To those who think that artists do their best work before age 50, meet Percival Everett (Dr. No; So Much Blue). He has produced some of his greatest fiction since he passed the half-century mark, including James, his hilarious yet angry reimagining of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett tells the story from Jim's--now James's--perspective. At his side again is Huck, as James, fleeing from Hannibal, Mo., vows to secure his family's freedom when he overhears plans to sell him to a man in New Orleans.

In making James the narrator, Everett cleverly addresses ruses intended to make white people feel good, such as when Black people speak with correct diction in one another's company but use stereotypically poor syntax when white people are around. That James occasionally slips up and confuses white people with his proper diction is only one of many brilliant details. Winner of the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, James marks yet another late-career triumph from one of America's most original authors. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

In Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Pilgrim Bell), destinies collide in a most spectacular fashion when an Iranian-American poet from Indiana meets a dying artist. Akbar's first work of fiction, shortlisted for the National Book Award, is an electrifying drama swirling with themes of sobriety, sexuality, and the meaning of art as the story travels from Tehran to Indiana and New York.

Martyr!, alive with crafty, energetic prose, follows Cyrus Shams, a former raging alcoholic who, approaching 30 and feeling directionless, decides it's high time he created something big and meaningful through his writing. Cyrus is determined to write a book about real-life martyrs, and travels to New York to interview the mysterious painter Orkideh. Orkideh has terminal cancer and is living her final days at the Brooklyn Museum in an exhibit called "Death-Speak," inviting museumgoers to spend time with her. Talking about death with the artist transforms and unsettles Cyrus, setting the stage for a radical moral reckoning for both parties.

Like the delicate shards that make up Iranian mirror art, Martyr! pieces together multiple narratives to deliver a stunning work of enduring literary beauty. --Shahina Piyarali

A disillusioned civil servant signs on to a secret time travel project in Kaliane Bradley's inventive debut, The Ministry of Time. In near-future England, the government has discovered technology to bring people forward through time and has collected five Brits from previous centuries. The unnamed protagonist is hired as a "bridge," someone who will live and work with one of these "expats" from history. She is assigned to Commander Graham Gore of the Royal Navy, a sailor and polar explorer transported just before his death during the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage through the Arctic.

Bradley deftly blends science fiction, romance, and thriller, creating an immersive world and plot that cry out for film adaptation. Readers are so swept up by the workplace and culture-clash humor that the moral quandaries and behind-the-scenes scheming form a background hum only noticeable when the protagonist is forced to acknowledge them. The Ministry of Time encapsulates life's paradoxes as easily as it transcends genre. Kaliane Bradley has created something brilliant and entirely her own. --Suzanne Krohn

Elaine U. Cho's debut novel, Ocean's Godori, is a cinematic and propulsive sci-fi adventure: chasing the bad guys (but what if they're the good guys?), saving lives while needing to wound and kill a few here and there, and maybe a long-shot at falling in love.

Cho's brave new world is dominated by the Alliance, a united Korea that leads the solar system. Ocean Yoon is possibly the Alliance's best pilot (ever). But she's been demoted following her involvement in the Hadouken incident, relegated now to piloting the Ohneul, a Class 4 vehicle way below her capabilities. When Ocean's close friend Teo arrives on the Ohneul in an escape pod, he's the solar system's most wanted criminal, accused of murdering his entire family. Ocean and the motley crew will need to figure out how to keep Teo--and themselves--alive long enough to prove his innocence.

Cho showcases a narrative agility with intricately intertwined cultural, historical, and philosophical layers. In a breathtaking finale, Cho leaves Ocean ample opportunity to continue that galactic chase for truth and understanding. --Terry Hong

Esteemed poet Phillip B. Williams (Thief in the Interior; Mutiny) offers a vast and rapturous feat of fabulism in his first novel, Ours. This is a 19th-century historical epic created with both a vivacious enthusiasm for folkloric traditions and a deep contemplation of what it means to be freed from the violent machine of slavery in the U.S.

Ours is a town where freed men and women could build lives insulated, by enchantment, from white supremacy. The place springs from the audacity of a mysterious woman who raids Southern plantations, ushering the owners unto death while giving safe passage to Ours for "the newly freed." As the novel sprawls across time, the newly liberated face the dilemma of fashioning freedom from scratch, as best they can, on their own or with each other.

Williams has a voice that soars across each page, breathing life into his dazzling array of characters--the lovers and the malcontents, the queer and the mystical, the brazen and the cautious. At an incredible 600 pages long, Ours is nevertheless a novel worth savoring. --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness

The poor souls in the National Book Award long-listed Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte's thrilling collection of seven interrelated stories, encounter nonacceptance in various painful forms. The self-described feminist of "The Feminist" assumes women keep rejecting a catch like him, with his "academic achievement in his Gender Studies major," because he's narrow-shouldered, "the most oppressed subaltern group." A 20-something woman in "Pics" has a one-night fling with a longtime friend who possesses "an era-definingly huge dick." When he rejects her, she gripes about the injustice with the women in her group chat.

Think that's explicit? Hang on, because it gets even more daring, starting with "Ahegao, or the Ballad of Sexual Repression," in which Kant, a gay Thai American virgin in his early 30s, begins his quest to "build his résumé" and find guys to have sex with, a pursuit complicated by unusual proclivities. Online culture, sexuality, allyship, and more come in for scrutiny, much of it hilarious, all of it unsettling.  With Rejection, Tulathimutte (Private Citizens) has written one of the most brilliantly funny works of fiction since Paul Beatty's The Sellout. Reject it at one's peril. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

This Strange Eventful History, longlisted for the Booker Prize, is Claire Messud's inspired and erudite epic recounting of seven decades of a pied-noir family--those of European descent born in Algeria before the country's 1962 independence from France. The story of the Cassars, based on Messud's family, begins in 1940, when military attaché Gaston is sent to Greece to find out what "the fascist Italians" are "up to in Albania." He feels "trapped in this remote and irrelevant backwater," in part because he misses his family, including wife Lucienne, with whom he struggles to maintain an aura of an ideal marriage, and their two children: François, the older child, and Denise, who fears the Nazis plan to kill their father.

Messud (The Woman Upstairs; The Burning Girl) follows her characters through multiple locales, from Algeria to Toronto, Buenos Aires to Sydney. Her chronicle of one family's history, the political events that shape them, and "these strange, beautiful, appalling times" in which they live is as fine a family saga as one will read. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

This deeply expansive portrait of a Native American family and those inextricably linked to it is Tommy Orange's masterful follow-up to his PEN/Hemingway and American Book Award-winner, There There. Part prequel, part sequel, Wandering Stars traces a family line from a boy who escapes the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to his descendants in the aftermath of the powwow shooting that takes place in There There. It is an immersive and stunning saga about individuals endeavoring to survive and to live.

Orange fills Wandering Stars with his signature musical prose and searing precision of language to tell a story about survival, belonging, and simply being human. He begins Wandering Stars with a nonfiction prologue about the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans, about children forced into boarding schools to be taught that their way of life was wrong, then goes on to capture with magnificent potency his characters' experiences as Native Americans. Wandering Stars is a transcendent, multi-POV novel that beautifully humanizes a way of life that the powerful in the U.S. have been attempting to eradicate for generations. --Samantha Zaboski

A bright young nurse enlists in the United States armed forces during the Vietnam War with the hope of making a difference, and faces the horrors of war and the turmoil of returning home in The Women, an epic, yet intimate, and heart-wrenching historical fiction saga by Kristin Hannah (The Four Winds). Through meticulous research and intricate character development, Hannah resurrects the voices of war's overlooked heroes: the women.

The social unrest in the United States in 1966 seems far from 20-year-old Frances "Frankie" McGrath's sheltered life in California, as does armed conflict in Vietnam. Her brother enlists, and when Frankie realizes nurses can serve in the military, she races to join up, too. Through Frankie's point of view, Hannah sensitively reckons with the tangle of horrors and heroism attached to one of the United States' most controversial military conflicts, and works in an enormous amount of atmospheric detail, pop-culture references, and historical fact. Book clubs, fans of epic stories with deep character work, and anyone curious about the vital, often ignored contributions of women in war will fall in love with The Women. --Jaclyn Fulwood

Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson is relatively unknown in the United States, despite years of international success. With Your Absence Is Darkness now available in English (via translator Philip Roughton), Stefánsson offers a weighty yet light-saturated novel sure to leave a lasting impression. It is poetic and elegant, and it all starts when a man wakes up on a church pew and realizes he doesn't know where--or who--he is.

The residents of this remote town in northern Iceland know him, however, and easily slip into telling him their stories. He is, it seems, a writer, one with an uncanny ability to stop time and access family histories that demand to be recorded. Music provides a throughline for this novel, found in both the lively musicality of Roughton's translation and in the way the novel plays with form, with headings that feel like song titles, and the way elements recur like a familiar refrain. Readers will recognize themselves in the various ways the characters embrace fate and chance, regret and loss, sex and--yes, always--love. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Create a Venn diagram of "bird nerds" and "word nerds," and the result will be close to a single circle. People who read are very often people who love birds, and The Backyard Bird Chronicles is custom-made for them, with evocative illustrations and lively narratives from celebrated writer Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club, The Valley of Amazement).

Tan's jottings span from 2017 through 2022, including 2020's Covid-19 lockdown. She reflects on the countless uncertainties of that time: "Almost everything seems like a potential transmitter of disease and death--the groceries, a doorknob, another person. But not the birds. The birds are balm." While readers may feel those particular threats have waned, The Backyard Bird Chronicles will still be a comfort, full of inspiration and encouragement to do as Tan does with her drawings, "to wonder in depth, to notice, to question." Tan's curiosity extends endlessly, so questions abound; some are answerable, others unknowable, but all point readers to a type of attention many long to capture for themselves. Put this book in their hands. It will be loved. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Cuban Peruvian poet Sara Daniele Rivera--winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award--uses language with artistry in The Blue Mimes, moving from English to Spanish with a lovely musicality.

Grief holds this collection of 27 poems together: personal grief over the loss of loved ones, as well as collective grief over Covid-19 and lockdowns, and over political crises such as the attack on the U.S. Capitol or the separation of children from their families at the border. In the acknowledgments, Rivera thanks her dad, even though it is his death that colors this lyrical and searching collection. She recalls how her father, who taught her to draw, insisted that it is "the movement, the searching, that matters."

The book's final poem, "Fields Anointed with Poppies," explores the way loss can live in a person. It also lives in words: "Hasta tenemos dos idiomas para decirlo: we have/ two languages with which to approximate one pain." Despite the pain, the final line--"And a road continues into open space"--is hopeful and, like this collection, bursting with life and sound. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir tells of living as a boy in the desert, struggling with gender, class, and a shortage of options for self-expression, and eventually taking a great leap in leaving for a wider world.

At age 11, Zoë Bossiere moved with their parents to a trailer park on the outskirts of Tucson, Ariz. In Cactus Country, they were, on the whole, able to make a fresh start, inhabiting a long-held dream of boyhood. The version of masculinity they found in the desert is characterized by stoicism, camaraderie, and violence. Especially as their body entered puberty, Bossiere struggled with gender expression in a world where they had never encountered the concept of transgender. After a troubled childhood and young adulthood, it was by studying creative writing that they eventually saw a way out of the Tucson area and into new spaces, geographic and otherwise, that included the concept of genderfluidity.

Cactus Country treats its characters and subjects with compassion in the face of assaults, addictions, dysfunction, and violence. Gorgeously written, thoughtful, and tough, this memoir of gender and a hardscrabble coming-of-age in the American Southwest excels at nuance. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

For readers who can't get enough Julia Child, Sara B. Franklin's The Editor offers one more inroad to the great chef. Judith Jones famously shepherded Mastering the Art of French Cooking to publication. But readers who come for Julia should find themselves equally smitten with Judith, a literary and culinary tastemaker of sound judgment and tremendous integrity.

Jones (1924-2017) grew up comfortably in Manhattan before landing at New York publishing giant Doubleday, from which she took a leave so she could travel abroad, where she fell in love with food. Doubleday established a Paris office, where Jones rescued from a slush heap what would become the 1952 publishing sensation The Diary of Anne Frank. Jones's editorial eye earned her a stateside publishing career at the male-dominated and prestigious Knopf, where she worked for more than half a century.

Anyone enamored of publishing's golden age will thrill to reports on Jones's professional duties. In her introduction, Franklin says that The Editor is "not a definitive biography," and it needn't be. Informed by Franklin's interviews with Jones, the book has enough "Judith told me"s to suggest a full-bodied and full-throated collaboration, and there's no other word for its juicest passages but delicious. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

It's a rare author who brings into clear focus the ever-shifting complexities of mother-daughter relationships. Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir by Tessa Hulls, covers the nesting-doll lives of three generations of women. It follows Hulls's grandmother, Sun Yi, a journalist who escaped from Communist China; the trajectory of Hulls's mother, Rose, from China to the U.S.; and Hulls's own arc of emotional growth. The skillfully told stories entwine in ways that make each section build on the previous one, propelling readers to uncover how each thread will find its home.

The illustrations are both gorgeous and terrifying. In moments where the memoir touches on emotional wounds, the art slides into the fantastical, depicting ghosts that add layers of meaning. Hulls often appears in panels narrating the intimate story as if she were sharing it with friends over coffee.

Hulls has biked across countries, worked seasonally in Antarctica, and prioritized her particular kind of cowboy freedom, but her telling of it transcends the personal. She explores the darkest corners of her own mind, yet she ultimately manages to take the reader on a journey toward light. --Carol Caley, writer

Essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley's Grief Is for People is a bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a distinctive structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world.

Crosley's Manhattan apartment was burgled on June 27, 2019--exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss, Russell, at 52. Throughout the book, the whereabouts of her family jewelry is as much of a mystery as the reason for Russell's death, and investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her. "Grief is for people, not things," she reminds herself, but her grandmother's amber necklace becomes a complex symbol of her synchronous losses. The relationship with Russell had been almost father-daughter in nature. While Crosley was making the uneasy move from a publicist job to full-time writing, Russell was her biggest fan.

Ever the literary stylist, Crosley (Cult Classic) probes the ironies of her situation, and documents her own choices about framing this story. This sui generis memoir--sting operation meets stage tragedy--is a bittersweet treasure. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck

In Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth, marine biologist Sönke Johnsen deftly, humorously, lovingly combines his lifelong awe and his many discoveries delving into the deep blue seas. Johnsen's first research cruise was a "trial by fire"--the realities of seasickness, privations, indignities. Yet, so far from shore in the seemingly endless expanse, the animals proved magical. "What on earth is that?" was a common refrain.

Johnsen explores--and deciphers as plainly as possible--the often mind-boggling adaptations necessary to thrive in the pelagic portion of the ocean. Pelagic, he explains, "is everything that is not the bottom, which includes the surface and the watery world between it and sea floor." Within these pages, interspersed with wondrously intricate black-and-white line drawings by Marlin Peterson, Johnsen highlights the pelagic animals that exist "particularly in the top 1000 feet"--their buoyancy, their sight (or lack thereof), their movements and migrations, feeding, camouflaging, reproducing, and establishing relationships within and between species.

Johnsen is an amusing writer whose friendly approach to science makes Into the Great Wide Ocean read like a warm chat. --Terry Hong

In The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, beloved author Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass) gleans encouraging life lessons from the humble serviceberry tree: embrace "the gift economy" and give as generously as the tree shares its fruits. Known by more than seven names, the serviceberry is beloved in indigenous cultures for its benefits of beauty and sustenance for humans and other creatures. Confronting the dire effects of human overconsumption, Kimmerer nevertheless offers hope that people might live harmoniously with the Earth.

Kimmerer has crafted an inspiring guide to fostering generosity through following examples from Native as well as natural practices. Kimmerer relies on "our oldest teachers, the plants," to impart the rules of a gift economy, including "take only what you need" and "ask permission before taking." In this brief primer, illustrated with delicate, detailed sketches by internationally renowned artist John Burgoyne, Kimmerer suggests that "wealth means having enough to share." In spite of her grim accounts of diminishing resources, Kimmerer gently and contemplatively describes birds with bellies full of serviceberries and cultures based on generosity, stirring readers to embrace a sense of "enoughness." --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

Slow Noodles tells a story that is moving, inspiring, harrowing, and mouthwatering. Chantha Nguon's memoir, written with Kim Green, encompasses both world history and an intimate personal account.

Born in Cambodia's Battambang, Nguon had nine years of soft living and good eating before Pol Pot reset time to Year Zero in the 1970s. Moving first to Saigon, where she weathered the end of the Vietnam War, and then escaping as a refugee into Thailand, Nguon gradually lost everyone she loved, ending with her mother's death when Nguon was 23. She was a food-focused young child with a mother who took cooking very seriously; she became a refugee in peril of starvation. With the loss of her family and, to some extent, her culture, she views herself as a repository of recipes, culinary knowledge, memories, pain, and strength.

Food metaphors and recipes enrich this book, which sparkles with poignant, lovely writing: "The green-fresh fragrance of young rice is as lovely and fleeting as childhood itself." Slow Noodles is a rare gem of a story, gorgeously written, humble and stirring, and packed with tempting recipes. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

The epic final voyage of Captain James Cook was historic but also catastrophic, as historian Hampton Sides (In the Kingdom of Ice) masterfully recounts in The Wide Wide Sea. On July 12, 1776, Cook left England aboard the HMS Resolution, which was soon joined by the HMS Discovery, on a projected two-year exploratory expedition to the Pacific. Cook's "secret instructions" from the British Admiralty were large in scope: reach the Pacific Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope and return Mai, a beloved Tahitian crewmember, back to his home; sail to the Pacific coast of North America and claim any new lands for England; and seek the fabled Northwest Passage.

Sides is a superb storyteller with an eye for the physical beauty within "the blue void" of the Pacific, and he paints lush portraits of the islands Cook visited and their diverse cultures. Sides's minute-by-minute account of Cook's last moments on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1779 is simply riveting. Populated with a panoply of colorful personalities and places, The Wide Wide Sea thrills as it also plumbs the problematic depths of "discovery." --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver