Lisa Genova, novelist and neuroscientist, has a gift for telling accessible stories about complex maladies and their victims. Still Alice explored early-onset Alzheimer's; in Left Neglected, a high-achieving woman suffers a brain injury. In Every Note Played, celebrated classical pianist Richard denies his diagnosis of ALS, until he sits at his Steinway and "the keys want to be caressed, the relationship ready and available to him, but he can't respond, and this is suddenly the cruelest moment of his life." Having chosen performing over his marriage and his daughter, Richard's tragedy is multiple; he suffers alone. Genova alternates Richard's chapters with Karina's, his ex-wife who sacrificed her rising career as a jazz pianist and deferred to Richard's relocations and touring. Richard is unfaithful; Karina grows bitter and vindictive.

Three years after their separation, as he becomes too disabled to live alone, she reluctantly takes him into her home. Their relationship is frosty; she cares for him but both rue their situation. However, as they each reflect on what led to their estrangement, the reader learns that Karina is not blameless. As Richard moves toward his inevitable death, they both hope for forgiveness and redemption.

Genova unsparingly details the tragedy of ALS. But she includes the beauty and joy of Richard and Karina's lives in music, balancing the horrific with the uplifting. Every Note Played is the story of a marriage, as well as a hard-hitting primer on a disease. She includes links to her website and "Readers in Action: ALS," and urges readers to learn more. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Andrea Morales, self-described member of the "Lesbian Mafia," is having an illicit affair. With a straight man. This simple construct provides the jumping-off point of Chelsey Johnson's Stray City, which explores the many ways friendship, love and sex intersect--and the many ways they do not.

Stray City is not built on a fast-moving plot: Andrea (Andy, to her friends) starts her affair with Ryan. She continues her affair with Ryan. She keeps the affair a secret. She questions what the affair means to her, but also what it means to her identity, to her queerness, to the life she has made for herself in Portland. The slow build of Johnson's debut is its best feature, giving Johnson space to explore not only the affair, but how it impacts Andy and the family she has found in Portland. Andy's reflections kaleidoscope inwards and outwards, filling the pages of Stray City with a cast of perfectly imperfect characters. Collectively, this group brings to life a specific place and time--queer, woman-centric, late-'90s Portland--in a way that is at once specific to that moment and yet universal in its truths: we are individuals and lovers and friends and family, and sometimes those things are the same and sometimes they are at odds.

Johnson writes with an energy and emotional intelligence that is at once unapologetic in its honesty and yet tender in its delivery of it. Stray City is a love letter to community, to a nostalgia-inducing era of Portland history, and to anyone who has ever gone looking for one's self and found it in an unlikely place. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Nora Nolan loves New York and can't imagine living anywhere else. For her husband, Charlie, however, the city is "not his natural habitat," so when he scores a long-desired permanent parking space on their dead-end street, she indulges his crowing. Anna Quindlen's 10th novel, Alternate Sides, builds from this quotidian victory into a fast-paced novel of family dynamics, societal inequities and, eventually, choosing what matters most to make a satisfying life.

Nora and Charlie have an enviable city home, good jobs and loving, successful college-age twins. While Nora notes Charlie's apparent unrest with his life, overall things are good, and her career as manager of a jewelry museum and her close-knit friendships sustain her. She understands the neighbors, among them George, the self-appointed majordomo, and Jack, dour and short-tempered. All rely on Ricky, the Latino handyman who arrives in his van to fix the pipes, shovel the walks and rescue them from household emergencies. But the peace is shattered when Ricky is assaulted, apparently over a long-simmering parking conflict. Nora and Charlie argue over the incident and its investigation, illuminating their differing perspectives on life, and leading her to make dramatic choices.

Quindlen has a gift for realistic contemporary fiction; supporting characters are richly drawn and their dialogue is often humorous. ("Ice?" Nora asks her son in response to her daughter's text. "I Can't Even" he explains, teasing, "Get with the program, lady!") Quindlen captures the ambience of the city itself in countless details, and readers will appreciate Nora's affection for her New York life. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife) once said that her book The Three Incestuous Sisters is a "novel in pictures" rather than a graphic novel. The 13 stories contained in Bizarre Romance are just that--oddly whimsical, mildly titillating and sometimes poignant tales in pictures. Co-authored and illustrated by Niffenegger's husband, Eddie Campbell (From Hell), the collection considers the wonders and horrors, banality and mystery of love and relationships in all their manifestations--romance, family, friendship and the metaphysical.

Some of the pieces are goofy. In "The Ruin of Grant Lowery," a man ends up in indentured servitude to an ocelot-juggling fairy, and in "Jakob Wywialowski and the Angels," angels are exterminated by flame-wielding pest control experts. What shines as the most memorable are the longer prose pieces--the hauntingly wistful Hurricane Katrina love letter in "Girl on a Roof"; the isolation of success and the desire to connect in "Secret Life, with Cats"; Niffenegger's thought-provoking meditation on religion and art in "The Church of the Funnies."

Campbell lightly illustrates longer prose pieces with simple pen-and-ink sketches. On more comics-driven stories, he uses a more contemporary style. Photographic play on "Motion Studies: Getting Out of Bed" especially stands out.

