In Deacon King Kong, National Book Award-winner James McBride (The Good Lord Bird, Five-Carat Soul) delivers a multilayered portrait of life in the projects during the Civil Rights era. It begins like any other fall day in 1969 at Brooklyn's Causeway Housing Projects (aka the "Cause"), "where 3,500 black and Spanish residents crammed their dreams, nightmares, dogs, cats, turtles, guinea pigs, Easter chicklets, children, parents, and double-chinned cousins from Puerto Rico, Birmingham, and Barbados into 256 tiny apartments." It's unremarkable until Deems Clemens, a 19-year-old baseball prodigy-turned-drug dealer, has his ear shot off in the project's central plaza. And no one can believe that the man who pulled the trigger, in his tattered jacket and pork pie hat, is old Sportcoat.

Sportcoat was a deacon at the Five Ends Baptist church and Deems's baseball coach; everyone liked him, even if he was frequently soused on "king kong" moonshine he shared with his buddy Hot Sausage. Sportcoat himself can't remember, let alone explain, why he shot Deems. But the series of events this act sets in motion reveals long-held secrets and surprising intersections with white folks outside the Cause, including The Elephant, a powerful but vulnerable mobster, and Potts, a tired cop who comes alive at the sight of the church's mighty Sister Gee.

While readers witness "the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness" that comes with life in the projects, McBride populates the Cause with characters who persevere with love and compassion for each other, unwavering faith in God and community, and lots of humor. Big-hearted and sprawling, Deacon King Kong cements McBride as a master storyteller. --Frank Brasile, librarian

Moving from 1969 Laos to 2018 Spain, Paul Yoon's spare novel concerning the tragedy of war follows three characters, scrappy teenagers who survive the relentless bombing of their country. In Run Me to Earth, nonlinear chapters alternate among each character's perspective and maintain suspense as Yoon (Snow Hunters) slowly reveals the fate of each. The novel reflects what war wreaks on civilian populations as they lead their lives in imminent danger.

In an author's preface, Yoon reviews the war in Laos and the nine years of CIA-directed bombing: "Over two million tons of ordnance were dropped." As the novel opens in 1969, Alisak and Prany, 17, and Prany's 16-year-old sister, Noi, have been wandering for three years and now work at a makeshift field hospital in a crumbling, abandoned estate. The teens, a few nurses and Vang, a Laotian doctor, minister to the victims of war, and dream of escape. They compare their fantasies, asking each other where they go at night. "France or Thailand?" is a recurring suggestion. Alisak recalls a helicopter rescue, then Yoon fast forwards to the story of Auntie, a long-ago neighbor, in 1974.

The juxtaposition of points of view and times mirrors the turmoil of war. As Alisak is resettled in southern France, Prany and Vang are "repatriated" for seven years. Auntie seeks word of their fate, continuing stealthily to lead others to freedom. While the despair of the story is profound, Yoon places resilience, loyalty, love and hope at its heart. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, freelance reviewer

Along the northeastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, just a short drive from bustling Barcelona, a large villa faces the Mediterranean Sea. Here a gardener spends his days tending magnolias, lilacs, red geraniums and a promenade lined with linden and mulberry trees. This unnamed and unassuming narrator of Spanish author Mercè Rodoreda's (1908-1983) Garden by the Sea flatly relates the dramatic lives of the villa's wealthy summer residents. A widower who has lived and worked on the property for decades, the gardener has become a fixture of the villa, and in this novel is the aperture through which readers come to understand the lives of its young residents.

As Kazuo Ishiguro made strikingly clear in The Remains of the Day, the literature of domestic service wields particular power when it comes to shedding light upon the interior lives of the upper class. Over a period of six summers in the 1920s, the gardener observes the lives of Senyoret Francesc, his wife, Senyoreta Rosamaria, and their friends Senyoreta Eulàlia and Feliu Roca, perpetual vacationers with family money. The first half of the novel focuses on the various leisure activities of this wealthy young group. The story then takes on a darker tone when an extremely rich businessman builds an even grander villa on an adjacent plot of land at the request of his son-in-law. Rodoreda reveals a complicated history between the families, and the small dramas gradually become more serious each summer.

The patient, eloquent and often digressive prose of Rodoreda, who wrote in Catalan, provides an aesthetic experience on each page that assembles itself bit-by-bit into an unforgettable novel. --Emma Levy, publishing assistant, Shelf Awareness

Bestselling Korean author Mi-ae Seo uses her screenwriting chops in The Only Child, a tautly plotted creepfest that already feels celluloid-ready. Making her English-language debut, Seo delves into the minds of those on opposite sides of the law. The incarcerated serial killer Yi Byeongdo, who previously eschewed all queries, has specifically requested an interview with criminal psychologist Seonkyeong. While the personal solicitation seems confoundingly random, Seonkyeong's curiosity as to why this enigmatic murderer seeks her attention is an opportunity she can't dismiss.

Meanwhile, at home, Seonkyeong faces another surprising entreaty. Her husband, Jaeseong, arrives with his 11-year-old daughter, Hayeong, in tow, nervously asking if the child might stay; she's become homeless after a fire killed her grandparents, with whom she's been living since the death of her mother, Jaeseong's first wife. Seonkyeong immediately makes every effort to welcome the girl. Her psychologist mind instinctively goes on high alert at Hayeong's unpredictable behavior, which wavers from nonresponsive to violent outbursts, but Seonkyeong ignores her inner alarms and accepts Hayeong as a suffering victim--until she can't.

Seo makes her readers privy to more knowledge than any of her characters have, revealing abusive mothers, an Edenic apple orchard, the triggering qualities of the Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." Her criminal focus perhaps overshadows less essential details (What does the new puppy do all day locked up alone in Hayeong's room? How can a medical doctor seem to know so little about doctoring?) but any potential missteps seem negligible when appreciating the sly, hair-raising manipulations by book's end. Trust no one. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Reminiscent of hardboiled noir in the past, One Day You'll Burn is simultaneously an homage to classic movies and an exciting mystery. Five years ago, Tully Jarsdel abandoned his Ph.D. path, much to the dismay of his fathers, who are both professors. He joined the Los Angeles police force, and is now a detective on a special fast-track promotion plan, to the chagrin of his new partner, Morales, a veteran detective. Jarsdel and Morales get called to the scene of a bizarre crime in Hollywood, where the victim was apparently slowly baked to death. The terrifying corpse, which looks almost like a grotesque movie prop, has been left at the base of a pagoda in Thailand Plaza.

Jarsdel and Morales are stymied at first, unable even to identify the victim, and horrified that one human could treat another so cruelly. Slowly, after taking a break to work on their other case (in which a series of dogs are poisoned on the wedding days of their owners), Jarsdel and Morales find the beginning of a bizarre trail of clues that seem to have connections to both classic Hollywood and the Thai mafia. Can nerdy Jarsdel and stolid Morales find a way to work together to catch a vicious killer?

Joseph Schneider's juxtaposition of crime and academia is a curious one, and readers will find Jarsdel's complicated character intriguing. Fans of James Ellroy or Raymond Chandler will enjoy the vibe of One Day You'll Burn, the first in a projected series. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

Elizabeth Tallent has savage dry spells. Until her PEN/Faulkner Award-nominated story collection Mendocino Fire appeared in 2015, 22 years had elapsed between books. But hear her out: she's hampered by perfectionism--by "the tyranny of my weird disease." (Readers may wonder: Is perfectionism any relation to writer's block, which is similarly hostile to productivity? Tallent doesn't say.) Although she has been in therapy to address her perfectionism, Tallent admits to an ambivalent relationship with it: while other afflictions can carry a stigma, "perfectionism's rep as ambition on steroids remains glossy: it can present not as delusion, but as an advantageous form of sanity."

Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism, Tallent's first autobiographical work, is a stroll through her life during which she pauses to examine episodes, most occurring in her childhood, that foreground the notion of perfection (the dream house her parents built) or its inverse (her fractured arm). When Tallent isn't quoting experts and others on the subject of perfection, she's devoting unremittingly gorgeous long sentences and multipage paragraphs to descriptions that most writers would reduce to a dozen-odd words. On the furnishings in her therapist's office she spends two and a half pages; on her marriage to this therapist she spends far fewer.

Tallent is welcome to direct her pointillism-precise observations at anything she chooses, and how lucky readers are that she has deemed the ones in Scratched worthy of publication. After all, "the truest perfectionist, the one I'm failing to be, would still be rewriting this sentence." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Eilene Zimmerman was fooled. Not foolish--family and friends of countless addicts don't see the signs, or accept their more inoffensive explanations. How could a wildly successful, professional father of two fall prey to addiction? In her intensely raw memoir, Smacked, Zimmerman proceeds through her denial step by painful step, leading up to the morning she finds her ex-husband dead on his bathroom floor. Even then, her eyes don't take in the bloody hole in Peter's arm or the drug detritus strewn about his bedroom. It takes reviewing the pathology report and police scene photos for his hidden reality to smack her in the face.

Following the devastating discovery of Peter's body, Zimmerman goes back in time to their meeting, courtship, marriage and eventual divorce. The early details, initially feeling superfluous, eventually make sense as part and parcel of the warnings of and particulars behind Peter's deterioration. Zimmerman deftly paints the portrait of a complicated and tortured man, essential to understanding addicts as fellow flawed humans.

Zimmerman keeps herself and her children afloat through their grief and guilt by trying to understand how they could have been so "blind." She talks to other survivors, clinicians and white-collar addicts, delves into addiction and occupation studies, and sheds important light on the toxicity of the law, technology and other high-pressure careers. Professionals finding it increasingly easier to kill themselves (via drugs and/or suicide) rather than quit their jobs is a current societal trend Zimmerman lived through, investigated and shares bravely. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

In the acknowledgements of Becoming a Man, P. Carl notes that by publishing his story, his publishers are not "just publishing a memoir, but affirming the reality of trans lives as a vital part of the American landscape." Carl is right in more ways than one: the book itself is also more than just a memoir, as Carl uses his own personal experience of transition to examine closely the gendered social, cultural and political context of 21st-century America.

Carl calls his story "a layperson's anthropological exploration of living a double life," a theme that resonates as Becoming a Man unfolds. He recalls what it was like to live for more than 50 years as a girl and woman who was dismissed and intimidated on the basis of gender, then reflects on his own ability to dismiss and intimidate as a man. He writes candidly about his relationship with his wife, first as one half of a lesbian couple, then as one half of a couple that seems, from the outside looking in, to be straight. He dissects his role in his family, watching westerns with his father as a child and later, as their aging son, caring for his dying parents. Throughout the pages of Becoming a Man, Carl grapples with his personal "contradictions and questions." His raw candor elevates Becoming a Man to more than "just" a memoir, to use Carl's own words: it is a story that is both deeply personal and yet reveals universal truths--and asks big, difficult questions--about how all people experience gender. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm 

Social historian Anne de Courcy (The Fishing Fleet) adeptly considers the glittering period between the two world wars, when the French Riviera was a society and cultural center of the Western world. W. Somerset Maugham wrote there, Picasso painted there, King Edward VIII stayed there long before he became the Duke of Windsor, and the most famous designer in the world, Coco Chanel, forever changed the way women looked when she allowed her skin to become tan there. It seemed nothing could change the Riviera: not the Depression of 1929, not when France instituted a national vacation that brought hordes of working-class tent campers to the beaches for two weeks every year, not even when Jewish refugees like Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov arrived in flight from Hitler's Germany. The Maginot Line would protect them, Riviera inhabitants claimed, right up until Germany invaded France. Within six weeks, France surrendered and no place in the nation remained unchanged.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor left for the safety of Spain, carrying their household in a convoy of four cars and a truck. Those who remained on the Riviera ended up trading their clothes for food. Malnutrition became so prevalent that one doctor called it "La maladie à la mode."

De Courcy deploys gleaming, well-chosen details to make Chanel's Riviera as vivid and entertaining as a novel. Her careful research, coupled with her polished narrative style, illuminates an era of opulence and starvation, of heroes and collaborators, in a world that soared high and swiftly plummeted. --Janet Brown, author and former bookseller

As an essayist, the poet and activist Luis J. Rodriguez (Always Running; It Calls You Back) holds to the poet's prerogative to outsize dreams--he imagines a world free "of banks, corporations, high-end developers, wars, and poverty" and more--while emphasizing local, practical steps that might nudge the world toward that ideal. Proudly radical, Rodriguez draws on a lifetime's study of race, culture and identity in From Our Land to Our Land's dozen essays, reporting frankly about life as it is (one moving piece concerns the one-time Los Angeles Poet Laureate's work teaching creative writing in prisons) but also demanding boldness in imagining life as it could be.

Rodriguez's essays, like his poetry and fiction, emphasize the experiences of Indigenous and Xicanx peoples in a United States that too often is, at best, indifferent to them. "Prickly Pear Cactus," an autobiographical survey of Los Angeles, Rodriguez's home, celebrates the barrio and la biblioteca--especially L.A.'s Central Library branch, where a young Rodriguez read Bradbury and Bukowski as he tried to find a way out of gang life. The searing yet hopeful "The End of Belonging" recounts injustices visited upon Latinx peoples in the United States while also focusing on them as vital to the nation's past and future--and beseeching readers to honor bonds that transcend mere nationality. Rodriguez spends a few too many pages recounting the achievements of his storied career, but overall From Our Land to Our Land, a work of revolutionary empathy, stands among them. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor

In her thought-provoking sophomore novel for young adults, following The Prophet Calls, Melanie Sumrow takes on a familiar theme--a child trying to balance the desire to respect authority with standing up for what's right--in an unusual setting (in the case of The Inside Battle, from within a white supremacist, anti-government militia camp).

Thirteen-year-old Rebel Mercer wants two things: to make it to regionals in the school robotics competition and to win his father's approval. Unfortunately, the two goals seem to be mutually exclusive. His dad is a Marine, "an actual American hero" who survived five deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan before being sent home with PTSD. Unable to settle into a productive life back in Amarillo, Tex., he has instead been listening to talk radio about the "evils of immigrants" and chatting online with a militia group called the Flag Bearers. He believes he's being cheated out of jobs by non-white people. In a moment of rage after Rebel's best (but secret) friend Ajeet beats him in the robotics competition, Rebel wonders if his father has a point. Rebel makes an impulsive, ruinous choice and in almost no time is driving into the mountains with his father, in search of the Flag Bearers compound.

Sumrow takes on an incredibly fraught subject with care and restraint, remaining firmly within Rebel's point of view as a young teen who desperately longs for his macho father's approval even as he wages an internal battle against his racist indoctrination. His transformation from a boy who believes he has no authority over his own life to a young man who ultimately rebels against flagrant immorality is both believable and inspiring. Entering Rebel's world will likely be an eye-opening, disturbing but rewarding experience for young readers. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

Candace Fleming, author of the much lauded and awarded The Family Romanov, delivers another thoroughly researched investigation into a historical figure in The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh.

It took Charles Lindbergh 33 and a half hours to fly from New York to Paris. His 1927 trip across the Atlantic--flown entirely on his own--was seen as a "victory for the entire human race," a "moral victory" and a symbol of the "heroic adventure of Christian life." Lindbergh was hurled into celebrity, changed in the span of 33 hours from a modest young man to the "second coming." So intense was his celebrity that the 1932 kidnapping of his first-born child is known to this day as the "crime of the century." How and why, then, did the New York Times describe him in 1941 as "Hitler's puppet-agent in America," while people removed his books from shelves and his name from streets?

Fleming lays out the surprising, confusing and at times extremely upsetting life of Lindbergh in this exhaustively researched and extremely detailed biography. With back matter that includes a bibliography, source notes and index, Fleming makes the extent of her research clear for young readers, dividing the bibliography up first by primary and secondary sources, and second by type of source: books, speeches, magazine articles, etc. Not only does this show her work, it also acts as a brief and excellent education in nonfiction writing for students interested in learning about journalism. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness