young gardener heads out with her spade and watering can, stamped with a pink heart: "It goes like this./ Little Miss/ planted a kiss." As if anticipating young readers' reaction, the author restates it as a question, "Planted a kiss?" The girl hero faces front as if listening to her audience. She answers with a confident smile in a declarative: "Planted a kiss." Reynolds's trademark hand lettering gives the book the feeling of a hand-me-down recipe, as the gardener explains her next steps: "Sunshine. Water. Greet. Repeat." Deceptively simple rhymes chronicle her shifting moods: "Doubt. Pout" when no shoots show, then when she spies a "sprout,... Shout! Shout!" In Reynolds's visual equivalent, she does a jig in the air, sunlike rays emanating from her, and her neighbors soon "gather about."

The sprout grows into a bubbling airborne confetti, raised from the pages in pinks, yellows and oranges. As the heroine's friends tell her to hold onto her blossoming tendril ("It's far too rare"), she shares it anyway and, like Annabelle's wool in Extra Yarn, the supply is endless. Love, like generosity, reaps more than what's sown. A wonderful Valentine for youngest booklovers up through the most seasoned readers. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: A new twist on how affection takes root as a Valentine for youngest booklovers up through the most seasoned readers.