David Leavitt's The Two Hotel Francforts takes place in the summer of 1940, as Americans crowd into Lisbon hotels waiting for the SS Manhattan to rescue them from war-torn Europe. Julia Winters, forced to abandon her dream flat in Paris, loathes the prospect of returning to the U.S. Her devoted husband is the gullible, well-intentioned Pete Winters, head of the Buick sales division in France.

When pigeons swoop low over their café table, Pete ducks, knocking Julia's playing cards off the table. When he bends to get them, his glasses fall off, and a passing waiter kicks them into the path of wealthy, charming Edward Freleng, who has never had to work in his life and is dominated by his tall, red-haired wife, Iris, who drives and sails and rides--and intends to hang onto her husband.

The couples discover they are staying in different hotels with, in essence, the same name, the Hotel Francfort and the Francfort Hotel. The women retire and the men decide to take a spin in Pete's car. Suddenly, Pete and Edward are on a madcap nighttime journey, where they try absinthe and plunge naked into the sea, changing all of their lives forever.

Leavitt is superb at comedy of manners, his dialogue is witty and tight and his characters constantly reveal themselves while trying to keep their true feelings hidden. He has never been in greater command of his talents: the genius of the set-ups, the pay-offs that generate more pay-offs, the luminous and perceptive language, the sensuous evocation of Lisbon, the re-creation of the sheer uncertainty in the face of Hitler's relentless advance. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

Naomi Ragen's The Sisters Weiss is a fascinating portrait of an insular community living by ancient laws in a modern metropolis--and of one woman's insatiable hunger for a life of her own. Beloved by their ultra-Orthodox parents, Rose and Pearl Weiss grow up sheltered but safe in their 1950s Brooklyn community. But when Rose makes a new friend and develops a secret passion for photography, she is shamed and banished to a distant neighborhood. Longing to reconcile with her parents, she agrees to an arranged marriage, but flees on the eve of her wedding, breaking off all contact with her family.

Forty years later, Pearl's daughter, Rivka, discovers the truth about her aunt Rose's break with her family and community. Feeling similarly stifled, naïve Rivka embarks on a reckless, rebellious journey of her own, which will have far-reaching consequences for Rose, her daughter, Hannah, and Pearl.

The Sisters Weiss is a sensitive look at a painful dilemma: the agonizing choice between freedom and family, between loneliness and an often stifling community, between a world of opportunity and a rich but demanding heritage. Ragen (The Saturday Wife) skillfully captures the paradoxes inherent in the lives of Orthodox Jewish women, who receive far less education than men, but must run their households and work to support their families while their husbands study the Torah. The choices of the Weiss women--Rose, Hannah, Rivka and Pearl--reverberate through their lives in surprising and empathetic ways. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

In the first sentence of Paradises, Iosi Havilio disposes of the romantic lead of his first book, Open Door, by having him run over. This sends Havilio's unnamed female narrator into a downward spiral that will leave her fighting for survival with her young son in a Buenos Aires slum.

This fascinating narrator is a strangely passive woman unburdened by moral considerations, who casually injects herself with someone else's morphine and steals a baby iguana from the zoo. She's too passive to say no to her daffy friend's plan to steal from her boyfriend's rich parents. Though coming out of a four-year relationship with a man, all of her bonds now are with women. The novel is crowded with female characters, like Iris, the Romanian babysitter who gets the narrator a job at the zoo, and Tosca, an immense woman who needs an injection of morphine every morning and night.

But most of all, there's Eloisa, the sexually uninhibited tattooed blonde first seen in Open Door. This potty-mouthed pothead is Havilio's finest creation, and effortlessly dominates the novel. An inexhaustible stream of eccentric characters, the marginal citizens of Buenos Aires, parades through Havilio's fiction. The plot is free-form, with parties erupting in the street, fistfights breaking out in restaurants and lost old friends appearing out of nowhere.

"This place is hell," says the narrator's best friend, taking in her wretched new living quarters. "Things turned out this way," the narrator replies, and that sums up Havilio's sense of the random momentum of life, the unexpected conjunctions that can lead a mother to raise her son among dealers and thugs and still have hope for the future. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

The Last Animal by Abby Geni is the rare short story collection that's as coherent and powerful as a well-constructed novel. It begs to be read straight through rather than sampled casually. Although each story stands on its own, as an ensemble, their brilliance becomes apparent. They build quietly on one another, examining the same dark little corners of the human experience from vastly different angles.

Geni's prose is clean and slightly dreamlike, in an intimate voice that lingers occasionally on glimmering sensory details. A suburban forest is "as shadowy and chaotic as deep ocean"; a son walks away from his mother, "following the marbled disc of the rising earth." Describing unexpected rain, she writes that "the sky opened suddenly, dropping a collision of water on the tender plants."

Reading The Last Animal is like glimpsing a distant, hauntingly familiar shore illuminated by the rotating beam of a lighthouse. In "Fire Blight," the illness of an orchard reflects the illness of a relationship, while elsewhere a sapling helps a couple find the future after a painful miscarriage. In "Terror Birds," the rage of a young child at his philandering father is expressed by a murderous flock of ostriches. In the title story, a manatee and a giant sea turtle help a woman lay the ghost of her husband to rest. In all cases, the natural world helps people find a place beyond their grief. There is no answer here--only luminous writing about pain and the possibility of peace. --Emma Page, bookseller at Island Books, Mercer Island, Wash.

Wolfgang Jeschke's The Cusanus Game is an ambitious amalgam of philosophy, religion, history and the best of science fiction that evolves from a seemingly typical near-future dystopian tale into a masterful exploration of metaphysical cosmology.

In 2052, after a nuclear disaster renders northern Germany uninhabitable, Europe is a nightmare of xenophobia and ecological catastrophe. Domenica Ligrina is finishing her botany training in Rome, a city dying of desertification and political anarchy. Even the pope has fled north, moving the papacy to a militarily expanded Austria. The Vatican, however, is far from idle. It offers Domenica a position in a secret new program, one that seeks samples from uncorrupted past ecosystems to heal the present. The details of this program have grand implications for humanity's past, present and future. Domenica's personal fascination with Nicolaus Cusanus, a 15th-century German cardinal and Renaissance humanist, defines her journey through time and space.

The complex world of Jeschke's future Europe is both familiar and alien. As Domenica travels from Rome to Venice and across Europe--including the irradiated exclusion zone in Germany--each location is alive with art and architecture, especially an astounding vision of Venice awash in benevolent experimental nanobots. The title refers to a game created by Cusanus, in which players use roundabout aiming strategies to hit the center of a board. It's an apt analogy of the novel's only drawback--some minor pacing problems. Aside from that, though, The Cusanus Game will appeal to science fiction buffs and lovers of literary excellence alike. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

From crack dealer to community icon and philanthropist, from a no-name Division II player picked in the final round of the NFL draft to the Green Bay Packers' all-time leading receiver, Donald Driver has experienced and accomplished a great deal. In Driven, Driver presents his story in refreshingly candid prose, writing candidly about the ease with which he and his brother integrated themselves into the underworld of Houston's notorious Fifth Ward, rising quickly among the ranks of drug dealers and auto thieves. He credits his success to the prodigious speed that earned him the nickname "Quickie" and also served as his ticket to professional athletics.

Driver also credits his success in the underworld to strict self-discipline, a trait that later fueled his determination to win a scholarship to college (Alcorn State University) and then to succeed in Green Bay despite his low draft position--and, after retiring from football, to win Dancing with the Stars. At Alcorn, Driver also met his eventual wife, Tina, whom he credits with providing the impetus to leave his former life behind. Driver's story makes for an incredibly compelling read told matter-of-factly, a moving tribute to the friends and family who helped him rise to his current status as one of the most beloved players in Packers history. --Benji Taylor, freelance writer, student, blogging at Destructive Anachronism

What Mary Roach does for the alimentary canal in Gulp and Robin Nagle does for garbage collecting in Picking Up, Jessica Alexander does for global catastrophe in Chasing Chaos--entertainingly enlightening us with a hands-on look at something we'd really rather not see.

A naïve do-gooder, Alexander studied at Penn and then drifted to New York City for PR work, grad school and a fiancé before she shucked them all to fly to Rwanda. As she works for aid organizations in Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka and Haiti, she brings not only compassion but also an eye for the story behind the story and an ear for the humanitarian lingo. She observes aid groups fighting over the Indonesian tsunami's huge relief jackpot "like watching a dog pee to mark his territory" and participates in expat workers' frequent parties.

Reality is never far away, though, like the Darfur curfew "in place because 10 p.m. was when the militia, usually drunk and wielding heavy artillery, came out to patrol the streets." Alexander doesn't shy from the horrors: the starvation and disease, the mindless violence, the red tape and stolen supplies. She wonders if her meager efforts matter. "Did the covers we put on the latrines to stop flies mean anything anymore?" she asks. "The country needed a government that didn't terrorize its own population."

Alexander returns to New York intent on finding ways to deliver humanitarian aid more effectively. She also returns with a new-found respect for the simple efficiency and ease she left behind where "even the DMV seemed well organized." Chasing Chaos is a journey well worth the chase. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Australian historian Carol Baxter melds true crime and science in the gripping The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable. The electric telegraph (or the "electric constable," as it was known) was a newfangled, doubtful-looking invention in 1845, when a well-liked young woman was found gasping her final breaths in the small English town of Slough. Fortuitously, Slough was connected by an experimental telegraph line to Paddington Station; when a distinctively dressed gentleman was seen leaving the apparent murder scene and boarding a train, quick-thinking locals sent word along the line. The pursuit by telegraph of a criminal suspect marked a turning point, Baxter argues, and sparked the communications revolution that continues today. That the suspect, John Tawell, was a Quaker made this case still more sensational, and his personal history as a transported convict helped to transfix the public.

This peculiar case involved not only the "electric constable" but also the new fields of toxicology and forensic science. The murder trial riveted the medical and legal professions, setting new precedents; the public, already inspired by poisoning cases, was riveted by the cyanide evidence that "the Quaker murderer" provided. Baxter's accounts of the telegraph's technology, the prevailing cultural climate regarding murder and poisonings, contemporary forensic methods and Tawell's personal history are all worthy of an engrossing thriller. (Her research was meticulous, though, she explains in an author's note, and all the dialogue attributed and factual.) Expertly told, The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable is a captivating accomplishment in nonfiction. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

On a November night in 2008, seven teenaged boys--six of them white--attacked two Ecuadorean immigrants in Patchogue, N.Y. During the melee, one of them pulled a knife and killed Marcelo Lucero. In 1993, Lucero had illegally entered the U.S. from Gualaceo, the small Andes valley town where most of Patchogue's Ecuadorean community originated. The fabric of the suburban Long Island town came unraveled as resentment between the immigrant population and the remaining "locals" exploded. Pulitzer-winning journalist Mirta Ojito (Finding Mañana) saw in this tragedy not only a dramatic news story, but also a microcosm of the controversy over immigration in the U.S.

Hunting Season is a first-rate study of prejudice and institutional indifference. With thorough research and tight prose, Ojito asks how Patchogue, a city built by Italian immigrants, could become such a hotbed of intolerance, fear and hate. Though an immigrant herself, Ojito rarely interjects herself into the narrative--the court and police records, U.S. Census Bureau statistics, her interviews and on-the-scene observations speak for themselves.

Only in the epilogue does she speak personally: "There were no winners in this case. Eight families were shattered," she writes. "After three years of reporting and writing this book, there is a lot I will never know." Fortunately, Hunting Season shines its light on a community, a crime and a social milieu so well that readers will know more about the historical and contemporary challenges of American immigration than they ever did before. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Mind of an Outlaw contains 50 of Norman Mailer's best essays, selected by Philip Sipiora, the editor of The Mailer Review. At more than 600 pages, it's mighty impressive--and so are the essays. Many have argued about Mailer the novelist, but there's no arguing about Mailer the essayist--he was outstanding.

From the groundbreaking 1957 essay "The White Negro," about the birth of the hipster and the cultural influence of black Americans, to 2004's "Immodest Proposals," which presciently notes "Roe v. Wade probably repels more good conservatives than any other item in the liberal canon," Mailer repeatedly shows that he could write, think and be an outlaw--a witty, pen-wielding one--and a social nonconformist.

These essays are very readable. Mailer's sentences consist of clean, strong prose, generally eschewing the fussiness of the semicolon or colon. Although he found some fault with Hemingway's canon, he certainly imbibed the master's prose style. He could grab your ear immediately, make you laugh or snicker with a turn of phrase. Take, for example, the descriptions of his literary contemporaries in "Quick Evaluations on the Talent in the Room." Jack Kerouac was "pretentious as a rich whore"; J.D. Salinger the "greatest mind ever to stay in prep school"; and James Baldwin one of the "most tortured and magical nerves of our time."

These insightful essays educate, argue and persuade on everything from politics and literature to film, philosophy and the human condition. We could surely use an essayist or television pundit as witty, opinionated and smart as Mailer today. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

The team behind Just You and Me portrays a loving father-son relationship in this tale of a cub who gets to return the tender care his father has shown him.

Little Hansie Bear pretends to walk like his friends the ducks and falls headlong into "a deep-down ditch." Luckily, his dad comes along to help and expresses his sympathy: "[T]hat's not easy... unless you're a duck," says Dad. Two more challenges arise (sand in Hansie Bear's eyes and a bonk on the head from a tree branch), also bringing Dad to the rescue; each time, the cub bounces back. Sam McBratney's (Guess How Much I Love You) playful language lets youngest children know that the cub is never seriously hurt ("Do blinkety-blink like this, and you'll soon be better," says Dad when Hansie gets sand in his eyes), and Ivan Bates's (Farmer Dale's Red Pickup Truck) depictions of a warm family, with fur that looks soft enough to touch, contrast nicely with the autumn backdrop.

Best of all, when Hansie's friends have all gone home, and his father comes very slowly through the gate due to a thorn in his foot, Hansie (with a little help from Mom) knows just what to do. Like Dan Yaccarino's Every Friday, this picture book honors the special bond between father and son. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

In the unerring voice of 12-year-old Mila, Meg Rosoff (There Is No Dog) unlocks a mystery that takes her heroine from precocious child to young woman over the span of her Easter holiday.

Just before Mila and her father, Gil, prepare to leave London to visit Gil's oldest and best friend, Matthew, in New York, Gil receives a call from Matthew's wife, Suzanne. Matthew has disappeared. Mila is good at solving puzzles, and she has always wanted to thank Matthew for saving her father's life at age 22 during an avalanche while the pair was mountain climbing. Mila wonders "if we've been summoned for some sort of cosmic leveling, to help Matthew this time, the one who has never before required saving." Also prior to their departure, Catlin, Mila's estranged best friend, attempts a rapprochement. Mila thinks, "I didn't exactly miss her because she seemed like someone I no longer knew." Flashbacks of what passed between them become a lens for Mila as she tries to make sense of her father's friendship with Matthew.

Mila's first impression of Suzanne and Matthew's home is: "This is not a happy house." With her discoveries about Matthew's messy life, Mila also learns that her father has also kept secrets from her. "If a person can lie to you about one thing," Mila thinks, "he can lie about something else." Mila's sense of humor, intelligence and innate sense of justice will win readers over so that they feel the full impact of her sense of betrayal. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness