In The Age of Miracles, the world is ending just as the life of a young girl is beginning. This coming-of-age story chronicles the parallel disintegrations of the world and the life and family of Julia, a sensitive 12-year-old girl buffeted with the angst of emerging adolescence. As apocalypse looms for the earth and its inhabitants, Julia grapples with the twin challenges of survival and growing up--in this instance much too fast.

The earth has suddenly begun to slow in its rotation. What starts as a minor oddity grows into catastrophe, as the lengthening periods of sunlight and darkness lead to drastic climate changes. As disasters multiply, it becomes clear that humans are living on borrowed time.

Walker constructs a believable alternate reality in which every detail is accounted for, from the food sources of the irrevocably damaged earth to the societal conflicts that inevitably erupt worldwide. Equally realistic is the depiction of people's stubborn clinging to the rituals of ordinary life in the face of bizarre conditions, even certain death. Yet Julia forges a bond with Seth, a classmate, that is stronger than her fear of the future. They represent a moment of brightness in a world where such moments are fast fading, making their relationship deeply poignant for the reader.

The Age of Miracles may be most remarkable for what it does not do: it does not extend any hope. The darkness only increases until at last, we bid goodbye to Julia as she stands clear-eyed on the precipice of the end of all things. --Ilana Teitelbaum

Read more about The Age of Miracles and Karen Thompson Walker in our Maximum Shelf.

Chris Cleave's Gold spins a tire-ripping velodrama out of two subjects underrepresented in novels: the head-games of Olympic track cycling and the heart-splitting demands faced by female athletes who try to balance motherhood and elite competition. Readers who don't know an individual pursuit from a keirin will be able to feel the excitement in Cleave's clearly depicted racing scenes and readers who are devotees of high-stakes emotional triangles will find much to untangle.

While the disparate athletic and relationship motivations of lone ranger Zoe Castle and her married teammates Kate Meadows and Jack Argall are complicated by a long-running friendship/rivalry, the novel's deepest human resonance is pumped up by eight-year-old Sophie Argall, whose reliance on a Star Wars fantasy life as she strives to be a champion leukemia patient is depicted with beguiling tough-tenderness.

Cleave shares Gold's stream-of-consciousness perspective among his main protagonists and their crusty Australian coach, to yield a many-spoked view of what makes them surge or fall back. The timeline of Gold spans three Olympic Games, beginning with a short set piece in Athens before it focuses on preparations for London 2012, when Zoe, Kate and Jack are all 32 and vying for what is probably their final chance to compete for gold.

To an American reader, the celebrity of British track cyclists might seem far-fetched, and to any cycling fan the dearth of doping references might seem blinkered. The plot has to ratchet through a lot of gears, but Gold is well worth the ride for its contextual details, its generous supply of dramatic scenes and the steadiness of Cleave's storytelling pulse. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

Santiago Gamboa's Necropolis is a hefty, Decameron-like a story-within-story-within-story set in war-torn Jerusalem, told by an unnamed 40ish narrator who, like Gamboa, is a Colombian novelist living in Rome. Receiving a letter inviting him to the International Conference on Biography and Memory, with no idea why he's been invited, the narrator finds himself in a hotel full of eccentric delegates--all storytellers, spinning tales of chess, God and drug addiction.

Gamboa expertly juggles an international cast of characters, including a muscular, tattooed ex-convict pastor of a cult religion, an Italian porn actress, a brave and honorable hotel switchboard operator and a pretty journalist from Iceland with a penchant for shedding her clothes. It's a literate feast, and the reader won't get 20 pages into the story before hitting references to Poe, Mann, Bolano, Balzac and Melville.

With room-rattling explosions creeping closer and closer, the novel dovetails narratives within narratives, like that of the hardworking young auto mechanic who dares to stand up to the paramilitary hoodlums terrorizing his village, or the pregnant woman knitting a sweater incorrectly while a tortured prisoner watches, or the Portuguese poet whose job as an air traffic controller forces him into a conversation with a pilot about to crash into the sea.

It's a dizzying mosaic and stunt-filled juggling act, with plenty of sexual hanky-panky, but with a few exceptions, the book is best enjoyed for its verbal pyrotechnics, because its fancy footwork seldom engages the heart. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle

Just barely surviving the dog days of summer, Inspector Bordelli is roused from his heat-induced torpor by an assassination devious enough to make a Borgia blush and leave Poirot puzzled. When the caretaker of a wealthy recluse finds her elderly mistress dead in her bed, Bordelli and his fresh-faced new protégé set out to prove it's a case of murder disguised as accidental death.

Set in Florence during the summer of 1963, Death in August is the first novel in a new mystery series by veteran Italian author Marco Vichi. A World War II veteran, Inspector Bordelli is weary, aging poorly and alone, still haunted by his years of wartime service. Yet he is saved from the doldrums of melancholia by his humor and heart--traits that draw to him an odd but loyal cadre of petty thieves, happy hookers and general misfits. (Not to mention his dinner parties make the Marriage at Cana look like a church potluck.)

Vichi's prose transports readers to the deserted, sweltering streets of down-and-out Florence, thanks to a translation by Stephen Saltarelli that conveys the dialogue with a lyricism and tongue-in-cheek wit one instinctively senses were present in the original. Straight from the city that brought us da Vinci and Dante, Vichi is on a par with writers like Henning Mankell and Elizabeth George who have elevated the police procedural to a work of art. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Scott Lasser's Say Nice Things About Detroit is a harsh but tender homage to his native city that tackles the city's racial tensions head on. It opens with the double murder of a retired black FBI agent and a beautiful white woman--not a typical urban murder about sex and drugs, though: Dirk Burton and Natalie Brooks were brother and sister, sharing the same German immigrant mother who left Dirk and his African-American father, then married an Englishman who fathered Natalie. Her children grew up in very different neighborhoods with very different opportunities and expectations.

Natalie's ex-boyfriend David, a divorced lawyer in Denver, comes home to help his father deal with his mother's dementia. Natalie's younger sister, Carolyn, unhappily married in Los Angeles, returns for her sister's funeral. David reconnects with Carolyn in a passionate love affair. When she becomes pregnant, they decide to move back to Detroit to raise their child together. Although she cautiously suggests "it's like moving back to Hiroshima," he answers, "But people live there now, I'm pretty sure."

Things are not so simple, however; there's the double murder to resolve, failing parents to care for and even more complicated interracial family dynamics that threaten to jeopardize their romance.

Lasser's (Battle Creek) intimate understanding of the city makes for a captivating novel rich with details of the local vernacular, weather, food, music, crime and, of course, cars. Detroit is not just the setting for Lasser's story--it's a place with a beating heart (weak pulse notwithstanding) and enough guts to have a future. --Bruce Jacobs

In the northeast corner of Los Angeles County, just outside the city's sprawl, lies the empty isolation of the Mojave Desert. On August 2, 2003, Deputy Sheriff Steve Sorensen ("not ever a slacker, always on time") was investigating a complaint on the remote property of the reclusive Don Kueck ("basking semi-asleep like the rattlesnake in the bucket at his front door, the living embodiment of the great American battle cry, 'Don't tread on me' "). As Sorensen approached the shabby trailer, Kueck angrily came outside, fired a dozen assault rifle rounds into Sorensen and tied his body to the bumper of his yellow Dodge Dart, dragging it off into the desert.

With a reporter's eye for detail, a novelist's sense of pace and no fear of inserting her own voice into the action, Deanne Stillman takes us through the history of Kueck's deranged anger and the massive effort to take him down. For seven days, a combined county, state and federal task force assembled all their high-tech equipment and spare officers to hunt the cop-killer, as Kueck lay low in underground tunnels and sheltered rock formations. Finally, the SWAT team found Kueck back in his trailer, where he refused to surrender and was killed in the resulting firefight and conflagration. When the smoke clears, we are left only with Stillman's vivid images of cold violence in the hot wilderness of an American desert. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were one of the greatest teams on Broadway. As Gary Marmorstein (Hollywood Rhapsody) notes in A Ship Without a Sail, in 25 years of working together the duo wrote more than 800 songs, including "Blue Moon" and "My Funny Valentine." While Hart's lyrics always came after the music and only with greater effort, together they created masterpieces.

Marmorstein seamlessly weaves a vast amount of material to fashion his portrait of the man Wilfred Sheed called a "forlorn dwarf." Hart, then 23, met the 16-year-old Rodgers in 1919. They began to work together soon afterward, turning out their first collaboration, The Garrick Gaieties, in 1925, followed by A Connecticut Yankee two years later. Their relationship was one of opposites: Rodgers the consummate professional, a details and deadline man, while Hart was amiable but unreliable and moody. To go along with Rodger's glorious melodies, Hart is credited with overhauling the American lyric, bringing a new, profound yet simple poetry to the words. (The book's title comes from a song in the 1929 musical Heads Up!)

Rodgers described his partner as a "source of permanent irritation." He lived with his mother and was tortured emotionally throughout his life, keeping his homosexuality a secret. He drank morning, noon and night, and his alcoholism exacerbated many of his problems and led to his early death in 1943. Marmorstein perfectly captures this complex man in a beautifully written and poignant biography.--Tom Lavoie, former publisher

When 19-year-old Janet Groth landed a job as the receptionist at the New Yorker in 1957, she believed it was only a matter of time before she rose through the ranks to fact-checker, reporter and regular contributor. More than anything, she wanted to be a writer; she once even submitted a story to a contest in Mademoiselle, though she didn't win. ("Another blond with daddy problems won that year," she recalls. "Name of Sylvia Plath.")

Twenty-one years after starting the job, though, Groth was still taking messages for the people she once thought would be her professional equals. When she left the receptionist's desk in 1978, she took with her the friendship and respect of her co-workers, a long-earned Ph.D. in English and an arsenal of literary gossip--but no byline.

The Receptionist recounts Groth's two-decade stint at the magazine and how she eventually learned to throw off the "New Yorker mantle of borrowed fame" to find her own self-worth. While readers looking for dirt on the likes of John Berryman and Muriel Spark won't be disappointed, Groth devotes much of her memoir to life outside the magazine's office, including a rather exhaustive analysis of her many romantic exploits.

Intimate and breezily conversational, The Receptionist is less a juicy tell-all about a legendary magazine and more a woman's story of her own becoming amid the chaos and glitz of Manhattan in the 1960s. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice

Francis Scott Key, best known for writing "The Star-Spangled Banner," was also a pro-slavery lawyer and chief prosecutor for the city of Washington, D.C., in the 1830s, where he did little to prosecute crime against blacks. This didn't worry Beverly Snow, a freed slave with a flair for cooking; he opened a restaurant to remarkable success and avoided the harassment free blacks often faced in the city--until August 4, 1835.

On that night, a young slave named Arthur Bowen drunkenly stumbled into the bedroom of his mistress, Anna Thornton, holding an ax. Mrs. Thornton ran screaming for help, and Bowen was arrested. But tensions were already high due to abolitionist pamphlets that had been circulating in the city, and a mob surrounded the jail screaming for Bowen to be lynched. Key and other city officials managed to hold off the mob that night--but, thwarted in their attempts to kill Bowen, the crowds quickly shifted to an attack on local African American‑owned businesses. As one of the most successful black men in the city, Snow was a main target, and the violence and destruction became known as the "Snow-Storm." Snow managed to escape, and Key prosecuted Arthur Bowen for the attempted murder of Anna Thornton.

Snow-Storm in August offers an absorbing look at a little-known period in American history, and a fascinating glimpse at a complicated man remembered by further generations only for writing a song. Jefferson Morley skillfully portrays the racial tension of the era, and the careful balance that was so easily upset by Bowen's drunken actions. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Assembled from Internet postings by a range of writers, The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals memorializes the political happenings of the early 21st century with satirical aplomb. While McSweeney's itself may be more familiar to readers left of center, the authors assault both sides of the aisle with vicious barbs that explode in bellyaching hilarity. No politician is beyond reproach or applause; Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, John Boehner and Mitt Romney are among those who serve as unwitting players in this artistic spin of words.

The lambasting occurs in the form of verse, role-playing games, one-act plays that cater to a politician's vanity or pure knuckleheaded malfeasance, and laundry lists of potential book titles that read like one of David Letterman's top 10 lists. Anthony Weiner's sexting debacle and Sarah Palin's love of moose-hunting become subjects for fodder in Ben Greenman's offbeat musicals, while Jen Statsky rewrites traditional nursery rhymes to reflect recessionary downsizing. The historical facelift continues with a timely lesson in sub-prime economics from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Chris Monks explains why TSA scanners have become the bane of travelers worldwide--men, size does matter. Why, even Occupy Main Street has the last laugh--against the miserable 99%.

McSweeney's features some of the sharpest tongues and wittiest minds to grace the earth, and while none of this will be new to fans of the website, for others it may become either the most life-changing eye-opener or most disgraceful baloney to exist on the written page. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer

In her third book of the Graceling series, Kristin Cashore returns readers to the seven kingdoms. In a Monsea devoid of the terrifying King Leck, whose Grace was to fog people's minds (and who acts as the through line in all three books), Bitterblue, his now 18-year-old daughter, rules as queen.

Bitterblue, fed up with her advisers' attempts to thwart her inquiries, walks her city's darkened streets disguised as a boy. Bitterblue is a coming-of-age story in which the heroine realizes she can truly trust only herself. Her nightly outings lead her to "story rooms" where fablers recount historical events and legends. On several nights, she meets two young men: Saf (short for Sapphire), a graceling who says he knows not what his Grace is, and Teddy, a kind and well-read printer. They begin to confide in "Sparks," as they call her (she conceals her true identity), and she develops feelings for Saf.

Saf and Teddy belong to a group of truthseekers attempting to bring about their own kind of justice as recompense for her father's transgressions. Bitterblue discovers her advisers are keeping things from her. Are they compromising her safety? Meanwhile, Po and Katsa--the heroes of Graceling--arrive to inform the queen that King Drowden has been deposed in Nander, and the people of Estill are mounting a coup against King Thigpen. Cashore's plot will sweep readers while she explores larger themes of the vital need for literacy and the nature of truth and trust. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

In this follow-up to Eve, in which girls learned to fear men in the New America--with the exception of the King--Eve will risk everything she holds dear to save the ones she loves, including Caleb, the boy she has grown to trust.

The sequel picks up where the last book ended, at Califia, the all-female settlement founded more than a decade ago as a refuge for women and girls in the wild, and where Eve was forced to leave Caleb at the entrance for her own safety. Three months later, the now strong Eve still resides in Califia, where she's safe only until the soldiers hunt her down. Eve was promised to the King as the future wife who would bear his heirs. After successfully dodging the city's soldiers in the first book, Eve is captured and taken to the City of Sand. The King comes to her and confides a secret that raises the stakes for the final installment of the trilogy.

Caleb returns, but a twist reveals his true motives. Anna Carey skillfully reveals inner motivations for all her primary characters, including the King. The monarch's prominence throughout the novel allows the author to build sympathy for him as his story unfolds.

Readers allured by the elegant settings and sisterhood of Lauren DeStefano's Wither and who craved the forbidden romance of Lauren Oliver's Delirium will revel in this sequel. --Adam Silvera, assistant, Books of Wonder

Pure fun, from 1 to 80, this book by the creators of Duck! Rabbit! once again makes us see things differently.

Together, author and artist create words made from letters and numbers. The cover offers the first clue, then the endpapers before the official start of the book: "Have you ever tiptoed through the 2lips?" asks one thought balloon. An especially amusing double-page spread depicts a girl decked out like a ballerina serving tea to her friend in a princess costume, as a kitten tugs at her royal sash. "Would you like some honey 2 swee10 your tea?" the ballet-clad hostess asks. "Yes that would be 1derful. Oh, and I just love your 2-2." The text on the page reads, "They are pre10ding." The wumbers translate into 4eign languages, too, as when a French guide takes Americans on a tour of the Eiffel Tower: "C'est 4midable, non? It's gr8, right?" Their response: "S2pendous!" The book closes with more contemplative moments: a boy and his dog snoozing side by side ("Pure con10tment") and a girl with her journal and book beneath a tree: "A sh80 spot 4 reading and writing."

Like William Steig and his C D B!, to whom Rosenthal and Lichtenheld dedicate their volume, this creative team will launch as many imaginations as the wumber of young people who read this book (artists and texters alike). --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness