Bill Roorbach's Life Among Giants is a novel of extravagant imagination about David "Lizard" Hochmeyer, a sweet high school quarterback from suburban Connecticut who loses his parents in a double murder and falls under the sway of the famous ballerina next door. As Lizard goes on to college and then the pros, he and his older sister, Kate, struggle separately to solve the mystery of their parents' demise. Lizard relates their story in retrospect, and by letting the revelations unfold over the decades, Roorbach makes the novel a leisurely mystery as well as a bildungsgroman. It's also a playful anthropological portrait of American preoccupations in the late 20th century: country club aspirations, 9-to-5 chicanery, Ivy League bumptiousness, the use of touchy-feely psychology in pro sports, the deification of prima ballerinas and the sloppy hedonism of 1960s rock stars.

"High Rise," the mansion that looms on the other side of the pond from the Hochmeyers' back yard, is home to English rock star Dabney Stryker-Stewart, his Norwegian ballerina-wife, Sylphide, and his disabled son from a previous marriage. One of the novel's seductions is discovering the extent of the connections between the modest Hochmeyers and the bohemian goings-on at High Rise.

Life Among Giants serves up descriptive bounty, including details on architecture, football, ballet, esoteric foodiness, restaurant management, touch-based bodywork and classic sailboats, and skillfully uses significant objects and nicknames as plot talismans. He also successfully creates a dozen unusual characters, from the slippery-yet-sturdy Sylphide down to the High Rise's fleet of eccentric factotums. Similar to the work of John Fowles, Life Among Giants contains flashes of fantasy and obsession. --Holloway McCandless

For years, Lydia Millet has been fashioning an ambitious trilogy. In How the Dead Dream (2008), a man named T. found consolation spending time with animals at the zoo after breaking into their pens. Then, in Ghost Lights (2011), T. is lost in the jungles of Belize, and Hal, the husband of one of his employees, sets out to find him, like Stanley in search of Livingston. T. returns; Hal doesn't. Magnificence begins.

Susan Lindley is grief-stricken over her husband's death, distraught with guilt over "her callous practice of adultery" (which was why Hal volunteered to track T. down). She's not in a very nice place emotionally, so Millet introduces her to a new place, a strange one. She has inherited a majestic home from a great-uncle she hardly knew. It's inhabited by animals--but the inhabitants of this jungle are stuffed. Uncle Albert was loved taxidermy, and the animals and murals in the mansion's eight bedrooms are laid out with geographic themes: Rainforest, Arctic, Himalayas and so on.

Susan quickly comes to love her comforting "glorious mansion," but then Millet complicates things. People begin showing up: an unfaithful husband, Susan's paraplegic daughter, strange old women, human skeletons. How Millet carefully manifests Susan's character within all this is what makes Magnificence so good. Her prose mirrors the world, mesmerizing in an understated way; emotions ripple beneath its poetic surface. Told beautifully in third person, it's itching to become first person, but Millet keeps it unsettled, disturbing and fulfilling in a splendid way. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Ruby Martin is a Grey, one of the worker class inhabitants of the generational colony space ship, The Creative Fire. She lives in the same habitat as her parents and their parents before them, goes to work repairing robots and hangs out with her friends, Onor and Marcelle. The Reds, the security class, enforce strict rules to ensure order, sometimes with brutality, other times with distaste. Ruby sings, as well, with a voice that expresses her beauty of spirit to all who hear it.

Then one day the roof falls in, quite literally. There's a breech between levels, and a mysterious Blue named Fox falls, injured, into the park where Ruby had been sitting. She learns about the unfair hierarchy on the space ship; she learns the Fire is headed to a planet called Adiamo; she learns that the ship society hasn't always been this stratified. Ruby joins a resistance faction, falls in and out of love with Fox and tries to stay one step ahead of the unseen powers of the space ship to free her people from a life of drudgery and near-slavery.

