The Mark and the Void

Murray, Paul (Get this book)
A darkly comic, lightly metafictional tale about a banker seeking love and a novelist seeking wealth amid the fallout from the financial boom and bust in Ireland. Claude Martingale, a well-paid analyst in the Bank of Torabundo's Dublin office, finds his routine upset when a man named Paul asks if he can trail Claude as research for his next novel. His creative energy sends the book in many directions, making it a little loose and lumpy, but the same may be said of Dickens, with whom real Paul also shares wit, sympathy, and a purposeful sense of mischief. --Kirkus

Numero Zero

Eco, Umberto/ Dixon, Richard (Get this book)
Famed author of riddling intellectual mysteries and sophisticated, hard-hitting essays, Eco combines his delight in suspense with astute political satire in this brainy, funny, neatly lacerating thriller. Colonna, a demoralized hack journalist and ghost writer of detective stories, is certain on this otherwise typical June day in Milan in 1992 that his life is now in danger. Eco’s caustically clever, darkly hilarious, dagger-quick tale of lies, crimes, and collusions condemns the shameless corruption and greed undermining journalism and governments everywhere. A satisfyingly scathing indictment brightened by resolute love.--Booklist

Thirteen Ways of Looking

McCann, Colum (Get this book)
A superbly crafted and deeply moving collection of fiction, with a provocative back story. The Irish-born, New York-based McCann here offers four pieces of fiction that focus on the process of writing and the interplay between art and its inspiration. As he writes in a concluding Author's Note, "Every word we write is autobiographical, perhaps most especially when we attempt to avoid the autobiographical. For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways." He provides literary framing with the title, evoking the oft-cited Wallace Stevens poem. The author's first collection of shorter fiction in more than a decade underscores his reputation as a contemporary master.--Kirkus

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Rushdie, Salman (Get this book)
In his latest novel, Rushdie (Joseph Anton) invents his own cultural narrative—one that blends elements of One Thousand and One Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and action/adventure comic books. The title is a reference to the magical stretch of time that unites the book's three periods, which are actually millennia apart. In the first period (the 12th century), jinn princess Dunia falls in love with real-life philosopher and advocate of reason and science Averroes and bears multiple children. In the second period (current day), Dunia's descendants, a group including a gardener and a young graphic novelist, are unaware of their powerful lineage. Rushdie even incorporates a third period, a far-future millennium, further tying his story together across time. His magical realism celebrates the power of metaphor, while both historic accounts and fables are imbued with familiar themes of migration and separation, reason and faith, repression and freedom. Referencing Henry James, Mel Brooks, Mickey Mouse, Gracian, Bravo TV, and Aristotle, among others, Rushdie provides readers with an intellectual treasure chest cleverly disguised as a comic pop-culture apocalyptic caprice.--Publisher's Weekly

Did You Ever Have a Family

Clegg, Bill (Get this book)
In this sorrowful and deeply probing debut novel, literary agent and memoirist Clegg delivers a story of loss and its grueling aftermath. The story opens with an unimaginable tragedy: a Connecticut house is consumed by fire in the wee hours before a wedding. The bride's mother, June, is the only survivor. Everyone else—Lolly, June's daughter, with whom she had a strained relationship; June's womanizing ex-husband, Adam; June's ex-con boyfriend Luke, 20 years her junior; and Lolly's fiancé, Will—all die in the blaze. The conclusion of the family's narrative is foregone: due to the fire, everyone ends up dead or alone. But it's Clegg's deft handling of all the parsed details—missed opportunities, harbored regrets, and unspoken good intentions—that make the journey toward redemption and forgiveness so memorable. --Publisher's Weekly

Confession of the Lioness

Couto, Mia/ Brookshaw, David (Get this book)

Inspired by real events experienced by prolific author Couto, this lyrical novel is about the many facets of fear that haunt the people in the tiny village of Kulumani, deep in the bush of Mozambique. Though the plot can get lost in dense dreamlike passages, its depiction of the oppression of women is impossible to shake. Couto weaves a surreal mystery of humanity against nature, men against women, and tradition against modernity. --Publisher's Weekly

The Last Pilot

Johncock, Benjamin (Get this book)
Using the early days of the U.S. space exploration program as a backdrop, Johncock’s impressive debut laces fact with fiction to tell the tale of Jim Harrison, an Air Force test pilot, and his wife, Grace. Jim’s story is fascinating, and the author writes with a strong ear for dialogue, which rattles the pages with intensity. A marvelous, emotionally powerful novel.--Publisher's Weekly

Confession of the Lioness

Couto, Mia/ Brookshaw, David (Get this book)
In the tiny village of Kulumani, the people struggle to keep themselves safe from a marauding band of lions. Mozambique biologist and writer Couto crafts a rich tale in which the spirit world is made real, animals are controlled by people, and dead ancestors are feared for their power to destroy cities. Couto also manages to explore the clash of disparate belief systems—tribal, Islam, Christian—in postcolonial Africa and deftly weaves in a critique of the embedded patriarchy. If there is a fault, it is the unevenness of the reveal of information which at times allows questions to linger too long, distracting the reader from fully falling under the spell of this otherwise entrancing narrative. A haunting, ethereal flight of magical realism.--Kirkus

In the Country: Stories

Alvar, Mia (Get this book)
In this stunning debut collection, the yearnings of the characters resonate well beyond the page, and each story feels as rich, as deep, and as crafted as a novel. Equally impressive is the confident fluidity with which Alvar moves from Manila to Bahrain to Tokyo, from 1971 to 1986 to the 21st century. Throughout Alvar’s stories, the language is as elegant as it is durable, while the lines of class, race, gender, and history are both blurred and crystallized.--Publisher's Weekly

Valley of the Shadow

Peters, Ralph/ Skoch, George (Get this book)
Those who enjoy Bruce Catton's and Shelby Foote's Civil War histories will find a fictional equal in Peters' retelling of the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign.Combining character study, strategy, and battle scenes, Peters focuses on the great, small, and those in history's shadows, like U.S. Gen. Emory Upton, "an enigma, a hardened Christian, mean as a Turk…a brilliant, intolerant merciless young man." Famous names also appear: Union Army Gen. Philip Sheridan, all pugnacious Irish temper; tobacco-chewing Confederate Gen. Jubal Early, "a spitting, crook-back man and harsh-mouthed as a heathen"; and future president Rutherford Hayes, who learned "War made it hard to credit a merciful God." A superlative novel. --Kirkus

The Turner House

Flournoy, Angela (Get this book)
A complicated portrait of the modern American family emerges in Flournoy's debut novel. For the 13 Turner siblings, the house on Detroit's East Side isn't just their childhood home. It's also the crux of memories of their dead father and a link among 13 very different adults. But the house has built up debt, their ill mother, Viola, lives elsewhere, and a question hangs—what to do with the Yarrow Street house? Flournoy's writing is precise and sharp, and despite several loose ends—Troy doesn't experience significant emotiona l change by the book's end, and the house's fate remains unclear—the novel draws readers to the Turner family almost magnetically. A talent to watch.--Kirkus

The Lady from Zagreb

Kerr, Philip (Get this book)
Bestseller Kerr’s superlative 10th novel featuring former homicide cop Bernie Gunther finds Bernie, now an officer in the SD, at an international police conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in the summer of 1942. Heinrich Heckholz, an attorney, wants Bernie to use his access at Wannsee to gather evidence that a charitable foundation is involved in fraud. Kerr combines a murder mystery that Raymond Chandler could have devised with a searing look at the inhumanity of the Nazis and their allies, presented from a unique perspective. (Publisher's Weekly)

God Help the Child

Toni Morrison (Get this book)
Brutality, racism and lies are relieved by moments of connection in Morrison's latest.A little girl is born with skin so black her mother will not touch her. Desperate for approval, to just once have her mother take her hand, she tells a lie that puts an innocent schoolteacher in jail for decades. Later, the ebony-skinned girl will change her name to Bride, wear only white, become a cosmetics entrepreneur, drive a Jaguar. Her lover, a man named Booker, also bears a deep scar on his soul—his older brother was abducted, tortured and murdered by a pedophilic serial killer. This is a skinny, fast-moving novel filled with tragic incidents, most sketched in a few haunting sentences. A chilling oracle and a lively storyteller, Nobel winner Morrison continues the work she began 45 years ago with The Bluest Eye. --Kirkus

The Sellout

Paul Beatty (Get this book)
The provocative author of The White Boy Shuffle (1996) and Slumberland (2008) is back with his most penetratingly satirical novel yet. Beatty has never been afraid to stir the pot when it comes to racial and socioeconomic issues, and his latest is no different. In fact, this novel is his most incendiary, and readers unprepared for streams of racial slurs (and hilarious vignettes about nearly every black stereotype imaginable) in the service of satire should take a pass. Beatty never backs down, and readers are the beneficiaries. Another daring, razor-s h arp novel from a writer with talent to burn.--Kirkus

All the Old Knives

Steinhauer, Olen (Get this book)

Two American spies—one retired, one active—dance around what really happened five years earlier during a mission gone horribly wrong. In this masterfully plotted and suspenseful stand-alone, Steinhauer pieces together the details of an event the CIA refers to only as Flughafen (after the German word for airport). Four Islamist extremists, members of the Aslim Taslam group, hijacked a plane at the Vienna airport, and, despite the presence of a low-level operative onboard—a pure coincidence—the takeover ended in tragedy. It's an understatement to say that nothing is as it seems, but even readers well-versed in espionage fiction will be pleasantly surprised by Steinhauer's plot twists and double backs. --Kirkus

Almost Famous Women: Stories

Bergman, Megan Mayhew (Get this book)
In her second story collection, Bergman tells the forgotten tales of women hovering on the edges of history. From Allegra Byron, the poet's illegitimate daughter, to Dolly Wilde, Oscar's niece, this book collects notable women whose lives have been forgotten. Though some stories seem to reveal more about their fictional narrators than about the women themselves, this gives the collection a unified feel and helps readers see how little the public has understood about these women and their genius. Only "The Lottery, Redux," a spinoff of the Shirley Jackson ta l e, seems obviously symbolic and mars this otherwise original and surprising collection. A collection of stories as beautiful and strange as the women who inspired them. --Kirkus

Mightier Than the Sword

Jeffrey Archer (Get this book)
The fifth of Archer's Clifton Chronicles begins with a bang before heading on to only slightly less explosive ground as Archer examines his fictional clan's financial, political and personal contretemps in the 1960s. Emma Barrington Clifton's family company, Barrington Shipping, has launched the luxury liner MV Buckingham, but her arch enemy, Don Pedro Martinez, an Argentinian gangster and Nazi sympathizer, hires the Irish Republican Army to sabotage its maiden voyage. The conclusion's a turbo-charged cliffhanger that'll have fans screaming Arrrcherr! --Kirkus

The Whites

Harry Brandt (Get this book)
Price is one whale of a storyteller by any name, as evinced by the debut of his new brand—okay, Brandt—a gripping, gritty, Greek tragedy of cops, killers, and the sometimes-blurry line between them. The sprawling tale centers on stoic police sergeant Billy Graves, banished to the purgatory of the NYPD's night watch since his role in a racially charged, politically explosive double shooting a decade earlier. The author skillfully manipulates these multiple story lines for peak suspense, as his arresting characters careen toward a devastating final reckoning.--Publisher's Weekly

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

Gaiman, Neil (Get this book)
The third collection of short fiction from a beloved modern mythmaker. Everything that endears Gaiman to his legions of fans is on display in this collection of short stories: his gift for re-imagining ancient tales, his willingness to get down into the dark places, his humor. Most of these stories have been published elsewhere, except for the new American Gods story "Black Dog" (which does not disappoint), but the collection as a whole does add up to something bigger than it seems (only partly because there's a TARDIS in it). Full of all manner of witches and monsters and things that creep in the night, this collection will thoroughly satisfy faithful fans and win new ones—if there's anyone out there left unconverted.--Kirkus

The First Bad Man

Miranda July (Get this book)
In a bizarrely touching first novel, July brings the characteristic humor, frankness and emotional ruthlessness of her previous work in film, prose and performance to a larger canvas. Cheryl Glickman lives a lonely, precisely arranged life afflicted by mysterious neuroses, including the persistent sensation of a lump in her throat. She obsesses over Phillip Bettelheim, a board member of the nonprofit where she works, and the belief that she keeps meeting a familiar, beloved soul embodied in the babies of strangers. A sometimes-funny, sometimes-upsetting, surprisingly absorbing novel that lives up to the expectations created by July's earlier work and demonstrates her ability to carry the qualities of her short fiction into the thickly fleshed-out world of a novel.--Kirkus

The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

Christopher Scotton (Get this book)
Debut author Scotton sets a captivating modern morality tale in Kentucky's coal country, 1985.With the small-town aura of "To Kill a Mockingbird", a man reflects on the summer he learned that tradition, greed, class, race and sexual orientation can make for murder. Multiple stories are at play in the coal town of Medgar: Bubba Boyd, the boorish son of a coal baron, is raping the landscape; local opposition leader and popular hairstylist Paul Pierce's homosexuality is used to attack his environmental position; and the narrator, Kevin, grieving the death of his younger brother, arrives at age 14 to stay with his widowed grandfather. A powerful epic of people and place, loss and love, reconciliation and redemption.--Kirkus

Cold Cold Heart

Tami Hoag (Get this book)
In Hoag's latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he's a sheriff's deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John's home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana's fiercely protective aunt to Mercer's pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag's narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion. A top-notch psychological thriller.--Kirkus

Die Again: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

Tess Gerritsen (Get this book)
A not-for-the-squeamish murder mystery set in both Boston and Botswana.The trouble starts on a safari in Botswana's Okavango Delta. Former Londoner Millie Jacobson narrates in the present tense about her vacation to hell, from which she emerges much the worse for wear-but the others on the trip don't emerge at all. Years later in Boston, Detective Jane Rizzoli and Medical Examiner Maura Isles investigate the death of renowned taxidermist Leon Gott, who never met a big animal he didn't want to shoot and stuff. Through relentless digging, Rizzoli and Isles uncover connections between the two events. Mystery lovers not familiar with the author's work should brace themselves, because they might trip over a bucket of entrails. But they will also find a terrific storyteller.--Kirkus

Moriarty

Anthony Horowitz (Get this book)
A Sherlockian pastiche without Holmes and Watson? Yes indeed, and it's a tour de force quite unlike any other fruit from these densely plowed fields.It is 1891. Holmes and professor James Moriarty are both presumed dead after hurtling over Reichenbach Falls, though the only body that's been recovered is thought to be that of a chef at the Englischer Hof. The Pinkerton Detective Agency has sent operative Frederick Chase to England to investigate rumors that Clarence Devereux, fresh from his triumphantly lucrative scheme to manipulate stock prices by sending false information over Western Union wires, has come to join Moriarty in an Anglo-American criminal empire-and, finding the Napoleon of crime deceased, has stayed to become his successor. Readers who aren't put off by the Hollywood pacing, with action set pieces less like Conan Doyle than the Robert Downey Jr. movies, are in for a rare treat, a mystery as original as it is enthralling.--Kirkus