In Gail Godwin's novel Grief Cottage, Marcus Harshaw is 11 years old when he faces the sudden, tragic death of his single mother. That summer he is left in the custody of his great-aunt Charlotte on a remote South Carolina island. His new guardian--a thrice married and divorced, set-in-her-ways, reclusive artist--takes in precocious, self-contained Marcus, and provides him a safe haven.

The young man's formative years with his mother--and their chronic struggles to make ends meet--made Marcus wise beyond his years, enabling him to adapt and be sensitive toward his aunt's brooding, hermetic life. Charlotte gained notoriety painting images of a deserted, dilapidated local house nicknamed Grief Cottage; its occupying family disappeared during Hurricane Hazel in 1954. The battered, run-down residence becomes a source of intrigue for Marcus, too, as he seeks to learn more about its history and those who perished there. This quest also unearths questions about Marcus's background--his relationship with his mother, how he lost his best friend from school and the identity of his absent father.

Godwin (Publishing: A Writer's Memoir) has written an exquisite narrative with metaphor embedded in subplots like the preservation of nested Loggerhead turtle eggs and the presence of a ghost at Grief Cottage. This grace-filled story probes aspects of life and death, isolation and family, and how great pain and loss can ultimately lead to unforeseen transcendence. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

A master of the historical fiction genre, Beatriz Williams (The Wicked City) sweeps readers across war-torn Europe to the tropical landscape of Central Florida with Cocoa Beach, a breathtaking family drama set amid the backdrop and aftermath of World War I. 

It's February 1917, and Virginia Fortescue is driving a rickety ambulance across the muddy battlefields of northern France when she becomes smitten with army surgeon Captain Simon Fitzwilliam. Virginia is determined to resist Simon's charms, especially considering he has a wife back in England. It's an unconsummated marriage of convenience, Simon explains; his wife, Lydia, loved Simon's deceased twin, Samuel, and she stood to inherit a vast fortune. Marrying Lydia would guarantee that the wealth would remain in the family and that Simon would have easy access to the money. Despite Virginia's hesitations, the two eventually marry.

Five years later, Simon dies in a mysterious fire at a lavish villa he's building for Virginia and Evelyn, their daughter. Determined to settle his estate and learn the truth behind Simon's death, Virginia travels to Cocoa Beach, Fla., where she encounters bootleggers, bandits, criminals and conspirators. She also discovers there's much more to Simon--including a shady past and layers of deception--than she ever could have imagined.

The literal and figurative symbolism of a once grand home that has been destroyed allows Williams to give everyone who has suffered heartbreak and been wrong in love and life a chance to see themselves in Virginia. Amid the ashes, it is possible to find the truth and emerge stronger, renewed and with a foundation built upon self-assurance and independence. --Melissa Firman, writer, editor and blogger at melissafirman.com 

Kelly J. Ford's novel Cottonmouths captures life in backwoods America like a fish in a frying pan. Ford takes her young, raw, flailing characters and rakes them over the heat of a high-octane plot until their vulnerable insides sizzle on the page.

When Emily Skinner drops out of college and returns to Drear's Bluff, a small town in the Ozark region of Arkansas, she finds her best friend Jody Monroe raising a child by herself. The single mom lives on an old farm and leases an outbuilding to meth-cookers in order to make ends meet. That Emily, a closeted lesbian whose sexuality disturbs her conservative parents, is in love with Jody adds even more heat to an already explosive set-up.

The results are thrilling. The only hangups occur when Ford uses Emily's internal voice to recapitulate plot points, as though the reader needed to be reminded of major developments. These narrative reminders are unnecessary given that Ford is such a strong writer. Her prose is sharp and lyrical, rendering the South--and outdated attitudes--with uncompromising candor, though such honesty doesn't preclude sympathy for the many small-town characters caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and resentment. Ford's writing fully shines when addressing young, forbidden love and the way it torments her protagonist: "The craving came on like a fever, as if a coal had been stoked within and blurred the edges of reasonable thought." It's a love that burns and breaks and leads to dangerous places. Cottonmouths grips the heart and doesn't let go. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author

Aging is no fun, as the protagonists of Helen Simpson's Cockfosters are all too aware. The breezy, dialogue-heavy style of these stories, each named after a location, masks the melancholy that drives them, with each piece focusing on middle-aged Britons who wonder what the rest of their lives have in store. The title story sets the tone: two 40ish women ride the Piccadilly Line back to Cockfosters, its northernmost terminal, to retrieve the glasses one of them left behind. As they discuss the pain of not knowing when they'll die, their journey is a metaphor for one of the collection's themes: life might be easier, or at least more predictable, if people knew the date on which they'll reach the end of the line.

Simpson explores this theme, as well as that of economic inequality, throughout these stories. A husband frets as much about aging as about the impending visit of his bombastic mother-in-law. After their holiday reading of The Chimes, book group attendees converse about "very average people who've made a great deal of money over the last twenty years." A 50-year-old acupuncturist likens the coming stage of life to Arizona, "brilliantly lit and level and filled with dependable sunshine," to a history professor client. The other woman agrees and says that one might as well be brave about death. After all, as another character in this wise book says, it "makes nothing out of something, and it lasts forever." --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

The cover of Hallie Ephron's You'll Never Know, Dear gives the impression that the sinister reside inside. Indeed, the opening pages include some marvelously unnerving descriptions, with shelf after shelf of bisque heads, glass eyes, stiff wigs and "bald, celluloid baby dolls, placid and patient, their painted eyes forever open." Fear not: in the first-rate hands of Ephron, four-time Mary Higgins Clark Award finalist, working through the creepy is worth the reward.

When Lis Strenger was 7, her sister Janey disappeared from the family yard under her watch. Also missing was Janey's doll, a special owner-replica doll made by the girls' mother, Sorrel Woodham. Unbeknownst to Lis, now a mother herself, for almost 40 years Miss Sorrel has purchased a classified ad on the anniversary of Janey's disappearance. Along with a photograph of the doll made in her daughter's image is a $5,000 reward offered for its return.

In the 39th year, Janey's doll may have finally come home. A mysterious young woman shows up with a very old, worn and dirty doll that bears Miss Sorrel's stamp. She runs off before Sorrel can question her, but three decades of Woodham women are determined to identify the doll, find the mystery owner and perhaps discover what happened to Janey.

You'll Never Know, Dear is a grabber, a mystery ballasted by women on a mission and the ties that bind them. Ephron is sharp; she swerves around potential plot snags and tosses red herrings like a master. Power past the menacing doll-head cover and reap the benefits of great writing. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist) has tackled issues of race, gender and class head-on with intelligence and unabashed insight. In Hunger, Gay turns the lens inward on her lengthy battle with body image and weight loss, reflecting on the hypocrisies underlying modern notions of beauty and femininity.

A violent rape at the age of 12 propels Gay into a 30-year psychological battle in which she turns to her appetite to stop the hurt and "fill the gaping wound of me, or to try to fill the gaping wound of me." Food became a source of safety for her. In this memoir, Gay uses her experiences to draw out the fallacies of unrealistic demands society places upon women to occupy a smaller space. Behind the deceptively simple passages lies a minefield of emotional pain and longing, whose revelation exposes uncomfortable truths about the destructive patterns that push women to embrace unhealthy behaviors.

"Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes," she writes. "And then I think about how f***ed up it is to promote this idea that our truest selves are thin women hiding in our fat bodies like imposters, usurpers, illegitimates."

At its rawest, Hunger addresses the dreams and desires, the hopes and fears, and the actualities of living in an overweight body, "hungering for what I cannot have, or perhaps wanting what I dare not allow myself to have."

Gay's journey ends not with the silver linings promised by reality television, but with uncertainty, the unknown and a quiet confidence despite the brutality of her past. Hunger is a work of exceptional courage by a writer of exceptional talent. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

For more than 25 years, anthropologist James Suzman has lived, worked with and studied the Bushmen of the Kalahari region in southern Africa. In this mix of memoir and scientific analysis, he shares a comprehensive history of one group in particular, the Khoisan, whose ancestors were among the earliest humans on earth. He traces the changes they have endured, particularly those created when Western explorers arrived in the 1600s and commandeered the land, forcing the Khoisan into increasingly smaller areas, a displacement similar to that of Native Americans onto reservations in the U.S.

Using personal stories from his adoptive family, Suzman discusses the Khoisan's methods of hunting with poison-tipped arrows, the importance of meat in their diet and the effects of drought and overhunting by nonnatives, including the widespread slaughter of elephants. He also explores the Khoisans' concepts of time, money, work and personal freedom. Many of this group, however, are turning their backs on the old ways, preferring cell phones and connecting on social media to scratching out a living in the sandy soils of the Kalahari. Ironically, Suzman shares, there are Khoisans of this latter demographic who earn a meager wage by living in mock tribal villages. These facsimiles harken back to the days of their ancestors and give eager tourists the opportunity to see "real" Bushmen. Suzman's thoughtful details preserve an insightful link to a shared human history. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Literature lovers looking for a better understanding of their favorite works, as well as writers who are struggling to create good literature will find new insights in Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. Margot Livesey (Mercury) is an admired writing teacher and a graceful and perceptive writer, the author of eight novels. This collection offers her experienced opinions and insights on the mechanics of writing fiction, novels in particular. It is also a memoir of her development as a writer in the context of her life and relationships. She describes her early misunderstandings and errors in composing fiction, and how she has moved from unconscious to conscious choices of techniques.

Much of her teaching is by example, using walk-through analysis of classic novels and stories such as Madame Bovary, Persuasion, A Passage to India and The Portrait of a Lady. She distills useful advice from authorities such as Aristotle, Francine Prose, E.M. Forster and offers "sixteen golden sovereigns" of advice that she has extracted from reading Shakespeare. Bad writing can also be educational, in her experience, but the main thing is to read with careful attention to how an author succeeds and fails. "For the practicing artist, influence requires a more active engagement. We must work to be influenced." There are many good books on the art of writing, but even those who have a collection of favorites will appreciate these clear and thoughtful essays on writers and the architecture behind their art. --Sara Catterall

Edwidge Danticat established her credentials as a memoirist with her 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Brother, I'm Dying. In The Art of Death, another entry in Graywolf Press's "The Art of" series on literary craft and criticism, Danticat again displays abundant prowess. She seamlessly blends an account of her mother's death from ovarian cancer in 2014 with an enlightening and compact survey of death in prose and poetry, "in order to learn (or relearn) how one writes about death, so I can write, or continue to write, about the deaths that have most touched my life."

Moving from fellow memoirists like Christopher Hitchens and Susan Sontag, through the searing suicides of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, to the works of Tolstoy and Chekhov, the breadth of Danticat's literary reach is impressive--especially so in a book that spans fewer than 200 pages. She confesses that her selection is "not an objective grouping but a deeply personal one," encompassing the body of literature she has turned to "when living with and writing about death."

Embedded within this literary criticism, she also offers a concise, but moving, description of her mother's final illness. Sitting by her mother's bedside, Danticat, ever the writer, imagines "a type of story I could tell her to keep her awake, and thus alive--a story that would never end."

"We cannot write about death without writing about life," Danticat says. And so, despite its ostensible subject, The Art of Death overflows with life, quietly but insistently inspiring anyone reading it to make good use of what remains of that precious gift. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Acclaimed poet Charles Simic is 79 at the time of Scribbled in the Dark's publishing. It's hard not to read the images of darkness falling and lost hope contained in these poems as anything other than meditations on death. But that discounts the streak of puckish glee throughout the collection, the joy in language and in a good joke. Simic may know the lights are being turned off, but there's no reason that that can't be both laughed and cried about.

The quatrain "Shadow on the Wall" is a perfect example of this humor. "Round midnight/ Let's invite/ A fellow bedlamite/ For a bite," he propositions the reader, using a sing-song rhyme that is found nowhere else in the collection. Is Simic suggesting a merry midnight snack with a lunatic? And who is getting bitten? The poem is a lark, only to be followed two pages later by the titular piece, which soberly depicts "Streams of blood in the gutter/ Waiting for sunrise."

Most of the poems in Scribbled in the Dark are simply images teased into verse. Simic will take a single motion (eyes catching on the street, a shout from outside his door), and pry open all its energy onto the page, evoking the tiniest fraction of time to reveal its beauty. None of that might be enough in the case of the man who finds that "little by little night overtakes him," but it might elicit a smile now and again. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

Chazz Young, CEO of DV8, a cable television network dedicated to trashy reality shows like So You Think You Can Pole Dance, has a vision. As he tells the astrophysicists he's hired from NASAW (National Association for the Study of Astronomy and Weightlessness), "[w]e want to take a bunch of teenagers and shoot them into space." Of course, "we'll be faking it," he reassures them: "[T]he mission commences. Lifelong friendships are formed. Bitter fights erupt. Maybe a slap or two. A slap in zero gravity--that's never been done before!... Every eye in America will tune in to check on their new cosmic sweethearts."

But--surprise! Things don't go quite as planned, as the 10 unwitting teens, carefully selected to fit Chazz's hilariously offensive stereotypes--the Party Girl, Rich Kid, Black Gay Astronaut--proceed to do... nothing much. Desperate to hold his viewers' attention, Chazz stirs things up with a manufactured asteroid attack and other space crises. But it's when the 24/7 live streaming contact is unexpectedly cut off--and not by DV8--that the strain of the adventure begins to show in each of the space travelers. Are they the victims of Chazz's heartless manipulations for TV ratings, or some other nefarious force performing psycho-social experiments?

Gina Damico's (Wax; Hellhole; Croak trilogy) biting satire is a fun and funny read that turns darker as it goes along. Watching the typecast caricatures become more human as they begin to crack, readers will experience the disintegration of the wall that usually separates viewers from the more absurd reality programming. Told in a series of transcripts, e-mails and personal accounts and "edited" by an unnamed whistle-blowing intern, Waste of Space is, decidedly, not a waste of time. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

In the world of young children, what is right in front of them most often dictates their preferences: "This is my favorite cloud/ because it's the one I am watching." Throughout a day, a child's favorite friends, colors, foods and books may change based simply on what they can see or hear or touch at that exact moment. Author and illustrator Antoinette Portis (Wait; The Red Hat; Not a Box, winner of a Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Award) uses this adorable tendency as the basis for her picture book Now.

The book's narrator, a lively little girl, shares her favorite things with readers: a breeze, a hole, a tooth, a hug. Her delightful bouquet of cherished choices blooms into rich sensations through the child's wonder and awe, as well as Portis's vibrant illustrations (using sumi ink, brush and bamboo stick). She basks in it all: "This is my favorite smell. This is my favorite bird. And this is my favorite song/ because it is the one I am singing." Portis's strong, solid brush strokes elicit the simplicity of childhood--everything stable and certain with little room for shades in any ideas or colors.

Now is a story that invites discussion between an adult reader and a child audience. It's a conversation that ignites analytical readers: identifying shapes and colors; sharing thoughts on sights, sounds and smells; and, of course, selecting one's own favorites, which are likely to change with each subsequent read. Sweet, charming and destined to be a favorite. --Jen Forbus, freelancer