Brenda Cooper presents many interesting ideas and themes, and writes characters with complex motivations and feelings. While The Creative Fire spends more time in dealing with Ruby's love interests than some science fiction readers might prefer, this first installment in a planned multi-volume series will hold their interest from beginning to end. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

The names that appear in Caroline de Margerie's American Lady are so impressive, the historic events and settings so inclusive, it's hard to believe one woman lived through it all. This fascinating biography of Susan Mary Alsop introduces readers to a colorful American aristocrat who was on hand to experience many of the most significant events of the 20th century.

Born a Jay in 1918 (of the founding family; her grandmother was an Astor), 21-year-old Susan Mary wed Bill Patten in 1939. After Bill was posted to Paris with the State Department in 1944, she blossomed as a diplomat's wife. "She liked seeing 'history on the boil' as Nancy Mitford put it," de Margerie writes, "being present in a room where the fate of the world was being played out." Her fame as a hostess, which lasted throughout her 86 years, started in Paris, and so, too, did the love affair of her life, with Duff Cooper. After Duff's death, then Bill's, she agreed to a platonic marriage with deeply closeted columnist Joseph Alsop; their Georgetown home became a renowned salon where anybody-who-was-anybody gathered, including Kennedys ("Please call me Jackie"), Kissingers and Grahams.

The delicious details of power and wealth don't obscure de Margerie's portrait of the less-public Susan Mary, a loving and loyal mother and friend who studied issues and held thoughtful opinions, volunteered, traveled globally and, in the last decades of her life, wrote four books. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller

Quick question: What movies did Lyle Talbot appear in? If you don't know (or even if you do), you'll want to read his daughter Margaret's lovely and affectionate biography of her dad, The Entertainer. Talbot, a staff writer at the New Yorker, was born when her dad was 59, the "lagniappe of a late-in-life fourth child." She remembers him telling stories about his "long-running picaresque adventures in entertainment," and now she wants to tell his story. It's not a memoir, but an "idiosyncratic history of how entertainment evolved in the twentieth century."

Lyle Talbot was a hypnotist's assistant, a magician in traveling tent shows, a star in the making in 1930s Hollywood who nearly became a B-movie has-been and then a regular on television from the 1940s to the early '80s. Drinking, along with his union activism (he was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild), sometimes made it hard for him to get work, but he acted with Bogart, Davis, Tracy, Lombard, Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple and the Three Stooges; he was Commissioner Gordon in the early Batman and Robin serials and starred in three Ed Wood pictures. He was a regular on the Ozzie and Harriet Show and appeared in Leave It to Beaver along with his son, Stephen (who played Gilbert). The Entertainer is a terrific pean to Margaret's dad and an even better history of American popular entertainment. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Quick, think of actor Kevin Pollak. Dollars to donuts you conjured up a vision of him as third banana in A Few Good Men or The Usual Suspects--or maybe you thought, "Who?" Pollak is a brilliant comedian whose impressions of Christopher Walken, William Shatner and Peter Falk gained him a following long before he shared screen time with Jack Nicholson. Now, he's written How I Slept My Way to the Middle, a book that should be given to all sourpusses because it is uproariously funny--laugh out loud until tears burn your eyes funny.

Pollak did stand-up for many years, coming up in the ranks with Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser (one of his favorite people to prank). The shrimpy kid who started out imitating Bill Cosby grew into a funny man with a yen for acting in movies, a journey his side-splitting memoir recounts in hilarious detail. It's clear Pollak loves show business and reveres consummate professionals. He cannot say enough about his heroes and the breaks they afforded him. His anecdotes about his brushes with greats like Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis are truly astounding. (At the same time, he reveals how Benicio Del Toro managed to fart in four consecutive takes during the line-up scene in The Usual Suspects.)

There's so much dirt Pollak could have dished, but he keeps it positive with feel-good, riotous stories and fascinating Hollywood lore. Except for that one time Michael Clarke Duncan accused him of stealing his pocket cash.... --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

For Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Africa is a land of shifting loyalties and shifting boundaries. Of Africa offers a well-conceived vision for the potential healing of the continent.

He begins with a critical analysis into the sources of conflict that have torn his homeland apart: colonial forces that sought to plunder resources, the slave trade (which Soyinka views as comparable to Hiroshima and the Holocaust) and internal power struggles resulting in mass genocide. In recent years, dictatorial theocracies have threatened to further erode the psyche of the continent, as fundamentalist sects draw lines of war between Africa's many ethnic groups. "Religion, or profession of faith, cannot serve as the common ground for human coexistence," Soyinka warns, "except of course by the adoption of coercion as a principle and thus the manifestation of its corollary--hypocrisy."

Next, Soyinka concentrates on African contributions to literature, art, alternative medicines and spirituality, which he sees as unifying and redemptive. He identifies the Yoruba traditions of Orisa and Ifa as accommodative and tolerant viewpoints that can counteract the polarizing pulls of Christianity and Islam. Orisa is "the very embodiment of tolerance," he says, and "tolerance, in its own right, is at the heart of Ifa, a virtue worth cultivating as a foundational principle of humanistic faith."

Soyinka's inquiry arrives at one impassioned plea--tolerance. Africa's various sects, he tells us, must come to the collective bargaining table with an embrace of its tradition and innate differences in order to truly become whole. --Nancy Powell

Snow White, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel are among the most recognizable stories in the world. It wouldn't be hyperbole to suggest that most adults in the Western world have told at least one of these stories to a child, whether they recite it from memory or read from some version of the tales compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 19th century. There have been many English-language translations and adaptations; now Philip Pullman, who helped redefine fantasy literature for the modern era with the His Dark Materials trilogy, tackles these classics with his own edition of Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm.

Pullman takes 50 stories--"the cream" of the Grimms' inventory, not just the obvious choices--and presents them in a way that respects the original renditions without being slavish imitations. In some cases, he rectifies what he calls the "clumsy storytelling" of the Grimms' sources to make the story run more smoothly. He gets the utter other-ness of the worlds in which these stories take place, where men fall in love with princesses at first sight and children constantly fall afoul of evil stepmothers. He also reminds us that the stories are sometimes weirder than we remember.

"When a tale is shaped so well that the line of the narrative seems to have been able to take no other path," Pullman says, "and to have touched every important event in making for its end, one can only bow with respect for the teller." There are several moments in Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm in which Pullman himself earns that honor. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

Despite a number of posthumous publications (most notably the unfinished novel The Pale King), David Foster Wallace has been dearly missed by a devoted readership since his death in 2008. Faithful fans will be excited to find a new anthology of Wallace's nonfiction, Both Flesh and Not, which contains 15 previously uncollected essays.

The first essay, "Federer Both Flesh and Not," is, without a doubt, the perfect beginning for a Wallace collection, covering a topic that he loved--it's an ode to tennis and one of its greatest players, Roger Federer. The remaining essays are wide-ranging in topic, from contemporary young writers to AIDS to the U.S. Open to Terminator 2. Also included are several in-depth book reviews and the introduction Wallace wrote for the 2007 edition of Best American Essays. Interspersed between the essays are a selection of unusual words and definitions taken from Wallace's personal vocabulary list.

Not all of the essays in Both Flesh and Not are equally powerful, but the mix of subject matter and the variation in breadth don't detract from the powerful pull of Wallace's writing. His insatiable curiosity and his divergent passions are clearly on display here, as is his ability to expound on pop culture just as authoritatively as literature or philosophy. Though Wallace will always be missed, readers won't want to pass on this chance to enjoy his work once again. --Roni K. Devlin, owner, Literary Life Bookstore

It should come as no surprise that Hugh Laurie's 1996 novel The Gun Seller is a hilarious spoof. Writing long before House, Laurie transferred his extensive background in British television comedy onto the page in an action-packed spy novel, which Simon Prebble now gives voice in an audiobook edition.

Former British soldier Thomas Lang hires himself out for just about any job, but he draws the line at killing. Confronted with a murder-for-hire offer, Lang turns it down and heads directly to the intended victim in order to warn him. This is mistake number one--and sets the course for the chaos to follow. Before he has a solid grasp on his situation, Lang's in the middle of a terrorist attack... and he's the terrorist.

Prebble's narration of Laurie's work highlights the sharp, sarcastic wit and the wildly absurd circumstances Lang stumbles upon. While never compromising the entertaining nature of the plot, Prebble ensures that the underlying social commentary is always clear.
However, Prebble's interpretation of Lang may come off to some listeners as overly sophisticated, and some of the American roles as exaggeratedly macho. Despite this minor quibble, the audiobook is a captivating listening experience. Prebble tunes into Laurie's pacing and atmosphere to build anticipation and delivers a performance that connects readers with Lang and leaves them anxiously hoping he'll defeat the odds--and the bad guys. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Ally Condie brings the Matched trilogy to a close with a powerful finale, as Cassia, Ky and Xander fight for free will against a totalitarian Society.

The Rising they've been waiting for begins when a sickness breaks out in the book's early pages. Leading the Rising is someone known only as the Pilot, who could be man or woman, dead or alive. Readers will not only question the Pilot's identity, but also his or her integrity, after some ominous occurrences. Cassia and her assigned Match, Xander, work undercover as agents within the Society, while Cassia's true love, Ky, pilots air ships carrying the only cure for the Plague. The rigorously statistical Society is uncharacteristically unprepared for the Plague--as are members of the Rising, when the Plague mutates with devastating effects.

Hearing from all three parties in the Cassia-Ky-Xander triangle will keep readers eagerly turning the pages, as Condie smoothly differentiates their voices, goals, obstacles and choices. The previous books centered on quiet rebellion, but the Rising grows into an insurgence to expose the Society's flawed methods of achieving perfection. Choices well beyond Cassia's pick for happily-ever-after add depth, while the author's picturesque prose will please romantics: "Cassia, I'm in love with you and I want you. So, what will it take for you to feel the same? A whole new world?" asks Xander.

The transformations these characters undergo while fighting for love and the ability to choose their futures make Reached a captivating read. --Adam Silvera, reviewer and former bookseller

Ever since this second-grade superhero's debut in Captain Awesome to the Rescue!, we can't get enough of him. The holidays and their winter plays are fast approaching, and this latest adventure combines a hint of mystery with cut-throat competition, elementary-style. Can Captain Awesome and his superhero pal, Nacho Cheese Man, keep The Winter Wonderland from melting into chaos?

Eugene McGillicudy (aka Captain Awesome) loves to play the triangle in Mrs. Randle's music class. Charlie Thomas Jones (Nacho Cheese Man) prefers the maracas ("I don't know what's inside, but I hope it's dried bugs," Charlie says). When Mrs. Randle announces a musical called The Winter Wonderland, Eugene and Charlie can't wait to play in the Snowflake Symphony ("My Triangle of Justice shall ring loud this day!" shouts Eugene). Perfectly pink Meredith Mooney volunteers to star, but when she gets cast as the Icy Icicle in the Frozen Chorus, watch out! Add to that Jake Story, who complains about how loudly Eugene plays his triangle and earns the nickname "the Whiny Whimperer," for his evil deed in keeping the duo apart. When the play's star gets sick, and Eugene steps into the role, someone tries to sabotage him. Could it be My! Me! Mine! Mere-DITH? The Whiny Whimperer? Or are they in cahoots? George O'Connor (KAPOW!) once again sweeps readers along with comics-style artwork that adds punch to the proceedings.

Readers just embarking on chapter books will embrace these two superheroes, who save the day--in more ways than one.- -Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness