When we meet Owen Lerner and his family, we learn a great deal simply from observing Owen, a pediatric psychopharmacologist, reaching into his pocket for a quarter to put in a parking meter. As he moves to slip the coin in, Owen reflects on his marriage, his children, his work. Life is good even if peppered with small anxieties. But then Owen feeds the meter and everything changes in one elongated electrified moment: he is literally struck by lightning and hurled to the pavement. In one of the novel's most elegantly crafted passages (among many equally lovely passages), Owen's body hovers near death as his life unreels--all of life's mysteries revealed in a flash of ecstatic enlightenment and accompanied, improbably, by the smell of the world's best barbecue.

Though badly burned, Owen survives his injuries, but his recovery is slow and hampered by his desire to revisit that fleeting moment of ecstasy, which leads him to act erratically--all he wants to do is barbecue. In the months following the accident, the entire Lerner family undergoes a sometimes humorous but often very painful transformation as roles are redefined and notions of reality are challenged and recalibrated.

The subtlety and intimacy with which Zuravleff portrays the Lerners would be enough to make Man Alive! a compelling novel but her understanding of and ability to convey the slippery nature of reality and by extension, what is "normal," lifts it to another level. This is a wonderful and in many ways magical novel by an exceptional author. --Debra Ginsberg, author

Daniel Woodrell's The Maid's Version is as rich in mountain vernacular as it is in the history and character of a region steeped in rural Americana. Drawing on a locally famous 1929 West Plains, Mo., explosion and fire that killed 39 mostly young ballroom dancers, Woodrell tells a story of tragedy and economic inequality in a small Ozark town. The fictional Arbor Dance Hall disaster "spared no class or faith, cut into every neighborhood and congregation, spread sadness with indifferent aim," but its cause or perpetrators were never identified--except in the settled mind of Alma DeGeer Dunahew.

Alma is the roughhewn grandmother of Woodrell's narrator, Alek, who learns of the tragic explosion and its suspicious origins when he's sent from St. Louis by his father to spend a summer with her in little West Table, Mo. His grandfather was an alcoholic ne'er-do-well who left Alma and their three sons to live off stolen table scraps from the wealthy Glencross banking family, whom she served for half a century as a maid. She entertains him with her version of the "colossal accident, an ongoing mystery she thought she'd solved."

A wonderfully diverse cast plays key roles in The Maid's Version. Alma's promiscuous sister, Ruby, captures Arthur Glencross's heart but dies in the fire; Sheriff Shot Adderly runs the investigation; Preacher Isaiah Willard rails against the eternally damned dancers ("God's wrath will find you even as you jerk about to pagan sounds").

Woodrell doesn't miss a lick in capturing the language of the Ozark hills and the details of its historically hand-to-mouth life. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

With The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante picks up where she left off in My Brilliant Friend, following her two protagonists, Lila and Elena, from adolescence into their 20s. The novel, the second volume in a trilogy, is a treatise on life in Naples, a part of Italy that has nothing in common with Rome, Florence or Milan.

The two girls have a complex, intense relationship, with Lila leading the way and Elena trying to accommodate--at least at first. Lila has pulled herself out of poverty with an early marriage to a grocer's son, whom she hates. Elena has continued studying, graduating from high school and going to university in Pisa.

Elena has been in love with Nino for what seems like her whole life. She orchestrates visits to the beach where he will be and, in a heart-rending scene, allows herself to be deflowered by his father. In a cruel twist, Lila becomes sexually obsessed with Nino, and he with her. Their affair causes scandal, results in the birth of a child and drives a wedge between Lila and Elena.

So far, this sounds like the stuff of soap opera, but the situations feel strongly autobiographical, and Ferrante's writing is convincingly real. By the end, Lila is living in poverty again and Elena has just had a book published--a recollection of her childhood, her friendship with Lila, her school experiences and the people they know. A story within a story? What surprises will the next volume in Ferrante's trilogy bring? --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Cassandra King's Moonrise is an homage to Daphne du Maurier's gothic classic Rebecca, using the same atmospheric tension, presences that may or may not be there and characters whose motivations are not what they seem. But King has modernized the tale, adding characters both complex and intense.

In the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Highlands, N.C., Moonrise is a dreamy Victorian estate, its beautiful garden filled with white flowers that bloom at night. At least, that is what it used to be. Now, a year after the death of Rosalyn, mistress of the mansion, the garden is neglected and forlorn. But Rosalyn's widower, Emmet, has returned with his new wife, Helen, and his oldest friends are gathering.

Tansy and Kit, mean and waspish, set about to make life miserable for Helen. Myna, a prize-winning poet, believes the whole Highlands scene is beneath her and views it with contempt. Rounding out the cast is Annie, Emmet's daughter. She and Kit are very close, which works against Annie and her new stepmother making a connection.

King (The Sunday Wife) tells the story in three voices: Helen, Tansy and Willa, a local girl working as a housekeeper for the rich folks. Since this is a Southern gothic novel, of course there is the suggestion of Moonrise being haunted. It is haunted, in a very real sense, by the mysterious death of Rosalyn in an car accident on the mountain road. Why did she travel to Moonrise alone and why did she leave the same night? That enigmatic behavior forms the crux of this rousing good story, with no apologies to du Maurier. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

New York book editor Richard Marder has no idea when he will die, but has a pressing reason to fixate on the timeline: an inoperable anomaly in his brain could burst at any time. Others in the same position might take early retirement, but Marder, a widower, has plans that will require him to draw strength from a side of himself he thought he had buried, to use skills he never expected to need again. Instead of going gently into that good night, Marder sets his affairs in order, buys a beach house in Playa Diamante in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, and bids goodbye to his old Vietnam buddy Patrick Skelly, keeping the details of his journey and destination as cryptic as possible.

As Marder expected, the secrecy proves irresistible to Skelly, who shows up unannounced at a rest stop in Virginia. Marder's plans will take him deep into areas of Mexico controlled by drug lords, and a man with Skelly's skills and somewhat warped moral code will come in handy. To Skelly, however, he maintains the pretense that he intends only to fulfill his wife's last wishes and scatter her ashes in her hometown.

Gruber knows how to hook readers. An appealing protagonist with a wild card sidekick, skillful pacing, smart one-liners and plenty of artillery tilt this thriller in the blockbuster-style direction, while also giving readers food for thought about relations between Mexico and the United States. This meaty but never maudlin thriller is smart, inventive, and sure to leave readers with pounding pulses and soaring imaginations. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager, Latah County Library District; blogger at Infinite Reads

Happy Hour in Hell is the second novel in a three-book supernatural noir series from fantasy author Tad Williams (of Otherland and Shadowmarch fame). Heaven and Hell are the ultimate Cold War opponents, and each side has its own set of agents and advocates pursuing their own agendas, as well as those of their higher-ups (or lower-downs).

Bobby Dollar--Doloriel the angel, more formally--has secretly fallen for a demon woman, but she's been taken back to hell by her master, who already hates Bobby (see the first book, The Dirty Streets of Heaven, for the details). Dollar knows an angel in Hell is a bad idea, but he loves Casimira and will do anything to get her back.

Bobby has to consult several shady characters to find out how to get into Hell, all while being pursued by an unhinged serial killer who looks like a warped giant spider. Dollar doesn't know whom to trust, but heads to Hell anyway, finding his way through a variety of laugh- and gasp-out-loud moments of sheer, hellish torture and insanity.

The atrocious, vile imagery of Happy Hour in Hell alone makes the story appealing; Williams has created a flawed angelic hero worth rooting for. The noir-style first-person narrative adds to an already delicious read, one fans of Raymond Chandler and Damon Runyon will appreciate. There are also plenty of hints regarding a larger overarching plot line involving the machinations between Heaven and Hell to keep readers engaged throughout. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

It's the year 2040, and the illegal drug known as "Nexus," which lets users program their brain like they would a computer, is everywhere. People from all walks of life are drawn to its illicit power, from terrorists and prostitutes to politicians and wealthy parents of autistic children. Internet access allows Nexus users to engage in telepathic communication, while the programmable interface makes it easy for them to control their neurological environment. Panic and fear can be quelled with a surge of serotonin; pain dulled with naturally produced opiates.

Ramez Naam weaves a complex web of political intrigue and personal drama around this central premise--introduced in his 2012 novel Nexus--following a large cast of characters whose paths occasionally intersect as they struggle with the practical and moral implications of a Nexus-driven world. Though Crux seems at first glance to be a science fiction novel with niche appeal, it is compelling enough to deserve the attention of readers who otherwise avoid the genre--and though it is a sequel, it is also able to stand on its own. The conceit is convincing and the writing is deceptively simple, allowing Naam's talent for high-paced action and complex characters to shine through.

Like the best science fiction, Crux uses an imagined future to turn a critical eye on the present day--and Naam does so with a readable appeal that many works of literary fiction struggle to achieve. --Emma Page, intern at Shelf Awareness, bookseller at Mercer Island Books

As Stephen Klaidman (Saving the Heart) points out in the entertaining Sydney and Violet, Sydney and Violet Schiff's claim to fame was that they knew people--important people. Wealthy, charming and magnanimous (attributes most of their famous acquaintances did not have), "their lives were tightly entwined with many of the defining figures of literary modernism."

Between London and Paris, you were either in one camp or another; the Schiffs, though, were in all. Their friends in Bayswater included Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield; they were equally well acquainted with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and others in the Bloomsbury circle. They knew D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce--and, in his final years, Marcel Proust. (Sydney even translated Time Regained, the final volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, after the death of his original translator.) They were the hosts of the famous dinner in 1922 where Proust and Joyce met for the first and only time--other guests that night included Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev. Joyce was tipsy; night-hawk Proust, fashionably late. Neither read the other, neither knew the other's friends.

Sydney and Violet is a goldmine of literary trivia, filled with comments from one writer about another writer to another writer. Most satirized each other, especially the irascible Lewis, who cruelly mocked the Schiffs in The Apes of God. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Evelyn Funda's mother escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in a wine barrel, eventually landing in the United States. Her father was the son of Czech immigrants, early homesteaders who sought to make farmland of the Idaho desert. The family farm never felt like it would be Evelyn's: this "farm daughter," unwelcome among the tractors and irrigation pipes, would leave to become a college professor. Her musing memoir opens in the fall of 2001 with a triple tragedy: the sale of the family farm; her father's cancer diagnosis; and her mother's death, closely followed by her father's.

Weeds is an elegy, an academic's personal tale of research and disillusionment, and Evelyn's own story--with hints of a botanist's or social historian's study. (The chapters are named for weeds, beginning with dodder, which she long misheard as "daughter," when her father cursed the unwelcome growth.) The pursuit of her mother's joyful youth in a series of cities and countries, of the truth of her grandfather's apocryphal tales, of her parents' romance and of the history of her own hometown takes Evelyn to dusty library stacks and to small Czech villages, where she meets dozens of cousins and examines old bones.

Meditative and lyrical, Weeds smoothly braids weeds with family. Funda is sometimes frustrated along the way, but finally satisfied with the personal history she builds for herself--and the conclusion that, even in exile, one can find a sense of place and of belonging. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In Room 1219, Greg Merritt (Celluloid Mavericks) brings one of Hollywood's most infamous scandals to life.

In 1921, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, the silent screen comedian, was at the apex of his career. He had just signed a three-year contract with Paramount for $1 million, an unheard-of amount for the time.

Arbuckle was known for his opulent, drunken parties, and his Labor Day celebration at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco was no exception. Fatty and his friends checked into three adjacent rooms; despite Prohibition, liquor flowed freely. Mid-festivities, Arbuckle went into Room 1219 to change clothes; a young actress named Virginia Rappe was also in the room. What happened in the next 10 minutes has never been conclusively settled, but four days later, Rappe was dead. Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter; though he was ultimately acquitted, the damage to his career was done.

The media loved the scandal. The graphic reportage included speculation that Arbuckle crushed Rappe under his weight--between 250 and 300 pounds--and that he raped her with a bottle. Autopsies determined she died of a ruptured bladder. She had undergone several abortions under questionable care--perhaps even shortly before the party. Nevertheless, Fatty was portrayed as a drunken predator.

Merritt looks beyond the scandal, showing how it became a defining moment for the film industry. In response to nationwide furor over Rappe's death, the studios appointed former Republican party chairman Will H. Hays to restore Hollywood's image. Within a decade, his office created a code outlining the moral standards for all film content, which over time morphed into today's rating system. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

After his paeans to the sea (Lightship) and space travel (Moonshot), Brian Floca here pays soaring tribute to the iron horse that rides the rails.

The author-artist opens with a verbal and visual lyricism that evokes the awe of those who first traveled the Transcontinental Railroad: "Here is a road/ made for crossing the country,/ a new road of rails/ made for people to ride." He connects past to present with the universal experience of a boy and girl who wait on the platform with their mother. As the train moves closer, the images and typeface grow in size and clarity ("CLANG-CLANG-CLANG"; "Whoo-oooo").

Floca labels the parts inside the cab, then leads into a close-up of the train rolling out of the station. He lays out the paradox introduced by train travel: a serene view of the Great Plains with nary a sign of civilization ("smell the switchgrass and the bluestem, hot beneath the sun"), as well as the sacrifices the railroad wrought ("Here the Cheyenne lived and the Pawnee and Arapaho.... The railroad and the men who built it--they have changed it all"). As the family travels along the tracks, Floca offers tantalizing details: toilets drain onto the tracks; a boy selling newspapers, food and soap is a "butch." At the end of the journey, the boy and girl's father waits with open arms.

With maps and milestones in the front, and a cutaway diagram of the engine at the back, readers will want to board this locomotive again and again. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Pulitzer Prize nominee Martin Sandler (The Impossible Rescue; the Through the Lens series) does a masterful job of tackling a complex topic, as he puts it, "one of the darkest periods in American history": the treatment of Japanese-Americans living in the United States during World War II. 

Sandler makes the case that the decision to intern more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor was not based on any potential or realized threat, but rather on perception. Text and photographs illuminate the history of Japanese-Americans in the U.S., the hysteria after Pearl Harbor, their loss of property and dignity, the condition of the relocation camps, the dedication and success of Japanese-Americans in war efforts, and the government response to those who were imprisoned during the war. The author sharply contrasts the treatment of Japanese-Americans as disloyal with the fact that they were some of the greatest contributors to the country, in business and in war, including the role of Nisei (or American-born Japanese) in the 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and, later, the 522nd Field Artillery, a special unit that helped liberate Jews and also parts of Europe from Hitler.

Despite the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and President Obama's honoring of the Nisei with the Congressional Gold Medal, the impact of the relocation is still felt today. Sandler seamlessly weaves together the historical landscape and the impact that these Japanese-American felt then and now. --Susannah Richards, associate professor, Eastern Connecticut State University

In this wordless graphic-format picture book, a boy discovers a world where everything is different.

Striking cartoon color panels tell the story of a family who leave their homeland and encounter foreign sites and sounds in a new country. In one early frame in the busy airport, the boy halts and spreads out his arms; readers can almost hear him screaming, "No! Stop!" But people and events continue to move onward. He carries a token in his pocket, a round red seed that brings him comfort and unleashes memories of his old home while he adjusts to his new one. His facial expressions and body language convey his moods as he observes activities in his neighborhood, travels underground (a subway map indicates he's in New York City) and sits alone on the steps at school. When the boy accidentally drops his special red seed out the window, he runs out to find it and, in doing so, begins to open up to the world around him. He and a new friend plant the seed together.

In the end, all the challenges he faces give way to positive experiences. On the final two-page spread, we see a peaceful scene, with his smiling face reflected in the water, and the book's only words: "Here I am." The universal themes in the story speak to a wide audience. Creative use of color, cartoon panels and graphic design make this story of adjusting to a new home a knockout. --JoAnn Jonas, children's librarian, freelance book reviewer