With a bold mixture of magical realism and unflinching frankness, Daisy Johnson guides readers into the brooding fenlands of England. Fen: Stories uses the wetlands fed by underground springs to tie together her remarkable stories.

The setting is central to her work; as Johnson has said in an interview, the fen "is not the coast. It is land that dreams of being coast." Similarly, her characters are not quite one thing, instead they dream of being something else. She adds, "The women in these stories feel the way the land does. As if they're missing something." In "Starver," a seemingly typical teenager stops eating. Instead of the expected tale of anorexia, the girl transforms into an eel and is reverently deposited in canal.

A theme of language weaves throughout the collection. In "Heavy Devotion," a messiah-like child learns to speak by taking words and memories from his mother. "The stealings," as she calls them, begins with the words she needs most, and ends with the inability to remember her name or "the sense of things." Johnson observes that "language spoken [in the fen] isn't the same as in other places; it's taken over, changed or destroyed entirely."

The women in these stories drink and smoke and swear and have sex and make bad choices. "A story seemed to find its place here when it did not look away from what was coming. I'm not sure our literary words should be for soothing." Johnson's next offering will be eagerly awaited after this strong and fearless debut. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

Mary Gordon's latest, There Your Heart Lies, is a novel of history across generations in which a woman seeks a meaningful life that reconciles her desire for universal justice with the need for personal compassion.

Marian is the ninth child of a wealthy Irish-Catholic family. At 19, she abruptly abandons her rigid upbringing in the wake of her brother Johnny's suicide, after his homosexuality was "discovered" and radically "treated"; the Church and her father knew best. In 1937, Marian boards an ocean liner for Europe to support the Republican anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War. Helping out in a Valencia hospital, she confronts the tangible horrors of ideological war--the torture and the rubble of homes, families and friends torn apart. She also evolves into a woman with passions and disappointments as she falls for a local doctor and bears his son. For 10 years she is stuck in an autocratic Spain searching for a life with some window of hope.

Layered between the chapters of Marian's life in Spain, Gordon tells the "today" story of Marian's settled life in Rhode Island, now 92 years old and cared for by her 22-year-old granddaughter, Amelia, from Los Angeles. When Marian is diagnosed with cancer, she realizes that her fraught and complicated past needs to be passed on to Amelia, to give her granddaughter a context for her own emerging life.

In There Your Heart Lies, Gordon weaves past and present, personal and public, into a rewarding exploration of recognition and acceptance. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

A senior writer at BuzzFeed Canada and contributor to the Hairpin and the New Yorker, Scaachi Koul stuns with her witty and affecting debut essay collection, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. Each piece combines self-deprecating humor, personal observation and keen cultural insight to examine the roots of modern fears and desires.

In the brilliantly layered opener, "Inheritance Tax," Koul excavates the origins of her own menagerie of phobias, including flying, swimming and traveling to exotic locales. Her parents immigrated to Canada from India, and after the deaths of their parents, became increasingly protective of their young daughter. Koul, in turn, adopted their worrisome ways and to this day frets over the "unknown forces" that might take the life of a loved one. Impressively, Koul writes with a humor that elevates her worries into something more universal.

Koul's parents reappear throughout the collection. In "Fair and Lovely," Koul and her family--including a young niece who is "always passing for white"--visit relatives in India. There, Koul experiences privileges as a light-skinned Indian woman that weren't available to her back in Calgary, and she watches with complicated feelings of pride and concern as strangers praise her niece's fair skin. By parsing these interactions, the essay transcends personal travelogue to create a biting yet hilarious commentary on racism. Taken together, the pieces offer a frank perspective of what it's like to live as a woman of color in both Western and Indian cultures. --Amy Brady, freelance writer and editor

Single parenting is hard enough, but Ella's situation is further complicated: she's on welfare and has PTSD from witnessing her father murder her mother at age seven. She has no memory of what happened that night, but her body remembers, causing debilitating panic attacks that temporarily put her in the psych ward, which prompts child services to take away her young son, Alex.

After Ella springs him from the foster home, they flee to the seaside town in Denmark where she grew up and take refuge in her grandmother's rundown home. Ella soon realizes the only way to stop the panic attacks is finally to confront what happened the night her mother died. But can she handle the truth?

What My Body Remembers is Agnete Friis's first solo outing after cowriting the Nina Borg series (The Boy in the Suitcase) with Lene Kaaberbøl. Friis is more than up to the task of sole authorship. She doesn't sugarcoat Ella's life; mental illness and poverty, plus notoriety in her hometown for being a murderer's daughter, add up to a bleak existence.

But Ella is stronger than she realizes and isn't without humor. When a Justin Bieber song comes on, "I pounced on the radio and shut him up," because Ella has "an acute allergic reaction to anything that sounded like crying." The plot twists aren't too surprising, but Friis's compassion for damaged people and Ella's reclamation of her life and sanity make this a memorable read. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Professor and historian Wayne Flynt (Keeping the Faith) first met Nelle Harper Lee in 1983 when the press-shy author of To Kill a Mockingbird spoke at an Alabama heritage festival. A friendly correspondence (with occasional visits) began in 1992 and continued until Lee's death in 2016.

Mockingbird Songs collects both sides of their correspondence, and Flynt begins each chapter with succinct background information on the letters to follow. Lee may have avoided the spotlight, but her letters reveal a devilishly funny, well-informed and gracious participant in life. Far from being a recluse, Lee lived half of every year in the Manhattan apartment she bought in the 1960s. "She was not one to excuse misstatements of fact, suffer fools gladly, silently dismiss literary misquotations, or allow anyone to invade her space without invitation," Flynt writes. But, she was also "empathetic, warm, nonjudgmental and a wonderful conversationalist."

A stroke in 2007 slowed her down but didn't affect her faculties. Her letters have precision and punch. She recalls her complicated friendship with Truman Capote, stating, "I was his oldest friend and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold." She also delighted in the success of the 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman, her first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, knowing that it presents a less romanticized version of Atticus Finch (and her father).

Mockingbird Songs is a sliver of an epistolary biography, but it towers over dry and unauthorized bios of Harper Lee thanks to her strong, compelling and entertaining voice situated center stage. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

In this brief remembrance of his parents, before and after his arrival late in their marriage, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford (Independence Day, Canada) offers a slice of America in the last century, showing a hard-working middle-class couple whose dreams he speculates upon, but whose love he never doubted.

Because he sees his parents as individuals rather than a "parental unit," he shapes the book into two sections: the first about his father, Parker, born in 1904, then about his mother, Edna, born in 1910, both in Arkansas, although Edna grew up more rural circumstances. They wed in 1928 and lived on the road, driving among five states as Parker called on accounts he served as a salesman for the Faultless Starch Company. When Richard arrived in 1943, they settled in Jackson, Miss. Parker continued to travel, and the family reunited each weekend.

Some of Ford's memories are richly detailed--descriptions of 1950s cars Parker test drove, the new housing developments they visited--while others remain vague: "Maybe I was nine or seven or five." But Ford clearly recalls his father's fatal heart attack when he was 13. Of his mother, Ford writes, "Nothing for her would be quite good again."

Other authors, including Richard Russo and Ruth Reichl, have written memoirs of their ordinary parents, and Ford's homage is similarly respectful and appreciative. "They loved each other. They loved me. Nothing else much mattered." --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

In 2013, Charlie English (The Snow Tourist), then international news editor of the Guardian, became obsessed with the news coming out of Timbuktu. Jihadists were destroying the city's religious monuments because they were not properly Islamic, and librarians were smuggling medieval books out of the city in order to preserve them. English was not the first Westerner to be fascinated by the city and its treasures: throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries European explorers had tried to find their way to the legendary golden city of Africa.

In The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past, English intertwines the history of Europe's relationship with--and quest to "discover"--a city that few Europeans had ever seen and first-hand reporting on the threat to Timbuktu's historical heritage. The result is a parallel set of adventures, both of which are shaped by personal danger, the search for funding, the difficulties of traveling across the desert, the threat of armed bandits, the frustrations of dealing with international cultural organizations, and a passion for medieval documents.

The contemporary story may be familiar to readers of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu. English, however, adds a layer of complexity by placing it in the context of Europe's historical attempts to reach the city. He captivatingly considers the mythic quality Timbuktu attained in the collective imagination, and the failure to understand the city's continued importance as a treasure trove of knowledge. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson (StarTalk) stands out as an engaging, charismatic and supremely knowledgeable science popularizer who knows how to explain the fundamentals of physics and astrophysics. Tyson promises Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is "a brief but meaningful introduction to the field" where readers "will earn a foundational fluency in all major ideas and discoveries that drive our modern understanding of the universe."

In about 200 pages, Tyson introduces big ideas, questions and concepts, and explains essential background information in breezy, humorous and concise language for laypeople to digest easily. "A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth's past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth's flora and fauna--including all the famous outsized dinosaurs," writes Tyson, explaining how mammals that were previously T. rex hors d'oeuvres evolved into Homo sapiens.

"The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you," reminds Tyson. But thankfully, Tyson does feel this compulsion, and succeeds in giving non-scientists an excellent introduction to quasars, dwarf galaxies, dark energy, black holes, the formation of Earth (nine billion years after the Big Bang), exoplanets and quarks. He even explains why no one saw the last two exploding planets, and ties it into a reference to Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Tyson's fun introduction to science, physics and astrophysics is a book that will create future scientists. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

"Some families have hardware stores. My family--especially me and my mother--has thinking about racism." W. Kamau Bell, host of CNN's United Shades of America, has experienced a lifetime of being on the outside. A blerd (black nerd) in school, Bell took little interest in sports or popular music, opting instead for comic books, martial arts and John Coltrane. When he started his career in comedy, he didn't fit in with the typical stand-up artists so he chose to make his own space with a multimedia solo stage show called The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour. And as a 6'4" African American male, he deals daily with being under-represented in all walks of life. The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell is a series of heartfelt, humorous essays about all of these aspects of Bell, as well as his roles as father, husband, friend, celebrity, even podcast host. Throughout, racism is intimately tied to it all.

At turns sarcastic, poetic and enraged, Bell's language is potent. His own realization of how racism intersects with other forms of discrimination, like sexism, broadens his platform and embraces a wide audience. Awkward Thoughts is definitely entertaining, but it also invites readers to look through different eyes. And those who aren't inspired to take action will at least have considered a new view. As Bell says, "that's progress." --Jen Forbus, freelancer

To read t'ai freedom ford's how to get over is to wish to see it performed live. Laden with internal rhymes and cascading images, it could chart on the radio if a drum track were added. This debut, however, is anything but disposable pop. Half of the poems are a fierce reckoning with the systemic injustices of the past, while the other half are a sweaty insistence on embracing the potential of the present.

Braided throughout the book are "past life portraits"--poems that channel the voices of historical objects and characters with method-actor intensity. Considering a machete used in the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue or Richard Pryor's grandmother raising him while running a brothel in Illinois, ford trains a sharp eye on domestic details. She writes that her small hands are good "for rescuing earrings wedged between car seats," and maintains a keen sense of her forebears, nodding to Ntozake Shange in the line "blue like colored girls who done tried dope when hope wasn't enough."

The pulse of these poems quickens most when ford writes of the pleasures of the body. The poem entitled "honeysuckle, pussy, and random acts of nature" concludes, "both taste of wet grass and dew/ watery honey and warm clay/ and on a hot summer day/ i can smell it for miles and miles." Tuned in and turned on, how to get over is a summons not to be missed. --John Duvernoy, bookseller, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, Wash.

In her first novel in four years, Tonya Bolden (Searching for Sarah Rector) translates her passion for the past into a beautiful and harrowing vision of freedom and tragedy.

Mariah remembers that "a hungry hush sent a shiver down her spine" on the day in 1864 when the Yankees arrived on her owner's land in Georgia, bringing her freedom. Born into slavery, the young woman gladly joins hundreds of other freed slaves following Union forces north. On the march, she meets Caleb, a kind young man who "brought to mind sightings of the moon in the middle of the day" for Mariah, who had previously never met a freeborn black person. Caleb lets Mariah and her developmentally delayed little brother Zeke ride in his wagon; through their conversations, Mariah learns about the war and freedom while the reader discovers the horrors she and her loved ones faced while enslaved. The couple fall in love as easily as breathing, but catastrophe looms over their future.

Teens may be surprised to see that "[c]olored lives don't matter" to many Union officers in this reimagining of a dark moment in American history. Poetic in tone and savage in its depictions of the tortures slaves endured, Crossing Ebenezer Creek grants dignity and depth to its characters and considers the difficult and vulnerable position of African Americans as they adapted to freedom among whites who did not always view them as human beings. Readers will fall in love with Bolden's gentle lyricism as she unflinchingly unfolds a difficult story. --Jaclyn Fulwood, Youth Services Manager at Main Branch, Dayton Metro Library (Ohio)

Eliza Mirk is a high school senior who lives in Indiana, but only in the technical sense--she's a pariah at school and feels no connection with her cheerfully athletic family. Eliza really lives online, in chats with friends she's never met in person and on the forums for Monstrous Sea, the massively popular webcomic she's created under a pseudonym. "It's so much easier to deal with people when you feel like they can't touch you," she explains. When the silent Wallace transfers into her school, Eliza is prepared to ignore and be ignored by him, too--until she realizes he's a Monstrous Sea fan. Eliza cautiously starts to open up to Wallace even as she hides the fact that she's the creator of his favorite comic.

Author Francesca Zappia (Made You Up) punctuates prose sections with Monstrous Sea artwork and online chats, mimicking the way one dips between real life and cyberspace. Zappia aims the book squarely at teenagers who have emotional walls up, fully taking Eliza's side when she explains why she prefers to stay absorbed in her sketchbook, but also hinting that Eliza's family might not be so bad if she lets them in. Another interesting thrust of the story is Eliza's relationship with her readers. Zappia is a popular author on tumblr and Wattpad, and she pointedly delves into the way fandoms can smother the creators they love. Eliza and Her Monsters is a compelling read on the labyrinths of imagination and the simple pleasures of ordinary life. --Ali Davis, freelance writer and playwright