Not so long ago, in a galaxy not too far away, author Byron Lane worked as Carrie Fisher's assistant, and some of that experience inspired his sparkling first novel, A Star Is Bored.

The story opens with Charlie, an insecure young man desperate to escape a career rut, arriving at movie star Kathi Kannon's mansion to interview for a job as her personal assistant. She opens her own door and asks if he's there for a colonic. Seeing his horrified expression, she says she's acting and "just f*cking with you." So begins their capricious relationship as employer-employee and, eventually, friends and confidants.

Charlie navigates the ups and downs of bipolar disorder with Kathi, travels with her, shares stories about his abusive dad--establishing a bond with the actress he's idolized since childhood (he had her Priestess Talara action figure from the epic film Nova Quest). The two laugh and cry together, fight and make up, in brutally candid ways only people who deeply care for each other can do.

Though Kathi is fictional, Lane gives her witticisms one can easily hear Fisher say, and Kathi is so vibrant she'll make fans miss the late Star Wars actress even more. Lane also captures the absurdities of being a celebrity assistant and the interactions within the network of PAs. Charlie's attitude about another assistant is: "I resent him, I abhor him, I friended him on Facebook."

Life with Kathi is unpredictable and at times demanding, but in her light Charlie blooms. Likewise, by the time the story reaches its lovely, bittersweet ending, it's clear Lane's star is on the rise. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Born in Addis Ababa, NEA fellow Maaza Mengiste (The Shadow King) takes readers home to "a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory." As one of the editors for Akashic Books' ongoing Noir series, Mengiste gathers "some of Ethiopia's most talented writers living in the country and abroad" and presents 14 intriguing tales in Addis Ababa Noir.

Vicious revenge looms in three of the collection's most memorable contributions: an unrequited lover twice betrays the object of his devotion in Meron Hadero's "Kind Stranger"; a daughter avenges her mother's attempted murder in Hannah Giorgis's "A Double-Edged Inheritance"; an abused orphan refuses to be bartered away in Mikael Awake's "Father Bread."

Women seeking agency are punished in Sulaiman Addonia's "A Night in Bela Sefer" and again in Linda Yohannes's "Kebele ID." Searching for missing answers from her childhood urges a Toronto woman home to Addis, accompanied by a colleague, in Rebecca Fisseha's "Ostrich," while identifying the remains of the disappeared haunts Mengiste's own "Dust, Ash, Flight," undoubtedly the collection's most accomplished story. The dead won't stay dead in Mahtem Shifferaw's "The Blue Shadow," nor in Lelissa Girma's "Insomnia"; some don't even seem to exist in Girma T. Fantaye's "Of the Poet and the Café." Innocent victims pay dearly in Solomon Hailemariam's "None of Your Business" and Teferi Nigussie Tafa's "Agony of the Congested Heart."

As is often the case with anthologies, quality varies, but the standouts ensure evocative glimpses into a bustling, multi-ethnic, multilingual metropolis few in the West will have visited. "These are not gentle stories," Mengiste warns, but promises "something wholly original--and unsettling." --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Rebecca Reid (Perfect Liars) delivers a cracker with The Truth Hurts. Poppy needs a plan after being unceremoniously fired despite years of dedicated nanny service. Instead, she's in a roadside bar in a foreign country with no friends or money. She's approached by an extremely attractive older man. After verbal sparring and an obvious connection, Drew offers Poppy his spare bed. She stays on in his decadent Ibiza summer home and, after a fairy-tale month, they marry.

Poppy isn't stupid. She knows "handsome rich men didn't just stumble into your life, buy you dresses and then offer to marry you.... There would be a reason." The other shoe begins to fall when Drew proposes an agreement: they never talk about the past. Poppy is wary but relieved. Drew is hiding something, but she also has much to conceal. Flashbacks to a prior nanny job swirl into the present timeline, revealing the awful events Poppy wants to stay secret. At the same time, she catches Drew in small lies and feels uneasy in their isolated London mansion.

Poppy invites her friend Gina to stay, then Drew's friends come for a weekend. As the longtime friends eat, drink and dig at each other, Poppy's and Drew's pasts are forced to the surface, to a shocking end. The tense, slow-burn relationship drama in The Truth Hurts unsurprisingly turns ugly and ends with a startling burst of intensity that works extremely well despite its abruptness. Reid's writing is engaging, taut and just plain fun to read. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

In this banter-packed, action-fueled opener to the post-apocalyptic Mercenary Librarians series, Kit Rocha (Beyond series), also known as writing team Bree Bridges and Donna Herren, imagines a technocratic future and the bold heroes trying to survive it.

"Nina had broken the cardinal rule, and now she had to kill someone." In 2060, the remnants of the U.S. exist under the rule of a megacorporation that seized power after a massive solar flare wrecked the country. Nina, a genetically altered clone, lives with her friends and fellow fugitives Maya and Dani in the ruins of Atlanta, where they're slowly re-creating a lost artifact of civilization--a public library. When gruff, gorgeous supersoldier Garrett Knox and his squad of artificially enhanced commandos ask the women to help them steal a complete copy of the Library of Congress, Nina can't resist the offer or the man. Knox, however, has a problem. His squad members will die if he doesn't double-cross Nina, but he's falling for her generous heart. If he doesn't come clean, he'll lose her forever. If he does, he'll lose everything else.

Exciting fight sequences, plentiful one-liners and spicy love scenes make Deal with the Devil easy to relish. Under its gritty veneer lies a deep core of idealism and compassion, as two people with traumatic pasts struggle to hold onto their ethics in a world where only the strongest survive. Filled with intriguing heroes- and heroines-in-waiting, this series is poised for a long, satisfying run. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Suzanne Allain (Incognito; The Celebrated Pedestrian) has created a delightfully witty and wholesome romance novel with Mr. Malcolm's List. Jeremy Malcolm is the extremely rich and handsome second son of an earl, and thus has been the target of many a matchmaking mama. But Mr. Malcolm has always managed to avoid an engagement, becoming known as "a Destroyer of Young Ladies' Dreams."

One of those young ladies was Miss Julia Thistlewaite. When Julia finds out that Mr. Malcolm has a list of attributes he's looking for in a future wife (of all the conceit!), and that she wasn't considered serious-minded enough to meet the fourth requirement on the list, she is outraged. She writes to her friend Selina Dalton, the smartest woman that Julia knows, begging her to come to London for a visit.

Selina is alarmed by Julia's plan: to make Mr. Malcolm fall in love with Selina, only to reveal her own list, proving that Mr. Malcolm couldn't meet all of Selina's requirements. She is reluctant to participate in such a preposterous revenge scheme, but she agrees because she is also desperate for an excuse to stay in London instead of returning to her parents' tiny vicarage.

Hilarious and fast-paced, Mr. Malcolm's List is a bright and refreshing Regency romp. The entanglements that Julia and Selina get caught in are quite funny, and Mr. Malcolm's slow realization that, indeed, he was a bit toplofty is very satisfying. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

In Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, historian Amy Stanley tells the dynamic story of an unconventional woman in early 19th-century Japan.

The project began when Stanley became fascinated with an archive that included dozens of letters written by a woman named Tsuneno and the letters (and legal documents) created by her family in response. Together, these letters created a rare picture of the life of a non-elite woman, written in her own words.

Born in 1804 in a rural village, Tsuneno was the daughter of a Buddhist priest. She tried to settle into the traditional (and relatively comfortable) life her family expected of her, but it didn't take. Divorced three times and faced with another arranged marriage, she ran away to Edo (now Tokyo), already one of the largest cities of the world. Her life in Edo was always hard and often scandalous by the standards of her family and society. She moved from tenement to tenement, took menial jobs that didn't pay enough to support her, and married, divorced and re-married a violent man from her home region. And yet she loved city life: its street food, street theater and street fashions. More, she loved that she had chosen it for herself.

Stanley places Tsuneno firmly in her historical context, creating a multi-layered picture of life in Japan in the decades before it was forcibly "opened" to the West by Commodore Perry's fleet in 1854. Stranger in the Shogun's City is a vivid and often lyrical portrait not only of Tsuneno, but of Edo, the city she loved. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Framed by the story of Michelle Bowdler's uninvestigated rape and subsequent activism, Is Rape a Crime? criticizes the abhorrent trivialization of rape by the criminal justice system; it will move readers to demand change.

In 1984, two men broke into Michelle Bowdler's apartment and raped her repeatedly. The police considered her "lucky"--she could have been murdered, "a legitimate crime. But the crime [she] experienced was not." She completed a rape kit--a multi-hour exam for collecting evidence that could identify her perpetrators--but it would never be tested. Then, a 2007 Boston Globe article about untested sexual assault samples spurred her to become a social justice advocate, fighting for the testing of the estimated 400,000 untested rape kits across the U.S.

Bowdler's damning account argues that rape isn't--but must be--investigated as seriously as other felonies. She outlines a pervasive, destructive status quo wherein rape victims' allegations are dubiously dismissed as "unfounded." Bowdler cautions against "equat[ing] rape with sex" and thus "a male need"; reducing testimonies to "he said, she said" arguments; portraying a rapist's life as "ruined" as much as the survivor's; creating special victims units that simply mask neglect; or celebrating "weak apologies" in response to movements like #MeToo. Though she finds hope in activism, Bowdler stresses that it's not the job of survivors to effect change. Is Rape a Crime? is a searing condemnation of rape culture that firmly places the onus on law enforcement and legislators to reform broken systems. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

If turning scraps of ancient papyrus into an enthralling true-crime escapade takes a miracle, consider Ariel Sabar a miracle worker. In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King shook the foundations of the Christian church when she announced in Rome the discovery of what she called "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife." Sabar, who had been following the story first for Smithsonian and then for the Atlantic, was the only journalist in the room for the presentation.

The discovery had the potential to unravel millennia of church dogma surrounding sex and gender. Furthermore, King's reading of the torn, nigh illegible text suggested that Jesus valued women's leadership far more than his church has. But as soon as the bit of inked papyrus saw the spotlight, its provenance drew far more scrutiny than its original proponents could handle. Clumsy handwriting, horrid syntax and unsubstantiated dating set off a chain reaction of queries, criticisms and suspicions of forgery, spurring Sabar to dig far deeper than he might have imagined when he first took the assignment.

The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of My Father's Paradise transforms top-notch research skills into riveting suspense. And even as he closes in early on his prime suspect, method and motive prove to be the more baffling questions, at increasingly bizarre turns. Engrossing as the forgery thread becomes, the underpinnings for why a respected historian such as King, and a fair few of her colleagues, would so audaciously pursue a flimsy excuse for authentic scripture drive at a far more unsettling conclusion.

Veritas is an extraordinary and mind-bending adventure into ancient traditions with modern consequences. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

"It started with a tie and a button-down shirt. When my daughter was three, she asked for that ensemble for Christmas." When journalist Lisa Selin Davis's daughter announced she was a tomboy, it caught her by surprise, though Davis grew up with tomboys as heroines on favorite TV shows (Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie, Jo Polniaczek on The Facts of Life) and in beloved literature (Jo March in Little Women, Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird). Ubiquitous when Davis was growing up, tomboys were uncommon in her daughter's 2015 crowd.

After recurring instances of people questioning her daughter's gender identity, Davis wrote a "hotly contested" op-ed for the New York Times pondering her daughter's experiences. Partly in response to the criticism, she began to study gender and tomboys. In Tomboy, Davis reports on numerous aspects of gender while acknowledging it's "one of the hardest subjects to talk about." She addresses the judgments embedded in the word "tomboy" that provide only cisgender girls the privilege of "blurring the boundaries," and how overly restrictive categories (the pink/blue divide) have tremendous social and psychological implications.

Davis (Belly) traces the origin of the word tomboy, as well as movements of the pink/blue line in history and the impact of commercialism, homo- and transphobias, the media, racism and privilege. Who gets to draw the line? The single unequivocal truth about gender Davis uncovered is "it's complicated," but the more we know, the sooner we can undo stereotypes. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

David Crystal (Spell It Out; The Story of English in 100 Words) explores exactly what makes an English conversation function in Let's Talk. English has dozens of words to describe different types of conversations: banter, chat, confab, gossip, harangue, joke, prattle and rant, to name a few. And from greetings to turn-taking to storytelling to online conversations, Crystal explores the many ways and styles in which English speakers communicate. He explains that there's one defining quality that separates conversation from every other variety of language except literature: "its semantically random and unpredictable nature."

Crystal unpacks this randomness to show how conversation is created, and even points out fallacies in the common conception of conversation. For example, most people would say that interrupting is rude or inhibits discourse, but Crystal explains, after examining recordings, that most interruptions are seen as "signs of solidarity or rapport."

Language has changed dramatically in the last century with the advent of telephones and the Internet, but Crystal assures readers that basic conversational models are unlikely to change, using examples of literature from Shakespeare to Percy Jackson to support his arguments. Full of interesting conversational models and some funny anecdotes from Crystal's own life, Let's Talk will make people think much harder the next time someone wishes them a casual "Good morning!" Let's Talk is perfect for armchair linguists. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

"For all its flaws," Sara and Emiliano believe, "the United States justice system was as good as it gets on this here earth." But after barely surviving their journey across the border, the siblings aren't sure the U.S. will provide the safe haven they so desperately need in Illegal, the second installment in Francisco X. Stork's compelling young adult series that began with Disappeared.

While investigating the disappearances of young women in her hometown of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, reporter Sara Zapata uncovered a human trafficking ring. Sara's investigation turned her family's world upside down, forcing them to flee their home. Ten days ago, she arrived at Fort Stockton Detention Center, where she will be detained until her asylum request is heard. Meanwhile, younger brother Emiliano lays low in Chicago with their father, a permanent resident, where he is trying to get an incriminating cell phone to someone who can help uncover the criminals behind the trafficking ring. As they come to realize U.S. justice isn't swift, and danger followed them from Mexico, Sara and Emiliano wonder if they'll ever be safe.

Stork's Illegal is a thrilling and heartbreaking look at immigration and the U.S. judicial system. While Emiliano and Sara are the main focus, Stork does a beautiful job of depicting a variety of immigration experiences, as well as others' perceptions of immigrants. Sara and Emiliano narrate alternating chapters, incorporating the stories of those around them into their own traumatic accounts: Sara bears witness to other women being held in the detention center on asylum claims; Emiliano sees how much his father gave up to appear "American." Thought-provoking and insightful, Illegal is a bold examination of conscience, hope and the courage to do what's right. --Kyla Paterno, freelance reviewer

In Tehlor Kay Mejia's compelling Paola Santiago and the River of Tears, the title character is a precocious tween who eschews her single mother's beliefs in the supernatural for the fact-filled certainty of science.

Paola is part of an inseparable trio that includes the more affluent Emma Lockwood and Dante Mata, her next-door neighbor and possible crush. When Emma misses their stargazing meet-up at the Gila River one evening and the authorities don't take their hunch that something's wrong seriously, Paola and Dante resolve to find her in the Arizona desert. Things start to get weird when Dante's grandmother arms them with a magical chancla (house slipper), shopping bag and Florida water. One by one, Paola comes face to face with all of the legends that her overprotective but flighty mother had taught her about--chupacabras, La Mano Pachona and La Llorona herself, the ghost of a woman who murdered her children and was cursed to wander the riverbanks for eternity in search of their bodies and looking for her next victim.

Mejia imbues her middle-grade debut with vulnerability and fierceness--Paola is an often angry girl who bucks up against her mother's traditions. The author adeptly showcases not only details about Mexican American culture, but also weaves in the protagonist's love for science and problem-solving. Clever chapter headings add humor in between harrowing scenes, and duplicitous characters will keep readers guessing whom to trust. Love is the saving grace here. Paola's love for her friends is key to her survival. But a mother's love--in all of its fierceness and fury--is what drives the narrative forward. --Shelley Diaz, supervising librarian, BookOps: New York Public Library & Brooklyn Public Library