Perhaps the artistic vision expressed in "The Church of the Funnies" explains the manner in which Niffenegger and Campbell have approached their collaborative debut: "We make things to find out what they are, what they can be, what they might mean. We make things to keep us company in the world. We make things to show them to other people, because we want them to understand." --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

The Temptation of Forgiveness, the 27th novel in the Commissario Guido Brunetti series, is another compelling look at life in modern Venice. After more than 20 years on the Venetian police force, Brunetti is inured to all forms of graft and corruption, but this time even he will be surprised.

Professoressa Crosera, a university colleague of Brunetti's wife, Paola, comes to tell him that she suspects her son is doing drugs. The commissario is at a loss. Crosera refuses to tell him who she suspects is selling the drugs at her son's exclusive school, so Brunetti puts it from his mind until a week later, when the woman's husband, Tullio Gasparini, is found at the bottom of a bridge with his head smashed in.

Is there any way Gasparini could have fallen accidentally? Could it have been an attack related to the suspicion of drugs? Brunetti and his colleagues, including Commissaria Claudia Griffoni, begin to put out gentle feelers, discovering an odd connection between Gasparini and a potential fraud ring.

With underlying themes of parental concern and violence against women, The Temptation of Forgiveness is an appropriate novel in the wake of the #metoo movement, and in a world where many parents fear the terrible things that could engulf their children. The philosophical debates between Brunetti and Griffoni lend a gentle thoughtfulness to the novel, which is placed in historical context by the ancient Greeks and Romans that Brunetti loves to read. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

Elizabeth Bear brings back her intrepid duo of female adventurers in Stone Mad, a steampunk western that features Karen Memory and her partner and love, Priya. In this installment, the couple are having a celebratory dinner out in the dining hall of the Rain City Riverside hotel, when they overhear two spiritualists at a nearby table. That is unusual, but not as odd as when a table begins to levitate and, stranger still, Karen and Priya's table flips over on its own. Karen knows she has to find out just what is causing all of this ruckus and jumps into the fray, much to her partner's dismay.

Bear's imaginative and fast-paced piece is filled with spiritualists, illusionists and a mad tommyknocker, as well as great descriptions that easily place the reader in this Victorian Pacific Northwest town. Blending strong elements of feminism and lesbian love, she captures the nuances of an argument between two lovers with perfect pitch. Stone Mad is as much about relationships and how to negotiate them as it is about the strange happenings at the hotel. Readers would do well to read Bear's Karen Memory before starting this one, as there are many references to the previous novel. For those searching for strong female characters in an unusual genre, this is a good series. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Tyler Wetherall is spending her 12th birthday in St. Lucia with her older sister and fugitive father when the phone call comes: Scotland Yard has tracked him to his not-so-secret location, and the girls need to flee to their mother in London immediately. In No Way Home, editor and creative writing instructor Wetherall artfully shares her life in pieces--from early days living as something resembling a family unit to her adolescent years filled with secrecy and surveillance while separated from her on-the-run father, and finally her adult efforts to learn and come to terms with the family legacy.

The first half of Wetherall's memoir reads like emotionally exhausting spy fiction. By age nine, she has lived in 13 houses in five countries on two continents, yet knows nothing of fake identities or legal problems. Reliving the accounts of her siblings as they begin to suss out the family secret is thrilling and gut-wrenching. Wetherall, who kept a journal from a young age, infuses her early memories--filled with clandestine phone calls and surprise visits from black-coated authorities--with a riveting presence of thought and perception.

Aided by her father's 300,000-word prison treatise, Wetherall reveals the saga behind the screens her parents employed to protect their three children. Although it lacks the emotional resonance of Wetherall's childhood account, her father's account of the impact his life had on the relationships, dynamics and paths of the family lends completeness to an undeniably fascinating work. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Gibraltar, the small territory on the coast of Spain, has been in British hands for hundreds of years, and remains a source of tension between the two nations. Gibraltar, by historians Roy and Lesley Adkins, traces the history of that strain, focusing on the years 1779 to 1783, when the forces of Spain and France laid siege to the British garrison stationed there. One of the longest in modern history, the siege is a story of courage and ingenuity, on both sides of the war. 

Using dispatches, diaries, newspaper clippings and other first-hand accounts, the Adkinses put the thoughts and feelings of the participants of the siege front and center, turning what could be a typical dry history of war into one filled with small, tender moments. Gibraltar housed many families, and the book wisely focuses on the plight of the women and children as their homes were destroyed by Spanish artillery. Matters of race and class are always in the background, and the authors call out the injustices of the British Empire and class system.

But, most importantly, the siege of Gibraltar is a riveting story, where a small group of British soldiers and sailors managed to outlast a massive campaign by Spain and France. The Adkinses lean into the terrors and triumphs of the siege, making sure the reader is swept up in each twist and turn of the battle. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

The borders of the U.S. Rust Belt are not defined, writes author and editor Anne Trubek (The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting), but "anywhere an economy was previously based on manufacturing and has since been losing population can be part of the gang." Her new anthology, Voices from the Rust Belt, aims to scrape some popular stereotypes off these places.

Trubek is founder and editor of Belt Publishing, and many of these 24 essays have appeared in Belt magazine and in Belt's city-themed anthologies. They are all by writers with personal, often life-long knowledge of their particular communities. They tell stories of their childhoods, work lives and night life, of desperate poverty in Pittsburgh, the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and the crummiest gay bar in Cincinnati. An Iraqi-American woman moves to Cleveland with her family and finds the warm Arab community she never had before. An Ohio professor teaches local ecology in parking lots: "I grew up with young forests and orange creeks because my own family had created them.... I give students a similar sense: This is the place where we live, that we have shaped and continue to shape. This is the place where our children will live." Several compare the history of white flight from their cities with the return of white liberals who praise diversity, but often recharge old injustices.

Oversimplified and whitewashed versions of the Rust Belt have too often been told by flyover journalists to serve preconceived political or cultural narratives. This collection is a welcome and humane antidote. --Sara Catterall

Since she was a child, Deena Kastor loved to run. Naturally talented, she won many races as a junior athlete by simply running harder and faster than the competition. But in college, plagued by injuries and her own persistent negativity, Kastor struggled with burnout. After graduation, she moved to Colorado to train with legendary coach Joe Vigil. To her surprise, Vigil emphasized training the mind even more than the body. Kastor details her journey toward mental toughness and a stellar career in her memoir (co-written with Michelle Hamilton), Let Your Mind Run.

"Ironically, practicing positivity showed me just how negative I could be," Kastor admits. She writes about the relentless daily effort of redirecting negative thoughts, sometimes dozens of times during a workout. Gradually, she built up a range of positive approaches: focusing on her breathing, her feet, the landscape, her goals of winning the next race or improving her times. While excelling as a runner remained important, Kastor also concentrated on building character: becoming kinder, more positive, more gracious. She chronicles the daily grind of practice, with its triumphs and setbacks, and tells the stories of key races within a larger narrative of becoming an elite runner and meeting her husband, Andrew. Together (with Vigil), they built a training program that would take Kastor to three Olympics and multiple world records.

Relentlessly positive without being trite, Kastor's memoir will inspire runners and anyone who wants to build a stronger, more agile mind. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

When her great-uncle Frank dies, Norma prepares to attend the funeral with her parents. She practices her sad face in the mirror even though she is actually feeling "pretty happy." After all, she gets to skip school and she'll see her favorite--"FAVORITE"--cousin Ray. During the long church service, Norma entertains herself by watching the dust motes dancing in the light of the stained-glass windows. Ray climbs and fidgets and stares at the hairy ear of the man next to him. When they are finally released, the cousins slip outside to play, happily shedding the somber mood of the funeral. They read names on gravestones and roll down a grassy hill and find feathers and frogs and sticks.

Matt James's (I Know Here) quiet, child's-eye view of a funeral, with all its mysterious rituals and traditions, is a pitch-perfect introduction to a sometimes-difficult theme. Readers can see Norma's mind working as she studies herself in the mirror and looks at the flower-covered coffin in front of the church, and when Ray asks her if Uncle Frank is still a person. At the end of the day, though, she seems pleased by the experience.  "Mom..." she says as she heads home with her parents, "I think Uncle Frank would have liked his funeral."

James's inviting multi-media artwork in The Funeral includes acrylic and ink on masonite and dimensional elements of cut paper, masking tape, rolled-up twine, cardboard and scroll-sawn masonite. The overall effect gives the illustrations depth and carries the story beyond the text. Simply lovely. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

Twelve-year-old Jerome was always "the good kid": whenever possible, he "skated by. Kept [his] head low." But now that he's dead, he's famous. Jerome was shot just a few blocks from home while playing with a toy gun. Officer Moore arrived on the scene, didn't announce himself, didn't tell Jerome to put down the gun or raise his hands. He shot Jerome before the cruiser even stopped and didn't render aid or call for help as Jerome died.

By many accounts, Moore "is a good cop." His daughter Sarah--who's the same age and grade as Jerome--however, becomes doubtful: "he can't be if he killed a kid, can he?" Sarah sees what her father can't--literally--because she's the only person alive to whom Jerome is visible, with whom he can talk directly. Prodded by the 60-plus-year-old ghost of Emmett Till (whom Sarah can also see), Sarah and Jerome learn the ugly history of decades of racial and police violence, beginning with Emmett's heinous murder in 1955 at age 14. While Jerome tries to understand his own death, often aided by Emmett's gentle conversations, Sarah must come to terms with her father's "racial bias" and figure out how she might "make sure no other kids die for no reason."

Inspired to give voice to the "countless" deaths in her own lifetime due to "conscious or unconscious racism," Coretta Scott King Honoree Jewell Parker Rhodes (Ninth Ward; Towers Falling) adds a fictional name to the long list of black boys killed in police violence. Beyond easy labels of good and bad, right and wrong, Rhodes unblinkingly confronts challenging perspectives and the mutability of truth. Rhodes wrote Ghost Boys because "racial prejudices and tensions... still haunt America" and she hopes that Jerome's story might prompt "meaningful change for all youth." --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon