Marie, the narrator of Chloe Aridjis's Asunder, has been a guard at London's National Gallery for 10 years. She lives with her flatmate, Jane, in Islington, enjoying occasional nights out with Daniel, a fellow guard and earnest, unpublished poet. In the privacy of her room, she creates miniature "artistic" worlds of her own out of eggshells, dead moths and bits of broken glass. Her needs are few, her routines predictable.

Aridjis is something of a genius in her ability to enrich the ordinary with epiphanies rendered in deceptively short and simple prose. Marie's world of work and her flat may be circumspect, but she lives large in the world of her mind and imagination. Surrounded by great art, talkative international visitors and instructive curators and restorationists, she can eavesdrop and observe life in its most profane and sacred moments. 

Asunder is not a novel driven by plot or dialogue. It meanders, much as Marie does through her assigned museum rooms. She goes out with Daniel when Jane's habits become too annoying. She concludes that a life is like a painting that goes from "being a thing of beauty to a thing of decaying beauty to a thing of decay." She destroys her miniatures and quits her job. What next? Her only answer is "new subjects and new verbs... my days would have something like a new vocabulary." In this little gem of a novel, Aridjis takes on the troubling questions of life and quietly works her way to the best answers she can find. --Bruce Jacobs

Nicholson Baker's new novel, Traveling Sprinkler, picks up where The Anthologist left off--with Paul Chowder, poet and former bassoonist, now contemplating his 55th birthday, sharing a picnic with ex-girlfriend Roz.

Chowder is having a midlife re-assessment. He can't finish a single poem, but "I've published three books of poems and an anthology. That's plenty. Nobody wants to read more than three books of poems by anyone." He decides to return to music, buys a guitar and sets up a studio in his crumbling barn.

Baker being Baker, his novel is also chock-a-block with digressions and idiosyncrasies. A portion of his barn collapses, burying a lifetime of family correspondence and books (along with a canoe given to him by Roz, the source of much of the pleasure of their romance). His growing collection of walking sprinklers gives the novel its title, as well as a metaphor for Chowder's malaise: "I feel like a traveling sprinkler that's gotten off the hose. I don't know where I'm going."

It's the love story, however, that holds the novel together. Chowder works hard at his songwriting, and the music opens a door for Roz to return. At a club, they listen to his teen neighbor play one of Chowder's songs; the music pushes them into a sublime kiss. "Our mouths remembered what they had to say to each other," he reflects. Unable to leave a happy ending without an aside, Chowder turns to Roz: "I bought a new canoe," he tells her. "You want to take a ride in my new boat?" A new Nicholson Baker boat is always worth the ride. --Bruce Jacobs

"Love was a simple equation, a recipe that could produce a decent result with the right ingredients and timing. Spend enough time together... and anyone could fall in love." This pragmatic and unromantic observation is one of many memorable lines in Galt Niederhoffer's chillingly accurate portrayal of a marriage headed toward the rocks. Love and Happiness is so on the mark when it comes to the boredom that sometimes crops up after a decade of marriage, it's a little scary.

The story traces Jean's initial love for her husband (two passionate artists in lust and making short films), her current floundering marriage and her adorable yet needy children. Jean spends nights in her Brooklyn brownstone obsessed with social media, writing passionate e-mails to a college ex-boyfriend she never sends. She despises sex with her husband. This is a woman who, if she's not in crisis, is surely stalled. Jean falls hard for a man whose only attribute seems to be his mysterious newness. Then, of course, comes the affair.

In Jean, Niederhoffer (The Romantics) has created a protagonist who has stopped pretending. She treats her husband with patronizing contempt (he's just so needy!) and crazily hires a private detective to investigate someone she meets in a bar. She's a mirror for an impulsive streak most adults have squelched--and readers will be unable to resist becoming intrigued by her.

Resonating, realistic and utterly unforgettable, Love and Happiness brings an innovative perspective on one of the world's oldest institutions. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Mother, Mother opens on a quiet Saturday morning in small-town New York. A young boy wakes up with his mother standing over him, waiting to start their day. He is a little odd--we soon learn he's been recently diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and epilepsy--and his mother seems to be wound a little tight, but she's also concerned and loving. Next, the perspective shifts to that of his older sister, a rebellious teen who has just been hospitalized in a local mental institute. We learn that the father is cheating, and the eldest daughter ran away with a boyfriend several years ago. These are the perceptions presented in the first few pages of Koren Zailckas's startling debut novel.

As the story of the Hurst family unfolds, the reader will learn to question every "fact" exhibited. The youngest child, Will, and the middle daughter, Violet, continue to trade off the first-person relating of their family drama. One is on the autism spectrum and the other is drug-addled; thus the reader has to parse not one unreliable narrator but two. Josephine, the titular mother, starts off coldly Stepford-like and quickly takes a turn toward chilling. Absent eldest daughter Rose remains ghostlike and disembodied for most of the book. From the start, the reader senses that something is amiss, but will have to puzzle for a time over which of these troubled characters to trust. Koren Zailckas exhibits a nuanced understanding of psychological drama, combined with a wry tone that brings surprising humor to such an unnerving story. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Turning from the distant future of 2312 to the distant past, Kim Stanley Robinson's Shaman adroitly intertwines raw human emotions in a modestly paced tale of one apprentice's journey into manhood.

Thrown out in the snow naked and with no tools, Loon, an orphan and rebellious shaman trainee, must survive his "wander," a fortnight alone in the woods. After the first night, Loon begins to face his fears as he struggles with the desire to survive, the gnawing pain of hunger and the numbing cold. Once he survives this test, his teacher, the curmudgeonly Thorn, intensifies the shamanic training by making Loon memorize the tribe's ancient tales. "Remember the old ways, and all the old stories," Thorn says. "Remember the animals, your brothers and sisters. Remember to take your place and play your part." Meanwhile, Heather, the pack's midwife and herbalist, teaches Loon to identify wild plants. But Loon wants to do things his way, taking chances that force members of his clan into dangerous situations where men and women are pitted against each other and the fierce elements.

Rich in anthropological details and survival skills, Shaman meanders across the rolling hills and valleys of an ancient past. The men of Loon's tribe hunt bison and caribou, tell tall tales and make cave paintings; the women are tough, courageous and filled with passion. And the endless cycles of the seasons and of life permeate everything in Robinson's entertaining jaunt into the imagined land of our ancestors. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

When Amanda Lindhout was a child, she lived inside National Geographic. The faraway flora and fauna would swallow her, while the real world--an abusive, impoverished home in small-town Canada--would fall quietly away. Though Lindhout would eventually convert these fantasies to reality, it is the powerful use of imagination, honed in youth, that would save her life and inspire the title of her memoir, A House in the Sky.

Lindhout's childhood escapism is reminiscent of A Little Princess or Bridge to Terabithia, but her adult life is shaped more by intellectual curiosity and a desire to impact the world. Saving up money from waitressing, she traverses the globe until 2008, when she attempts her most dangerous feat--going to Somalia to cover the civil war. Though warned repeatedly of the danger, she proceeds with a brazen defiance that tempts the reader toward judgment. Yet in this defiance is an enviable daring, as though her fear of stagnation usurps all other fears--the prospect of futility looming darker than danger or death.

When Lindhout is abducted and held hostage for over a year, her life comes full circle. Thrown back into a captive and harrowing existence, she must, as she did at home, invent a place to retreat psychologically when actual escape is not an option.

Despite anticipating her capture from the introduction, the narrative remains somehow suspenseful. Humble, brave and naïvely optimistic, Lindhout possesses the elements of a classically compelling hero. --Annie Atherton

Though Alan Rusbridger's day job as editor of the Guardian leaves him little time for hobbies, he is a keen amateur pianist, even carving out time to attend a piano camp in France every summer. When he hears a fellow camper perform Chopin's famously difficult Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Rusbridger determines to master the piece himself--and to play it at camp the following year.

Rusbridger tackles the Ballade by enrolling in piano lessons for the first time in decades, researching Chopin's life and music, shopping for a new piano. A journalist to the core, he also interviews concert pianists, music teachers, neuroscientists and others about Chopin, music, practice, distraction and memory. Through it all, breaking news stories (including the WikiLeaks scandal and the Arab Spring uprisings) pull Rusbridger's attention back to his demanding day job.

Rusbridger's memoir is a witty, thoughtful (if sometimes rather technical) account of a turbulent year. He finds carving out even 20 minutes a day to concentrate on Chopin provides a calming escape from the rest of his life--and enriches it as well. Conferences, interviews and other glimpses of events behind the scenes at the Guardian intertwine with Rusbridger's struggle to "wall off a small part of [his] life for creative expression."

A celebration of music and creativity, Play It Again is an honest, ultimately joyous account of pursuing a daunting artistic challenge amid the triumphs and frustrations of everyday life. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

The impetus for the essays collected in Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc.) is Delia Ephron's loss of her older sister Nora, the firstborn of the four Ephron daughters. Hallie and Amy complete the talented cast. The parents and each of the daughters were or are screenwriters, some are novelists. Delia and Nora co-wrote the play Love, Loss, and What I Wore, which ran for two years off-Broadway and has been performed around the world. Delia's movies include The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, You've Got Mail, Hanging Up and Michael.

High praise from their screenwriter father was: "That's a great line, write it down." Their mother scorned housekeeping, attending children's activities and anything else that smacked of ordinary wifedom and mothering. Delia has nothing good to say about her mother; in the most poignant of the essays, she chronicles her mother's descent into alcoholism, beginning when Delia was 11 and continuing, accompanied by Delia's father, until her death.

Despite all, Delia and Nora grew up with their senses of humor intact. In every essay, she gets several laughs, often at her own expense. She is also mad for dogs (she has a Havanese named Honey) and has lots to say about contemporary life--trying to talk to someone about a tech problem when that someone doesn't speak your language, for instance. Another essay is about ordering online and having it go terribly wrong. She can find the funny in any aspect of life--except the death of her beloved sister. --Valerie Ryan

Diarmaid MacCulloch, a professor of church history at Oxford, has produced a multifaceted meditation in Silence--considering how silence enhanced and made worship possible, as well as how it has helped allow those in power avoid penance for their crimes, from the time before Christ to today.

He cites examples of the monastic tradition in Western Europe, where the use of silence as a ritual tool reinvigorated the church, and recalls cases where silence was considered shameful--in the face of abuse or questionable consolidations of power that a true Christian conscience, aligned with the gospels, should have roared about. There are also subtler concepts of silence on display here, such as instances in which "silence meant survival," from oppressed Catholics in Elizabethan-era England to homosexuals throughout history. MacCulloch has a keen discernment of the tension between the monastic (interior and silent) and the bureaucratic (exterior and vocally demonstrative) and the correlative tension between silent, sole worship and the needful public displays of corporate faith. He rightly takes the Catholic Church to task for its silence on slavery and the gutlessly circumspect response to the Holocaust, and deftly looks at the cover-up of child abusing priests in relation to celibacy and the expression of sexuality.

MacCulloch's Silence is intimate and sometimes moving, but also a deeply scholarly and intellectually invigorating book. He shows with great lucidity and compassion how a single concept has renewed faith and brought it to its greatest heights, but has also been party to Christianity's most fumbling missteps. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

Stealing Sugar from the Castle represents the best of more than a half-century of work from one of America's greatest living poets. In 1962, Robert Bly published his first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Woods. The homespun title belied the amazing influence its deceptively "simple" and profound poems would have on American poetry.

Here is the complete text of "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last," his powerful anti-Vietnam War poem ("Massive engines lift beautifully from decks..."). Here are many of his masterful prose poems, including the moving "The Dead Seal," along with "deep image" poems and ghazals.  Always the careful observer, Bly starts many of his poems with "the act of" words, like "looking" (at aging faces, the stars), "listening" (to the sitar before dawn, old music). Sadly, we'll have to look elsewhere for Bly's brilliant translations of other poets, such as the Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Tomas Tranströmer.

Now 85, Bly suffers from Alzheimer's. Let us rejoice in this retrospective--and the small handful of new poems it includes. Let us be sad that he was never chosen as the nation's poet laureate. Let us now praise a great poet while he's still here to chuckle at the praise, smile and read us a poem like "Taking the Hands" in that singularly rich, Midwestern voice:  
"Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages...
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hands."
--Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Newbery Medal–winning author Kate DiCamillo's (The Tale of Despereaux) latest adventure begins when a Ulysses Super-Suction, Multi-Terrain 2000X vacuum cleaner accidentally sucks up an ordinary squirrel, thus transforming him into a super-strong superhero who can type poetry, if not vanquish villains. Flora, a quirky-smart 10-year-old as lonely as a giant squid, fears for the life of her extraordinary new friend Ulysses, with good reason. Her mother (an unhappy romance novelist who might love her monstrously frilly shepherdess lamp more than she loves her own daughter) wants Flora's father to whack the critter with a shovel and bury him. Arch-nemesis, check.

The heart-tugging story of Flora's loneliness, her rocky relationship with her divorced parents, and a peculiar but possible new friend, William Spiver, interweaves seamlessly with the side-splitting shenanigans and ponderings of a sentient squirrel superhero. When we get inside the fuzzy head of Ulysses, we discover that not only is he always very hungry, he's enamored with the world: "He loved all of it: smoke rings and lonely squids and giant donuts and Flora Belle Buckman's round head and all the wonderful thoughts inside of it." K.G. Campbell's charming, funny, cartoon-panel, black-and-white pencil-sketch vignettes zero in on Ulysses in action, whether typing, flying or outmaneuvering an evil cat. (The squirrel's love of the world most often excludes felines.)

Eccentric characters, snappy prose and the fantastical plot give this delightful novel a giddy, over-the-top patina, but the core is big and hopeful, contemplative and bursting with heart. No small feat, even for a superhero like DiCamillo. --Karin Snelson, freelance writer and children's book editor

Hilary McKay (Binny for Short) once again crafts an utterly charming chapter book for newly independent readers, her third in the series that began with Lulu and the Duck in the Park and Lulu and the Dog from the Sea.

When her parents go on vacation, they leave Lulu and her cousin Mellie safely in the care of their grandmother Nan. All is well until a large, mysterious bag appears on Lulu's doorstep, which begins to... snore. Lulu opens the bag to find an enormous orange cat, who stretches, purrs and runs off. "Good," says Nan. "Ran away! Good!" Nan may not be an animal lover, but Lulu certainly is. With their hamsters, fish, rabbits, a parrot and two dogs, Nan is certain her granddaughters already have enough pets. But Lulu and Mellie set off to look for the runaway stray. Lulu knows that this new snoring, purring orange cat will need a good home.  

McKay is a genius at creating fun-loving, caring and original families who take their pets seriously. Sticking to age-appropriate sentence structure and vocabulary, McKay conveys a warm and thoroughly appealing early chapter book. The adventures begin immediately, and the fun doesn't let up until the last page. Lulu's mysterious cat has an unusual habit, which helps Lulu and Mellie to simply follow the feline's trail. Along the way, a new cat lover is born, and all ends peacefully, with a lovely surprise. --Lynn Becker, host of Book Talk, the monthly online discussion of children's books for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators