"What kind of maniac travels in time?" The answer is Dr. Rachel Katzman--a Jane Austen fan with a keen desire to retrieve the manuscript of the author's supposedly unfinished seventh novel, and to identify the mysterious disease that caused her death at age 41. Under the auspices of the Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, Rachel and her colleague Liam Finucane travel to 1815, where they pose as a wealthy brother and sister newly arrived in England from Jamaica. From there, Kathleen Flynn spins an entertaining story of time travel, complicated romantic connections and Austenalia in her debut novel, The Jane Austen Project.

Rachel's wry, observant narrative voice teaches readers the delights and hardships of life in 1815 with rich historical detail. Flynn renders the whole Austen clan vividly: charming Henry, self-absorbed James, neurotic Mrs. Austen, disapproving Cassandra. Jane is as witty and wise a friend as Rachel could wish for, but the latter can never forget that she has a set return date and a task to complete. As Jane's health worsens and their time begins to run out, Rachel also must face the fact that her feelings for Liam are decidedly un-sisterly. Flynn's conclusion raises (and leaves lingering) a few unsettling questions: How much change is too much? Can anyone travel back in time without drastically affecting the future? And is a manuscript--even a completed version of The Watsons--worth a life?

Witty, well-researched and thought-provoking, Flynn's debut is a fun and unusual addition to the canon of Austen tributes and pastiche. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

In his fourth novel, Fredrik Backman displays once again an almost omnipotent insight into human nature. This time around, the author of Britt-Marie Was Here spreads out his story among the citizens of a small town whose pride is wholly invested in their hockey team. From teenagers to the elderly, Backman chisels each in fantastic detail, illuminating the deepest recesses of their souls while touching the deepest recesses of the readers'.

Beartown has been slowly deteriorating due to unemployment, but the city's promising junior-level hockey team could be everyone's salvation. If the Bears can pull out a championship, there is talk of a hockey academy and a new arena, and that could translate into reasons for people to move to Beartown. The hopes of a whole city are riding on a team of teenage boys, until a fateful night changes everything.

Beartown carries a darker tone than Backman's previous novels, but still possesses his charming wit and delightfully colorful perspective on humanity. His dialogue flows with an authentic and natural rhythm that reflects a keenly perceptive ear--whether from a teenage girl with musical aspirations, a young man coming to terms with his identity or a seasoned coach facing the end of his career. Backman offers his audience a compassionate view of their lives through concise but powerful imagery.

One needn't be a fan of hockey to appreciate Beartown. It's merely Backman's vehicle to themes of loyalty, love and community. He will drive the Beartown Bears into the hearts of all his readers, sports aficionados or not. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

In Orly Konig's debut novel, it's been 16 years since protagonist Emma Metz has set foot in her Maryland hometown. A terrible accident at the local Jumping Frog Farm involving her two best friends--a girl named Jilli and a horse named Jack--drove her away and she's never looked back. Until now.

Her emotionally distant father, who'd never recovered from the death of Emma's mother, has just passed away. As she organizes his affairs and sorts through his belongings, Emma is reminded of her deep and surprisingly abiding love for the farm where she spent the happiest years of her childhood. She also discovers a series of letters and drawings that reveal a closer connection between her damaged family and the farm than she could have guessed. Can Emma let the pain of the last 16 years go in the hopes of a happier future?

Gently paced and introspective, The Distance Home is told in the present, with important points in Emma's past featured through a series of flashbacks. Emma matures from an eight-year-old riding for the first time to a 16-year-old winning competitions left and right, coming full circle through her rise toward horse-riding superiority, fall from grace and journey back to the Jumping Frog Farm. A moving story of homecoming, forgiveness and reconciliation, The Distance Home will appeal to readers of Kristin Harmel or Katherine Reay. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) delivers another dark, spellbinding suspense novel with Into the Water. This time, the search to unravel a mysterious death focuses on the river that cuts through Beckford, a small, northern British town. Nicknamed the "Drowning Pool," the river is where, over the centuries, local women--outsiders as well as misfits from within the community--have died under tragic, often suspicious, circumstances.

Danielle "Nel" Abbott--a single mother, successful photographer and lifetime Beckford resident who had been writing a book about the Drowning Pool, its history and its secrets--has become a suicide casualty at the very place of horror she had been researching. Her younger sister, Jules Abbott, gladly fled Beckford years before. An unmarried social worker in London whose bitterness and resentment kept her estranged from Nel for years, Jules returns to Beckford to sort out the "bloody mess" and care for Nel's outspoken and rebellious 15-year-old daughter, Lena. Neither believes that Nel killed herself, and Lena also has doubts about the suicide of her best friend, Katie Whittaker, at the Drowning Pool six months earlier. Katie's inconsolable parents are wracked with guilt. Were they so focused on their anxious, sensitive son that they didn't give proper attention to their confident, over-achieving--yet obviously vulnerable--daughter?

Hawkins keeps readers guessing while exploring the overt and subtle ways trauma, grief and long-buried secrets can affect minds, hearts and motivations. A growing undertow of suspense builds as some characters, consciously and subconsciously, cannot face who they are, so they reinvent themselves and their memories. This intricate story is filled with red herrings and surprising reversals that probe the tangled depths of family loyalty. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Richard Blais, winner of Top Chef All-Stars and a regular on Food Network, professes to be "a little cr-a-zy in the kitchen," and So Good: 100 Recipes from My Kitchen to Yours has an eclectic collection of recipes to match his persona. Although he's a successful restaurant chef, in this fun cookbook, Blais focuses on the dishes he loves to make at home for his family.

His curiosity in the kitchen has led Blais to experiment with many styles of cooking, and thus So Good contains a range of recipes. Many have an Asian influence--oysters with a kimchi cocktail sauce, Chinese chicken and rice porridge, a Hong Kong bowl with trotters and wontons. Others have a Southern flair, like fried chicken, cornbread and campfire baked beans. He also reimagines many old favorites, like vegetarian Horse Carrot Pot Roast, Spaghetti and Bone Marrownara Meatballs, and a delectable Brown Sugar Cheesecake in Oreo Crust with Honeyed Blueberries.

With fresh, unusual ingredients, cute pictures of his family and funny introductions to each recipe, Blais's personality and reputation for being a little unorthodox in the kitchen shine on each page. Sure to be popular with fans of Top Chef and home cooks looking for inspiration, So Good is a beautiful cookbook featuring 100 recipes from this delightfully quirky chef. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

From our earliest moments, we accumulate memories through images, scents, sounds, etc., and as we accrue the vocabulary to describe those senses, the words become the links to those past moments. We use words in speaking, writing, reading and in our internal thinking. So what happens when the ability to form words--to access memories, to speak, write and read or to have an inner monologue--disappears?

When an aneurysm ruptured in Lauren Marks's brain at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, she woke in a hospital and discovered she had lost much of her language abilities. In A Stitch of Time, her soul-searching debut, Marks recalls how she struggled to find the words that had seemingly always been there, but were now beyond her grasp. She ponders who she was and the interactions she had with long-time friends, experiences she could not readily remember. Her aphasia gradually improves as she enters speech therapy classes and learns new ways to process information, yet there is always a piece or two missing in her comprehension.

Feeling as though she'd become someone new in the flash of a second, Marks dives into research about aphasia and the way words play a vital role in human connections. She depicts the support she received and challenges she faced with her long-time boyfriend and with immediate family and close friends. Marks's story is humbling and hopeful, a demonstration of the mind's flexibility and resourcefulness to heal, morph and press on, even when met with potentially life-threatening circumstances. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Father Greg Lockwood is a Catholic priest with very conservative views. He plays guitar too loudly (and badly), makes thunderous pronouncements, lounges in boxers--and has a wife and five children (he was originally a Lutheran priest and then became a Catholic priest, and kept his wife and family through Vatican dispensation). Father Greg is Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy, an often self-centered patriarch whose life, if his wife is away, descends into willful chaos. Lockwood (Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals) exploits this perfect set-up for absurdity with verve, while exploring life's conundrums: "Faith and my father taught me the same lesson: to live in the mystery, even to love it." A medical crisis causes Lockwood and her husband, Jason, to move into her parents' rectory for a while, providing a rich lode for mining the surrealism of her childhood and adulthood.

As a teenager, Lockwood had "grown timid in the face of my father's thunder." But she found herself in writing; she became a poet whose command of both lyricism and zaniness are beguiling: "the citric humor of high school girls--which is eternal, but which tasted new to us at the time. My friends and I were four full oranges of it, with a resilient shine on our leaves." At a Carmelite convent, "the darkness smelled of curled leaf tips and keys." In her mother's closet she can "still find hangers with pro-life messages printed on them. The Midwest, contrary to popular opinion, does not lack a sense of irony."

Priestdaddy is flamboyant, like Father Greg. At the same time, the graces of humor and familial love shine through. Patricia Lockwood writes with radiance and audacity: "On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength." --Marilyn Dahl

Richard Rothstein (Grading Education) is a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute and the author of numerous books and reports on race, ethnicity and education. In The Color of Law, he brings clarity and firm evidence to a topic that has often been glazed over with omissions and euphemisms.

Rothstein systematically refutes the popular idea that segregated neighborhoods are the de facto result of personal choices. He makes a sound argument that they are a de jure ghetto system built by 20th-century government policies that violated the 13th Amendment. He demonstrates how city ordinances and housing projects, many promoted by the New Deal and the Federal Housing Administration, enforced existing segregation and expanded it to previously integrated areas. These initiatives were often supported by liberal progressives who argued that they would promote racial harmony. He also examines wage suppression for African Americans, industrial rezoning, the segregation efforts of white homeowners, churches and colleges, and the roles of corrupt landlords, realtors, lenders and regulators. All these factors twisted together into a choking net that could trap even the most resourceful and hardworking individuals.

This is everyone's problem, says Rothstein. "As a nation, we have paid an enormous price for avoiding an obligation to remedy the unconstitutional segregation we have allowed to fester." He is not optimistic about the political will for change, but he makes both radical and moderate recommendations, and identifies the many obstacles to reform. The first step is to learn and accept the historical truth. --Sara Catterall

Perhaps only in a Tom McCarthy essay would profound philosophical insight be pulled from both William Faulkner and M.C. Hammer. Such is the brainy, playful and always subversive power of McCarthy's first collection, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish.

McCarthy (Remainder) is a novelist and ardent defender of the avant-garde. This collection includes 15 of his most provocative essays, many of which have appeared in publications like the Believer and London Review of Books. Almost every essay involves the interpretation of art and literature--classics, pop music and movies sucked into the grind of his intellect. Blended with an encyclopedic knowledge of modern science, especially physics, McCarthy's writing branches out and electrifies new conceptions of reality, much like the tentacles of a jellyfish.

A recurrent theme in the collection is that of the "recessional," or what McCarthy describes as a perceptual space between normal measures of time, between life's inevitable pretenses, where the art of fiction finds raw experience. This is the heart of artistic modernity, McCarthy concludes: a private space always incomplete in its becoming, resisting categorization. If McCarthy relies too much on postmodern skepticism at times--that is, a reflexive aversion to logical positivism--he makes up for it with the sheer, careening energy of his prose, at once wordy and incisive. He's an adept stylist, in the vein of Nabokov, and never fails to deliver dazzling twists of language and meaning. Each essay impresses with the author's preternatural intelligence. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish will entice lovers of art and literature. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author

Serving much the same function that manga and comic books do today, ukiyo-e (meaning "the floating, transient world"--the art of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings) arose in 17th-century Japan to satisfy public appetites for escapism from the rigidity of everyday life. Ukiyo-e offered safe ways to explore fears and experience the sensual pleasures of taboo subjects; they also served as advertisements for kabuki productions and as ringing endorsements for travel to the Edo capital. Hokusai X Manga developed from a permanent exhibit of ukiyo-e at Germany's Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. It captures the many facets of this art form: the haunting religious imagery in yōkai ("hybrid spirits"); the quiet spirituality of geometrically layered, Prussian-blue landscapes; erotica, forbidden love and heroic battles. 

The anthology does a wonderful job of exploring the art form's origins and providing cultural context behind its mass appeal. The editors also analyze the visual techniques used in creating woodblock art, particularly in the development of the first comics, kibyōshi, which were cheaply assembled booklets of sequential pictures. Kibyōshi would become the precursors to the modern manga movement and influence anime greats such as Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) and Shigeru Mizuki (Kitaro). Though Hokusai X Manga fails to address the more widespread influence of these 17th-century Japanese artists on the West, this collection and its colorful commentary should serve as a valuable reference tool for manga enthusiasts and art collectors, with a good sampling of the best ukiyo-e prints. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Who wouldn't be stunned clean out of their cheap Payless shoes if their fairy godmother appeared in drag, bearing a striking resemblance to Diana Ross? Chris Bellows is certainly caught off guard.

Chris, a 17-year-old living with his stepmother, stepsister and stepbrother after his father's death, is quietly and innocuously making his way through high school. His family, however, intends to regain the wealth and social status they lost in the recession. His stepmother's plan involves a very public courtship and marriage between her daughter and New York's most eligible bachelor, J.J. Kennerly. That plan is threatened, however, when J.J. falls for Chris.

David Clawson breaks the glass slipper with his hilarious, heartwarming debut, a modern retelling of Cinderella. The vibrant characters in My Fairy Godmother Is a Drag Queen won't hesitate to steal readers' hearts even as they leave them laughing out loud. Chris's friend Duane, aka Coco Chanel Jones, radiates outrageousness--physically in his drag, but also through his intelligence, intuition, compassion, creativity and humor: "Baby, we've got to get you cleaned up and pretty. I'm going to be your fairy godmother, ya hear?... And when Coco says fairy, honey, she means fairy!" Clawson's dialogue is tack sharp, but be forewarned that it is not always wholesome.

The political element of the novel--the Kennerlys parallel the Kennedy clan--provides a strong conflict for Clawson's star-crossed lovers, putting their love in an all-too-real predicament and creating a perfect scenario to explore the theme of identity.

Ingeniously plotted with a spectacular cast, My Fairy Godmother Is a Drag Queen is magical excellence. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

When 13-year-old Chase Ambrose wakes up in a hospital after four days in a coma, there's a woman weeping at his side. "Where am I?" he asks. "Who are these people?" Turns out the woman is his mother, and Chase has developed amnesia after falling off his roof. Once he's recovered from his more acute injuries, he's free to return to most of his normal activities. The trouble is, he has absolutely no idea what those activities were, or with whom he did them. He's told he was a football star. He knows who his best friends are because he finds a picture of them on his phone. But why do so many people cower and cringe when he walks by? Why does a girl dump frozen yogurt on his head? And why do his supposed buddies now seem like "the worst people [he] know[s]?"

As he navigates life post-accident, Chase is horrified to learn that he used to spend his days terrorizing less popular kids. But he also begins finding happiness and satisfaction in things his old self never would have considered: the video club, for instance, and his volunteer work at the assisted living facility. As he learns more about the kinds of things he used to do--blowing up pianos and worse--Chase wonders about the person he was--and the person he is now. Meanwhile, those around him also struggle to understand who the "real" Chase is.

Told in the alternating viewpoints of Chase and his classmates, Restart, by master middle-grade storyteller Gordon Korman (Schooled; Ungifted; The Hypnotist #1), explores what happens when a boy who doesn't even know he needs a second chance gets one. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

"For the last time, NO PET!" Colette is told. But for this creative new-kid-in-town, an empty moving box quickly becomes the perfect device for introducing her titular "lost pet" to the neighborhood gang. "It's... a parakeet," Colette initially tells Albert and Tom, who appear outside her backyard. The boys propose seeking out Lily, because she has "huge binoculars" to help locate Colette's avian ally who, Colette next declares, is blue "[w]ith a bit of yellow on its neck." Colette continues to divulge delightful details during each encounter with a new friend, until the missing Marie-Antoinette is revealed to speak mostly French, have flown all over the world and last ate a rattlesnake in the jungle. Suddenly, Colette has an entourage ready to revel in all her "truly amazing" adventures--at least until she gets called home for dinner.

Isabelle Arsenault, who lives in Montreal and is a three-time Governor General's Literary Award winner, makes her charming debut as both writer and illustrator (her previous solo title, Alpha, was an ABC book). Her whimsical artistry sparkles here, as she uses just two colors--Marie-Antoinette's blue and yellow--to emphasize the enchanting power of a child's creativity. Colette's yellow hoodie stands out on every page, as the children fall in line to follow her creative lead. Arsenault emphasizes the growing elaborateness of Colette's fowl descriptions by adding color to what could be Marie-Antoinette's domain--the bird feeder, a tree's leaves, water fountain droplets; the more outrageous Colette's avian adventures become, the more colorfully spectacular Marie-Antoinette grows. For picture book readers of all ages, Arsenault's imagination celebration will prove irresistible. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon