Jan Wolkers's 1969 novel Turks Fruit was translated from the Dutch into many languages and adapted into a highly regarded 1973 film. Sam Garrett's English translation is not the first of this work, but reflects its continuing appeal.

Turkish Delight opens with the unnamed narrator, a sculptor, lamenting and railing against his lost love. He describes in great detail a surfeit of sexual affairs undertaken after she departed, then flashes back to describe their first encounter: Olga picked him up as a hitchhiker, then pulled over the car for the first of their sexual enthusiasms. Olga is the heart and life of this novel and of the narrator's existence: he obsessively recites and reviews her body, her sex, her red hair, her love for animals, her jokes and delights. The lengthy flashback sees their relationship and, later, marriage run its course (his evil mother-in-law plays a heavy role), and returns again to the sculptor's tortured single life. His love for Olga does not flag, even as she degrades herself (in his eyes) with subsequent marriages and physical decline. The novel ends at Olga's deathbed, where the former lover feeds her the soft candy Turkish delight, as her teeth fail her.

Not for the faint of heart, Turkish Delight was immediately notorious upon its original publication for its graphic sexual content. Garrett's translation of Wolkers's prose is often lyrical and always heartfelt; the juxtaposition of poetry with crude language echoes the narrator's passionate love and enormous lust. Turkish Delight is a serious and artistic literary work, but only appropriate for readers fully tolerant of the salacious. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Domenico Starnone's Ties is an expertly crafted short novel that is charmingly intimate, disarmingly chatty and laced with some walloping surprises. Its Italian publication so captivated Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri (whose memoir In Other Words documents her study of Italian) that she translated the novel into English, and superbly so.

The novel is a meditation on love--what is gained, what is lost and who is affected when it all goes wrong. Part one follows a sequence of furious letters written by Vanda Minori, a 30-something wife abandoned, along with her two well-behaved children, by her husband, Aldo, who has fallen in love with 19-year-old Lidia and set off on a new, exciting life.

Part two, told by Aldo 40 years later, opens with Aldo and his wife (they're still together!) returning home one night to discover their apartment vandalized and the cat missing. Among the wreckage Aldo finds a swollen yellow envelope containing his wife's letters from four decades ago--the contents of part one. Something else has gone missing as well--the secret little packet with naked photos of Lidia that Aldo has never been able to throw away. Part three is unexpected, perfect and best left without comment here.

Starnone's natural theatricality and robust characters, combined with a sneaky, clever plot, make for a delightful novel that is cruelly short. Nevertheless, the whole story reeks of love--the frustrated, truncated, too-much and not-quite-enough love that holds families together in life. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

Comic book writers Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and Tom Sniegoski (B.P.R.D.) have collaborated on a highly entertaining, illustrated gothic horror story. In Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal, Bentley Hawthorne is a Bruce Wayne type of vigilante. Haunted by ghosts of the unjustly killed, he dishes out vengeance to murderers behind a skull mask and black trench coat, guns a-blazing. He is assisted by Pym, the devoted manservant who raised and protected Bentley after his parents died.

One day the ghost of a beautiful circus aerialist visits Bentley and demands justice for her murder at the hands of her lover, William Tuttle, who now sits on death row awaiting execution. What appears to be a clear-cut case turns out to be anything but, and Bentley must solve the puzzle of what transpired in the face of  threats to his own life.

The story alternates between present and past, with the past serving to highlight how Bentley came to inherit his current occupation. Mignola and Sniegoski are both masters of storytelling, and Grim Death follows in this tradition. The authors include a lot of visual description, which makes the novel move like panels in a comic, building in suspense and anticipation until the final reveal. Mignola's drawings serve to break up the story and emphasize Bentley's vengeful nature. Grim Death offers a satisfactory and somewhat uplifting ending that leaves open the possibility for sequels. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

A single mother dying from ovarian cancer writes a book of memories, hopes and wisdom for her six-year-old son. Her plan is for him to receive it when he is 18, so he can "open this book and read these pages and remember me." Readers should have tissues nearby. Yet Our Short History, Lauren Grodstein's fifth work of fiction, is funny as well as poignant, sad but not maudlin.

Manhattanites Karen Neulander and her son, Jake, are spending their summer across the country, on Lake Washington's lush Mercer Island, with her sister and her family, who will care for Jake after Karen dies. She's in remission, and so she has continued working as a political consultant for a narcissistic New York City council candidate--whose antics offer a welcome respite from tragic themes. In spite of Karen's carefully constructed plan for Jake's future, her bright little boy throws her a curve: he asks her to find his father. Her lover rejected Karen when she announced her pregnancy; she's told Jake his father left them. However, Jake persists, and Karen concedes and contacts David.

Against her hopes, and to Jake's delight, David is kind, thoughtful and smitten with the son he'd never met. Karen honors Jake's needs, struggling with her own sorrow while allowing father and son to grow closer. While a happy ending is impossible, Grodstein reaches the inevitable conclusion with Karen at peace, knowing she's given Jake everything she could. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Adrian McKinty (Gun Street Girl) writes again about the tense world of 1980s Northern Ireland in Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly (a line from a Tom Waits song that aptly sums up the violent atmosphere). As the novel opens, Detective Sean Duffy, one of the only Catholics on the Royal Ulster Constabulary force, is being marched at gunpoint into a boggy wilderness. Unknown villains have come calling for Duffy's head, and even Duffy's quick tongue is unlikely to save him.

The story then flashes back a few weeks, to when a low-level drug dealer turned up dead with a crossbow bolt in his back. It seemed like an open-and-shut case, but the more Duffy investigated, the more he was convinced that somebody--quite possibly a high-ranking officer in the RUC--wanted him to think it was an easy solve. And so, naturally, someone as stubborn, tenacious and irreverently honest as Duffy couldn't stop digging. But will it be the death of him?

Often laugh-out-loud funny, with a vivid Irish setting, McKinty's sixth Sean Duffy novel is sure to appeal to fans of Ian Rankin or Tana French as well as to history buffs who remember the days of "the Troubles." Set during the escalation of violence following the March 1988 deaths of IRA volunteers in Gibraltar, Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly is simultaneously a gripping thriller and a fascinating history. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

In New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson (Shaman), one of the greatest living science fiction writers, presents a drastically changed city that retains many of its eternal charms and perils. In his vision, climate change has resulted in the First Pulse and the Second Pulse, massive sea level rises fueled by polar ice sliding into the ocean. After a period of devastating flooding, New York has adapted and survived as the newly christened "SuperVenice"--a city linked by boats, sky bridges and dirigibles rather than roads.

The novel's complex plot revolves around the mysterious disappearance of two coders from the partly submerged MetLife building, which leads to wide-ranging investigations. These turn up various threats that target the building, including sabotage, a hostile takeover attempt and machinations by cutthroat corporations.

Sporting a diverse cast of characters and a bracing, rarely cynical tone, New York 2140 is some of Robinson's nimblest writing to date. More traditional characters are occasionally interrupted by a "citizen" who provides a witty, fourth wall-breaking running commentary: "a New Yorker interested in the history of New York is by definition a lunatic, going against the tide, swimming or rowing upstream against the press of his fellow citizens, all of whom don't give a s**t about this past stuff."

The trials and travails of Robinson's characters range from goofy to darkly topical--Robinson has cleverly replaced subprime mortgages with "submarine mortgages," for example. Through it all, though, his 2140-era New York City remains as delightfully confounding as the present iteration. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C.

Helene Cooper (The House at Sugar Beach) is a Liberian-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked for the White House, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Her second book, Madame President, is a sympathetic biography of Liberia's extraordinary and controversial president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Raised mostly in Monrovia as a light-skinned member of the Congo elite, Sirleaf became head of the Debt Service Division at the Treasury Department in the 1960s, a huge job for a young woman in Liberia at the time. Her courage was astonishing from the start of her career. She repeatedly spoke out against Liberian political corruption despite being marginalized at work, jailed and sentenced to hard labor, released and imprisoned again, gradually becoming a domestic and international political hero. She first ran for president in 1997, but lost. She ran again in 2005, with a spectacularly successful grassroots campaign that increased the voter registration of Liberian women from 15% to 51%. Sirleaf then had to confront the chaos of her decimated, traumatized and deeply violent country, its $4.7 billion debt and the outbreak of Ebola. She won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize four days before she went up for re-election.

Cooper frankly describes Sirleaf's missteps, nepotism and other failings as president, while sympathetically laying out what she considers to be extenuating circumstances. She regards Sirleaf as a flawed but still heroic figure, and though her view is persuasive, she also makes it possible for readers to develop their own opinions. Madame President is a valuable addition to the history of an iconic world leader. --Sara Catterall

One quarter of the earth's surface is mountains, and about 10% of the population resides in them. Given the inclement weather, difficult travel conditions and relative isolation, this is perhaps unsurprising. In No Friends but the Mountains, journalist Judith Matloff does explore a surprising statistic: approximately 85% of the world's conflicts over the past two decades have been fought in mountain areas.

A professor of conflict reporting at the Columbia School of Journalism, Matloff is intimately familiar with this disproportionate reality, learning firsthand as she covers clashes in 39 countries over five continents. While altitude appears to nurture danger, the causes are many and fascinating, borne of different cultures, environments, traditions and politics.

Whether the discord is violent at its core (drugs, traditional vendettas), based on spiritual connections to land, or the product of diminishing resources, harsh topography tends to breed self-sufficient, insular communities that don't take well to rule by others. No Friends but the Mountains travels straight to the heart of eight mountainous regions as distinctive as their surrounding terrain.

Each region is steeped with centuries of politics, religion and culture. Matloff's lively writing keeps the dense subject matter from getting bogged down, and her accounts of perilous trips into hot zones are akin to an adventure novel. In addition to macro views, Matloff highlights the stories of individuals to provide a more personal perspective and connection. As distant as they may seem, mountain conflicts have global consequences. Understanding is crucial, and No Friends but the Mountains is an essential work on the fundamentals of high-altitude warfare. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me was warmly welcomed by readers who saw their own experiences reflected in Solnit's reaction to patronizing exchanges with men who considered her incompetent or underestimated her intelligence simply because of her gender. In her follow-up collection, The Mother of All Questions, Solnit continues the conversation with new and previously published essays that explore the "rapid social changes of a revitalized feminist movement in North America and around the world that is not merely altering the laws [but] changing our understanding of consent, power, rights, gender, voice and representation."

In this collection's newest and longest essay ("Silence Is Broken"), Solnit writes of "the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the erased, the unheard.... If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one's humanity. And the history of silence is central to women's history."

Distinguishing silence from quiet's more voluntary nature, Solnit explores why many in society perpetuate the silencing and discrediting of women through instances of domestic violence, sexual assault, online harassment and economic inequality, among others. Solnit is encouraged by the groundswell of activism in the aftermath of recent high-profile incidents such as the Steubenville rape case, the massacre at a University of California Santa Barbara sorority (which prompted the hashtag #yesallwomen), and reports of "America's Dad" Bill Cosby assaulting enough women for New York magazine to fill an entire cover with their photographs. Solnit documents an uprising of empowerment that can amplify others' voices and stories with the potential to bring meaningful change. --Melissa Firman, writer, editor and blogger at melissafirman.com

"I guess when you bring a dog into your life, you are setting yourself up for heartbreak, aren't you? Sure, you will most likely have to say good-bye and it will be the saddest day ever, but it's so worth it," Lauren Fern Watt learns through the unconditional love of her 160-pound, English mastiff best friend, Gizelle.

Nineteen-year-old Watt and her mother buy Gizelle as a not-so-little puppy on a whim one weekend. Gizelle's ever-growing size isn't an issue while Watt is in college near home in Tennessee. But when Watt--who habitually keeps lists in her journals--decides she's going to cross off a goal by moving to New York City with her giant best friend, life becomes much more challenging. Through tiny apartments, a boyfriend, her mother's addiction, even their jaunt on a Halloween costume contest runway, the pair navigate life in the city that never sleeps.

Gizelle's Bucket List is more of a before-the-bucket-list story, but the last third focuses on the tragic news of the Gizelle's cancer diagnosis and list Watt creates to ensure her friend experiences as much life as possible in her remaining days. Anyone who's ever loved a pet will identify with the humor that fills one's heart to overflowing and the devastation that breaks it into a million pieces. Watt articulates those emotions with raw authenticity and honesty. She will undoubtedly have readers scribbling their own pets' bucket lists before they even reach the end of this touching memoir. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

In this searching, plaintive poetry collection, Native American poet Layli Long Soldier digs deep into the often unseen strata of language, history and identity. Whereas beautifully upends poetic forms to summon a powerful voice hidden in the interstices.

Long Soldier is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Her poems confront the dual existence of those Americans belonging to a culture predating European colonialism. They address atrocities and injustices perpetrated against indigenous peoples and the duplicity of the American government in officially "apologizing" for historical wrongs. In fact, the collection's title refers to the government's self-indemnifying legalese, perhaps nowhere more conspicuous than in repeated use of the conjunction "whereas."

To break through such jargon, Long Soldier unleashes fierce poetic energy. While it manifests in experimentation with shape and punctuation--forcing attention to the bright lacunae of a page and alternately to isolated words in all their gravid peculiarity--it also produces cadences and images of breathtaking clarity: "Whereas since the moment had passed I accept what's done and the knife of my conscience/ slices with bone-clean self-honesty."
 
These poems are haunted by what Long Soldier describes as the "meta-phrasal ache of being language poor." Exploring this ache--and delving into the instability of linguistic meaning and identity--she is able to create a surprisingly positive argument for poetry as a way to fill the philosophic void and provide spiritual restitution. "My hope: my daughter understands wholeness for/ what it is, not for what it's not, all of it     the pieces." --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author

Avani's dad wants her to go to Flower Scouts to make some friends in their new town, but she doesn't have much in common with the other girls and hates being a scout. When an alien scout accidentally abducts her, though, scouting becomes her lodestar. Avani's new alien friend Mabel introduces her to the Z-98s, "the worst troop in Star Scouts," and Avani's lonely days are transformed. But when her new troop heads to the galactic Camp Andromeda for a week, Avani stumbles into a competition for badges with an angry "methane breather" (the camp is split between oxygen and methane scouts), and she'll need help from all of her new friends to get her back to Earth and keep her Star Scout status.

Lawrence's debut as a solo graphic novelist (he previously illustrated Muddy Max: The Mystery of Marsh Creek by Elizabeth Rusch and The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl by Melissa Keil) is a colorful romp with a silly sense of humor; one benefit to adding methane-breathing aliens to a book is endless opportunities for fart jokes. Though there's not much Earth science in the story--one of the badge challenges is Jetpacks--the book's sense of wonder will complement STEM-oriented lessons and readers. Lawrence’s illustrations are bright and dynamic, driving the action across (and down, and around) each page. And, significantly, when Avani's father tries to cheer her up with "tum meri raajkumari ho" ("you are my princess" in Hindi), Star Scouts adds a much-welcome young Indian girl to Earth's ranks of fictional space explorers. --Stephanie Anderson, assistant director for public services, Darien Library, Conn.

Freya is really something--funny, gorgeous, smart. She also happens to be the Norse goddess of love and war. Centuries of diminishing belief have left her in a weakened state, so she bides her time in a Florida mental hospital, passing herself off as a delusional high school student. As she says, it's "the only place where they'll believe in me." When the evil Finemdi corporation comes calling, resolved to add her to its stable of useful deities, Freya bolts, causing a bit of mayhem in the process. She gets work as a Disney World princess, gaining strength from the adoration of small children, and then decides to destroy Finemdi from the inside, pretending to work for the company while devising a plan of attack.

This raucous debut young adult novel by Matthew Laurence celebrates a strong-willed female out to establish herself as a "world-changing goddess on the rise." She's not above using her sexual charms to get humans and gods to do her bidding, but she's also dabbling in something new for a goddess of her vintage, self-control. As she resists the urge toward chaos, she gains control over her life, a lesson any non-divine teenager might find helpful. In Finemdi, Laurence nicely satirizes the earnestness of corporate life. One droll scene shows Freya and her nemesis, Dionysus, enduring a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Divine Calibration: Setting you up for success!" Freya's refusal to cede her divinity to her corporate overlords, and her determination to fight back when the moment is right, make her a goddess worth worshipping. --Ann Shaffer, freelance writer and editor

Mr. Brown, a cheerful, pear-shaped brown bear, is a big, big fan of hats. As he steps out one morning, he's wearing the perfect topper to call on his friend Miss Plum: a wide-brimmed purple derby with a perky flower in the brim. Alas! It's raining. Luckily, "I have just the hat for that," says Mr. Brown, retreating to don a bright yellow rain hat. He opens the door again... but now it's snowing! Thank goodness he has just the hat for a snowstorm, too: a cozy, green-ear-flapped number. Savvy readers will have a sneaking suspicion by now that his next attempt to leave the house will be met by yet another hat-changing event--and they will be right. Again and again (but not enough to get boring!), dogged Mr. Brown returns to his hat rack to find the right headgear for a marching band, a "rootin' tootin' rodeo" and even a fire-breathing dragon. When he realizes he's going to be late for his visit, his delightful solution is, of course, to wear them all, one on top of the other. Little does he know that the biggest surprise of the day awaits him behind Miss Plum's door: a birthday party for him with all the friends we've been catching sight of in previous pages.

Hats off to T. Nat Fuller and Rob Hodgson for joining the pantheon of hat-obsessed children's authors and illustrators. Their silly and entertaining contribution will fit nicely on the shelf between P.D. Eastman's Go, Dog. Go! and Esphyr Slobodkina's Caps for Sale. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor