Kate Tempest--rapper, acclaimed playwright and winner of the Ted Hughes poetry award--is a manic whirlwind who lives up to her chosen surname. She's got chops. Her first novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, is an engrossing story of young Londoners from the wrong side of the river struggling to make it in a world where options are limited, family ties are frayed, and a frothy pint and line of coke help make the days go by--yet they still have their dreams and yearn for love while "forcing a good time out of their tired, broken hearts."

Becky is a 26-year-old music video dancer, barista and on-call "happy ending" masseuse who aspires to join a professional dance company. Her father's a lefty writer and politician in jail for sex crimes with his underage staff. Her mother is a born-again Jew who ran off to the American Midwest. Her boyfriend, Pete, is habitually unemployed, unmotivated and jealous. Despite lofty ambitions, Becky lives in fear of "Twenty years of nothing changing but the rent." Then she meets Pete's sister, Harry, an androgynous lesbian and high-end drug dealer. Becky and Harry connect, and The Bricks That Built the Houses becomes a modern urban love story--albeit one with a world of complications, where the reliable "bricks" of family and meaningful work are not there to support their fragile lives.

Tempest's captivating novel is rich in detail, clever in plot and filled with characters who live on the edge but never quite give up. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Anna Smaill's first novel, The Chimes, infuses the well-used dystopian trope with a twist: the ruling class delivers oppression through music.

In a London torn apart by civil war, a monastic society called the Order lives in seclusion, writing music to be played on the Carillon, a giant organ crafted from pure palladium. The population outside the Order's walls hears two melodies: Onestory, in the morning, which tells of the war, and Chimes, in the evening, which erases all memories of the day. Citizens are left with only "bodymemory," the muscle memory and second-nature actions required to fulfill their occupations, and "objectmemories," possessions connected with important experiences now forgotten that inspire traces of emotion. Attempts to recover the past are considered crimes of "blasphony"; the Order claims that its status quo prevents another war.

Before she dies of "chimesickness," a condition the Order says is an urban legend, Simon's mother urges him to go to London. Once there, he takes up with a band of youths who aim to collect bits of the legendary palladium weapon to sell. Lucien, their golden-haired, blind leader, thinks Simon may hold the key to stopping the Carillon forever, but the Order threatens both their mission and their budding romance.

Smaill's clever use of musical terms in her characters' speech adds to the immersive quality of the work, and her melodious prose lures the reader like a pied piper. With literary trappings but a solidly speculative heart, The Chimes is a cantata of pure delight. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

In novels like Underworld and White Noise, Don DeLillo has served as a literary sentinel, on the lookout for intelligence to carry back from the borderlands of our civilization. Zero K, his 17th novel--a serious reflection on the subject of cryonics--is an unsettling dispatch from that shadowy zone.

The prospect of immortality plays out at the Convergence, in a remote area of Kyrgyzstan, where billionaire Ross Lockhart has helped underwrite a scientific complex devoted to preserving the dying and someday resurrecting them. His second wife, Artis, soon will die of complications of multiple sclerosis and is scheduled to undergo cryopreservation.

Ross invites his son, Jeffrey, to witness what the latter believes is "science awash in irrepressible fantasy." In conversations with prophet-like characters known as the Monk and Ben-Ezra, Jeffrey comes to understand the philosophical underpinnings of the Convergence, reinforced by apocalyptic scenes of war, fires and floods projected on screens throughout the facility. Ross may be planning his own departure, too; for Jeffrey, this discovery dredges up painful memories of his father's abandonment and his mother's death.

The notion of supercooling ailing bodies, intending to bring them back when cures may exist for their terminal illnesses, exudes an aura of presumption tinged with absurdity, but DeLillo makes it feel plausible. "The defining element of life is that it ends," observes one of the principals of the Convergence. In this intriguing novel, Don DeLillo trains his intense and singular vision on a future where people with the imagination and resources to achieve it may succeed in rewriting that definition. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

With rigorous detail and moment-by-moment exposition, Pamela Erens drops readers into one of the most personal and specific experiences a woman can go through: labor. In shifting points of view, Eleven Hours documents the story of two women who forge a relationship based on the experience of childbirth. Lore arrives at the hospital with no partner and no friends to support her, but she has a carefully laid-out plan for what she will not allow during her labor: no fetal monitor, no IV and no epidural. Franckline, also pregnant, is the nurse assigned to monitor Lore throughout her labor. Since she was six years old, Franckline has watched and helped the women of her village in Haiti deliver their babies; she was called the Ti Matrone, the little midwife. Together, these two strangers form an intimate bond as Lore's labor progresses during a snowy day in New York City.

Erens rapidly weaves their lives together, one story pulsing into the other, timed with the contractions Lore experiences. Lore was immersed in a love triangle and she is still struggling to recover. Franckline has lost one child and is fearful she'll lose the one she's carrying.

The tension builds and recedes, moving from a fast pace to an almost dreamlike one, as Lore's contractions increase in frequency and intensity. Erens's prose pushes readers to a finish that is raw, vivid and vicious, the last pages a race toward birth, fear, wonder and reverence as both women accept their respective futures. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Post-World War II Jerusalem--with thousands of Jewish immigrants and diverse factions fighting against the British for Israeli independence--is the setting for Stewart O'Nan's 16th novel, showcasing his talent for crafting an intimate story. From Middle America (Last Night at the Lobster; Emily Alone) to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood (West of Sunset), O'Nan's characters bring to life a place and time, and City of Secrets is sure to both thrill and enlighten.

Brand, a Latvian Jew, has reinvented himself in Jerusalem after escaping Soviet and Nazi internment by chance, while his entire family perished. Driving a taxi provided by the underground resistance, he stealthily executes missions, undermining the British authorities, while ferrying tourists as a cover. At night, he goes to Eva, "the Widow," who, like him, "would always be another's, that dead love private, untouchable." Comrades in the movement, Eva and Brand share a reserved love, "a brittle consolation"; they do not speak of their past, and dare not reveal their roles. O'Nan's history is accurate, and the plot builds to the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946.

In a spare, noir style, City of Secrets puts a face on political violence, offering an unspoken parallel to current headlines. Eva and Brand spar: "So killing was no longer a sin?" he asked. "Not in the cause of freedom." Brand escaped unthinkable horror but places himself again in deadly conflict, dedicated to the movement until eventually forced to reinvent himself once more. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Antonia Hayes's first novel, Relativity, blends quirk with compelling family dynamics for an often funny and occasionally heartbreaking look at ties that bind as well as divides that cannot be overcome.

Ethan Forsythe can't remember a time when Mark, his father, was a part of their lives in Sydney, Australia. His mother, Claire, devotes the love she once gave to Mark and to her former career in ballet to her brilliant, science-obsessed son, who has a form of synesthesia that allows him to see phenomena usually invisible to the naked eye, such as sound waves or the Doppler effect. Ethan also has a lack of social skills and is bullied at school. Meanwhile, Mark returns to Sydney to see his ailing father, who insists upon meeting Ethan before dying. Although Mark and Ethan's shared love of physics forges an almost immediate connection, Claire fears learning the reason their family splintered will hurt Ethan far worse than life without a father.

Hayes tackles difficult themes and situations: Claire's perception that her failure to protect her son left him irrevocably changed; her vow to keep Mark out of their lives; how families can determine its members' futures despite contrary intentions. However, the story gets considerable lift from Ethan's awed devotion to the beauty of science and Hayes's knack for turning matters of physics into graceful prose. While readers may expect the exact opposite of the ending they get, Hayes makes brave choices throughout for a story that feels authentic and characters who stick in the mind and heart. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

During the 1990s, the Israeli army maintained a string of hilltop forts in southern Lebanon to protect towns in northern Israel. At one such outpost, called the Pumpkin, boys beginning their mandatory military service spent time on guard duty, washing dishes and watching grainy VHS tapes, a tedium punctuated by deadly clashes with Hezbollah fighters. The Pumpkin shared its shielding mission with other benignly named outposts like Red Pepper, Basil and Citrus. When the soldiers in the Pumpkin were not under fire, setting up ambushes or searching for hidden bombs, they heard the euphemistic radio codes from their comrades who were under attack elsewhere: a wounded soldier was called a flower, a dead one a cyclamen.

"If you listened to the language of the Lebanon troops, you might have thought they occupied a kind of garden," says journalist Matti Friedman (The Aleppo Codex) in Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story. Friedman, a veteran of several tours at the Pumpkin, weaves a poetic account of his own experience with that of another soldier who served at the outpost before him and Friedman's own harrowing trip back to Lebanon as a civilian after the Israeli army pulled out in 2000. Friedman captures a time and place where the new millennium seemed to promise peace instead of geopolitical conflagrations scorching the Middle East, when the Israeli experience in southern Lebanon felt like the trailing edge of a conflict instead of the beginning of a new type of war. Pumpkinflowers is a beautifully written, gut-wrenching book. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Journalist Amy Haimerl and her husband, Karl, loved their Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., but were facing rising costs and considering relocating. Friends and family were surprised by their choice of famously struggling Detroit, Mich., but they fell in love with a 1914 Georgian Revival (lacking heat, electricity, plumbing, windows and much more), and took the plunge. The house they named Matilda cost them $35,000 to purchase--and exponentially more in renovations.

Detroit Hustle is Haimerl's memoir of rebuilding Matilda and building her marriage to Karl in parallel. But it is also a musing on what it means for a girl from a working-class family in rural Colorado to move through Mississippi and New York to arrive in the gritty and disparaged city of Detroit. Five weeks after they buy, Detroit declares bankruptcy. Amy covers the court proceedings for Crain's Detroit Business while researching her new city and its history. Her study of the city yields complexities and contradictions, a portrait of proud residents and the difficulties of gentrification.

Haimerl is thoughtful and reflective about her relationship to place and to the intricacies of Detroit's past and future; quirky, funny and loving about her marriage; and by turns vexed and inspired by the process of home renovation. Her vivid personality pairs well with the rich, colorful, troubled city she loves. Detroit Hustle is a remarkable memoir spanning home repair, political and culture geographies, and the choices we make for the people, places and things we love. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

U.S. forces commandeered Saddam Hussein's notorious prison at Abu Ghraib in order to house thousands of detainees after the March 2003 invasion. Later that year, reports of prisoner torture and abuse by American soldiers with accompanying pictures and videos became world news. At this nadir of American pride, the 152nd Maine Army National Guard Field Artillery Battalion was finishing mountain conflict training at Fort Dix with orders for deployment to Afghanistan. Among them was William "Dizl" Thorndike, middle-aged father of four with a background in clam digging, teaching, EMT dispatching and prison guarding. A week before deployment, the 152nd was abruptly redirected to Abu Ghraib with no relevant training and little basic desert battle gear. Their job: bring order out of chaos, and unofficially, "do not make us look bad."

Veteran Marine combat correspondent W. Zach Griffith's Packed for the Wrong Trip is the story of how Dizl and his comrades overcame their lack of training with raw guts and a Maine talent for fixing anything with "duct tape and string" in order to tame the monster hellhole Abu Ghraib--"a garbage-strewn complex of grayish-brown buildings... surrounded by a twenty-five-foot-high grayish-brown concrete perimeter wall." Bedeviled by regular mortar and rocket attacks, prisoner uprisings, sniper fire and explosives along the supply road to Baghdad, Dizl and the 152nd managed in one year to upgrade conditions for prisoners, expedite release of the innocent, and partially redeem the U.S.'s tarnished reputation. Griffith has a storyteller's knack for action and successfully weaves anecdotes, interviews, history and the frightening ambience of men at war into a chronicle of heroism and redemption. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In The Morning They Came for Us, Janine di Giovanni presents the ethnic, religious and political history of Syria, a complicated country carved from Middle East border negotiations between British and French diplomats, with its widespread Sunni majority, the Shia minority, the northern Kurds, the Armenian/Greek Christians, the Yazidi mountain nomads and, above all, the iron-fisted Assad family's 50-year dictatorship. Di Giovanni (Ghosts by Daylight; Madness Visible) is a seasoned foreign correspondent with experience in warzones including Sarajevo, Kosovo, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. She knows first-hand that war is not so much about history and religion, but about the people caught in the middle of it.

The Morning They Came for Us is about Syrians such as Nada, Hussein and Maryam--people from places like Damascus, Homs and Aleppo who suffered under the Assad government and lost family and friends to the incessant bombings and assaults from the many sides pulling their country apart. In informal interviews, di Giovanni elicits their stories of rape, beatings and repeated torture. Some were student opposition activists, some were highly educated, multilingual elite who were "bi-national," having "a second passport, a way out," and some were apolitical working people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Morning They Came for Us tells the story of Syrians who have discovered that "war starts with a jolt: one day you are busy with dentist appointments or arranging ballet lessons.... ATMs work and mobile phones function. Then, suddenly, everything stops"--except for the brutal and seemingly endless war that di Giovanni chronicles so effectively. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Two-time Caldecott Honor artist Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man; Grandpa Green) has created a playful, profoundly beautiful universe in his glorious picture book There Is a Tribe of Kids. Smith's appealing and kid-friendly--yet artfully stylized and elegantly hip--artwork blossoms with each reading.

The story--a boy's solo odyssey through the natural world--begins with his happy discovery of some baby goats: "There was a TRIBE of KIDS." Much of the narrative unfurls in wordless comic strip-style panels, often expressing the joy of interaction between the boy and his new animal friends, followed by a quiet sense of loneliness when they part ways. The only words in the book highlight collective nouns, from "There was a SMACK of JELLYFISH" to "There was a "BAND of GORILLAS."

When the boy arrives at the ocean shore, there's a "sprinkle" of lightning bugs and a "family" of stars, a "bed" of clams and a "night" of dreams. A "trail" of shells leads to... a "tribe" of kids, this time a tree full of leaf-clad human ones, much like Peter Pan's lost boys, except with girls, too. Is this a homecoming for the boy... or a discovery?

Perhaps There Is a Tribe of Kids is about the deep need for connection, and the exuberance, and often humor, that arises from it. It's a celebration of the wondrous natural world where whales spout and caterpillars morph into butterflies--and how sometimes the line between animals and humans isn't as well defined as one might think. A "sparkle" of gems. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Frances O'Roark Dowell (Dovey Coe; Chicken Boy) has written an eerie, slow-burning novel set in 1950s Kentucky, with lively, pitch-perfect dialogue reminiscent of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Eleven-year-old Callie, Wendell, Jim and Thomas are four children who are linked by an old golden retriever, and not much else. Their stories wend their way toward each other like the poison ivy-strewn paths through the woods surrounding a dilapidated Civil War-era cabin. Callie is sure it must be haunted: "That place felt funny. Felt cold and, well, occupied." Callie, who is black, and her new companion Wendell, who is white, work together to get to the root of the ever-expanding mystery about the cabin, the dog and Jim, a boy who drowned a long time ago. But the town of Celeste is not ready for a black girl and a white boy to walk down the street together, let alone join forces, nor are they ready for an action the black newspaper is advocating--to integrate the local swimming pool. The feeling of injustice is old news to Callie in this "mean old world," but Wendell is just starting to wake up to the sting of it.

The unsettled ghosts of the drowned Jim and of Thomas, a once-enslaved boy, overlap in the cabin, neither one ready to cross the proverbial--and literal--river to allow their spirits finally to rest. Callie and Wendell--troubled spirits in their own right--form a near-friendship based on what they can share, with a cautious hope for a future without boundaries between black and white. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

Grandad's Island by British author-illustrator Benji Davies (The Storm Whale; Bizzy Bear series) celebrates a close grandfather-grandson relationship with warmth and style. Whether it's read as a picture book about love, loss or just missing someone who isn't around anymore, it's a charmer. Cheerful cinematic spreads invite young readers into all sorts of intriguing places, from a cozy attic full of curiosities like a turtle teapot, to a vast ship's deck, to the deep jungle of an island paradise.

The book opens as Syd pays a visit to his Grandad's house, just out the back gate from his own house. He hears his grandfather call him from an upstairs attic he's never seen before, and the two of them (three, counting the gray kitten) enter a big metal door--surprise!--and emerge onto the deck of a tall ship. The ship takes them across rolling waves to a lush tropical island teeming with wild animals, including an orangutan that looks curiously like a stuffed toy in Grandad's attic. They fix up an old jungle shack, with help from a toucan and some parrots, and Grandad, an artist, paints the wonders around them. It's perfect. When Grandad tells Syd he's thinking of staying put, the boy asks, "But won't you be lonely?" With all those smiling jungle animals? Maybe not. They hug "one last time."

Back at Grandad's house, it's quiet, and the big metal door is gone. But what's this? A jungle toucan taps on the attic window, bearing a little painting from Grandad, "For Syd." No matter the interpretation, Grandad lives on. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness