British novelist Eliza Clark's first short story collection, She's Always Hungry, is packed with darkly funny, often speculative pieces, each with a hefty punch. In "Build a Body Like Mine," a young woman becomes obsessed with growing parasites in her gut to maintain her goal weight. Women's self-destructive desires take center stage in other pieces, too, while men's hunger for submission is explored in "Goth GF," in which a bartender develops an insatiable infatuation with his sharp-tongued coworker. Finally, in the showstopping titular story, Clark (Boy Parts) builds an entirely new world, a matriarchal fishing society.

Inventive and incendiary, Clark's stories never shirk from the challenges in their content or their broader themes. Make no mistake: they are disturbing. In perhaps the most (wonderfully) unhinged story, "The King," set in a postapocalyptic landscape ruled by apex predators, beheadings, human-flesh eating, and sexual enslavement run amok. But Clark threads this needle carefully, employing dark humor--as when the narrating predator reveals, "For the moment, I work in tech"--that curtails the story's grim content while wryly gesturing to larger societal evils. This tendency to go straight for the irreverent jugular doesn't prevent Clark from capturing tender moments with emotional acuity; in "Nightstalkers," for example, a young man's tentative exploration of his sexuality is particularly sensitively wrought. But it's Clark's ability to attack taboo topics of gender, sexuality, violence, and the power dynamics that intertwine them that makes her collection unmissable. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Australian author and physician Melanie Cheng's third title, The Burrow, is an exquisite gem about a damaged family suffering in the aftermath of tragedy. Though her book is dominated by grief, Cheng is an expertly balanced storyteller, leavening the mourning with unexpected laughter, comforting cuddles, surprising grace, and the human need to win the love of grumpy (furry) creatures.

Jin and Amy Lee and their 10-year-old daughter, Lucie, live in metropolitan Melbourne. Four years ago, the family was a quartet--until baby Ruby drowned at just six months old. Despite the Covid-19 lockdown, the household is about to grow. First, there is the rabbit: "For sale: nine-week-old fawn-coloured male mini lop in search of his forever home." One week later, Amy's estranged mother, Pauline, arrives with a broken wrist, sent by her medical team because she shouldn't be alone. At least the granny flat in the backyard is finished and Pauline can have a space of her own. Only Lucie seems to welcome her, but over the next few weeks, despite so much (more) hurting, the promise of healing begins to root and tentatively grow.

Cheng writes with superb, often wrenching, clarity: "she was in the habit of pretending"; "not caring was a kind of superpower." In depicting the family that Jin Lee and Amy née Fitzgerald create, Cheng's own mixed-race Australian Chinese identity deftly reveals multicultural insights--about the number four (homophone for "death" in Mandarin), immigrant challenges, generational discomforts, the neither/nor of being in-between. As the lockdown slowly eases, alterations and adaptations are inevitable. Cheng empathically tracks a family finally learning to live with death. --Terry Hong

With novels like Clockers and Lush Life, Richard Price (The Whites) has long been lauded as an expert observer of urban life in the United States. Lazarus Man, a streetwise story of a small group of New Yorkers brought together unexpectedly by tragedy and the quest for redemption, will only enhance that reputation.

On a spring morning in 2008, 42-year-old Anthony Carter, an unemployed, recovering addict whose wife and stepdaughter have left him, is pulled from the rubble of a five-story East Harlem apartment building 36 hours after it collapsed with a "primordial volcanic roar." After he appears on television describing his rescue--"like something out of the Bible"--he's transformed improbably into a sought-after motivational speaker at events that include a community rally against gun violence and the funeral of a teenager killed in a street shooting.

But Anthony isn't the only person whose life has been altered irrevocably by this catastrophe. With Price's keen eye, efficiently constructed scenes, and, above all, crisp dialogue that evokes his work on TV shows that include The Wire, he follows the lives of several world-weary characters over the course of roughly 10 days, while artfully revealing the elements of their pasts that have brought them to this singular moment.

Lazarus Man's appeal mainly depends on Price's skill in stirring readers' sympathies for these engagingly flawed characters and portraying the world they inhabit with a gritty realism. To the extent there's any drama in the novel, it's reserved for a moment close to the end of the story, but when it appears it only provides further evidence of Price's confidence and talent. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Set My Heart on Fire is a raw and unrelenting coming-of-age story published in English for the first time, 38 years after the death of its author, Japanese writer and actress Izumi Suzuki. Now perhaps best known for her science fiction short stories, Suzuki blazes new emotional territory in this semi-autobiographical, instant cult classic.

Viscerally translated by Helen O'Horan, Set My Heart on Fire follows its narrator, also named Izumi, through Tokyo's 1970s underground psychedelic-rock scene. As Izumi navigates the fractured landscape of music, drugs, and men, she forms more memorable relationships with her friend Etsuko, as well as with the disarmingly quiet and sincere musician Joel. Yet as Izumi sinks deeper into the hallucinatory intensity of her sexual liaisons, she finds herself drifting away from the people she most loved and toward a life poised more precariously on the edge.

The episodes throughout Izumi's life are rendered as unsparingly as they are tenderly in Suzuki's hands. Izumi's journey proves to be less the corruption of an innocent girl than the assured decision making of a woman eager to learn who she might really be through transgression. But as Izumi learns more about herself with each affair, she also compiles more data on how to read men--their insecurities, their obsessions, the performances they, too, put on.

Yet perhaps it is that very confidence of having it all figured out that proves to be both Izumi's and the people in her orbit's weakness. Even the most jaded in Set My Heart on Fire reverberate with more profound resonance than any of the music that weaves its way into their lives. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Debut author Jacquie Pham builds a novel that is a complex murder mystery and an exploration of the problematic nature of colonization. Duy, Minh, Phong, and Edmond are close friends at one of the most prestigious boarding schools in 1917 Vietnam when they sneak out on a forbidden visit to a fortune teller. What starts as a young boys' lark ends on a dark note when they receive a prophecy: "The four of you. One will lose his mind. One will pay. One will agonize.... One will die." A decade later, the final part becomes reality, and the three survivors are left to determine which of them is a murderer--and which of them will pay the price for their friend's death.

Those Opulent Days moves back and forth in time between the boys' friendship as young men and the days leading up to the death, and Pham leaves tantalizing clues for readers to figure out the identities of the murdered and murderer. The boys are among the richest and most powerful in the colony, but Edmond's very existence exhibits something the other three struggle to identify. As the blond-haired, green-eyed son of a French diplomat, he's representative of the opportunity afforded to Europeans and denied to the Vietnamese people, of the prejudice and racism steeped into the colonial systems of privilege in which these boys--now men--were raised

Those Opulent Days brims with lush detail and characters at once rich, corrupt, and ambitious. It's the best type of historical fiction--a novel that reveals new and nuanced layers of context within the structure of a compelling plot. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer

Someone is murdering children in South Birmingham, England, and it's to a child that a detective turns for help solving the case in Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney's debut thriller, a first-rate character-based creep-out with literary chops.

It's 1981, and late one night, 14-year-old Ava Bonney goes outside to check on her "secret roadkill body farm," which she created "to feed her curiosity about dead things." There she finds the body of 14-year-old Mickey Grant, who has been missing for two weeks; there are human bite marks on his forearm. Not wanting to get in trouble for being out at night, Ava anonymously reports the death to the police. Working the case is Detective Sergeant Seth Delahaye of the West Midlands Police, who, through the course of making neighborhood inquiries, meets Ava, unaware that she phoned in Mickey's murder. Ava demonstrates to Delahaye an understanding of criminal minds that will be of use to him when the murderer strikes again.

Ava is an indelible creation: she's precocious--Delahaye notes her expertise in skeletal anatomy--but never cute. "We are our bones," she tells him. And while Ava is alert to the unfairness of her squalid home life, she won't be defined by it. Delahaye, a gentle loner, is a singular character as well, but Deadly Animals is Ava's story. Mystery fans will likely prefer its first half, when the killer's identity isn't yet apparent, but horror fans and anyone who values sharp writing (and has a strong stomach) should appreciate it all. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

In most mystery novels, the suspects outnumber the sleuths, but seemingly not in The Saint, the intriguingly intricate fourth title in Carin Gerhardsen's Stockholm-set Hammarby series. The book, translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlen, has a multigenerational ensemble cast of Hammarby cops who act like a superhero squad. Their superpower? Collaboration.

Published in Sweden in 2011, The Saint begins when a 13-year-old jogging in the Herräng forest discovers the body of her soccer coach, banker Sven-Gunnar Erlandsson; he was fatally shot in the neck, apparently while on his way home from a get-together with his four-man poker club. There's a rain-smeared note in his pocket, along with four playing cards with no fingerprints on them, indicating that someone besides Erlandsson put them there. Was he a card cheat who drove a fellow player to murder, or is something else afoot?

Gerhardsen lets her half dozen detectives take turns with the point-of-view reins, allowing readers to savor the cops' idiosyncrasies (one is a former rock star who appeared on Idol 2008) and appreciate their personal dramas carried over from previous Hammarby books. One inspector explains that the public-spirited Erlandsson organized "bicycle events": "You bicycle around the neighborhood and eat with each other to promote neighborhood harmony." As if in counterpoint to these very Swedish-sounding gatherings, the novel features a show of violence that's more tartan noir than Scandi noir. The Saint has some creaky phrasings, but the plotting is agile, and the title, which ends up having three meanings, is sublime. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

An artist recovering from an abruptly severed marriage finds consolation in the sport of pickleball in the competitively spirited rom-com Pickleballers, a fun first novel by Ilana Long.

Seattle, Wash., resident Meg Bloomberg is emotionally unmoored and struggling since her dentist husband of two years walked out on her. But when her best friend encourages Meg to take up pickleball, she admits it's a great "mental distraction from her loneliness" and soon finds meaning and purpose for her life again.

Meg crosses paths with a variety of players, each with personal problems of their own. But as she sets out to competitively master the game, Meg learns that her local pickleball courts are facing closure, because environmentalists are intent on restoring the area to a nature preserve. This sends Meg to practice with her partner on nearby Bainbridge Island. On the 35-minute ferry crossing back to Seattle, Meg is drawn to a charming stranger with "dreamy eyes," with whom she makes a connection, only to discover that he is working with the conservationists intent on closing her local Seattle courts. This sets up a host of complications for Meg, on and off the court.

Pickleball history and lore, as well as nuances of the game, flesh out this amusing, flirty rom-com. With a background in stand-up and sketch comedy at Second City in Chicago, Long serves up witty volleys of banter and clever plot twists that play out with winning aplomb. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

One writer's career flourished while the other's didn't, but the lives of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz are, in many ways, inextricably linked, as Lily Anolik shows in Didion & Babitz, her chatty, entertaining follow-up to Hollywood's Eve. Anolik is up-front about her preference. "I've picked my side: Eve's. A no-brainer since I'm crazy for Eve." She calls Babitz "the secret genius of L.A.," whereas, regarding Joan, she writes, "I respect her work rather than like it." Anolik thought she was done with her "unbalanced, fetishistic" obsession until, after Babitz's death in 2021, she discovered a letter Babitz wrote to Didion, which contained surprisingly harsh sentiments toward someone who helped get her work into Rolling Stone and was unofficial editor of Babitz's memoir, Eve's Hollywood. Further discoveries convinced Anolik to revisit Babitz's story and examine more closely Didion's achievements.

The result is this diverting read. Through letters and dozens of interviews, Anolik creates an atmospheric portrait of late 20th-century California. She contrasts party girl and aspiring collagist Babitz, who was unapologetically "a woman in hot sexual pursuit of the men of her era who moved and shook," to the more disciplined Didion, who "worked on her reputation as diligently as she worked on her books." Despite her preference, Anolik is fair-minded about Babitz's writing, calling Eve's Hollywood an immature work with prose that is "baby-fat voluptuous." Readers will choose their sides, too, but everyone will agree that Didion & Babitz is a lively biography. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Life is unpredictable. And Kate Gladdin, a life coach, understands this better than most. In Okay, Now What? she offers pragmatic motivational advice to those trying to cope with the lingering anguish of painful experiences.

Gladdin's own personal testimony drives this inspiring narrative. In 2012, her beloved older sister was killed in a road accident. Then-20-year-old Gladdin spiraled into "a dark fog of grief," and when the driver who caused the accident was not properly charged for her sister's death, Gladdin further struggled with a sense of injustice that spawned even deeper issues of anger and bitterness.

Absorbed by despair and victimhood, Gladdin (Mini Habits for Teens) came across a quote by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." This idea became a watershed, lifting the hopelessness that had been paralyzing Gladdin's perspective. It eventually snowballed into a much larger, longer-term quest to help others struggling with depression and anxiety.

Gladdin walks readers through a process to identify deep-seated feelings. Through practical, well-explained examples from her own life and stories from others, Gladdin demonstrates how to manage those feelings by focusing on things that can be controlled in order to live more purposefully. Readers will come away with a greater understanding of how hardships do not have to harden the heart and/or break the human spirit. Rather, via Gladdin's sensible, affirming approach, seekers will grow and cultivate resilience, discovering ways to turn uncertain, painful experiences into "something that makes you fall back in love with life again." --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

"We risk losing all this magnificence before we begin to understand it," writes Katherine Rundell in Vanishing Treasures. In her bestiary of 23 extraordinary, endangered creatures, Rundell (Impossible Creatures), an award-winning children's author, reveals wonders of the world that humans might still be able to protect. She illuminates this collection of essays with fable, legend, and truth stranger than fiction, passionately arguing that as "we have lost more than half of all wild things that lived.... The time to fight, with all our ingenuity and tenacity, and love and fury, is now."

Rundell finds wonder and inspiration in wombats and raccoons, as well as primordial Greenland sharks and iridescent golden moles. Furthermore, she traces the incredible feats of evolution, the survivorship, and the adaptability that have kept these creatures alive in an ever more aggressive and changing world. She describes how each animal has been in some way a part of the human imagination, like how wolves have haunted our fears and fantasies.

The last entry is "The Human," hammering home how people are part of the marvels of the world, and the only ones who can actively do something to stop these "treasures" from vanishing off the face of the earth. In her author's note, Rundell follows up with steps that individuals can take to be part of an effort in saving these--and other creatures. Although it is a sobering glimpse at the destruction humanity has wrought on other living things, Vanishing Treasures is ultimately an uplifting and inspiring exploration of the wonder left in the world and how humanity can fit within it, and add to its extraordinary quality. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Landscape designer Christian Douglas's The Food Forward Garden is a spellbinding book for anyone who wants to make better use of their outdoor space for growing food--or for armchair gardeners who just want to enjoy the results of others' creativity. Readers will enjoy this visually lush exploration of how to transform any yard, hillside, nook, or cranny by growing herbs, vegetables, fruit trees, and more in creative and smart configurations.

Douglas brings impeccable taste and practicality to bear on the residential spaces he showcases. His philosophy that "gardens are part science, part art" and "you can't cultivate one successfully without embracing both" shines through on every page.

All variables are accounted for, including sunlight, climate, soil, irrigation, planting, transplanting, and harvesting, along with Douglas's preferred tools for each stage of the process. The book's chapters are as elegantly and efficiently laid out as the garden spaces themselves.

Replete with interstitial "secrets to success" and a troubleshooting section that anticipates problems and offers solutions to ward them off, The Food Forward Garden prepares even relative novices to make the most of their space, be it casual, formal, or multiuse, as it discusses options for containers, trellises, urban rooftops, and "unexpected sites for edibles." Douglas points out that front yards are often relegated to decorative lawns, which "consume a lot of resources without any meaningful return," and instead encourages considering the potential of a front yard garden that "invites visitors and neighbors to admire the view."

Douglas has created the perfect resource to curl up by the fire with during the cold winter months as readers dream about next year's garden. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.

Multi-award-winning author and 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Jason Reynolds enters the world of YA romance with Twenty-Four Seconds from Now...: A LOVE Story, a hilariously sweet, candid, and guileless story about two Black teens preparing to have sex with each other for the first time.

Seventeen-year-old Neon and his girlfriend, Aria, have been dating for two years and have decided that they are both ready to have sex. At book's open, Neon is stuck in Aria's bathroom talking to himself in the mirror, nervous with anticipation. Twenty-four minutes before that, Neon, who works three nights a week at his father's bingo hall, arrives at Aria's house with her favorite chicken tenders. Twenty-four hours prior to that, he is thinking about the perfect gift to make for Aria to take with her to college. The conceit continues until 24 months ago, when Neon meets Aria for the first time. Then we're "back to now" and the exciting, special, nerve-wracking moment when Neon and Aria's relationship will change.

Twenty-four Seconds from Now... features Reynolds's distinct, direct, and informal style in Neon's intimate, first-person narration. Reynolds (Long Way Down; Track Series) tenderly covers the big topics he's taken on--love, sex, bodily autonomy, and consent--through mindful and attentive advice from Neon's older sister, parents, and grandparents. Neon receives nothing but sex-positivity from his loved ones, including his Dad's refrain: "don't bring no babies in here unless they know how to count money." Not only is this the perfect book for sex-curious youths, Reynolds's messages on how to approach sex, how to be gentle, and how to respect each other give readers profuse, healthy versions of Black love and community. --Natasha Harris, freelance reviewer

Emily Lloyd-Jones returns to the beloved world of The Bone Houses and The Drowned Woods in The Wild Huntress, an enrapturing, action-filled standalone fantasy.

The immortal King Arawn of Annwvyn and the mortal King Pwyll of Dyfed celebrate their kingdoms' friendship every five years with the Wild Hunt, a "revel of blood and magic and madness." The victor of the Hunt receives a boon: any wish that magic or power can grant.

Gwydion of Gwynedd is a 19-year-old trickster and diviner. He wants the Hunt's boon to prevent his tyrannical brother from ascending Gwynedd's throne. But Gwydion's no hunter and needs a champion. Eighteen-year-old Branwen is a huntress who uses a magicked eye to hunt monsters that mortals can't see. The boon could cure her mother's devastating "memory sickness," so she agrees to be Gwydion's champion. Pryderi, the 18-year-old son of King Pwyll, who was kidnapped as a baby by an afanc (an ancient monster with a scaled hide), wants to win the Hunt to prove to the king (and himself) that he's more human than creature. The trio form an alliance and battle a conscious forest, dangerous otherfolk, and assassins on their quest for victory.

Emily Lloyd-Jones majestically marries magic and monsters against a backdrop of standout visuals and enticing action. Her fanciful, captivating setting is the stage for apt discussions of fate versus choice and how this relates to power and class. Jones extends this conversation through the way she presents her compelling story: all three characters' voices are given equal space in alternating perspectives, with  snappy, droll dialogue and descriptions that tickle the senses. An exceptional story of magic and fortune. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader

Elly MacKay's radiant, fantastical Frostfire showcases the bond between two sisters who take pleasure in letting their imaginations take the lead.

Celeste and older sister Miriam leave home to enjoy a "glittering winter kingdom" of snow and ice. When they hear a "deep grumbling sound," Miriam insists it is the roar of a snow dragon. Understandably, Celeste has questions. Miriam, luckily, is a dragon expert (she was "just reading about them") and explains all to her younger sister: snow dragons are huge, sneaky, fire-breathing, princess-eating beasts, who prefer flying to walking and never get tired. When Celeste wanders off to find a sword, she hears a grumbling sound and bravely welcomes the snow dragon--as long as it eats pinecones, not princesses. Celeste shows Miriam the wonderful creature (now "camouflaged to look like a cloud") and the girls watch until the wind shifts and the dragon moves "out of sight."

MacKay (Zap! Clap! Boom!) features a charming give-and-take between her two loving, humanlike fox sisters. The author's illustrations--photographs of paper scenes made with numerous materials, such as spray paint, glitter, fabric, and foam--depict crisp characters set upon silvery backgrounds suffused with golden light. At times, Celeste and Miriam appear as if they're floating in the scenes, an effect that makes the protagonists feel ungrounded, but may enhance the whimsy and fantasy of the text and Celeste's dragon. Frostfire is a sweet and elegant tribute to imaginative play. --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author

Italian author/illustrator Marta Pantaleo introduces budding readers to the evolution of the human-dog bond in the delightfully illustrated Dogs and Us. This picture book primer recounts the progression of human and dog development and the now symbiotic relationship that was "thousands of generations" in the making.

Pantaleo walks her readers through the human-dog timeline. She features occasions (like hunting for food) that brought the two groups together, and depicts the benefits humans enjoyed from their co-existence with dogs, such as how the dogs' "alert ears sensed distant dangers when [humans'] couldn't hear them." Pantaleo presents human/dog accomplishments--"When we explored the edges of the world, [dogs] were right there next to us"--and the ways we continue to interact today, sharing the same "victories," the same "defeats," "the same house and the same life." The text beautifully lauds the many benefits humans have reaped thanks to their bonds with dogs.

Pantaleo's digital illustrations employ bright, fully saturated colors that create an atmosphere of joy and celebration that perfectly complements the spare, direct text. The art also depicts a diverse range of dog breeds and human nationalities, emphasizing the breadth of our incredible relationships. Dogs and Us includes backmatter that shares specific details about the breeds highlighted in the book and organizes the canines into skill categories. This splendid picture book is perfect for anyone teaching young children to love and respect dogs and is an endearing tribute to the loyal companions with whom we share our lives. --Jen Forbus, freelancer