The stylus is mightier than the sword in Paul M.M. Cooper's adventurous first novel, River of Ink, set in 13th-century Sri Lanka.

Asanka started life as a lowly village boy but rose to the lap of luxury when King Parakrama chose him as the royal poet. Then comes Magha, prince of Kalinga, with his conquering army. Asanka's beloved king is brutally murdered before his eyes, the regal queen imprisoned, all loyal members of the nobility slaughtered. But rather than kill Asanka, the cruel Magha commissions him to translate a holy Sanskrit poem into the language of the Sri Lankan peasants. Out of fear and a desire to protect Sarasi, the palace servant girl with whom he is having an affair, Asanka agrees, but the mixture of horror and disgust he feels for the tyrant king leaks into his translation; the villain in Asanka's version of the poem bears a strong resemblance to Magha. When his words become a covert rallying cry in the local villages, Asanka finds himself torn between accepting the role of revolutionary symbol and saving his own life.

The elegance of Eastern palaces, the lush flora of Sri Lanka, even the hot stink of war elephants become vivid in Cooper's hands. Sprinkled occasionally throughout the narrative, short chapters in the voices of characters from the Shishupala Vadha and Mahabharata help familiarize readers with Krishna, Shishupal and other heroes and villains of Asanka's culture. Both an homage to classical Indian literature and a demonstration of the strength of allegory, Cooper's suspenseful South Asian adventure shows the best and worst of the human heart. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

For the wealthy, glamorous and idle, 1950s New York was a glittering whirl of parties, lunches and social maneuvering. At the center of it all were Truman Capote, wildly talented author and flamboyant society darling, and the handful of women he called his "swans." Melanie Benjamin (The Aviator's Wife) explores the intimate, tangled relationships of this circle in her fourth novel, The Swans of Fifth Avenue.

Stylish, gorgeous and married to wealthy, powerful men, the swans embraced Truman first as a curiosity and then as a friend. As he spent more time in their company, Truman became particularly close to Barbara "Babe" Paley. Admired for their external gifts--Truman for his way with words, Babe for her beauty and taste--both harbored deep insecurities that they revealed to one another. Benjamin traces Truman and Babe's unexpected, wholly absorbing friendship and its effect on the other swans.

She evokes her characters and their milieu in prose that sparkles like the diamonds they wear. She draws parallels between the swans' unspoken terror of being abandoned for younger, more desirable women, and Truman's fear of being unable to top the success of his blockbuster book, In Cold Blood. When Truman decides to mine the juicy scandals his swans have shared with him privately for a new story, neither he nor they can imagine the destruction it will cause.

Full of catty asides and moments of startling vulnerability, The Swans of Fifth Avenue is like the swans themselves: elegant, razor-sharp and irresistible. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

If medical science could create new "blank slate" bodies for the sick and incapacitated, And Again posits, what consequences would come with transferring into one? Hannah the artist and David the congressman both were near death from cancer. Connie the actress had an aggressive strain of AIDS. Paralyzed in a car crash, wife and mother Linda spent eight years unable to move any part of her body except her eyelids. In a revolutionary clinical trial, doctors implant cross sections of their brains into new bodies grown from versions of their DNA--with the diseases deleted.

Delivered from death's door back into the arms of their loved ones, everything is different--and yet, nothing has changed. Hannah thinks her fiancé, Sam, and older sister, Lucy, who once dated and remain close, harbor a secret about the last days of her illness. David hoped a new body would free him from his bad habits, but still finds himself itching for a cigarette. Now that she has her physical beauty back, Connie feels alienated from the film industry that quit valuing her when she lost it. Linda returns to a lukewarm welcome from her children, who were babies when she had her accident, and immediate requests for more children from the husband she isn't sure she still loves.

In And Again, Jessica Chiarella provides a finely nuanced look at four people whose return to the living feels miraculous but provides no magical answers or happy endings in the long run. Strength and resilience abound in this deeply felt debut. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

When Veblen Amundsen-Hovda and Paul Vreelend fall in love, the path to the aisle is rocky.

Paul, an ambitious Stanford doctor, is perfecting a device that will minimize battlefield brain trauma. Named for Thorsten Veblen, the "conspicuous consumption" economist and author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen is an "experienced cheerer-upper, and freelance self," a temp and amateur translator of Norwegian--and she's thrilled with Paul's altruistic goals. Will Paul's "peacenik" hippie parents, or Veblen's narcissistic hypochondriac mother, or the heiress of Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals, with her eye on Paul's invention (and Paul), sour the romance? We could ask the squirrel.

The Portable Veblen, Elizabeth McKenzie's audacious and hilarious novel, introduces the western gray at the very moment Veblen responds to Paul's proposal. "'Yes?' the man said. The squirrel emitted a screech." Veblen, who has a talent for communing with nature, heeds its cues. McKenzie's squirrel is as credible as anyone in her delightful cast of quirky characters.

As Paul and Veblen navigate the obligatory meeting of the families and planning their wedding, Paul starts trials at a VA hospital for his invention. McKenzie satirically juxtaposes the grim reality of wounded veterans with the military bureaucracy, and big pharma wheedling its share. When Hutmacher rushes the product into production, Paul blows the whistle--with disastrous results.

McKenzie's similes and metaphors leap from the pages when lovable Veblen delivers lines like "tattoos like thunderheads," "can-can skirts of fuschias." There's good in almost everyone, sweet justice for the not-so-good and an unpredictable yet satisfying conclusion. Or, as the squirrel says: "Seeforyourselfforyourselfforyourself." --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Tim Powers, twice winner of the prestigious World Fantasy Award (for Last Call and Declare), is back with another hard-hitting fantasy/horror novel in which time bends, spirits abound and madness threatens.

In Medusa's Web, Powers tells the story of siblings Scott and Madeline Madden, who return to Caveat, the aging, sinister mansion where they were raised, after their aunt's suicide. Their cousins Claimayne and Ariel, however, are anything but welcoming. Claimayne has become addicted to a form of magic that involves temporal location, and once the Maddens are settled back into Caveat, they, too, succumb to the enchantments that Claimayne uses to enter another's body in the past--folded bits of paper with arcane designs that flatten time. Madeline, in particular, is drawn into the past in an obsessive, dangerous way, and Scott must put himself in great danger to attempt to set matters right.

Powers excels, as always, at offering a strange new version of reality. In his hands, the most fantastic plot devices become easily acceptable as he skillfully builds layers of detail. Trippy takes on time travel and bodily possession achieve verisimilitude because Powers contrasts them cleverly with everyday details like addiction, alcoholism, jilted lovers and abandoned children. There is also a sense of real danger and lasting cost in his novels; Medusa's Web is no exception in this regard. A character, even a protagonist, can end up wounded or dead in a Powers novel, but, more importantly, they are often battling for their immortal soul. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

Like Serge Storms, the protagonist of his 18 comic Florida crime novels (including Shark Skin Suite), Tim Dorsey has made it a personal mission to chronicle every swamp, strip mall, abandoned speakeasy and weird roadside attraction of his home state. Nobody does wacky Florida like Dorsey, and no other fiction crime buddies quite compare to Serge and his drug- and alcohol-fueled sidekick, Coleman. In Coconut Cowboy, they aim to rewrite the ending to the iconic 1969 movie Easy Rider. To Serge, their adventure is to complete the film characters' goal of finding the American Dream in Florida. To Coleman, it's "morning, noon and night, coast to coast, blazing fat ones... listening to righteous music, munching out." They trade their Mercury Comet for a Harley hardtail with ape-hangers and a sidecar, and off they go down back roads, stopping at little-known landmarks like early haunts of the Allman Brothers, Tom Petty and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the hippie tent cities of off-road dope and music festivals.

As in other Dorsey novels, a seemingly unrelated plot develops in the small town of Wobbly, where a local extended family of rednecks lines its pockets from highway speed traps, utility shakedowns, real estate developments straddling sinkhole formations and money laundering for a Miami drug dealer who describes them "like if Duck Dynasty went over to the dark side." Of course, the Serge and Coleman road trip winds up in Wobbly, where all sorts of wrongs get righted--and many rights get trampled. It's all fun in the Sunshine State, which one character describes as "the nation's pace car of dysfunction." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

As editor-in-chief of io9.com, Charlie Jane Anders is an influential voice in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Her debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky, is two coming-of-age stories in one, following Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead as they evolve from bullied, misunderstood children into socially accepted, internally conflicted adults. Their lives and their respective interests in magic and science intertwine. As a child, Patricia finds that she has the ability to talk to animals, and a Parliament of Birds--difficult to explain but exactly what it sounds like--proclaims her a witch. Laurence finds refuge from social torment in gadgetry, building a two-second time machine and an artificial intelligence that talks to Patricia when she's lonely.

All the Birds in the Sky stands out thanks to its sweeping ambition. What Anders is attempting here--aside from a bildungsroman, love story, climate change warning, meditation on the nature of consciousness and all-around existentialist panic attack--is nothing short of a grand, semi-literal reconciliation of science with nature.

This is a novel where a character can make Herzogian pronouncements such as: "Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small" and have it seem no less philosophically significant as another character's experience of first love: "Even as Patricia said it back to him, she felt like her whole history was taking on a whole new focus, the landscape of her past rearranging." All the Birds in the Sky is a triumph. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Volker Weidermann's Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark is a glimmering work of language and an insightful tribute to literary friendship in a singular historical moment.

Stefan Zweig was a successful and popular Austrian writer; Joseph Roth was less successful but also gifted, a tortured, heavy-drinking writer whom Zweig called his "literary conscience." When war loomed in the summer of 1936, Zweig returned to the Belgian seaside town of Ostend, where he had spent the summer of 1914. His work no longer welcome in Germany, his home in Salzburg defiled by police and his marriage collapsed, he nonetheless joyfully embarked on new work and new love with his secretary, Lotte Altmann. And he brought along Roth, supporting him financially and in his work (support that would strain their complex, fraternal relationship throughout). The troubled Roth, too, found new and rejuvenating love with a German writer, Irmgard Keun, one of the few non-Jews in their small émigré community.

Aside from brief background and epilogue, Weidermann stays within the boundaries of the summer of 1936--the summer before the dark, in which Zweig, Roth and an assortment of "detractors... fighters... cynics... drinkers... blowhards... silent onlookers" manage for a single season to love, laugh and exercise creative genius in a world rapidly falling into war and fascism. Translated from the German into lyrical, meditative prose by Carol Brown Janeway, Ostend is a brief but scintillating portrayal of this season, its spirit and a set of remarkable characters. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Ji Xianlin was one of many Chinese intellectuals held in makeshift prisons, called cowsheds, on university campuses during China's Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and lasted for 10 years. He was mocked, humiliated, beaten and starved. He wrote about these experiences only reluctantly, observing late in life that none of his fellows had done so and that younger Chinese need to know their history in order to learn from it. In 1998, he released his memoir, now translated into English for the first time as The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Ji narrates his years of torment compellingly, in remarkably fair-minded fashion. He claims that his work is not literary, but it is adorned with lovely metaphors: he compares his torture to Indian and Chinese concepts of hell, "a veritable pagoda of horrors," and makes reference to the steep path to Mount Tai, one of five Taoist sacred mountains.

Ji's story is painfully moving and beautifully related, elevated by his preface and journalist Zha Jianying's introduction, and his appendix, an abbreviated memoir of Ji's whole life that puts the bulk of The Cowshed into perspective. He ponders the question of human nature as basically good or bad, and illuminates Chinese culture with sensitivity and humor; for example, "We Chinese intellectuals are descended from a tradition of scholars who would rather be killed than humiliated." Until his death in Beijing in 2009, the wise older man who wrote this book remained a patriot who wanted the best for China and who appreciated that he saw the Cultural Revolution so intimately, if only so that he could bear witness. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

After a decade as a columnist for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Sayed Kashua has shared much of himself with the public. Described by the New Yorker in 2015 as "perhaps the most visible representative of Palestinian life in Israel," Kashua has written hundreds of personal stories, as well as the popular television sitcom Arab Labor and three novels (Dancing Arabs, Let It Be Morning and Second Person Singular). Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life collects his columns, translated to English by Ralph Mandel.

Kashua's work is a rare window into the effects of Israel's political climate on the personal lives of its residents. When he began the column, he wrote in Hebrew, which, though not his native tongue (he grew up in Tira, a small Arab village in the Triangle region of Israel), was the language he'd had to learn at age 14, as the only Arab student in his high school class. Though his stories center on mundane moments (holidays with family, trips to the doctor, a quarrel with his wife), they are spiked with subtle social commentary--often funny, occasionally searing. After being ID'd on his way into a mall, he tells his daughter, "It's fine to speak Arabic everywhere, anytime you want, but not at the entrance to the mall, okay, sweetie?" As writing in Hebrew opened Kashua's experience to a Jewish Israeli audience, the English translations now offer American readers a glimpse into everyday life in a region often portrayed in the media only in terms of violence and conflict. --Annie Atherton

In Salt to the Sea, Ruth Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray; Out of the Easy) illuminates a lesser-known World War II maritime disaster: the Soviet torpedoing of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea on January 30, 1945, a tragedy that killed 9,343 evacuees--including 5,000 children--more than the Titanic and Lusitania combined. Sepetys's father's cousin Erika had passage on the Gustloff, but never boarded it.

Readers are introduced to the strong, distinct voices of four young adults in short, powerful blasts: Joana, a Lithuanian nurse; the pregnant, Polish Emilia; the Prussian restoration artist Florian; and Alfred, a twisted and zealous Hitler-loving sailor who imagines, but doesn't send, chilling, self-aggrandizing letters to his beloved Hannelore. Joana, Emilia and Florian meet randomly in East Prussia, all fleeing from the advancing Red Army, all hiding dangerous secrets that slowly reveal themselves. They move west across a wintery landscape with "a kindly shoemaker, an orphan boy, a blind girl, and a giantess," eventually making their way to Alfred's ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, at the port of Gotenhafen.

"What had human beings become?" Florian wonders. "Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?" The ragtag crew braves freezing temperatures, hunger, Soviet planes and precarious ice crossings on their slow journey west, and win readers' hearts--and each other's--along the way. When the inevitable happens and the ship sinks, it's gruesome and gut-wrenching, but some do survive. In her intimate, extraordinary, artfully crafted novel, Sepetys shows both the wonder of humanity and the horror of dehumanizing people as "enemies" in wartime or any time. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Newbery Honor author and Scott O'Dell Award winner Kirby Larson (Hattie Big Sky, Hattie Ever After, Dash) takes an 11-year-old orphan girl from Indiana to President Taft's 1910 White House in her delightful series debut, Audacity Jones to the Rescue.

Miss Maisie's School for Wayward Girls is the crumbling home to peevish girls, caterwauling girls and sweet girls--17 in all--but Audacity Jones, or Audie, is the only one who regularly, inexplicably, gets banished to the "Punishment Room." What the other girls don't know is that this much-feared room is a magnificent library, and therefore absolute heaven for the bookish Audie, who longs for adventure, both fictional and real. She gets her chance when Commodore Crutchfield appears at the school, pretending to recruit a volunteer for a "[s]upremely hush-hush" mission, but secretly hoping to find a disposable orphan to aid him in a nefarious scheme involving President Taft's 12-year-old niece, Dorothy. (This plot was inspired by an actual news story!) And that's how Audie finds herself in a fancy automobile heading east to Washington, D.C.

As keenly observant as Audie is, it takes her forever to realize she's a mere pawn in a dastardly White House crime of revenge, nor does she know she has an elaborate network of friends (including her beloved stowaway cat) who have her back when things get rough. The companionable narrator, bouncing back and forth between Indiana and the capital, recounts Audie's hair-raising exploits with warmth and wit, satire and suspense. Audie is an inquisitive, resourceful, funny and kind heroine, and readers will be glad to know more Audacity Jones adventures lie ahead. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

There's a public space in New Orleans called Congo Square where people have been meeting on Sundays to make music, sing and dance ever since the mid-1800s, the time of slavery.

Freedom in Congo Square is a graceful, gorgeous picture book that honors this Louisiana gathering spot, now on the National Register of Historic Places. Caldecott Honor author Carole Boston Weatherford (Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom) calls this landmark "freedom's heart." As her author's note states, "Congo Square is now part of Louis Armstrong Park, which is named after the jazz great and New Orleans native. That is fitting since jazz... evolved from the African rhythms kept alive in Congo Square." A glossary and a dense but accessible two-page foreword further contextualize the book, which on its own is a rhythmic countdown of hardworking slaves looking forward to a celebratory Sunday off in Congo Square.

The chanting rhyme begins: "Mondays, there were hogs to slop,/ mules to train, and logs to chop./ Slavery was no ways fair./ Six more days to Congo Square./ Tuesdays, there were cows to feed,/ fields to plow, and rows to seed./ A moment without work was rare./ Five more days to Congo Square." In his bold, folk-art style, Caldecott Honor artist R. Gregory Christie (The Palm of My Heart; Brothers in Hope) paints slaves toiling in surreal fieldscapes in lush persimmons and yellow-golds, plowing, hanging clothes, picking cotton--then expressively dancing, swirling and playing music on their much-anticipated Sundays. This is a powerful testimony to the resilience of the human spirit and a fine conversation starter. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness