Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser (Martin Dressler) is a captivating group of 16 stories, whose decidedly fantastic perspective on ordinary life infuses mundane existence with a persistent sense of mystery and wonder.

A characteristic Millhauser story starts off in an unnamed, nondescript town where an odd event or series of them quickly alters everyday life. That's the essential plot device in "Phantoms," where people start seeing night visions, and "Elsewhere," where a collective wanderlust emerges over the course of one summer. "A Report on Our Recent Troubles" describes a wave of suicides that devastate one town, while "Mermaid Fever" is the account of what happens when a dead mermaid washes up on the beach and is put on display by the town's historical society. Millhauser's gift lies in his ability to maintain the plausibility of these stories while at the same time allowing their surreal qualities to flourish.

One of the most striking aspects of Millhauser's style is the near absence of anything that looks like conventional dialogue. Only "Miracle Polish" (the tale of a product whose magical glass-cleaning properties permanently alter one romantic relationship) and "Sons and Mothers" (a frightening story of the encounter between an adult son and his mother on one of his infrequent visits) contain any meaningful number of scenes in which characters talk to each other. Because Millhauser excels at exposition and pacing, this unusual feature of his work doesn't diminish its appeal.

In these enchanting, unsettling stories, Steven Millhauser bursts the boundaries of the world we think we know to help us see it anew. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

When the four brothers who are the focus of Chigozie Obioma's debut novel, The Fishermen, decide to go down to their village river to fish, they have no way of knowing that their lives will be changed forever. But their encounter with the town madman on the riverbank--who prophesies that the oldest brother will be killed by one of his fellow fishermen--proves to be a turning point.

Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of the brothers, the story of Ikenna's descent into fear and paranoia, driven by the prophecy, is heartbreaking in its inevitability. "I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent," Ben reflects, "and what becomes permanent can be indestructible."

This is certainly the case with Ikenna, whose unraveling begins with his belief in the madman's words and ends in tragedy, taking his family along with him. The brothers' family saga is set against the background of a tumultuous and politically charged 1990s Nigeria, which, combined with Obioma's stunning prose and twisting narrative style, succeeds in grounding the tale in the reality of history and emotion while exploring ideas of fate and destiny that feel mythical in their scope. The Fishermen is a story with intent and purpose, slim but powerful, with not a word out of place--and one not to be missed. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

The childhood summers she spent with her grandparents, and stories of their many children, inspired Angela Flournoy's first novel, The Turner House.

Francis and Viola Turner raised 13 children in their house on Yarrow Street. Viola has remained in the changing, crumbling Detroit neighborhood long after Francis died and the family dispersed, but age and illness have finally forced her out, too, into the home of her eldest son, Charles ("Cha-Cha"). Knowing that Viola is unlikely to live on her own again, Cha-Cha calls his siblings together to discuss their mother's house. It's worth far less than its mortgage; even collectively they can't afford to pay it off, but they can't agree on how--or whether--to keep it.

This debate is especially unsettling for Lelah, the youngest Turner, who has secretly moved back into the house after being evicted from her apartment and suspended from her job. For his part, Cha-Cha is juggling personal problems alongside the family ones. On leave from his job as a truck driver after an accident, Cha-Cha has been sent to counseling, but he's finding his therapist more confusing than helpful.

Flournoy could have structured The Turner House as a sprawling multi-generational saga or a reflection on urban decay; instead, she opts for a more intimate scale. She concentrates on selected members of the large cast of characters. At times the plot threads become difficult to wrangle, but the conversations between the Turner siblings ring true, and so do the family's tension and affection. One hopes Flournoy has more stories to tell about them. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

In Legend: A Harrowing Story from the Vietnam War of One Green Beret's Heroic Mission to Rescue a Special Forces Team Caught Behind Enemy Lines, journalist Eric Blehm (Fearless) details the stirring account of Master Sergeant Raul "Roy" Benavidez's rescue of a hopelessly surrounded small Green Beret squad on a covert mission near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia.

In May 1968, Special Forces Detachment B-56 was ambushed and surrounded by hundreds of North Vietnamese Army soldiers. The first choppers sent to extract them were shot down or couldn't make it through the heavy fire. Roy Benavidez--a never-say-die soldier whose perseverance and tenacity allowed him to regain the use of his back and legs after being severely injured during a previous tour--volunteered to fly on the rescue mission. In an adrenaline rush, he endured a half a dozen serious wounds while dragging survivors and the bodies of downed soldiers to the choppers. Then he collapsed. Back at the base, medics mistakenly piled him with the corpses and nearly zipped his body bag shut before recognizing him.

With access to recently declassified documents and first-hand accounts from soldiers, Blehm asserts that the sometimes small stories of men at risk deserve to find a larger place in the history of the war. Benavidez was a man who "from the moment he jumped out of the chopper until his last recovery run... was in complete control." Not a bad definition of a hero, no matter the circumstances. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In his beautifully introspective memoir, How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Lessons of a Racist Childhood, novelist Jim Grimsley (Winter Birds) says, "No one ever pointed out a black person to me and said, 'You cannot drink water out of the same glass as that person, or call him "sir," or sit next to him in a public place.' Yet the knowledge of those truths had come into me in spite of the silence." When he returns to his North Carolina public school in the fall of 1966, these truths are sliced wide open: school desegregation is now law and three African American students are joining his sixth grade class.

While many of his classmates avoid integration by attending all-white private institutions, Grimsley's family is poor; paying tuition isn't an option. So he's exposed to a race of people he's never noticed before--they had never been important enough to acknowledge--and he discovers, "The differences were not what I had been led to expect... and they did not add up to superiority for me or for my skin color." The mere recognition of this fact doesn't erase the racism ingrained in him from birth, but seeing these classmates is his first step in overcoming a long-held tradition of hate.

Grimsley examines his intimate thoughts and experiences in order gracefully to retrace his odyssey through a world turned on its head. His adult reflections on his child self are often humorous and always brutally honest. In a world that continues to struggle with race relations, How I Shed My Skin is a stunning beacon of hope. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

While Gyalo Thondup attended a local fair, his brother was born to his peasant parents. Little did anyone know that this infant would become the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. As Thondup writes in The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet, "Our lives were changed forever. One day we were an ordinary farm family in Amdo, and then we became the family of the Dalai Lama, living in a huge 50-room house looking up at the Potala Palace where my little brother lived in the highest room atop the tallest building in Tibet."

Instead of becoming a monk like his other brothers, Thondup was groomed to become the Dalai Lama's closest political adviser. This book details Tibet's history as seen through Thondup's eyes, as he traveled abroad to negotiate deals with China, India and the United States, attempting to procure aid for a Tibet overrun by the Communist Chinese. He lived in the semi-spotlight as the older brother of the most revered person in his country. He details the building tension in Tibet from the late 1940s to 1959, when the Dalai Lama escaped under cover of darkness to India--to begin his life-long exile from Tibet--and the intense difficulties Thondup experienced after that. In 1999, Thondup retired to Kalimpong, where he and his wife had started a noodle factory in 1968. Although the pacing is slow at times due to the dense amount of history packed into this story, Thondup's perspective is valuable to readers attuned to the tragic history of the Tibetan people. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

In A Good Place to Hide: How One French Village Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II, journalist Peter Grose describes how a population with its own experience of religious persecution and two charismatic pastors with unlikely international connections turned an isolated community in the upper reaches of the Loire Valley into a haven for Jews and other refugees during World War II.

A Good Place to Hide combines solid historical research with the tension of a spy novel. Grose recounts the story of Le Chambon and its neighboring villages, which were primarily Huguenot in Catholic France, the relationship between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany, and the growth of French Resistance. He traces the community's gradual shift from hiding refugees to helping them escape into Switzerland. But the heart of the book lies in the stories of individual people, often told in their words with use of journals, letters, memoirs and interviews. Among them: a 17-year-old Jewish office-machine repairman who became a master forger of identity papers; a teen girl who carried money from one Resistance cell to another, right under German noses; a mother of five who scoured the countryside for safe houses; middle-aged refugees who disguised themselves as Boy Scouts and hiked toward freedom; the activist pastor who inspired the community to offer sanctuary with a literal reading of one Old Testament verse.

In the vein of Schindler's List, A Good Place to Hide is an inspiring account of the extraordinary courage of ordinary people. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Dave Goulson follows A Sting in the Tale, about his years studying bumblebees, with A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm. In 2003, Goulson purchased a 33-acre property with a decaying farmhouse and barn, and turned it into a private nature reserve; here he describes the multitude of wildlife he shares those acres with. His goal is to celebrate the wonder of the natural world--especially insects, which make up roughly two-thirds of known life on Earth.

Goulson charmingly depicts the mating practices of dance flies and the many butterfly species he sees on his daily run, and elucidates the habits of the famously cannibalistic female mantis, with added knowledge gained through his own studies. A Buzz in the Meadow is both a descriptive work and a call to arms, a reminder that all species are precious and necessary, even the tiny ones. Goulson repeatedly states that conservationists should look beyond large and charismatic creatures like whales and tigers; he perhaps overstates that "the extinction of the giant panda... would not have any knock-on consequences. There would perhaps be a tiny bit more bamboo in a forest in China," but his point is well taken--that insects make up the majority of life and play an outsized role in the interconnectivity of biological systems worldwide. Goulson's tone is personal, even humorously self-effacing, but clearly expert. A Buzz in the Meadow accessibly presents natural science and gracefully offers an earnest wake-up call to conservation. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Frank Stanford's What About This is a monumental achievement. So much of Stanford's work was unpublished, scattered about in limited-edition, hard-to-find volumes, but now it has been collected, and readers will rejoice to discover (or rediscover) a distinct poetic voice.

Stanford was born in Mississippi in 1948, and 29 years later, in Fayetteville, Ark., he shot himself three times in the heart. One of the last poems he wrote was "Memory Is Like a Shotgun Kicking You Near the Heart," with these lines:

I think of the hair growing on the dead,
Any motion without sound,
The stars, the seed ticks
Already past my knees,
The moon beating its dark bush.

He was a voracious reader and heavily influenced by Thomas Merton and the Surrealists. His poetry is wildly imagistic, imbued with Southern folklore and culture, and it's--to use Stanford's own word--"strange." "If a person is quiet enough inside he might be able to catch on to what I'm trying to do in my poetry." In "Belladonna," from Stanford's first published collection, The Singing Knives (1971), he writes about "A song that comes apart/ Like a rosary/ In the back of a church."

This collection, more than 700 pages, is filled with amazing, forceful, words-on-fire poems that will have readers shaking their heads in amazement. Here indeed is lightning in one's hands. In an unpublished fragment Stanford tells us: "This poem is asleep. I/ don't want you yelling at it,/ waking it up. Let it dream." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Parneshia Jones begins her debut poetry collection, Vessel, with the important subject of her name. "Parneshia [par: knee: she a] n/ i. 1980--daughter of high school sweethearts," she explains in the poem "Definition," after first defining "Parnassus," the Greek mountain symbol of poetry. From there she makes clear the inextricable nature of poetry to her life.

Vessel is a book of family, history, storytelling, the South, romance, Chicago, music and tradition. Each entry opens like a delectable advent calendar of Jones's heritage; each a surprise, each a treat. There are warm memories she offers tenderly, like the moment her grandmother welcomes her in the middle of the night: "I slide into the pocket of the quilt,/ letting my grandmother's hands/ cradle me back to child" ("Dream Catcher"). There are sultry moments shared with a comely companion: "Our fingers, licked slow, tuck themselves/ between full bodies feasting on the night's heat." ("Two Lovers and a Pot of Collard Greens"). And there are somber elegies written in anguish: "Children become ancestors/ in the Georgia night" ("Georgia on My Mind").

Together, the moments Jones writes swell into a tremendous epic, of not just one life but the lives of each person touched by the first. Vessel is a satisfying, lyrical chorus of both black struggle and personal revelation, swirling with regional sights and sounds, and sizzling with the burn of whiskey. "You/ Rare/ Reserve," Jones writes for her father in "O.W. Starling"--"Live to be savored." Savor these words. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

When they observe the healing powers of truth-telling, Susan Juby's (Alice, I Think) funny, smart 16-year-old narrator and her two best friends decide to form a Truth Commission.

Normandy Pale is writing this book as a work of creative nonfiction for her spring project junior year. Her author's note describes her anticipation of writing her acknowledgments: "It's going to be like writing an Academy Awards speech for an award that I gave to myself!" By footnote number 11, Norm admits that she and her friends would have been better off sticking to the time-honored concept of the "truth and reconciliation commission."

Her statement foreshadows many situations that at first seem like successful truth-seeking but have unintended consequences. Norm nearly loses Dusk and Neil's friendship because she has not yet sought truth from anyone. But she's withholding from them her graphic novel artist sister's confession to Norm: that she crossed a line with a teacher at college. When Norm finally does approach her first "subject," he turns the questions back to her: "You might want to start a little closer to home." A standout exchange occurs when Norm tells Mr. Thomas, "Asking people the truth is a spiritual practice." He responds, "I thought that spiritual practice involved asking yourself the truth."

Juby beautifully frames the questions at the heart of adolescence. When do you want to know the truth and when is it too much? How much do you present to the world and how much do you keep for yourself? --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

The rhythm of a drumbeat infuses Margarita Engle's (Silver People) picture book based on the life of Chinese-African-Cuban jazz musician Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, set against Rafael López's (The Cazuela that the Farm Maiden Stirred) warm-toned acrylics with a hint of magical realism.

Author and artist paint a picture of a child who can't sit still. She dreams of "pounding tall conga drums/ tapping small bongó drums/ and boom boom booming/ with long, loud sticks/ on big, round, silvery/ moon-bright timbales." López's turquoise and deep violet backdrops summon the night, while his tangerine skies drip with sunlight. Boys and men happily parade the streets with their drums, while the heroine can only dream of them by moonlight: "Her hands seemed to fly/ as they rippled/ rapped/ and pounded/ all the rhythms/ of her drum dreams." In López's illustration, the heroine hovers like a hummingbird, her wings keeping her aloft to play on a drum held up by a flower. Her father finds her a teacher who "taught her more/ and more/ and more/ and she practiced/ and she practiced/ and she practiced." In the artwork, the rhythms leave her teacher's fingertips in bands of color and seem to stroke the drum skins of his eager pupil. When her teacher says she's ready to play at a café, "everyone who heard/ her dream-bright music/ sang/ and danced/ and decided/ that girls should always/ be allowed to play/ drums."

Young people will be inspired by this heroine's defiance of the gender lines and her rise as a drummer. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness