Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah pulls readers into its well-crafted, richly observed universe and makes us witnesses to stories that feel true and stay with us long after the final page. The people in Adichie's (Half of a Yellow Sun) novel are people we know; its places are as intimate as home.

Americanah begins just after 30-something Ifemelu's impulsive decision to return to Nigeria after 13 years in the United States. Framed by Ifemelu's visit to an African hair braiding salon in preparation for the move, the story moves seamlessly between present and past, unfolding into an elegant, multi-continental epic that spans two decades.

Ifemelu's decision baffles her family and her American boyfriend. After all, she's an American citizen with a brilliant (and lucrative) blog on race in America who's just completed a fellowship at Princeton. But there was "no bold epiphany and there was no cause," Adichie writes. "It was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her" home. There is also the anguish of homesickness and the reverberant ache of her first love, Obinze--who has also come back to Nigeria after making his fortune abroad.

Eventually, Ifemelu does return home, where she must reckon with Nigeria's transformation into an oil-rich, globalized country--and with her own undeniable transformation into an "Americanah."

Americanah isn't just a Nigerian novel, or an American novel, or an immigrant story--although it's all of those. It's a character study, a love story, a book about being black and about being a woman. It's a story of becoming, and each page is a revelation. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice

Like the ripples of a pebble falling into a lake, the decision of an Afghan villager to give his daughter to a wealthy couple for adoption will have an impact from the 1950s to the present day, from Kabul to Paris and San Francisco--while, simultaneously, the cataclysmic takeover of Kabul by the Taliban will have even more deeply felt repercussions. In And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini presents a multitude of windows into the souls affected by these events. The novel's rich kaleidoscope of images coalesces around one theme: the powerful legacy of family ties within the maelstrom of history.

Unlike Hosseini's previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed never lingers with one point-of-view character. Instead, he links multiple narratives together by blood or circumstance, tying them to a single mansion in Kabul and a desolate Afghan village. Hosseini's remarkable talent for engendering empathy for his characters is in full force; the opening sentences of each section introduce a distinct personality and worldview that draws the reader in, whether he's writing about the village boy who loses his treasured sister to adoption, their shy stepmother with a terrible secret in her past or the adopted daughter herself and her attempts, as a well-heeled Parisienne, to grapple with her Afghan identity. In later years, the narrative crosses the Atlantic to touch upon the experience of Afghans living as immigrants.

The thread connecting all of these stories is Afghanistan, but it is also the seismic shifts of identity created by war and emigration. Readers get a glimpse of a cosmopolitan, culturally brilliant Kabul--and feel the tragedy when the curtain of fundamentalism and violence descends. --Ilana Teitelbaum, book reviewer at the Huffington Post

Part romance, part mystery story-within-a-story, Sarah Pemberton Strong's The Fainting Room will charm readers with its wistful account of three lost souls who find each other.

Partially-tattooed lady Evelyn escaped her old life as a circus performer with an abusive ex-husband and married wealthy architect Ray Shepard, but she's now feeling out of place and under pressure to fit in with Ray's upper-crust friends. Ray, meanwhile, is struggling in a job that suppresses his creativity. When they hear about Ingrid, a blue-haired 16-year-old with nowhere to go for the summer, Evelyn suggests they take in the girl, secretly hoping the distraction will help her marriage.

At first, Ingrid charms them both, giving Evelyn the companionship she's been missing and putting Ray back in touch with his long-lost passion for writing noir detective fiction. However, the idyll begins to fall apart when Ray realizes he's falling for the too-young Ingrid, and Ingrid begins to fall in love as well--with Evelyn. As she ferrets out the secrets her hosts keep--the truth about Evelyn's first husband and the trouble at the heart of the Shepards' marriage--Ingrid discovers her alter ego, Detective Slade, a tough-talking identity that allows her to protect her vulnerable heart.

Strong (Burning the Sea) gently explores the dysfunction of a marriage with too many secrets through a story about the entangled lives of damaged people who cannot help each other until they heal themselves. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads

In the wake of The Tudors and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Laura Anderson delivers in her debut novel a glamorous royal drama--but The Boleyn King offers a refreshingly offbeat, counterfactual take on the familiar story.

What if Queen Anne had not miscarried in 1536 and thus not been executed? Anderson invents a male heir--the charismatic, 17-year-old William--who experiences his first taste of unbridled power as the novel begins. Threatened by both the continental nobility and his Catholic half-sister, Mary, William is determined to prove himself as a ruler. Rather than lean on advisers twice his age, the young king relies on a close group of friends that have grown up with him.

While The Boleyn King pivots on Europe's political tensions, it is just as much about friendship as it is about ruling a kingdom. Anderson's characters are innocent and prideful, their lives fraught with all the surging affections and restless energy of adolescence. The difference, of course, is that they must navigate these feelings while governing a country. Tudor England was an era in which the young and inexperienced were still granted dizzying power, and Anderson captures this atmosphere insightfully. The Boleyn King is the first book in a trilogy that promises to be inventive and entertaining. --Annie Atherton, intern at Shelf Awareness

Luis Humberto Crosthwaite's Out of Their Minds, a novel first published in Spanish in 2001, is a motley collection of fictional interviews, dreams, dialogues and sketches. It's centered on Ramón and Cornelio, a couple of bored kids in Tijuana with a bajo sexto and an accordion. Then God speaks to Cornelio, offering to write his songs for him, and the duo known as los Relampagos de Agosto (a sly reference to Jorge Ibargüengoitia's satiric The Lightning of August?) takes off.

Greeted onstage by screaming women throwing underwear, their world explodes in undreamed-of decadence and groupies. Fast forward a few years, though, and Ramón and Cornelio's lives are sadly riddled with drugs and superficiality. Unsurprisingly, the two lifelong friends no longer see eye to eye, and the rock-and-roll lifestyle has dimmed their fire. Where they used to lie awake at night and discuss the perfect girlfriend (she must have pretty feet), now their wives have left them and Ramón talks to his accordion instead.

In the ever-shifting perspective of this strange world, where God worries about producing fresh material ("he doesn't want to be judged as a repetitive God, with few ideas") while a friend of Cornelio dies over and over again, the duo's career arc clearly references the Beatles--but places them in Mexico's norteño music scene. Wry, lyrical and frequently funny, the story of Ramón and Cornelio is indeed incredible and sometimes sad; but the music plays on and we continue to revel in it. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Walter Mosley left readers hanging at the end of Blonde Faith, as Easy Rawlins plunged to a certain death. Easy returns from the dead in Little Green, but he's a changed man living on what can only be borrowed time--and it takes a mission from his friend Mouse to bring him fully back to the land of the living. Barely able to leave his bed, he embarks on a search for the titular "Little Green," a bookish young black man who disappeared while tripping on acid. Easy is a hip Ulysses as he voyages through late-1960s Los Angeles with its hippies, drugs, racist cops--and a little murder and fighting thrown in for good measure.

From his roots as a returning World War II veteran to his career as an aging private investigator in the tumultuous 1960s, Easy's personal timeline has enabled Mosley to guide readers through the 20th-century African-American experience over the course of 12 novels. This mystery is the next leg of our journey through the shifting tides of race relations, as always with Easy's steady hand on the helm. And Mosley is never one to paint his characters, whatever their race, in broad strokes; his portraits are always tempered with the nuance of personal experience. If the whole picture reveals hard truths, they serve only to help us better understand our world. Like Easy, Mosley's "kinda nice comes from a place people like it rough." That's what keeps his fans coming back for more. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

In The Human Division, John Scalzi extends and enriches his popular Old Man's War series with a collection of rousing tales of adventure across known space. The novel--originally serialized and distributed electronically in weekly installments--takes place after the events of The Last Colony, in which the people of Earth discover that they are part of a larger (and not super-friendly) universe, information the Colonial Union has withheld as it maintains Earth as a source of soldiers and colonists.

The Human Division is structured as a set of self-contained short stories, easily understood on its own yet contributing to an overall narrative arc that's frequently (but not exclusively) centered on Colonial Defense Forces Lieutenant Harry Wilson, who's been assigned to provide technical support to Ambassador Abumwe and her staff. This group, though it's generally assigned to bottom-of-the-barrel diplomatic missions, consistently performs well under pressure, and soon the "B-Team" finds itself thrust into ever less predictable or winnable situations.

Scalzi's stories are typically fun, full of clever bits of wordplay and structure, and rocket along like any good space opera should. It's not until the final few chapters that the entire story comes together, making a brilliant kind of sense and engaging a humanistic sense of pathos. What they find out about the real politics behind the galaxy-spanning conflicts sets the stage for the next book in the series, one that can't come soon enough. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Self-proclaimed barbecue snob Daniel Vaughn embarked on a series of road trips around Texas, stopping at every barbecue place he found along the way. With his photographer friend Nicholas McWhirter, and occasionally another friend or two, he spent 35 days and 10,343 miles on the road. Together, they ate at an astounding 186 barbecue joints. The Prophets of Smoked Meat details their journey through Daniel's words and Nick's pictures, bringing to life the wide variety of meat, pitmasters and restaurant workers in the Texas barbecue world.

Vaughn explains that Texas barbecue actually comes in four distinct styles: hill country style (which uses direct heat), east Texas style (featuring hot links and sweet sauce), south Texas style (centered on barbacoa) and central Texas style (low and slow cooking, no sauce).

Daniel and Nick offer brief takes on the places they eat--dry brisket, perfect ribs, smoky sausages, etc.--and provide a bit of the history about many of the small towns where barbecue traditions have been passed down for decades.

Whether you read it as a travelogue, a cookbook or a restaurant guide, The Prophets of Smoked Meat is sure to appeal to lovers of barbecue and lovers of Texas in general. The gorgeous pictures and short and snappy restaurant reviews keep the pages turning. But fair warning: reading this book practically requires excessive snacking. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

When David Hungerford and Peter Nowell first detected a mutation in the chromosome of a chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) patient in 1959, they had no way of knowing this singular discovery would change cancer treatment 50 years later. Christened the "Philadelphia Chromosome," Hungerford and Nowell's find set off a search for the genetic origins of cancer, spurring the development of molecular genetics and leading to laboratory methods and techniques that isolated and identified the genes responsible for a variety of deadly cancers.

Science journalist Jessica Wapner's The Philadelphia Chromosome draws upon extensive research and her own interviews with the clinicians and scientists involved to tell this story. She explains how the mutation led to further discoveries: viruses could transform healthy genes into cancerous ones; protein products such as tyrosine kinases could fuel cancer; molecules that targeted the production centers of these proteins could reverse the disease's progression. She also recounts how a group of dedicated researchers and oncologists defied pharmaceutical industry skeptics and professional colleagues to introduce personalized medicine in the form of targeted cancer therapy, giving hope to terminally ill patients.

The Philadelphia Chromosome concludes as a hard-fought victory over one form of cancer, but it also brings the promise that other trailblazing cures are possible--even if they must be found one gene and one protein at a time. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

In the smart and witty The Potty Mouth at the Table, Laurie Notaro (The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club) takes a sarcastic stab at a variety of targets: airport security, Yelp reviewers, Antiques Roadshow and her municipal court clerk, among others. No one is safe--she strikes out at friends, family and fellow writers--but the funniest blows are those directed at herself.

The title may lead readers to believe Notaro's essays are steeped in cuss words. It's not a G-rated book, but when Notaro uses profanity, it's with a flourish that makes every word count. In one essay--which has a title that does live up to the "potty mouth" description--Notaro discovers someone is using her "bath puff" and must put a stop to this violation of the "Cootie Code." The conversation that ensues crackles with pun and innuendo, concluding with new house rules regarding bath puffs, including "Just because we sit on the same potty does not mean it's okay to put my puff on your butt."

Several essays feature Notaro's husband, who must be a great sport for tolerating her neurotic behavior and taking all the insanity in stride. (Be sure not to skip the story of how she brings yet another chair into their living room....) Essay to essay, her unpredictability will keep readers enthralled and entertained. She even saves the best surprise for last. If you're reading in public, be prepared to answer the question: "What's so funny?" --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

In her third novel, Jessi Kirby (In Honor) weaves together mystery, romance and a coming-of-age story narrated by 17-year-old Parker Frost.

Parker is valedictorian. She's never been kissed, and she has never broken any rules. Her best friend Kat has been pushing her to do more her whole life, but something she says this time finally clicks: "When's the last time you took a chance? Or didn't do what someone else expected of you? Or did something you really wanted to, even though you probably shouldn't have?... Well, it's time. It's time to do something worth remembering." What Kat doesn't know is that Parker is in charge of mailing journals back to the seniors who created them 10 years ago. One of those journals belongs to Julianna Farnetti, who was in a tragic accident with her boyfriend their senior year. Julianna's family left town, so Parker decides to borrow the journal for a little while. This leads to the unraveling of a mystery and the forming of relationships Parker wasn't expecting.

Kirby has written another beautifully crafted contemporary novel that explores the way someone is remembered versus how they really were. Complex characters come together to solve a mystery, and the quote from poet Mary Oliver with which English teacher Mr. Kinney introduces the journal project sums up the themes of Golden perfectly: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" --Shanyn Day, blogger at Chick Loves Lit

In a sequel just as goofy and sweet as the original book, Hakata Soy and the team at Astronaut Academy return for another semester of school in the middle of space, but love keeps getting in the way.

Soy and his friends want to focus on going to class and, more importantly, winning the Fireball championship, but someone is eating the hearts of the students. (This is less gory than it seems; students need their hearts in the same way video game characters do.) While the series launch hinted at some love stories, including romantic triangles and a heaping adolescent helping of unrequited love, here love takes the main stage. Finding love in high school is complicated enough, without the threat of having one's heart literally stolen. Scared of losing too many students, the school bans love altogether. Though the students have other things to occupy them, like Fireball and MonChiChiMon cards, they must figure out who is taking the hearts before it's too late.

Roman's use of flashbacks fills readers in on the origin stories of many favorite characters. The manga and video game references will appeal to teens, as well as many younger readers, who will love the book just as much (if they're ready for a lot of crushes and smooching). Hakata, and many of the characters, must come to terms with some painful truths, and once again Roman's deft handling hides some deep thoughts under the bubbly panels, and brings the action-packed story to a satisfying conclusion. --Stephanie Anderson, head of readers' advisory at Darien Library and blogger

This debut picture book from Eliza Wheeler makes an ideal end-of-year gift for the right teacher, as Miss Maple affirms her mission to send her seeds out into the world to blossom.

As August winds start to blow in fall, Miss Maple, donning her pink-beribboned straw hat, plants her seeds. All summer long, Miss Maple gathers orphaned seeds and prepares them "in her tall maple tree" for the following year's planting. As Miss Maple cleans the seeds, she sings her refrain, "Take care, my little ones... for the world is big and you are small." She takes the seeds on field trips, describes the rich soil of the riverbed and warns them to "stay clear of weedy characters," whose leaves mimic a hand-on-hips pose. At night, she reads by firefly light and bids the seeds goodnight.

In May, Miss Maple proclaims the seeds ready to "find roots of their own." She sends them off in maple seedling "helicopters," one at a time, within tiny thimble-size baskets. Wheeler sidesteps the pedantic by closing on a high note: "Even the grandest of trees once had to grow up from the smallest of seeds." The sentiment may be familiar, but the art is accomplished. The sky, the dryness of the land, the long shadows all telegraph August. One standout page resembles a scientist's notebook, with a drawing and clear label for each seed she's found, both usual (acorn, pumpkin) and unusual (water lily, lupine). --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness