At the close of The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals, all seems well in tiny Narberth, Wales. Wendy Jones's debut concluded with a hard-won resolution, but in The World Is a Wedding, the author returns to Narberth to find that the state of affairs wasn't entirely tranquil, and the residents of the sleepy village are changing at the breakneck pace of the world around them.

Set in the U.K. in the 1920s, the novel traces the parallel stories of Wilfred Price and Grace Reece, his former fiancée who has since embarked for London, pregnant, unwed and ostracized from her family. As in Jones's previous work, it's a testament to her magnetic characters that the details she inserts, like the upstairs/downstairs politics of Grace's employ at the London Ritz-Carlton, don't overshadow the intimate dramas at the forefront of the story. As titillating as it is to meet bobbed-haired hotel aristocrats like suffragist Lady Lytton, the subtler tensions between Wilfred and his new wife, Flora, are equally compelling. The sensuous details of time and place embroider the conflicts that propel the story from small town to big city and back again.

At the novel's close, Wilfred's and Grace's affairs seem sorted, and this time, one gets the sense that they've truly taken stock of their own lives, for better and for worse. In fiction and in life, joy comes paired with sorrow, and sweetness tastes all the better after a bitter dose of truth. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer

Part satire, part fantasy and unabashed in its affection for the world of traditional publishing, Farrar, Straus & Giroux president and publisher Jonathan Galassi's first novel, Muse, is a captivating roman à clef, written with the insight and wit of a true insider. An accomplished poet, Galassi (Left-Handed) effectively deploys both his knowledge of that art form and of the business of producing books in this clever story.

From its seedy offices on Union Square to the outsized personality of its founder, Homer Stern, the "scrappy but consequential" publishing house Purcell & Stern is a clear proxy for FSG, where Galassi has worked for the last 30 years, and its iconic leader, the late Roger Straus. Homer, a scion of the German-Jewish aristocracy, has spent his career locked in professional combat with Sterling Wainwright, owner of Impetus Editions and a certified member of the WASP establishment.

Whether it's a trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair ("carnivorousness at its most rapacious, with a genteel European veneer") or a dinner with the founder of an Amazon-like e-tailer, aptly named Medusa, Galassi delivers realistic glimpses of pressures that loom over the traditional book business today. Equally pleasurable are his flights of fancy: a world where first editions of poetry books sell 750,000 copies and where the death of a beloved poet spurs the president to declare a national holiday.

For all the wistfulness of its backward-looking glance, Muse is anything but a nostalgia trip. Instead, this gentle, wry novel should reinforce the belief of anyone who loves books that the survival of the world Jonathan Galassi portrays is worth fighting for. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Jamie Anderson knows the risks of being a cop's wife: her husband, Mike, faces danger on the job every day. But when Mike's partner is seriously wounded in a shooting, Jamie watches helplessly as Mike becomes mired in guilt and grief. After Mike goes back to work, he's involved in the death of a Hispanic teenager--but this time Mike is the shooter. As the story hits the local news and he withdraws deeper into himself, Jamie struggles to keep their family afloat.

In her sixth novel, Things You Won't Say, Sarah Pekkanen (Catching Air) touches on the sensitive subjects of police brutality and racial profiling. But Mike's motives are never in question. Instead, Pekkanen takes the incident as a starting point to explore the effects of the shooting on Mike's family, which includes not only Jamie and their children but Mike's flighty ex, Christie, and her teenage son. Meanwhile, Jamie's younger sister, Lou, must figure out how to help the big sister who has always taken care of her.

Pekkanen's strength as a writer lies in her exploration of the complicated bonds between women. The fraught relationship of Jamie and Christie--who both love Mike and his son, Henry--feels particularly true to life. While Lou, a socially awkward zookeeper, is an appealing character, she feels more like a type than a distinct personality, as do Jamie's younger children.

Written in Pekkanen's signature energetic style, Things You Won't Say is a compelling look at complex family dynamics in the face of tragedy. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Perhaps as a result of her years as a TV host, Jemma Forte (Me and Miss M) has a knack for writing quirky dialogue and believably awkward scenarios. As her new novel, If You're Not the One, opens, 38-year-old Jennifer is attempting to seduce her husband, Max, but her efforts go sadly awry. Humiliated, Jen runs out of the house, only to get hit by a car.

As Jen's body lies in a coma, Jen's mind takes a long journey. She reflects back on the three serious loves she had before Max, and what her life would be like today if she'd stayed with one of them. Would she and the hot, pot-smoking Aidan be living in an Australian surfer's paradise? Would her billionaire ex-boyfriend Tim, inventor of a popular social media site, have lavished her with everything she wanted? Or could sweet but sappy Steve the plumber, the boyfriend she dumped for Max, have been The One?

Anyone who's ever wondered what could have been if they'd settled down with someone else will enjoy If You're Not the One. With its unusual structure (told in alternating flashbacks from 1994 until the day before the accident), and its very unexpected ending, If You're Not the One is not run-of-the-mill chick lit. Using a lot of humor, and a few surprisingly deep moments, Forte analyzes the nature of happiness, the exhaustion of parenting, the struggle of a midlife crisis and the tricky balance of love and friendship. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

When Algerian author Kamel Daoud wrote The Meursault Investigation, a mesmerizing sequel to Albert Camus's The Stranger, few might have guessed it would cause him so much trouble. The New York Times reported that a radical Islamist preacher in Algeria issued a fatwa (on Facebook) against Daoud and his book for the "war he is leading against God and the prophet." Despite this attack, the book has gone on to garner wide critical acclaim internationally and win prizes, including the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. The novel is now available to English-language readers, thanks to John Cullen's accomplished translation.

In Camus's tale, his anti-hero, Meursault, shoots and kills a nameless Arab on a beach. Daoud gives him a name--Musa--and imagines he is the brother of The Meursault Investigation's narrator, Harun. Daoud picks up the story 70 years later. Playing off the opening line of The Stranger (Meursault says, "Mother died today"), Daoud's novel begins with, "Mama's still alive today."

Harun is in a bar telling his story to another customer, but it's as if he's talking to the reader. He says it's "no normal story... you're like everyone else, you've read the tale as told by the man [Camus] who wrote it. He writes so well." Daoud also writes a shooting into his book, but with vastly different results. At the heart of Harun's meditative personal account is his religion and his country's anguished chronicle of colonialism and finally independence from France. Daoud's unusual, plaintive exploration of literature and history results in a thoughtful and illuminating book. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

After 14 books, including his hugely popular first novel, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk is bringing out his first collection of short stories, Make Something Up. Most possess the snarky, transgressive quality his books have become famous for, but a few show a bit of a warm side.

In "Knock-Knock," a boy inspired by Patch Adams's work with sick children tries to save his dad, who's dying of cancer, with jokes. Then there's the outrageous "Toad Prince," in which a young man serves as his own guinea pig in the art of genital modification. "Inclinations" is about an adolescent girl who equates getting pregnant with an ATM card. Her pro-life parents give her new cars to deliver the babies; her collection of vehicles grows along with the size of her bust.

One of the best stories is the enigmatic "Expedition," which alludes to being a prequel to Fight Club. Felix M. is a young writer who roams Hamburg's seedy streets at night. Fatherless, he needs to "grow guns in place of arms and a loaded cannon for a mouth." One evening he meets a man who speaks in an "attic faux-cabulary" (prithee and forsooth). His eyes have a "spark of orange mania," and he invites Felix to meet a "most loathsome monster."

There's plenty of irreverence here to match the enfant terrible quality Palahniuk fans enjoy, but he includes incisive, sensitive pieces in this collection as well. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Janice Cantore's 22 years of experience working for the Long Beach, Calif., police department lends authenticity to her romantic suspense novels, including Drawing Fire, the first in a series focusing on cold cases--unsolved murder investigations that are reactivated years later.

Cantore presents Abby Hart as a sympathetic character with a complicated history. The 30-something, Long Beach homicide detective has earned the nickname "Superglue" because of her tenacity in pursuing justice for the dead and closure for families. When Abby was six years old, she was rescued from a restaurant fire that claimed the lives of her parents. Although it proved the defining moment of Abby's life, the mystery surrounding the blaze was never solved. When a slew of homicides involving elderly women claims a beloved aunt of the governor, a man formerly connected with Abby's parents long before his political reign, Abby is eager to speak with him about the murder, and for the opportunity to discuss her parents' case. But does he seem tight-lipped? Amid Abby's pursuit, Luke Murphy--an annoying yet handsome private investigator--becomes embroiled in the "Granny Murders," and also seems invested in Abby's personal quest. Does he have information about the string of homicides, and might they somehow tie in with Abby's suspicions about her parents' death?

Cantore's well-drawn characters employ Christian values and spirituality to navigate them through tragedy, challenges and loss. However, layered upon the underlying basis of faith is a riveting police-crime drama infused with ratcheting suspense and surprising plot-twists. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife is his first book for adults since his 2009 debut novel, The Windup Girl, swept most of the major science fiction awards. In between, he published well-regarded young adult and middle grade books, including the 2010 National Book Award finalist Ship Breaker. Throughout his varied career, Bacigalupi has focused on extrapolating present-day ecological concerns into semi-dystopic future scenarios. The Water Knife may be the apotheosis of his pessimistic vision.

The Water Knife takes place primarily in Phoenix, Ariz., a shadow of its former self thanks to the relentless drought plaguing the American Southwest. The narrative switches among a trio of viewpoints that include a reporter struggling to rise above the level of journalism colloquially referred to as "implosion porn"; an immigrant from now-desolate Texas scheming desperately to stay alive; and the titular water knife, Angel Velasquez, whose occupation involves stealing water from struggling communities and redirecting it to his employer in Las Vegas. Bodies are dropping in Phoenix and, in a vaguely noir-esque setup, Angel is sent to investigate.

The Water Knife is haunted by the specter of looming catastrophe and, even worse, by the idea that people could have stopped it. Catherine Case, Angel's cynical employer, muses early on: "There's a theory that if we don't have the right words in our vocabularies, we can't even see the things that are right in front of our faces." Bacigalupi tries to find the words, even as his own book suggests that it will all end in dry riverbeds and blood. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

"When we eat, we travel," Mina Holland observes in the introduction to her first book, The World on a Plate. "As Proust noted on eating a petit madeleine with his tea, food escorts us back in time and shapes our memory." A food writer and the editor of Guardian Cook, the newspaper's weekly food supplement, the British-born and well-traveled Holland takes readers on a tour of 40 world cuisines.

"A cuisine is the edible lovechild of both geography and history," Holland asserts. Beginning with France and its famous vineyards, she gives readers an overview of food cultures on six continents, accompanied by lists of pantry essentials and recipes for 100 iconic dishes. Instead of focusing on trendy meals or the flavors of a certain city, Holland spotlights several regions of each country, such as France's Loire Valley and Provence or Italy's Veneto, Lazio and Calabria. She includes several maps of key ingredients that tie together the foods of a culture: grapes for France, spices for the Middle East, chili peppers on nearly every continent.

Sprinkled among Holland's exploration of each regional fare are her memories of eating its food: the borscht made by her childhood friend's Polish grandmother or the tortilla she learned to make from a Spanish chef. Holland writes with particular affection of her native British cuisine, which she calls "my love in a cold climate." Mixing culinary history with recipes and cultural commentary, Holland serves up a varied and mouthwatering feast. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Bob Morris (Assisted Loving; Crispin the Terrible) loved his parents very much, even if he was not always the ideal son. His older brother, Jeff, played that role; Bob was less reliable.

When his mother died, her last garbled word was his name: Bobby. As his father died several years later, he cried out: "Wonderful!" As Morris relives and reconsiders those difficult experiences--caring for each of his parents (more or less), witnessing and helping to make decisions about the ends their lives--he pairs those final words to make the title of his searingly candid memoir, Bobby Wonderful.

Morris is on a much-needed vacation in Scotland, tasting whiskies and forgetting his cares, when he gets the call to come home for his mother's last days. His first reaction is resentment; the scarf he brings her as a souvenir is a knockoff of the first one he considered. Still, he was there, with Jeff. In the years that follow, Morris helps his father learn to date again and encourages his independence, in part because Morris is busy trying to enjoy his own life. When his father attempts suicide, though, Morris is forced to face uncomfortable questions about his father's end-of-life wishes, his own devotion and what it means to be a good son.

Morris's struggles are sensitively told, deeply moving and highly relevant in a world where more and more people face situations like his. Bobby Wonderful is a gift of a book: an often funny but also perfectly serious contemplation of living and dying well. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Who says an obsession with ice cream can't be good for you? The red baseball–capped boy hero of this irresistible picture book follows his passion into historical research, math story problems, cartography and more.

Peter Sís (Madlenka) frames the story as a letter from the boy to his grandpa, describing his "delicious summer." In the boy's bedroom, festooned with dessert-accented shapes, a teddy bear plays a cone-shaped guitar, wall and desk lamps look like ice cream cones, even birds come in winged cone shapes. At the beach, cone-shaped planes fly "ice cream" banners and ships bear cone-shaped smoke stacks. Ice cream flavors expand the boy's vocabulary: "I am conquering big words like tornado and explosion," he writes, in reference to "cherry tornado" and "mango explosion." With the encyclopedias Grandpa gave him, the narrator is "diving into world history." He traces the first ice cream back to ancient China 2,000 years ago (made of snow, milk, rice and fruit). Marco Polo carries the recipe along the Silk Road from China to Italy, bringing ice cream to Europe; Quakers get credit for carrying it from Europe to America. Sís depicts its embrace by three presidents--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison--on the sails of a three-masted schooner ("The Founding Fathers and I have a lot in common!" the boy writes to his grandfather).

Sís fills his text with fun puns ("I always take a break on sundaes") and his pages with ice cream–tinted watercolors, outlined in chocolate sprinkles. Delicious indeed. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

The team behind Tyrannosaurus Dad presents a picture book that probes a misunderstanding between two best friends. 

The girl narrator's mood comes through in Matt Myers's (A Is for Musk Ox) portrait of her slouched under the weight of disappointment, anger and sadness. A splatter of blue and purple paints offer evidence of her having thrown down her paintbrushes, along with crumpled papers. James, who appears opposite on the right-hand page, peers out from an angry smattering of the paints from her cast-aside brushes. The narrator traces the telephone game that led to her upset: "James told Aiden, who tells everything to Hunter,..." through a line of a half-dozen others, "that I think I am perfect." This line of overlarge type also peeks out from an angry splash of violet paint. Liz Rosenberg charts the overlong day for the lonely narrator without her best friend to share it. Throughout the pages, James persists in trying to find out what's wrong. Myers magnifies the friends' emotional states by rendering them in realistic watercolors while painting their surrounding bus passengers and classmates in monochromatic watercolor images. James's persistence finally pays off, and the narrator realizes that the game of telephone twisted what began as a compliment into an insult.

This short book delivers a big life lesson: a true friend stays his or her course no matter what, and has faith that the truth will win out. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

This thriller set in the cut-throat world of New York ballet functions as a microcosm of societal hierarchy when gifted African American dancer Gigi arrives from California to upset the lily-white world of the American Ballet Conservatory.

The story alternates between the first-person narratives of Gigi, Bette (who looks "like a ballerina from a music box"), and June, Gigi's roommate, whose Korean mother danced in the ABC and whose white father remains a mystery to June. Waiting for the cast list of The Nutcracker to be posted, Gigi thinks, "After one month here at school, the first major casting makes me feel my skin color like a fresh sunburn." All of the girls compare themselves to "Queen Bette," who casts a blonde, blue-eyed spell over her peers. When Gigi not only wins the roles Bette covets but also the affections of her longtime "on-again-off-again" boyfriend, Alec, Bette takes action. Some blame Bette for the unraveling of the company's previous prima ballerina and warn Gigi to "be careful." But Bette is not the only dancer who feels threatened by Gigi's talents. "The boys like the competition. We thrive on it. Makes us work harder," Alec tells Gigi, adding, "The girls make it dark, full of drama... They let it get to them and act crazy."

Sona Chariapotra and Dhonielle Clayton layer in boy-on-boy crushes, girl-on-girl crushes, and stage mother dramas as readers try to discover who's behind the latest prank on Gigi. There's no shortage of motives here, and enough chemistry and love triangles to keep the pages turning. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness