Dodgers is a road trip novel, a coming-of-age novel, a crime novel--and more. Bill Beverly's debut, about four black kids from Compton confronting white Middle America for the first time, is as durable and expansive as the early-winter trees 15-year-old East notices along the Iowa-Wisconsin border: "Trees unlike the trees in L.A: these rooted hard, grew up tall, muscular, their bare limbs grabbing all the air in the world."

The gang is on a "just business" mission for their top dog, Fin. In the middle bench rides East, Fin's loosely related nephew, who has risen from drug house lookout to running a crew of younger kids. East's younger brother, Ty, takes the back seat, thumbing his video game, and at the wheel is the oldest, fast-talker Michael Wilson. Sitting shotgun, fat Walter is Fin's fixer and problem solver.

And so they set out, without cellphones or connection to their drug 'hood known as the Boxes, and make their way through the mountains and the plains. But things go south. Their van gets vandalized by kids out trashing for fun. Always on edge, brothers Ty and East get crossways over stealing a different car to get home. Walter puzzles out a way to score himself a plane ticket out of Des Moines. Alone, East makes his way farther east to a small town in Ohio, where, exhausted with running, he settles into a job at a paintball range.

With the savvy of a much more prolific writer, Beverly plants a powerful conclusion on a powerful first novel. Dodgers is brilliant with no more than it needs--and no less. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In The Railwayman's Wife, Ashley Hay draws an intimate map of the bereaved heart against the picturesque backdrop of a seaside Australian town in 1948.

Anikka Lachlan leads a quiet, wholesome life with her husband, Mackenzie, and young daughter, Isabel, in postwar Thirroul, New South Wales. Mac works for the railway while Ani keeps house. The Lachlans have nothing but a pleasant future waiting for them when the unthinkable happens: a train accident kills Mac and makes Ani a widow. She cannot escape the pain of the loss, waking to wonder "how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before." With their daughter to think of, Ani accepts the offer of a job at the Railway Institute's library, one branch in a network that transports books to patrons via train. Meanwhile, her loss continues to eat away at her heart.

Ani's compatriots in the land of despair are Frank Draper and Roy McKinnon, survivors of World War II's European theater who have only recently returned home. Hays lovingly constructs a rich snapshot of late '40s Thirroul, with its sea air, endless skies and thundering locomotives. Her quiet, graceful prose acts as a translucent overlay for turbulent emotion, like glimpsing rich velvet through wisps of lace. This thoughtful, elegant portrait of lives turned inside out and finding the way forward from despair is sure to find a place in the hearts of its audience. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Mark Tompkins's debut novel, The Last Days of Magic, is a tightly wound adult fantasy epic, an engrossing thriller that doesn't skimp on historical detail. In the 14th century, the Catholic Church is consolidating its hold on Europe, and so it targets Ireland, one of the last realms where faeries, goddesses and demons wield political power. The faeries (known as Sidhe) and human Celts are splintered, and their only hope for unity is a girl named Aisling, the living incarnation of a Sidhe goddess.

The story plants one foot in the world of Celtic folklore and one in the world of human events, and both are meticulously researched. At times the historical flourishes slow the pacing, but by and large they are welcome details that enrich the story, which Tompkins is careful to keep hurtling forward. And while fantasy novels can tend toward the self-serious, Tompkins's wit surfaces in unexpected ways, as with the appearance of Geoffrey Chaucer in the role of shrewd politico. Tompkins clearly relishes his minor characters, and there are many. While there's enough worldbuilding here to support a whole series, Tompkins demonstrates you don't need a multivolume saga to achieve lifelike detail and epic scope.

There's substance in his mythmaking; it's telling that Tompkins's previously published nonfiction (Illuminations) deals with spirituality and empathy. The Last Days of Magic strikes the right note: adult but not gratuitous, densely plotted but nimble, and a pleasure to read. --Zak Nelson, writer and editorial consultant

For her first novel, Columbia University writing instructor Lynn Steger Strong has penned a heartbreaking portrait of a dysfunctional family unraveling under the weight of failed expectations. They are unable to cope and hold the pieces of their lives together in the face of personal destruction. 

The story opens with a foreboding prologue in which Maya rescues her eight-year-old daughter, Ellie, from an incoming wave, and Ellie responds, "Ma, I'm fine." What has transpired since that beach trip has torn the family apart: Maya's alternating displays of smothering affection and total neglect have left her family walking on eggshells, resulting in Ellie's teenage rebellion and subsequent descent into addiction. By 2011, Maya has sent the 20-year-old recovering addict Ellie to care for a friend's child, who dies as a result of a terrible mistake. And in 2013, Maya has now escaped into her books; her philosophy professor husband, Stephen, avoids any mention of their daughter. Meanwhile their son, Ben, harboring guilt for his sister's actions, drops out of college, struggling with Stephen's disappointment and his family's emotional disintegration. Their collective fear of confronting their own demons prompts life-changing consequences.

Blame and guilt circle each other in an endless loop of suffering. Hold Still is a metaphor for not being able to break beyond past grief to live in the present. It is "about the impossibility of communication, the need to turn the abstract into the tangible, how some people cannot achieve this without the help of someone else," and the consequences that come from seeking comfort in things farthest from the heart. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

After her husband's death on a Canadian airfield and a stint working as a nurse in a remote Spanish village, private investigator Maisie Dobbs has returned to England. As she contemplates the next steps in her personal and professional life, two old acquaintances at the Secret Service tap Maisie for a sensitive mission: retrieving an engineer imprisoned at Dachau by the Nazis. In Journey to Munich, her 12th Maisie Dobbs novel, Jacqueline Winspear paints a keen picture of a woman and a country struggling to remain calm in the face of sweeping changes.

Winspear (Leaving Everything Most Loved) has brought Maisie full circle in some ways with this novel: she is back in England as an independent woman, considering a return to her investigative career. (Longtime readers will appreciate the reappearance of Maisie's colorful supporting cast.) But Munich in 1938 is new territory for both Winspear and her heroine, who must employ her varied skills--diplomacy, nursing, self-defense--to get herself and her frail charge out of the country alive. Complicating matters is a request from a family of Maisie's acquaintance: their grown daughter Elaine, a reckless society darling, is also in Munich and may be in danger. Maisie is forced to set aside personal grievances and solve a complicated international puzzle, its pieces seeming to multiply by the day.

Deftly blending historical detail with taut suspense and her usual thoughtful exploration of Maisie's inner life, Winspear turns in another satisfying entry in her beloved series. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

A young boy is dead. Alex Beech was 10 years old, and home alone when his apartment building caught fire. The coroner's report was conclusive: death by smoke inhalation. Within days of the fire, the police and the public have come to the conclusion that his death was no accident: Alex was an unintended murder victim, and Jess Moulson, Alex's downstairs neighbor, is the one who killed him.

As the prosecution presented it, the evidence was clear: Jess and her boyfriend, John, both heroin addicts, had fought. Jess, high and out of her mind with anger, set the apartment ablaze with the intent to kill her boyfriend. He escaped, she was rescued from the flames in the depths of an opiate fog, and Alex was the fire's only victim.

Unable to remember the events of that night, Jess becomes so convinced of her own guilt that she decides to kill herself, refusing food for weeks on end as she wastes away in the Fellside prison infirmary. As Jess's body atrophies and her vital functions weaken, Alex begins to visit, begging her for help. She didn't kill him, he says, but she can find out who did.

M.R. Carey's (The Girl with All the Gifts) prose is elegant and streamlined, with occasional lush imagery bubbling up out of the darkness. Fellside is dark, much darker than many thrillers that feature more brutal crimes or more explicitly evil villains, but its appeal lies in its unflinching depiction of powerlessness. --Emma Page, bookseller at Wellesley Books, Wellesley, Mass.

After chronicling his wildly dysfunctional childhood (Running with Scissors) and his addiction and recovery (Dry), Augusten Burroughs tackles his largely unlucky search for romance and the man of his dreams in Lust & Wonder: A Memoir. Fans will find a new vulnerability added to Burroughs's usual mix of harrowing and hilarious confessions.

Burroughs abandons his sobriety after the death of a beloved HIV+ friend. Buying and drinking two bottles of scotch becomes a daily ritual. "I can say this with authority: a queen-sized mattress can hold a year's worth of urine and still be perfectly serviceable," he writes. He pulls himself out of his stupor by writing a satirical novel, Sellevision. Burroughs becomes smitten with his dashing new agent, Christopher, but rules out a romance because Christopher is HIV+. Instead, he starts a relationship with Dennis. "Dennis had the soul of an accountant, and was exceedingly good at cataloguing my flaws," he writes. After a decade together, he and Dennis finally admit their relationship is not happy. Suddenly single again, Burroughs wonders if Christopher has been his Mr. Right all along.

Burroughs's wit and pen are razor-sharp, and his observations are acerbically funny. He avoids becoming unlikable by saving his best jabs for himself. When he does drop the laughs, he can be vulnerable and emotionally raw, as when dealing with the slow death of his relationship with Dennis. Readers will delight in the fact that by this memoir's end, it looks like Burroughs may have finally found his happily ever after. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

That country music legend George "The Possum" Jones survived to age 81 is something of a miracle. Born in the no-man's land of Texas's Big Thicket region to an abusive, alcoholic father and doting mother, the chunky 12-pound baby George broke his arm when he was dropped during delivery. This ominous beginning was only the first traumatic insult to a hellraising man who went through four wives, countless bar fights, bankruptcy, jail, several car wrecks and multiple revolving-door visits to rehab hospitals. As he said to his last wife, Nancy, sitting at his deathbed, "I've had eighty-one good years. Some of 'em I messed up, paid for 'em." Writing with rich detail, music critic and journalist Rich Kienzle (Southwest Shuffle) chronicles the stumbles and falls but also the many musical triumphs in "No-Show" Jones's remarkable life.

Through it all, the songs and hits kept coming. Songwriters knew just what kind of range and lyric fit his distinctive life and voice, songs like "If Drinking Don't Kill Me" and "Stand on My Own Two Knees." In the end, he won every country music award and was honored in a memorial concert ("Playin' Possum: The Final No-Show") with dozens of stars paying tribute. His Nashville gravesite features a substantial stone monument designed by Nancy, with this epigraph engraved beneath his name: "He Stopped Loving Her Today." Kienzle's The Grand Tour: The Life and Music of George Jones covers it all--the bars, the theme parks, the empty concert halls and the millions of adoring fans and admiring musicians. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, Adam Hochschild (To End All Wars) moves beyond the familiar image of the Spanish Civil War shaped by Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's iconic photographs. He uses the experiences of less famous volunteers--a young economics professor and his wife; a college senior who was the first American to die in the battle for Madrid; a 19-year-old idealist who cut short her European honeymoon to join the Republican cause; a New York socialite turned war correspondent--to tell a story of the war that is both larger and more intimate.

Hochschild brings each of his characters to life, but does not reduce the war to a simple story of idealism and heroism. He contrasts the idealism of the international volunteers who flooded Spain in support of its democratic government with the brutal actions taken by partisans on both sides of the war. He details the political infighting among the Soviets, anti-Stalinist communists and anarchist revolutionaries. And he demonstrates how fascist sympathizers in Britain, the United States and France kept those countries from supporting the Spanish government. (One of the most interesting sections is the previously untold story of how a Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies illegally provided Franco with oil.) Most importantly, the author highlights Germany's use of this war as a training field for a European war in the making.

Spain in Our Hearts is gripping, illuminating and ultimately heartbreaking. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Alfred Rosenberg was the ideologue-in-chief of the Third Reich, an architect of the National Socialist philosophy and an early member of Hitler's inner circle. His book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), was second only to Hitler's Mein Kampf in its prominence on Nazi bookshelves. Though Rosenberg was far less politically powerful than Himmler, Göring, Goebbels and the like, his philosophy of rabid anti-Semitism, anti-Bolshevism, anti-Christianity and German racial superiority inspired the worst of the Nazi's atrocities, so much so that Rosenberg was hanged for war crimes in 1946.

Rosenberg was also a prolific diarist. His journal survived the war, was used as evidence during the Nuremberg trials, and then disappeared for more than half a century. The fate of this diary and its content are the subjects of The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich by Robert K. Wittman and David Kinney. Wittman (Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures) created the FBI's Art Crime Team, and as a private citizen, helped an archivist from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum track down the missing diary. He and Kinney (The Dylanologists; The Big One) trace the document from the desk of Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Kempner to the hands of an unscrupulous publisher in upstate New York. Much of The Devil's Diary is a fascinating account of Rosenberg's life, now with previously unpublished content from his diary. It exposes a generally unknown but important Nazi figure. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, Booker's Point is a debut collection of narrative poems celebrating the cantankerous Maine character Bernard Booker, Tree Warden of the Town of North Berwick and self-proclaimed Mayor of Ell Pond. Resting comfortably in the tradition of Robert Frost and E.A. Robinson, Megan Grumbling's poems speak in well-crafted blank verse of a WiFi-free rural life where trees are identified by sight (not Google images) and stones are harvested from the land by touch. Booker is a crotchety old scavenger and hoarder--gathering the discarded tools of loggers, abandoned whiskey crocks and jugs, and the gears and drives of weed-covered stone-crushing machines.

The poems' narrator shadows her yarn-spinning teacher, who is wise in the ways of the woods, but as one of Booker's childhood friends recalls in "License," "Numb as a post, as schooling went--/ numbers he got, but Jesus how/ the kid would squint at alphabets." When it comes to the land, the forest, the tending of his property, however, Booker knows plenty. In "Good Digging," for example, the narrator marvels at his practical know-how: "When most folks dig a hole, it seems to shrink/ as they go down. But he's not done it wrong/ yet, learned dirt symmetries enough to sink/ his johns and ditches straight... it's the last two feet can lame/ you. Gotta loosen it up as you go." With clear homage to Frost (she won the Robert Frost Foundation Award in 2004), Grumbling captures both the characters and lessons of the countryside, where, as she ends "Blueberrying," "The best picking/ is work, bright with abandon, both hands full." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Tim Federle's (Better Nate Than Ever; Five, Six, Seven, Nate!) confident YA debut, The Great American Whatever, stars 16-year-old Quinn Roberts, a film-obsessed gay teen from western Pennsylvania, struggling to recover from the death of his sister, Annabeth. The day she died in a car accident, he started wearing earplugs and "gave up on becoming a screenwriter, or an anythingwriter, or an anything." The story kicks off with Quinn's best friend, Geoff, dragging him to a party, where Quinn meets a cute Iranian-American college guy. The promise of romance helps draw Quinn out of his extended mourning period, but he still has to deal with his mother's paralyzing grief and a number of harsh realizations about the sister he thought he knew everything about. If Quinn's life were a screenplay, he says, his would be "a fairly standard coming-of-age LGBT genre film, with a somewhat macabre horror twist." Quinn is underselling his own story, which reveals new levels of heart as it follows the occasionally surprising arc of his recovery.

What sets this fantastic novel apart is Quinn's brilliantly realized, often hilarious first-person voice, from laugh-out-loud asides ("My mom's theory--which I fully endorse--is that fruits are best in a cobbler and vegetables are best in the ground") to heart-wrenching admissions, such as the wry observation that earplugs "give the world a comforting dullness." Quinn's tendency to view scenes from the perspective of a true film geek has him occasionally re-inventing real-life dramatic moments as fictitious screenplays. Charming and imaginative. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC

Booked, the followup to Kwame Alexander's 2015 Newbery Medal-winning The Crossover, is an often funny, often poignant novel told in short poems.

Soccer-obsessed eighth-grader Nick Hall stays up too late one night with his friend Coby (they've been "tight as a pair of shin guards" since first grade), and wakes up to hear his mom arguing with his dad. Nick has trouble with his father, too: he wishes he could be something cooler than "a linguistics professor/ with chronic verbomania" who forces him to memorize words from the dictionary he wrote. As Nick confides to his audience, "And even though your mother/ forbids you to say it,/ the truth is/ you/ HATE/ words." Nick doth protest too much--for a guy who hates words, he's very big on wordplay, making Booked a treat for word-loving readers.

The story takes a heartbreaking turn when Nick's horse-loving mom leaves town to "chase her equine dreams": "HAY, Mom, why'd you BALE?" he texts. His troubles pile higher when he has to deal with "pit-bull mean" bullies, and falls for a girl he's too nervous to talk to. On top of that, Nick--a soccer star at his school--is living to compete in an international tournament, but it's not even clear he'll be able to participate. Throughout the quick-footed narrative (in which some of Nick's woes resolve and some don't), his evolving relationship to books and the world of words stays front and center. By the end, because of--and in spite of--the pressure of the well-meaning book-pushers all around him, he finds his own path to literature. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness