Margaret Wrinkle's debut novel, Wash, begins as an unflinching look at the particular horrors inflicted within the larger horror of slavery. But Wrinkle, a filmmaker and artist from Alabama, then delves deeper into one of America's founding sins; she plumbs beyond the brutality and into the wisdom of the ages to compose an elegiac yet surprisingly uplifting portrait of the resilience of the human spirit.

Wrinkle creates indelible characters to lead the reader into the nightmarish world of slavery. Wash (short for Washington) is too free, strong and defiant to make a good field slave, so his conflicted owner hires him out to other slave owners as a breeding slave. Pallas, a slave woman from a neighboring plantation, is given to three teenage boys for their sexual amusement. In a circular narrative voice full of the presence of nature's divinity and the cycles of life, Wash delineates the utter debasement of Wash and Pallas, but also reveals how both of them find ways to hold onto a piece of themselves that cannot be stolen or exploited.

Wash is a challenging novel that unabashedly confronts the inherent homoeroticism of a slave owner admiring his slave's prowess, as well as the other sexual undercurrents of slave society. But it also suggests sympathy for slave owners who destroyed their minds and hearts trying to live with their young country's contradictory practices of liberation and cruelty. Most of all, Wash is a solemn and magnificent paean to the survival--even amid the most crushing, inhumane conditions--of the special and eternal essence within every soul. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic

In 1002, Emma of Normandy was sent by her brother, Richard of Normandy, to marry England's widowed King Athelred. The marriage, like so many of its time, was political in nature, meant to bind a peace between the English and the Normans in face of the ever-growing threats of Viking invasion. Teenage Emma soon finds herself wed to a much older man who sees her as little more than an annoyance; the only way to secure her place in the English court is to bear the king a son. But when the Viking threat becomes a reality and she finds herself falling in love with a man who is not her husband, she must decide where her loyalties lie--with Normandy or with England, with duty or with passion.

Shadow on the Crown, Patricia Bracewell's debut novel, gives readers this story and more, basing its version of Emma's life on events recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. According to Bracewell's author note, Queen Emma commissioned a written history of her life, but started her tale in 1017, leaving no record of her first 15 years in England or her marriage to King Athelred. Shadow on the Crown is the first in a planned trilogy that will recreate this forgotten period of Queen Emma's life, combining historical accuracies with imagined romance and political intrigue in a novel that will fit nicely on the shelf between Gabaldon's Outlander and Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

In Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, the ground is constantly shifting. Is this the story of an aging writer as dictated to his inquisitive son, or is the son imagining what his father might say to him, or is the son even real?

Or is it about a ranch owner who stumbles into a relationship with a horse doctor? Is Murphy a contractor who accepts an antique Leica camera from a morbidly obese neighbor or a painter who's just discovered he might have an adult daughter? And just how did Nat Turner survive from the time of his pre-Civil War rebellion to hang out with Charlton Heston as part of Martin Luther King's inner circle during the March on Washington?

The elderly author in the nursing home, the narrator who comes closest to mirroring Everett, angrily recalls how one critic told him his work "was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world," so "I asked him what he thought objective reality was. Then I punched him."

Eventually, the narrative settles into a single groove, but it's not entirely safe to assume that the aging writer in a nursing home is the same writer from the earlier chapters.

Everett's metafictional reflections on identity free him to create scenes of great emotional authenticity, as the array of characters gives him multiple options with which to tackle some of the toughest questions we can ask ourselves about our relationships to the world--and the people closest to us. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

In his seductively fascinating debut novel, Indiscretion, Charles DuBow poses the question, "What does the man who has everything desire?" It's hard to imagine Harry wanting anything more in his idyllic life: he's an exceptional athlete and award-winning author happily married to a smart, loving woman whose beauty is legendary. They throw fabulous parties, fly planes and generally live a charmed, golden life that, despite their wealth, seems to emphasize the things that really matter in life.

Enter Claire, a young dazzling woman who becomes a part of their social circle and falls for Harry. Harry adores his wife, Maddy, and their son, but he's powerless against his profound connection with the exciting Claire--and she has no scruples in getting what she wants. In fact, she can't seem to help herself; she's overwhelmed by her feelings for this fabulous, accomplished older man.

Indiscretion draws you in like a beautiful, intriguing woman you meet on a long train ride. Harry and Claire's affair begins to lose its luster (as most clandestine arrangements do) once it's out in the open, and judgment and contempt trump desire, but DuBow isn't going to let Harry get away too easily. The story's tone transforms from glamorously erotic and appealing to a cautionary tale that will linger in the darkest part of your heart long after you've completed this stunning tale of love and loss. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Stephen Dobyns's The Burn Palace begins early in a late October morning in the small town of Brewster, R.I. As most of the town sleeps, we see Nurse Spandax rushing to the nursery after an illicit sexual encounter with Dr. Balfour. A newborn boy is missing, replaced by a "huge snake with red and yellow stripes." She screams.

"Now, like an airborne camera," Dobyns writes, "we move back from the hospital," and meet the town's residents. Among them are Ernest Hartmann, a visiting insurance investigator; Larry Rodman, who collects rings, "one of the perks of working at the Burn Palace," as Brewster residents call the local crematorium; Vicki Lefebvre, whose daughter is also missing; Sheriff Woody Potter, off to investigate the babynapping; and 10-year old Hercel McCarty Jr., who can do "things" and whose pet snake is missing. Hercel's afraid of his stepdad, Carl, who has something in his gut trying to "break free."

Things slowly begin happening, like the way one character speaks: "the words percolated into his head like water seeping into clay." While visiting an Indian burial ground, Hartmann is stabbed and scalped by a man without a face. There's talk of Wiccans and witches, and the mother of the missing baby says she was impregnated by devils. Nurse Spandax goes missing. Coyotes are gathering around town. Carl, hearing voices, has taken to growling and staring at knotholes in his bedroom.

Dobyns weaves a huge, seamless tapestry of a narrative, unfolding a suspenseful, eerie tale of a town caught up in a spell ripped from a Nathaniel Hawthorne story. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Lady Isabella Trent is known from Scirland to Eriga as the world's preeminent dragon naturalist, an unexpected and somewhat unorthodox career for a noble woman of Scirland. But before she became famous for her dragon exploits, she was a young woman thrust into society in search of a husband at her parents' insistence, sacrificing her love of books and learning in favor of doing what was expected of her. Little could her parents have known she would land one of the most eligible bachelors in Scirland--or that he would entertain her dreams of studying dragons in far-off lands.

A Natural History of Dragons is Marie Brennan's imagined memoir of this fascinating woman and the creatures to which she dedicates her life. Brennan's skill in developing believable, engaging fantasy steeped in archeological history and folklore is what makes this "memoir" so successful--it is at once as fantastical as it is real. Brennan, writing as Lady Trent, drags readers through lands we have never heard of in search of creatures we have never seen, but never once lets us forget that we are reading about an insecure young woman and new bride, struggling to prove her worth despite her gender and to maintain a ladylike reputation without sacrificing what she loves most. Though dragons may not exist in our own world's history, it is certain that the struggles of women like Trent do, and Brennan captures both with equal elegance in this first volume in the memoirs of Lady Trent. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

In the opening scene of Cassandra Rose Clarke's The Mad Scientist's Daughter, Cat is just a small girl when her father brings Finn home to live with their family. At first, his strange demeanor convinces her that he's a ghost. She tries taking him to the local cemetery to make his spirit vanish, but he doesn't go anywhere; in fact, her father decides to make Finn her homeschooling tutor. Eventually, she discovers the truth--Finn is a vividly life-like robot--and as she hits adolescence, her parents grow concerned about her intense emotional attachment to him. Despite their best efforts, though, she begins to push their relationship into uncharted territory....

In her first novel for adults (after the YA The Assassin's Curse), Clarke traces Cat's life through several decades, maintaining an emotional consistency to the character even as she convincingly echoes the shifting mindset from early childhood to middle-age. The novel also walks a careful tightrope: Although Clarke portrays the discreet sexual relationship between Finn and the adult Cat sympathetically, she also makes it clear Cat is exploiting the robot both physically and emotionally. It's also obvious that Finn has a greater emotional capacity than Cat suspects, and when she enters into a loveless marriage with a wealthy industrialist to support her artistic lifestyle, he dramatically breaks off contact. Cat still has some significant growing up to do, and though Clarke does steer things toward a happy ending, it's definitely one that is earned rather than rewarded. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

In many ways, Charlie LeDuff's personal story overwhelms the account of the decline and fall of Motor City in Detroit: An American Autopsy. LeDuff made his bones as a reporter at the New York Times, contributing to its Pulitzer-winning series "How Race Is Lived in America," but when the staid Times became too restricting, he quit and moved to Detroit to work the city beat for the underdog Detroit News.

LeDuff knows the dark side of Detroit down to its grim corner taps ("cinderblock, cheap paneling, a jukebox, and a handful of wretches with faces of mud"), yet he holds sentimental hometown affection for his city despite recognizing that "it never was that good in the first place." With a reporter's tenacity, he digs into the details of Detroit's history of corrupt and incompetent leadership. His sharp tongue takes on a string of mayors and petty politicians on the take, "bejeweled and flamboyant... Little Richard of the cloth" preachers and the arrogant executives who destroyed the automotive goose that laid Detroit's golden egg. For LeDuff, the story of Detroit is "about angry people fighting and crying and snatching hold of one another trying to stay alive. It is about the future of America and our desperate efforts to save ourselves from it." Even if this metaphorical leap is a little over the top, Detroit: An American Autopsy is first-person reporting at its best. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Biographies of Jane Austen adopt a reverent tone when extolling her prodigious literary gifts, yet little is known about Austen herself; many of the letters that could cast light on her short life were destroyed by her sister Cassandra. Paula Byrne dissembles the myths surrounding Austen by focusing on the minutiae of life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Key scenes, objects and experiences pivotal to Austen's fiction become the anchor with which to reveal The Real Jane Austen.

"Her novels were grounded in the real world," Byrne writes. "In order to create them, she drew upon the reality she knew: the people, the places, the events." She uses personal artifacts such as a topaz cross and Austen's vellum notebooks, as well as scenes from the novels, to support or debunk modern perceptions about the author. A family profile becomes the preamble for a general discussion on the custom of childless couples adopting distant relations as heirs; a description of a shawl imported from East India leads to a treatise on poverty and its effects on a woman's prospects for marriage and survival--a very real threat for dowry-less daughters and a theme of great significance in Austen's fiction.

Under Byrne's scrutiny, Austen's satirical and wickedly delicious wit, her worldly ways and confidence in her craft serve as an antithesis to the image of a staid, naïve maiden living a simple country life. The result is a fresh behind-the-scenes look at an author who, for many, stands behind only Shakespeare as the greatest English writer. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

"Fresh off the boat"--FOB for short--is used derogatorily to describe immigrants who have not yet assimilated into their adopted country's cultural environment. Eddie Huang, the notorious chef of BaoHaus, a New York eatery known for its Taiwanese-style street sandwiches, turns this negative meaning into an affirmative cri de guerre. Huang asserts that he "refused the American Experience [he] was sold, remixed it for [himself], chopped it up, and sold it back." Told in a voice replete with hip-hop ethos, Huang's tale of growing up Taiwanese-American is a "recipe" for how to thrive in a culture that values individualism but judges its citizens by a pre-pack standard of success.

Eschewing measurements for this recipe, Huang instead describes how he arrives at "good food," relying on humble ingredients steeped in personal history but free from neurosis. By turn contradictory, belligerent, yet surprisingly reflective, Fresh Off the Boat emphatically rejects the Asian American male's standard narrative, discarding the emasculated "mandarin" stereotype to embrace the model of a shrewdly contentious marketer--a 21st-century version of Ralph Ellison's (In)visible Man.

Ultimately, Huang's rebellion represents a quintessential American story. From drug-dealing undergraduate to streetwear designer to restaurant owner (and also attorney for a white-shoe law firm along the way), Huang intuitively understands the power of self-invention as a means to realign social and racial inequalities: "I tell people all the time. Whether it's a girl, a skirt steak, or a record, you know in the first five seconds if it's a hit." --Thuy Dinh, editor, Da Mau magazine

Marissa Meyer takes up the second installment of her four-part tale, begun with Cinder, with 18-year-old Scarlet's discovery that the police have closed the case on her missing grandmother. The author continues to move at her lightning pace, and smoothly weaves Cinder's story into this Little Red Riding Hood retelling.

Scarlet and her grandmother grow "the best tomatoes in France," according to their top client, Gilles, owner of the Rieux Tavern. And Scarlet knows her grandmother would never leave without a note, and certainly not without her I.D. chip, which Scarlet had found bloodied and wrapped in cheesecloth on the kitchen counter. Footage of Cinder at the ball, the culminating event of the New Beijing festival in the first book, plays on the netscreen at Rieux Tavern as Scarlet makes her delivery there. Scarlet takes issue with the raunchier remarks, and a fight breaks out. A stranger to town, a streetfighter known only as "Wolf," comes to Scarlet's aid.

Meyer once again reimagines a classic fairy tale and delves into its darker implications. Themes of feminism, keeping one's autonomy in a relationship, coping with betrayal and good old-fashioned storytelling come together in another tour de force. Both Cinder and Scarlet begin a quest to uncover and accept newfound facts about themselves and their families, even as their searches bring them together. Meyer creates another memorable heroine, and fans will be chomping at the bit for the third book, Cress, modeled on Rapunzel. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Megan Miranda's debut novel, Fracture, established her as a strong architect of psychological drama, and she comes through again with her sophomore novel, Hysteria.

Mallory has killed her boyfriend, but can't remember the details of that night. With the heroine caught between sanity, her dreams and the opinions of those around her, her parents decide to send her to a prep school where she can escape the stares and finger pointing. They feel confident that the new start will help Mallory to move on. But a new environment isn't enough: "The room throbbed with the boom, boom, boom just like at home. Same as always." The guilt and madness slowly build as Mallory has trouble discerning her dreams from real life. Mysterious bruises appear on her skin, she has interactions with students she can't remember and, finally, another boy is killed in her room.

Alternating between Mallory's memories and the present, Miranda uses a narrative style that evokes a teen on the edge of sanity. Mallory's journey to find herself and understand what happened with her dead boyfriend and the boy at her new school will leave readers feeling as anxious as the narrator. Miranda has created a true psychological drama from first page to last. --Shanyn Day, blogger at Chick Loves Lit