Prolific novelist Elin Hilderbrand (28 Summers) ponders death, grief and the hereafter in the beautifully uplifting Golden Girl.

As the book commences, Vivi Howe--successful author of 13 novels and a 51-year-old divorced mother of three--dies in a hit-and-run accident near her home on Nantucket Island. Once Vivi's soul ascends from Earth, she is assigned a spirit guide, Martha, who allows her to view one last summer as life goes on without her for her three adult children, their father (her ex), her best friend and an old flame. As Vivi monitors from afar, she can give three "nudges" to alter the shape of events as they unfold in the lives of those she's left behind.

What ensues is an emotionally powerful story largely centered on Vivi's three children, all named for authors. Willa, the oldest, is married and pregnant again after suffering two miscarriages. When a long-lost beau of Vivi surfaces, Willa becomes intrigued to learn more about the life her mother led--and the secrets she kept--before marriage and family. Beautiful, rebellious middle child Carson gets swept up in substance abuse and makes histrionic bad choices. And Leo, an angsty high school senior about to start college, faces romantic turmoil. Threaded throughout the story is an ongoing investigation into who might've killed their mother.

Faithful readers have come to depend on Hilderbrand's top-notch escapist fiction that puts lively, dramatic new spins on families challenged by love and loss. Golden Girl will exceed their expectations. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

A quiet, severe winter in the Korean coastal town of Sokcho warms unexpectedly with the arrival of a foreigner in Elisa Shua Dusapin's prize-winning first novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. The unnamed young woman narrator is working the desk at a guesthouse in the off-season when Yan Kerrand, a creatively blocked comics author from France, checks in to work on the final installment of his series about a peripatetic archeologist. Pressured to fit an unfulfilling ideal of femininity, the narrator's ambivalent season of life dovetails beautifully with Kerrand's restlessness.

But this short, exquisite novel is not easily defined by a simple artist-muse relationship. The pair forge a mutually searching dynamic through intimate walks in the cold and daytrips to nearby points of interest, like the DMZ. The daughter of a Korean mother and an estranged French father, the narrator takes interest in Kerrand's country of origin, a place she has never seen but is connected to by blood and dreams. Meanwhile, she challenges his simplified impressions of her country: "Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that's been going on for so long people have stopped believing it's real.... We're living in limbo. In a winter that never ends."

There is a terseness to Winter in Sokcho, precipitating from the narrator's irritations with her vapid boyfriend, who aspires to be a model, and her aging mother's continual criticisms. But the brevity and pacing of its vignettes are also reminiscent of comics, Kerrand's books having "no dialogue, very few words." Conversely, Dusapin's beguiling work resembles a vibrant graphic novel, sans pictures. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Robert J. Harris's A Study in Crimson: Sherlock Holmes 1942 is an homage to both Arthur Conan Doyle's novels and Universal Pictures' war-years movie franchise, which transposed Holmes to the then-modern era. Like the BBC's Sherlock, A Study in Crimson does right by its venerated source material while putting a new spin on Conan Doyle's characters by rejiggering their historical context.

The novel opens in September 1942, when London is enforcing blackouts that make it that much easier for evildoers to carry out their crimes by night; sure enough, the body of a young woman is found garroted and mutilated in a courtyard. After Holmes learns that the body of another woman killed by a similar method was discovered some days earlier, he determines that the murders occurred on the same dates that Jack the Ripper's first two victims were found in 1888. Holmes's customary periods of reflection while working on a case may be a luxury that the women of London can't afford, given that Jack the Ripper ultimately claimed five lives.

Harris's mystery is up to snuff, and as impressions go, he does yeoman's work with Watson's narration, capturing the good doctor's starry-eyed bemusement with the fustily fastidious detective. Harris (The Thirty-One Kings) elaborates on Holmes's background in a way that jibes with Conan Doyle's careful characterization, and Watson's personal life gets some fresh ink as well. A Study in Crimson's suspenseful subplot: Will widower Watson make romantic headway with an American journalist wrapped up in the case? --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Abundant in heart, intimacy and flavor, Josephine Caminos Oría's Sobremesa: A Memoir of Food and Love in Thirteen Courses invites readers to pull up a seat and settle in. Born in Argentina but raised mainly in Pittsburgh, Pa., Oría translates sobremesa as "time spent being present at the table, lingering over a meal in conversation well after the food is gone." The table Oría sets in her rich telling explores not just her own coming of age but also the legacies of the women, family and cultures that have helped shape her, and her decisions, along the way.

Even amid heartbreaks and tragedy, love in Oría's life is plentiful: in memories of ancestors watching over her; as she gazes upon the handsome ranch hand who eventually becomes her husband; and as she changes the course of her professional life, to dedicate herself to re-creating her grandmother's dulce de leche.

Oría lingers over memories, living her sobremesa philosophy in her telling itself: prolonging the stories, steeping them in indelible details. A poignant example: Oría urges survivors of anyone who had standing appointments--as in her late mother's case--with hairdressers who served as longtime confidantes: "Should you ever lose a loved one suddenly... call their hairdresser. Go sit in their chair and talk to them." In Sobremesa's many moments like this, Oría's story spreads love and nourishment where others might forget its power--even simply through a recipe for Empanadas al Cuchillo. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer

Daisy Hernández is adept at blending memoir and journalism, having mastered the confluence of personal experience and dogged reporting in her memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed, and through her writing, which has appeared in the New York Times and the Atlantic. While she's written about a variety of topics, her personal connection to Kissing Bug Disease--also known as Chagas disease--as well as years of research into the little-known condition, makes The Kissing Bug: A True Story of Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Deadly Disease an especially compelling and impressive read.

Like a skilled detective analyzing the most convoluted of mysteries, Hernández takes readers along as she attempts to make sense of the parasitic disease that killed her Tía Dora and currently afflicts some six to seven million people, mostly in Central and South America and Mexico; the CDC estimates 300,000 cases in the U.S. Despite its reach, the disease is not as well-known as other insect-borne conditions. This discrepancy drives Hernández's book. Through extended interviews with patients, doctors and epidemiologists, Hernández weaves a vital narrative of the racial politics that overshadow modern health care and reveals who "we choose to take care of and when and how and for what reasons."

There are many obstacles to eradicating Chagas. The parasite can be transmitted through blood transfusions and organ transplants, and benznidazole, a potential treatment, is expensive, in large part because of exploitative prices set by pharmaceutical companies. Yet Hernández's lucid writing provides a paradigm for how to begin addressing the inequities baked into medicine. --Gwen Aviles, freelance writer

In Hyphen, the feminist activist and academic Pardis Mahdavi explores her hyphenated identity as an Iranian-American who is struggling to belong. With her Iranian heritage often at odds with her American self, Mahdavi examines the hyphen's rise and fall during its curiously turbulent history as a uniter and divider of words.

Hyphen is part of the Object Lessons book series (Sock; Veil), which illuminates stories behind everyday objects and inspires readers to contemplate the deeper significance behind items that generally aren't thought about beyond their immediate usefulness. Mahdavi (Crossing the Gulf; Gridlock) highlights the hyphen's glory days, including its enduring presence etched into the stone facade of the New-York Historical Society, and its politicization by President Theodore Roosevelt when he questioned the loyalty of hyphenated Americans.

As dean of Social Sciences at Arizona State University, Mahdavi connected with students whose struggles with their hyphenated identities mirrored her own. She shares their stories and speaks eloquently to the travails of those caught between worlds, trying to connect their past and present. After being stripped of her Iranian citizenship, Mahdavi realized she didn't have to fit on one side of the hyphen or the other. Instead, she embraced the space between her various identifies, her voice and authority residing in the mighty hyphen itself.

While the hyphen shines as a connector of compound words and allows them, over time, to take on new meanings, for the author its true magic lies in its ability to harmonize and honor a person's individuality. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and freelance reviewer

Readers who know the fog's name is Karl as well as those who've never been smitten by the City by the Bay will find the 25 essays in The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco to be heartfelt, enlightening reflections on the authors' diverse feelings for the city.

Editor Gary Kamiya (Cool Gray City of Love), a San Franciscan since 1971, distills the collection's many perspectives. "For the last decade or so," since the "Tech Tsunami" came to town, "the chorus of San Francisco detractors has begun to outshout its defenders," he writes. Common themes--both homage and elegy--surface. Housing, always at a premium, is revered, and "to move neighborhoods in San Francisco is to change personalities," Elisa Bassist writes, from "the tie-dye of Haight-Ashbury" to the Castro's converted Victorians. First-generation San Franciscan Alia Volz mourns the gentrified neighborhoods that are "losing their grit and idiosyncrasies." References to loss recur: bookstores, landmarks, Black residents, soul. Peter Coyote sees the city as "colonized, homogenized, and marginalized," transformed by "money and an addiction to power," and fears it's a precursor to a nation that resembles San Francisco's "exclusive enclaves."

This collection illuminates the beauty, the climate and the history that drew (and sustained) residents to "the glittering, devil-may-care" city, with contributions from 25 writers who may have left her, but undeniably have loved her, too. (A portion of the book's proceeds will go to support families experiencing homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area.) --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

Nigerian-born writer Akwaeke Emezi, whose YA novel Pet was a National Book Award finalist, brings readers a deep, tender look at a family unraveling around the tragic and early loss of someone they loved but never understood in The Death of Vivek Oji, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

"They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died," the first chapter says in its arresting entirety. Born to Chika and Kavita, with a starfish-shaped birthmark on his foot identical to a scar his grandmother had on hers, Vivek comes into the world "after death and into grief." As a tween, he suffers from inexplicable blackouts, and Chika considers him too sensitive. As an older teen, Vivek finds solace and love among friends who accept him and in his impossible yet undeniably passionate relationship with cousin Osita. When Vivek's fabric-wrapped corpse is left on his parents' doorstep without explanation, Kavita desperately searches for explanations about his life and death, while Osita grapples with how much of the truth he should tell.

By turns raw and gentle, this gorgeous #OwnVoices drama features a cast of diverse nationalities, sexual orientations and gender identities. The mix of third- and first-person narration reconstructs a life, largely from secondhand accounts. Emezi (Freshwater) beautifully captures an ordinary family in all its loving, hurtful, messy glory, then thoughtfully demonstrates that pressure placed on one member can backfire and undermine the entire unit. A spot-on pick for thoughtful book club discussion, The Death of Vivek Oji wraps up heartache with hope. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

In Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar's impressive whirlwind of a second novel and a Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2020, the author turns his own phenomenally successful American story inside out, eloquently exposing fault lines that persist for those viewed as outsiders in their country of birth. Taking the literary form of a reality drama, Homeland Elegies explores the socio-economic upheavals that created Trump's America through the astonishing family saga of an American Muslim playwright of Pakistani ancestry.

A narrator named Ayad, born in New York and raised in Milwaukee with a firm belief in American exceptionalism, struggles to reconcile the complicated truths behind the United States' obsession with wealth as holy pursuit and its fanatic consumerism. His Islamic heritage bears the traumatic aftershocks of 9/11, when living in New York became an act of provocation for Americans like himself, the beginning of his "deepening travails as a Muslim in this country." Through profoundly intimate vignettes, Ayad shares the distorted American dreams of a father who served as Trump's physician in the '90s and an uncle whose conversion to Christianity is a misguided effort to feel safe in the U.S. Meanwhile, his dying mother pines for an idealized version of Pakistan, the same country that learned terror-as-tactic at the feet of the CIA.

True to the legacy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Disgraced, Akhtar (American Dervish) dissects themes of Muslim self-identity with incredible precision. Homeland Elegies will appeal intellectually to readers secure in their sense of belonging as well as those who, like Ayad, wrestle with feelings of otherness. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and reviewer

Catherine Gilbert Murdock's Da Vinci's Cat is a fanciful, middle-grade alternate history romp that narrates the adventures of 16th-century "gentleman" Federico and his encounters with New Jersey time-travelers Herbert Bother and Beatrice "Bee" Bliss.

The year is 1511, and 11-year-old Federico of Mantua is living in Rome as the hostage of Pope Julius II where he freely associates with Renaissance masters like Michelangelo and Raphael. One night, Federico hears scratching coming from an ornate closet and discovers a tawny kitten. The next night, the kitten jumps into the closet and returns moments later, fully grown and held in the arms of Herbert Bother, time-traveler and art trader from 1928 New Jersey. Herbert tells Federico that the closet (and Juno the cat) belonged to Master Leonardo and offers Federico a trade: Herbert will bring the boy chocolate if Federico brings Herbert sketches. In modern-day New Jersey, Beatrice "Bee" Bliss discovers a tawny cat. When she takes the cat across the road to the home of Miss Bother, the old woman recognizes Bee from an unsigned Raphael drawing. To figure out this puzzle, Bee will need an ornate closet, a feisty cat and the prideful young hostage of Pope Julius II.

Da Vinci's Cat, told in third person, is a story about selflessness, friendship and the importance of seeking unity through difference. Gilbert (The Book of Boy) emphasizes a classic lesson: it is important to help others, no matter how they might dress, speak or act. Life's greatest trials, the children learn, may not be conquerable alone, but any difficulty can be overcome with a little bit of help from friends. This novel will be perfect for lovers of Madeleine L'Engle and When You Reach Me. --Cade Williams, freelance reviewer and staff writer at the Harvard Independent

The Littletown Library had been around for so long that people almost forgot it was there. After a tornado blew through and "carried the whole thing away," residents weren't even sure they needed a new one. In the fanciful--yet eminently sensible--Nia and the New Free Library, one book-loving girl cooks up an imaginative plan, not only for rebuilding the missing institution, but for getting the entire town to value it as well.

Now that there's "an empty space where the library used to be," the builder thinks the town would be better off with another skyscraper, while the grocer is partial to a parking lot. Only Nia misses the old Littletown Library, which she visited every week. After giving the matter some thought, Nia gathers "a desk and a chair. And a pencil and some paper." She gets comfortable and begins to write. Days later, Nia has created enough books to fill a little wagon and she shares this New Free Library with people in town. The grocer thinks the words are wrong, so Nia gives out pencils. Pretty soon "the entire town was lending a hand." Before long there are "enormous piles of freshly written books."

Ian Lendler (The Fabled Life of Aesop) deftly concocts a tale of kid-friendly activism, demonstrating how one person might achieve outsize results by giving the whole diverse community a stake in the dream. The sketchy line work and pastel washes of Mark Pett (This Is My Book!) bring to mind the picture book art of David Small. His loosely defined panels give a graphic novel feel to some spreads, with the sequential art allowing the illustrations to propel the story forward. Nia and the New Free Library demonstrates how spreading the love of reading might well elevate an entire community. --Lynn Becker, blogger and host of Book Talk, a monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI