Louise Miller returns to the bucolic setting of her first novel, The City Baker's Guide to Country Living, for her second, The Late Bloomers' Club. Since her father's death, Nora Huckleberry has been mostly happy running the Miss Guthrie Diner, the small-town Vermont gathering place that was his dream. She's used to taking care of everyone, including her regulars. But when Peggy the town cake lady dies unexpectedly, Nora and her sister, Kit, discover that they've inherited Peggy's farmhouse, her land, some significant debt and the question of whether to sell the land to a big-box developer.

 

For Nora, caring for folks and being dependable aren't simply good choices: they're fundamental to her identity. A self-effacing, capable eldest child, she increasingly took on responsibilities during her mother's illness, Kit's childhood and their father's slide into Alzheimer's. Kit, a freewheeling, exuberant filmmaker always in search of a home (and ready cash), returns to Guthrie to film her latest project and urge Nora to sell the land. As the townspeople argue over the sale, the sisters must reckon with the deep love and resentment that are part of their bond.

 

Miller's narrative is full of big life questions, but also joy: Guthrie's annual tomato and corn festival, the diner's mouthwatering omelets and Peggy's luscious cakes and gestures of support from friends and neighbors. As Nora wrestles with her difficult inheritance, she starts to believe she might have the chance for some new possibilities: even autumn, after all, has its flowers. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize winner Talley English's first novel, Horse, takes place in rural Virginia, where Teagan French lives with her brother and parents on a farm with a menagerie of horses, dogs, barn cats, occasional adopted geese and other stray critters. In this seemingly idyllic family life, Teagan struggles to find her place in the world, taking long horseback rides on the old pasture horse Zepher.

 

No surprise, the French family is not as mellow as it seems. Teagan's father is a high school principal nursing a midlife hankering for a fast horse, a sports car and an erotic fling--until he leaves abruptly. Her mother is a preschool teacher, horsewoman and the rock of the family. Obsidian (nicknamed Ian) is her father's impulse buy: a 16-hand thoroughbred gelding trained for freewheeling fox hunt jumping. Charlie is the typical older brother, with his first driver's license and an attitude.

 

When Zepher has to be put down, Teagan begins to ride Ian even though he is too much horse for her. If she can't have her father, she can at least have his horse. Sensing Teagan's increasing detachment, her mother agrees to send her and Ian to a nearby boarding school with a highly regarded riding program. Together, Ian and Teagan become a working team, "removed from the turmoil of her house." Horse is no National Velvet. It is a sensitive story of a young girl coming to grips with her broken family--and yes, a horse helps her find her way. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Wedding bells are ringing for Sheriff Quinn Colson in Ace Atkins's eighth installment of his crime fiction series set in Tibbehah County, Miss. But before he can walk down the aisle with his fiancée, Maggie Powers, Colson has to discover who killed a young black man and left his dismembered body stuffed in a tool box in the Big Black River.

 

Meanwhile, Colson's pal Boom Kimbrough is driving a semi for Sutpen Trucking. On a routine check of his cargo, he discovers electronics where his manifest says avocados should be. Growing suspicious of the company, Kimbrough examines all of his trailers more carefully--and on another run he finds drugs. That's enough to convince him to cooperate with the DEA to trap Sutpen in their dirty business dealings.

 

As the two friends' investigations barrel toward each other, a weed-growing family of race car drivers and the Gulf Coast syndicate jump into the mix, threatening not only Colson's wedding, but the lives of people he loves.

 

With the Quinn Colson series (The Innocents), Atkins draws a flawed hero with a strong sense of morality, and he consistently delivers complex relationships, rich internal conflicts and suspenseful action. He's also a master of dialogue, often mining Southern aphorisms for distinctive humor. The Sinners rolls all that into its timely, intense and enthralling plot. There are many sins in the novel, but the greatest would be missing it. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Cecilia Wilborg, an interior stylist, is married to a banker and lives with him and their two daughters in an enviable home in Sandefjord--"the Hamptons of Norway, they call it." The easily agitated Cecilia, whose narration drives The Boy at the Door, doesn't handle disruption well, and she faces a major one the day eight-year-old Tobias goes unclaimed at the pool where her daughters swim. The facility's receptionist, whose phone calls to the contact number on file for the boy go straight to voicemail, asks Cecilia to drive Tobias to the address on record. Cecilia reluctantly ferries him to the house and finds it abandoned. Grudgingly, she takes Tobias home with her, intending to grant him only an overnight stay.

 

When the body of a woman named Annika Lucasson washes up in a harbor, the police suspect that she is Tobias's mother. The woman's journal entries, which appear throughout the novel, describe her drug-addled existence with her physically abusive boyfriend and attest that Tobias was in the couple's care before he met Cecilia, with whom, as it happens, Annika has a connection.

 

Alex Dahl's literary debut offers one of the payoffs of good psychological thrillers: a cagey narrator whose reliability is both the reader's and the police's job to determine. The Boy at the Door is Scandi noir for fans of Big Little Lies, whose denizens are likewise hell-bent to convince the world that pretty on the outside means pretty on the inside. (It doesn't.) --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Cixin Liu (The Three Body Problem), a nine-time winner of China's Galaxy Award and a Hugo Award winner, explores the ontological consequences of unrestrained scientific inquiry in Ball Lightning, translated by Joel Martinsen. A quantum physicist chases ghosts while studying a little-understood natural event after its devastating display of power changes his life forever.

 

Ball lightning, an inexplicable phenomenon that destroys specific objects with bursts of deadly energy, strikes Chen's home one night and incinerates his parents. This event drives him to dedicate his life to studying it. While on a graduate study trip, he meets the beautiful and ambitious army major Lin Yun, who dreams of harnessing ball lightning's deadly energy for military weaponry. She enlists a dubious Chen, post-graduation, to work on ball lightning research alongside the morally ambiguous Ding Yi, a brilliant theoretical physicist obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge. Together, they unravel the secrets behind this mysterious energy source, but as Lin Yun and Ding Yi become consumed with its awesome power, Chen struggles to reconcile his own values against the self-serving interests of his co-conspirators.

 

Liu nimbly explores the ethical conundrums facing unrestrained scientific research and its consequences to humankind's survival. The single-minded and headstrong Lin Yun shuns moral considerations in her relentless pursuit of knowledge; philosopher Ding Yi acts as the mode-alternating "quantum wave" between good and evil; and Chen serves as the trio's moral compass.

 

Ball Lightning is a cautionary tale about the dangers of total technological reliance and unchecked ambition, an all too real issue that continues to haunt the modern world. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

With movies, TV shows and countless books written about him, it's hard to justify yet another biography of notorious mobster Al Capone. But crime writer Max Allan Collins and historian A. Brad Schwartz are up to the task in Scarface and the Untouchable, a history that weaves Capone's life together with that of the man popular culture calls his nemesis: Eliot Ness.

 

History is far more complicated, and the two men met only once. But the "battle for Chicago," as Collins and Schwartz call it, was exemplified by Capone and Ness. Both were the sons of hardworking immigrants, and they combined intelligence and ambition to change the face of a city--and country. While Capone was at the forefront of modern business practices used for shady purposes, Ness's work helped usher in a new era of crime-fighting, using ballistics and other new tactics to solve cases. Capone's flamboyancy was matched by Ness's reticence. Yet the mob boss rarely got his hands dirty, while Ness personally raided criminal sites across Chicago.

 

Ultimately it's Ness who proves the more interesting of the two, probably because his story is usually told under Capone's shadow. Collins and Schwartz bring out the real person behind the inaccurate depictions from Hollywood, showing a thoughtful, courageous man who had not yet turned 30 when Capone was put behind bars. By telling the two men's biographies together, the authors paint a large picture of Chicago during the '20s and '30s and throw into broad relief the more interesting aspects of each man's personality. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

Ryan Hampton's personal, decade-long opioid addiction and recovery led to his tireless campaign to break down barriers and educate others about the epidemic in the United States. In American Fix, his first book, he details what the crisis entails, why it is happening and the scope of who it affects and how. He also offers a well-considered plan to help combat and win the war.

 

Hampton, a former White House staffer under President Obama, shares how he first became addicted to pain killers: he originally received a prescription for an ankle injury, and that led to his heroin habit. A high-functioning addict, Hampton landed multiple senior-level staff positions in the Democratic Party. Yet, even as his career was taking off, he was sinking deeper into secret addiction until his dependency wreaked havoc on his life. After treatment and recovery, he was determined to help others.

 

Through Hampton's story--and those of other addicts, especially those he encounters on an extensive research road trip across the U.S.--he explores the bias, stigma, prejudice and injustice associated with addiction. He outlines challenges addicts face, the pitfalls of treatment and recovery and the role of politics and Big Pharma. Meanwhile, he gives insight and strategies for better communication, harm reduction and feasible pathways to reform. For the more than 45 million Americans and their families who are directly impacted by addiction, Hampton's thoroughly presented, unflinching and deeply personal book will offer understanding, enlightenment and practical solutions. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

"I aim to persuade you that much of our contemporary thinking about identity is shaped by pictures that are in various ways unhelpful or just plain wrong," writes Kwame Anthony Appiah (As If: Idealization and Ideals), a professor of philosophy and law and a prolific author. In The Lies That Bind, he challenges and debunks popular ideas about identity. "We are living with the legacies of ways of thinking that took their modern shape in the nineteenth century, and... it is high time to subject them to the best thinking of the twenty-first."

 

We are led astray, says Appiah, by our willingness to attribute essential qualities to groups of people based on whatever unexamined generalizations we have heard. He limits himself to five categories of identity often discussed as if they can be pure, or have fixed definitions: creed, country, color, class and culture, with a substantial nod to gender as well. With erudition and clarity, he demolishes them all. He analyzes historical disagreements within religions, the relatively recent invention of race and of nation states, the destructive inherited hierarchies of class; he describes culture as innately fluid, a "process you join, in living a life with others." Identities are inescapable, he says, but "the problem is not walls as such but walls that hedge us in; walls we played no part in designing... walls that block our vision and obstruct our way." Rather than use identities to separate ourselves, we can use them to "give contours to our freedom... connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns." --Sara Catterall

Katie Ford's ruminative poetry collection If You Have to Go transforms a failed marriage into soul-searching art.

 

Ford (Blood Lyrics) divides her collection into four parts, with parts one and three containing a single poem each. The first poem, "In the Hearth," sets the tone of the collection: "I am everywhere and the fear/ when it desires/ to grow, grows continental, drifting." What follows in part two is a long sequence of sonnets plumbing the poet's emotional devastation. Thirty-nine sonnets in total use sere metaphor, rhyming couplets and linked first and last lines to stretch out and interrogate the sense of loss when a relationship fails. The traditional poetic form proves useful--and gravely succinct--in locating the floor of the poet's grief. These are poems of profound introspection, paring down one's voice to a skeleton of perception.

 

After the austerity of the sonnet sequence, parts three and four open with more breadth and air. Not offering easy solace, these later entries nonetheless provide clarity and a more modern tone, in contrast to the sonnets. In "Iridescent Lake," the poet alights on "some form of yourself you love best because it survived the pain." The collection's last poem, "All I Ever Wanted," provides a mirror-like reflection of desire bereft of its object: "that all I ever wanted/ was to sit by a fire with someone/ who wanted me in measure the same to my wanting."

 

The sadness permeating If You Have to Go can be overwhelming, but by Ford's sheer insistence to map painful experience, and by no shortage of poetic skill, a sense of resilience emerges. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset

What do our memories really mean? By reflecting on our past, how do we affect our present and future? These are some of the philosophical themes Elizabeth Spires (Worldling) broaches in her seventh collection of poetry, A Memory of the Future.

 

The influence of Japanese culture is evident throughout the meditative and spiritual collection in its methodology and topics--a squat bottle of sake, a wooden shrine or a historic statue brought from Japan after the attack on Hiroshima. Spires ponders the natural world of pomes, clouds and their hidden meanings and the sound of the sea in a shell. She reflects on the accidental death of a child, the sorrow one experiences as a child grows older and the incessant demands of cell phones. Written in a variety of poetic and visual styles, each piece is a lesson in zen, a way of being one in body and mind.

 

Spires considers the shape of an inky brushstroke on the page and the warm light of a March day. Each poem calls the reader to pause and contemplate the connection of the words on the page with the imagery that leaps to mind: "everything ravaged, burned, cracking in a godless desert heat"; "the white peacock spread its rippling tail, the sound/ like a sibilant wind rushing through many leaves." Quiet and forceful, Spires has taken random moments and created a book full of memories through her words, altering the future for those fortunate enough to read her work. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

With Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, Alice Faye Duncan, the author of several children's books, takes as her subject Martin Luther King's last campaign, and she makes clear that, while he didn't live to see its outcome, his work was not in vain.

 

Duncan's text is narrated by a nine-year-old black girl named Lorraine Jackson, whose father is a sanitation worker. In February 1968, Lorraine's dad returns to their Memphis home reporting that two of his coworkers were killed by a malfunctioning garbage truck. There has been talk of a strike--the overwhelmingly black sanitation crew makes outrageously low wages in abysmal working conditions--and these senseless deaths spur action. When 1,300 Memphis sanitation workers strike on February 12, 1968, Lorraine's father is among them.

 

Organizations including the NAACP show support for the strike, and so does Lorraine's mother: "In her right hand she carried her boycott sign. In her left, she held my hand." Spirits soar when news spreads that Dr. King will be joining the struggle in Memphis. When the march turns violent, King leaves the city and promises to come back; it's after his return that he's killed on April 4. But this doesn't end Lorraine's story.

 

A memorial march takes place on April 8 to honor the fallen leader, and this time, they're accompanied by King's widow, Coretta Scott King. R. Gregory Christie, whose innumerable illustrator credits include Freedom in Congo Square, displays his unmistakable style: he sets elaborately tended faces and forms against less worked-over slabs of color; in his ennobling art, humanity is always paramount. King's death isn't the main story in Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop; it's a tragic part of an inspiring account in which a heroic campaign lost its leader but nevertheless marched on to victory. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

To his New York City nephew and niece, iconic author and civil rights activist James Baldwin was mostly known as "Uncle Jimmy," although the siblings would realize soon enough that he was also "a famous writer" of world renown. "When you gonna write a book about MeeeeEEE!?" nephew Tejan Karefa-Smart once asked. This book, Little Man, Little Man, was his answer.

 

Four-year-old TJ runs up and down his street playing ball. His two most constant companions are an older boy and girl--seven-year-old WT, "who like a brother," and eight-year-old Blinky, who "[l]ook like she do everything she can to be a boy." Around their Harlem neighborhood, Mr Man, the building janitor, "always try to act like he mean. He ain't mean." TJ runs errands for Miss Lee, who's married to Mr Man, and for Miss Beanpole, who lives behind multiple locks and observes the outside world only from her window. Baldwin presents TJ's personal microcosm, describing the "little store" run by a Puerto Rican man, front steps and fire escapes, the local bar and churches.

 

Originally published in 1976, Baldwin's only children's title did not initially fare well. Four decades later, Duke University Press resurrects Baldwin's self-described "celebration of the self-esteem of black children." The new edition retains the original illustrations created by Yoran Cazac, a Caucasian French artist with whom Baldwin chose to collaborate. At 42, Little Man, Little Man has aged well. What might have been permanently dismissed as a "book [that] lacks intensity and focus" has instead matured into a timely representation of an urban African American childhood, presented in "the black vernacular style of [Baldwin's] Harlem neighborhood," made accessible once more to eager new audiences.  --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon