Elegy on Kinderklavier, a debut collection of stories from Arna Bontemps Hemenway, marks the beginning of a promising career for a gifted young writer whose work has been included in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies.

These remarkable tales circle around absence and loss, often using the Iraq War as a catalyst. In "The Half-Moon Martyrs' Brigade of New Jerusalem, Kansas," a young woman examines her culpability in a long-since-passed act of cruelty as she remembers the summer her small town turned against the local army recruiter. "The IED," an astounding story in slow motion, examines each nanosecond that follows after a young man steps on a land mine, from his involuntary kinetic and physiological reactions to the flashbacks that reveal the entirety of a life almost lived. In the title story, a father watches his young son lose a battle with brain cancer while his emotional distance from his own wife increases; the story of the couple's relationship pivots around the boy's prize toy, a child-sized keyboard, which never gets played.

Closely observed and elegiac, these stories keep a tight focus on the narrative present, with vivid and sometimes shocking descriptions of the moment their characters' lives are altered. Hemenway pays close attention to physical landscapes--as familiar as Kansas or as exotic as the Middle East--weaving them together so seamlessly that the stories begin to feel otherworldly. This collection is worth reading slowly, paging carefully through each beautiful, lyrical story that captures the disorienting aftermath of loss. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Picking up where book two of the All Souls trilogy (Shadow of Night) left off, Deborah Harkness's The Book of Life reunites readers with witch Diana Bishop, her vampire husband, Matthew Clairmont, and their many friends and enemies. After traveling through time in the previous novel, Diana and Matthew are back in the present at his ancestral home, Sept-Tours, where they are horrified to learn that Emily, Diana's aunt who was also a witch, has died.

The witch-vampire couple must also contend with Matthew's family, who distrust Diana. As their visit wears on, Diana learns more about her husband's past, that he is more than a "scientist, vampire, warrior, spy, and prince" and that his blood rage flows through the veins of others. Her in-laws, meanwhile, ponder the incredible and seemingly impossible fact that Diana is pregnant with Matthew's twins. If it's true, Baldwin claims, "they'll be the most hated--and the most hunted--children the world has ever known. Creatures will be baying for their blood."

Firedrakes, daemons, a tree that grows in the living room and a house that produces strange objects swirl around the couple as they travel to Connecticut, France and Italy in search of answers to the questions that have chased them through the centuries. Unfamiliarity with the preceding volumes may make this a confusing read for newcomers; start at book one, as the entire trilogy is a delightful plunge into the world of magic, witches and vampires, where love breaks all rules and happy endings are possible. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

It's the early 1930s, and young Weldon Holland lives on his grandfather Hackberry's ranch while his father is gone, looking for work. Trespassers in a 1932 Chevrolet Confederate challenge Weldon and Grandfather, and the confrontation ends with Weldon firing a shot through the back windshield at Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow and two of their associates. This interaction casts a long shadow over the rest of Weldon's life.

His story resumes in 1944; Weldon, a second lieutenant, digs Sgt. Hershel Pine out of a collapsed foxhole after an attack in the Ardennes, and together they rescue Rosita, a beautiful Spanish Jew, from an abandoned death camp. The three cross enemy territory, lose toes to frostbite, fight tuberculosis and are eventually separated. After the war, Weldon finds and marries Rosita, and Hershel turns up on Grandfather's Texas ranch.

Together they establish the Dixie Belle Pipeline Company, building a minor oil empire. But the old money in Houston's exclusive River Oaks neighborhood is offended--by their success and their humble upbringings, and particularly by Rosita's heritage. And thus enter two of Burke's favorite subjects: the evil lurking in the everyday, and the hero's struggle to repress the evil within himself.

James Lee Burke (Feast Day of Fools; Creole Belle) creates convincing characters on the sides of both right and wrong, and through them writes a compelling American history. Perhaps more than any of Burke's previous work, Wayfaring Stranger is not a mystery. It's a tender love story, proving yet again his versatility and skill in creating gorgeous, luscious, painful stories of the American experience. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Octogenarian Ben Bova is still going strong. He's written more than 120 works of science fiction and fact, has won the Hugo Award six times, and has edited both Analog and Omni magazines over his long career. It's no surprise, then, that his latest collection of short speculative fiction, New Frontiers, is full of interesting characters and fascinatingly scientific settings. Bova explores ideas with ease, like how to make a golf course on the moon, or what might happen to terminally ill people rich enough to pay for a trip to a better future via cryogenic sleep.

In "The Question," humanity takes too long to respond to a time-sensitive request sent by an alien intelligence from beyond the moon's orbit; a rogue astrophysicist sends out an unofficial plea for help. Bova puts a modern spin on the real story behind 101 Arabian Nights--starring some cleverly disguised members of the Science Fiction Writers of America--in "Scheherazade and the Storytellers," and then tackles the implications of personal conflict in virtual reality in both "Duel in the Somme" and "Bloodless Victory."

Brilliant in every diverse concept, these stories are also a callback to an earlier era of science-fiction storytelling, when men were men, and women were bright and capable (but always beautiful). They deal with humanity's place in the universe, both interpersonal and extra-solar. Each story has a kernel of scientific truth and extrapolation in them, like the best of golden age of science fiction. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Upon visiting Rome, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley described two Italies--one "sublime" and the other "odious." That contradiction is the driving force behind Joseph Luzzi's compelling historical memoir. Luzzi (Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy) believes "two Italies" reside inside himself: his childhood experience as an Italian American whose family immigrated from the south of Italy, and his adult devotion to studying the cultural realm of northern Italy. Duality shapes the author's impressions of the north-south Italian divide, the poor and the powerful, morality and corruption, hunger and satiety (literal and figurative) and love and hate.

The story examines the origins of Luzzi's poor, Calabria-born parents, their dramatic exile and immigration to the U.S. and the author's childhood, in which he longed to assimilate. Luzzi later developed a fervent desire to study all aspects of Italy in order to understand his family's history--and to reconcile personal tragedy in his own life. Throughout the narrative, he delves into the works of Dante and Botticelli, and politicians like Mussolini and Berlusconi. He compares these icons to contemporary depictions of Italians (e.g., Jersey Shore, The Sopranos) to round out his portrait of Italian culture, past and present, which made--and often unmade--his family. "Our pride in our ancestors grows with the distance we set between them and ourselves," Luzzi writes. "I was Italian and American--a little of each, yet not fully either." The complicated relationship of the "old country" contrasted against the modern world will enlighten readers to an Italy glimpsed with passion and sensitivity from the inside out. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In 1990, when Andrew Meredith was 14 years old, his family fell apart. The downfall was caused by his 50-year-old father, a teacher fired from Pennsylvania's La Salle College after he was accused of sexual misconduct with a female student. The scandal and its lasting impact on Meredith's mother and sister, and the author, bind this powerfully drawn, often wrenching debut memoir. His father later found work as a "remover"--someone who takes away the bodies of people who died in their own homes--and the story of Meredith's experiences working alongside him becomes the central thread and metaphor for the dissolution of his family.

A remover is "paid to be invisible.... We are men made to be forgotten." Fortunately for the reader, however, Meredith never forgets incidents from his life; he vividly recall details from his often gruesome, sometimes exhilarating experiences handling corpses while grappling with his bitterness toward a man who broke his heart.

Meredith's fluid, unabashed prose is delivered in a stream-of-consciousness style interspersed with scenes of how he floundered for 15 years after high school. He worked a job he didn't want, taking 10 years to finish college, and endured a series of failed romantic relationships. After ultimately moving to California, Meredith missed his hometown--the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia. Might his work with the dead have been his true professional calling, his salvation? Meredith's circuitous journey of self-discovery will fascinate those interested in the mysteries of life and death. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In The Victorian City, social historian Judith Flanders (The Invention of Murder) reminds us Charles Dickens was a journalist before he was a novelist. The London that stands at the hearts of his novels--so vibrant that it's almost a character in its own right--is not only a work of the imagination but the reportage of a great observer. From his first works to his last, Dickens recorded and reinvented the people of London's streets and the world they inhabited. His earliest readers recognized the jokes behind his often-sly accuracy; today, the lines between imagination and observation are less clear.

Using both Dickens's novels and a wide range of other contemporary accounts, Flanders attempts to look at the streets of London as they existed from 1812 to 1870, a period of tremendous transformation and growth. (The title Victorian City is a conscious misnomer. As Flanders points out, the great recorder of Victorian London spent almost half his life under the rule of Victoria's uncles.) Beginning with workers making their way through the city in the early morning and ending with the seedy side of Victorian nightlife, Flanders provides a detailed picture of both familiar and unfamiliar aspects of life in 19th-century London: markets, prisons, gin palaces, brothels, slums (known as "rookeries"), the mail stage and hackney cabs, and the health problems caused by overflowing cemeteries and overflowing cesspools. The Victorian City, filled with squalor, social injustice, larger-than-life characters and expansive prose, is Dickensian in every sense of the word. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

A reporter and managing editor for the Asia Society, Dan Washburn takes his title, The Forbidden Game, from the fact that though golf is "officially" banned in China, it is unofficially experiencing a significant boom. Chinese golfer Shanshan Feng recently won the LPGA Championship, making her the first person from her country to ever win a major tournament. A 14-year-old Chinese amateur, Guan Tianlang, became the youngest to ever qualify for a major tournament--the Masters. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the opening of China's first course and this is the inaugural season of the PGA China Tour.

Few in China can afford to play and the game is still against the law, yet golf grows in popularity. Even China's president, Xi Jinping, is rumored to have played. Washburn profiles three men to help tell his story about "golf's shift to the East": Zhou Xunshu is one of China's first professional golfers, a young man who has used the game to help him realize his "Chinese Dream"; American Martin Moore's career building courses in China shows how greedy government officials can be handled, how eccentric course owners' egos can be managed and how to avoid the "Beijing golf police"; and Wang Libo, a lychee farmer on Hainan Island, has gambled his family's future on the success of a new, huge golf resort built next door to his farm.

Washburn's extensive research and his breezy, reporter's style make this insightful book both educational and delightful. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis (American Voyeur) didn't think his dog Casey liked him much. So when they set off on a four-month cross-country journey in an RV to explore the bond between Americans and their dogs, he also hoped to explore and nurture a more personal connection with his travel companion.

During their excursion, Denizet-Lewis and Casey visited dog parks, shelters, conventions, even the Westminster Dog Show. They spent time with dog walkers, pet psychics, trainers and a doga teacher (that'd be yoga for dogs). The encounters are a mixed bag of entertainment, encouragement and heartbreak, from the New Yorker in Tompkins Square Dog Park who "just got out of a mental hospital, actually" to the homeless 19-year-olds in Washington State who always make sure their dogs eat before they do.

Interspersed in this travelogue, Denizet-Lewis shares research, history and geography connected to the locations he visits, including the Navajo Nation reservation where he encounters "rez dogs." His journalistic training enables him to ask educated (and sometimes probing) questions, rather than simply react emotionally, as when he asks the founder of PETA why the organization seems willing to do anything for attention.

Emotion still plays a strong role in the book, however; Denizet-Lewis's love of dogs is evident in the empathy, respect and compassion he exhibits for all the canines and their humans. Denizet-Lewis ultimately discovers that the bonds he set out to explore are both complicated and simple, like the creatures they connect. Whether dog lovers or simply individuals interested in America's obsession, readers will find Travels with Casey enlightening, eye-opening and fun. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Globes, by professional globe-restorer Sylvia Sumira, is a history of globe-making from the late-15th through the late-19th centuries, when globes were used as educational tools, scientific instruments and status symbols. It is also breathtakingly beautiful.

The first two sections of the book are scholarly articles in which Sumira considers not only who made globes, but why and how. The first piece, "A Brief History of Globes," is clearly for specialists. The second will fascinate anyone who has wondered how these specialized artists wrap a flat map around a ball; she provides a step-by-step description of the construction of printed globes from the process of forming a papier-mâché sphere around a mold to the challenges of fitting 2-D printed sections (triangular pieces called gores) around the 3-D object.

The text is almost irrelevant next to the photographs of 60 historic globes, most of them from the collection of the British Library. They range in rarity from an unusual hand-painted globe made in 17th-century China to mass-produced globes from the end of the 19th century. Sumira includes printed gores drawn by master cartographers, templates for self-assembled paper globes to be made as inexpensive educational aids for children, tiny pocket globes, elaborate clockwork globes, celestial globes that map the heavens and an oddly modern 19th-century teaching globe that folds up like an umbrella. The brief essays that accompany the photographs consider each object both in terms of its provenance and historical context and also as a work of art.

Certainly worth a spin, Globes will grab the imagination of anyone fascinated by maps. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

After teaching youngest readers how to navigate the alphabet (LMNO Peas) and to count (1-2-3 Peas), Keith Baker's little green heroes now introduce them to colors.

A summery spread of "BLUE" kicks off the proceedings, with each letter in a slightly different texture or pattern, as well as a slightly different hue. One letter looks as if it were sponged in an aqua tone, another in an indigo shade shows subtly mazelike patterns. The text--"Blue boats, blue seas, blue flags, and..."--in thick black letters, introduces green pea sailors and flag wavers, whose props pick up on the word's diverse tones. A turn of the page completes the sentence: "little green peas." The characters swim, snorkel, build sand castles and wave from the deck of a luxury liner (as in the earlier books, a ladybug appears on each spread). An internal rhyme holds each line together, as the little green peas move into autumn ("Red fences, red trees, red kites, and.../ little green peas"), winter ("Purple mountains, purple skis, purple mittens, and.../ little green peas") and a standout for spring: "Green vines, green leaves, green sprouts, and.../ baby green peas." Readers will easily spot the babies, with each pod carefully guarded by at least one adult pea, while the gardener peas water the sprouts and sport waterproof boots, showing how to tend their offspring.

Once again, Baker models a busy community of little green peas working and playing together. He ends on a humorous note for "White/Black." Read the book to discover his clever twist. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

In Una LaMarche's (Five Summers) romantic, illuminating novel, a power outage in a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital brings together two 16-year-olds who dwell in the same geographical area yet live in different worlds.

Eastern Parkway separates Devorah Blum and her Chabad-Lubavitch community from the rest of society. When her sister Rose's baby arrives prematurely, Devorah accompanies Rose and Rose's husband, Jacob, to the hospital. Her brother-in-law's long absence sends Devorah searching for him in the cafeteria--but then the elevator goes out, and she finds herself alone with Jaxon, an African American boy her age. As Devorah considers just how many rules she's breaking (most of all yichud, as Devorah explains it, "Plop two teenagers in a confined space, let them get to talking, and sooner or later the conversation will go to a sinful place..."), she also begins to realize how others might see her. And she feels an attraction for this kind stranger. Their alternating first-person narratives reveal that they both know a relationship between them could cause problems in their families. Still, they defy the odds and plan to meet again.

LaMarche takes readers into two families with loving parents and siblings and makes plain the taboos that Devorah most blatantly, and Jaxon insidiously, breaks, including lies to cover up their plots to spend more time together. The author creates a connection between them as authentic as their bonds to their families, and through that tension crafts an engrossing novel that raises searching questions about fate and free will. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

There are books that ease the transition for the first day of school, so why not for a first visit to the library? The creators of A Visitor for Bear team up for another adventure that's sure to inspire lines to sign up for a library card.

Mouse shows up at Bear's house and announces, "We are off!" Bear had agreed to accompany his friend to the library, but he's having second thoughts. He indicates the mantel above his fireplace where six books sit spine-out (he holds a seventh in his paw) and replies, "I have all the books I need right here." But Mouse insists, "Oh, there are many delightful books in the library." Are there ever! "In the library were more books than Bear had ever thought there could be," writes Becker. MacDonald's watercolors depict endless shelves, each with an icon as a key to the contents (a person for biography, a baseball bat for sports, etc.). As Bear slouches miserably, clutching his roller skates as if he can't wait to leave, Mouse searches for the "perfect" book for Bear. After inspecting books about rocket ships, wooden canoes and dancing pickles, Bear's words of rejection climb in volume until he's shushed by someone attending the storytime hour on the other side of the stacks.

MacDonald gracefully chronicles Bear's body language as he shifts from resistance against Mouse's suggestions to the seduction of storytime, where the librarian reads about a "Very Brave Bear." Let's just say that by book's end, Bear's mantel is full. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness