A headstrong young heroine guides this spirited adaptation of a horror classic

Megan Shepherd’s YA update of The Island of Dr. Moreau, the first in a trilogy of books that will take on the horror classics Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein, focuses on Juliet Moreau, the teenage daughter of H.G. Wells’s titular doctor. Orphaned in London — her mother has died and her father has vanished, tainted by scandal — Juliet, once at the foothold of society, gets by cleaning the university building where her father once taught. A tip to his whereabouts leads to a chance encounter with the family’s former servant, Montgomery. Desperate to know why her father would abandon his family and curious about his rumored practice of operating on live animals, Juliet follows Montgomery on a long trip back to the island. Along the way they rescue a shipwrecked scientist named Edward (the hero of The Island of Doctor Moreau) and a romantic triangle forms.

The island itself does prove to be inhabited by the rumored animal-man hybrids: Moreau’s explanation is that he considers himself a pioneer in “the science of manipulating living forms,” much to the horror of his daughter, who is a keen student of science. Juliet Moreau is a welcome addition to the YA canon: passionate, spirited, and a little ahead of her time.

Narrated with pluck by Lucy Rayner, The Madman’s Daughter is a smart adventure story with delectable elements: romance, thrills and sharp dialogue. It’ll leave readers excited for the next installment.

A bold fantasy imagines a dark shadow lurking below some beloved Christmas traditions.

Giving “Christmas spirit” a new meaning, Brom’s bold fantasy novel just might make you think differently about that familiar figure in red. Krampus opens on a desolate Christmas morning in a West Virginia trailer community. Struggling songwriter Jesse Walker is outside his home, drunk and depressed over losing his wife and young daughter to Dillard Deaton, the local police chief. He’s pointed a .38 down his throat, ready to make this his last Christmas, when he spots a bunch of small, devilish men chasing a man in a Santa suit. Moments later, a velvet sack drops from the sky and crashes through the roof of his trailer. Turns out, not only does the sack contain the dolls his daughter wants this year, but it will restore order to the dark Yule Lord, Krampus. As the story goes – and feel free to muffle the kids’ ears – Santa Claus imprisoned the Krampus, and this year, he and his men are back with a vengeance. If Jesse makes a deal with the Krampus, he might get his family back.

Brom has a talent for drawing dark shadows underneath beloved stories. With The Child Thief, the writer and illustrator added a touch of the macabre to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. And while this tale of evil retribution appeals to horror fans, it’s grounded in a domestic drama that wouldn’t be out of place on the five o’clock news. Kirby Heyborne adds robust narration that recalls your favorite holiday stories, but with plenty of new twists.

A witty, whiskey-soaked romp with a Prohibition-era bank-robbing hero

Wake up in Attica, go to bed at the Plaza. Fuckin’ America. Such was the life of bank robber Willie “The Actor” Sutton, an Irish kid from Brooklyn who came up during Prohibition and stole an estimated $2 million during his career. The con was released from Attica Correctional Facility on Christmas Eve 1969 to the acclaim and notoriety that a nickname like “The Actor” might have earned earned him – or so Moehringer would have us believe. Sutton (who died in 1980) granted a single post-prison interview, though the resulting article, Moehringer writes, contained several errors and “few real revelations.” To, in effect, give a fascinating subject the profile he deserves, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and memoirist (The Tender Bar) has imagined Sutton’s first day of freedom, being followed around New York City by an unnamed reporter and photographer.

Flashing between Sutton’s Christmas ’69 and his Prohibition-era bank schemes, Sutton is a witty, whiskey-soaked romp through a Gotham populated by Chesterfield-smoking hustlers and surly newsmen. Sutton is undeniably the story’s moral center, less a thuggish Dillinger clone than a romantic and intellectual who reads Cicero behind bars. Leading a tour from the Brooklyn waterfront to Times Square, Sutton is struck by the vanished landmarks of his criminal career and haunted by memories of his former love, Bess Endner. The wealthy daughter of a shipping magnate and the poor Irish son meet as kids at Coney Island, but her family disapproved and Bess disappeared around the time Willie entered the racket. He muses: “Money. Love. There’s not a problem that isn’t caused by one or the other. And there’s not a problem that can’t be solved by one or the other.”

Narrated by actor Dylan Baker, Sutton shines a light on the class divide while affectionately adding to the legacy of a famous antihero.

A kaleidoscopic view of a relationship in crisis from an actor who understands characters

Whether it’s a chance encounter or code-red crisis, every gesture in Molly Ringwald’s fiction debut has a ripple effect. Greta, one half of the couple at the center of this “novel in stories,” is shocked to learn of her husband’s infidelity. Her husband, Phillip, has been having an affair with their daughter’s violin teacher, and his philandering, laid bare in the opening story “The Harvest Moon,” sets the tone for the rest of the novel.

We get to know Greta through her relationship with Peter, an actor who recently left a popular children’s show and is at a crossroads in his personal and professional life (“Ursa Minor”). Meanwhile Phillip bonds with Marina, a single mother whose young son, Oliver, would rather go by Olivia (“My Olivia”), and their daughter, Charlotte, reacts to her parents’ separation with visits to neighbor Betty, who is trying to reconnect with her adult daughter (“The Little One”). In the title story, Greta’s feelings of abandonment sound like they’re being spoken into a tape recorder. “When it happens to you, you will wonder if he loved her. He will assure you that he did not, that it wasn’t about love.”

Drawing on her career as an actor (The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, The Secret Life of the American Teenager) Ringwald is very good at getting into the heads of her characters, from emotionally wounded children to a cuckolded wife and a man exploring his own fractured relationships. Observing each character can have the effect of watching surveillance video, switching between rooms. With her empathetic narration, Ringwald brings each one further into focus.

An aging literary giant's meditations on life are a powerful reminder to take advantage of every day

Death does not become Paul Auster but, in this memoir, it consumes him. In January 2011, one month before his 64th birthday, the author started this journal. In a lucid, second-person narrative, Auster contemplates being and time, from the deaths of his parents to sex, marriage, the body and scars of unknown origin. A wide, entertaining swath of Winter Journal is devoted to a listing his previous addresses — a clever bit of biography. There are 21 in all, from East Orange, N.J., to extended stays in Paris, and Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he now lives with his wife, writer Suri Hustvedt.

A companion to Auster’s 1982 debut, The Invention of Solitude, which ruminates on the sudden death of his father and the breakup of his first marriage, Winter Journal is a desirable autumn listen: quiet, reflective and austere. He’s candid about his own mortality, from what he calls a “false heart attack” to almost killing his wife and daughter in a car accident (his last turn behind the wheel). While the memoir skips around in time, it’s grounded by Auster’s considered narration. If you’re a fan of his famed tales of New York (The Brooklyn Follies, The New York Trilogy), you’ll find comfort in his Brooklyn home on a snowy day.

This slim volume is a good reminder to take advantage of each day, while also taking a moment now and then to savor it all.

Like High Fidelity for the Twitter age

In 2009, dumped by his girlfriend and living back home with the folks, Justin Halpern mined Twitter gold from his father’s foul-mouthed wisdom. Dusting off quotables from childhood talks and bourbon-soaked heart-to-hearts, Shit My Dad Says spread fast, leading to a best-selling book and TV sitcom of the same name. While Halpern’s career in comedy took off, it took a little longer to win back the girl. With I Suck at Girls, Halpern toys with marriage, taking his father’s advice to consider what he’s learned about the fairer sex before deciding whether to propose. As the title suggests, Halpern’s education has been far from sentimental.

Like a lot of late-blooming boys, Halpern’s adolescent knowledge of women is limited to dirty magazines and lunchroom gossip. When he and a friend discover an abandoned stack of Playboy magazines, it’s practically a light from the heavens. It’ll be a few years before he’ll lose his virginity to a Hooters waitress (he’s a dishwasher on summer break), and a few more before a meaningful relationship comes his way. Like High Fidelity for the Twitter age, Halpern fit together the pieces of his romantic past in order to ready himself for commitment. These collected vignettes, narrated with goofy humor by Sean Schemmel, make up a shaggy-dog memoir that any mother (and father) could love.

As his name might suggest, Pak Jun Do – literally “John Doe” – has a way of slipping in and out of situations with some anonymity. Whether abducting Japanese citizens on a ship or navigatingTexason a diplomatic mission, the recent North Korean military enlistee is given some sobering responsibilities. Jun Do is the son of the director of Long Tomorrows, an orphan labor camp outsidePyongyang. When Jun Do isn’t choosing which boys will eat first, he dreams of his mother, an opera singer who was also stolen away. In his second novel, Adam Johnson skillfully describes a nation we mostly know from newswires. His everyman, Jun Do, is equal parts hero and bystander in a visceral tale of abandonment and loss. But in addition to the horror, there’s a hint of the romantic: Jun Do defeats Commander Ga, a rival of Kim Jong-Il, and squires his wife, the beautiful actress Sun Moon.

It comes as a surprise that this painstakingly detailed novel, which was published shortly after the Dear Leader’s death in December 2011, is written by an American with limited firsthand knowledge of the country’s dark landscape. Narrated artfully by the author, with Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee and James Kyson Lee, The Orphan Master’s Son is a nail-biting listen.

As much a puzzle of a marriage as a portrait

As a specialist in domestic dramas (A Home at the End of the World, The Hours) Michael Cunningham has a way of elevating dinner table conversation to Italian opera. Set in New York’s SoHo sometime in the mid-aughts, By Nightfall is the story of Peter and Rebecca Harris, an art dealer and magazine editor, respectively, who represent the staid yuppiedom we’re familiar with from Mia Farrow-era Woody Allen movies. Cunningham’s outsized references to Fellini and Thomas Mann help stir the Creuset, making for a page-turner that’s hard as hard to resist as a 2 a.m. Thai food delivery or a designer sample sale.

As the Harrises evaluate their long marriage, the already shaky foundation of their household is rattled by the arrival of Rebecca’s brother, Ethan, an attractive Yale dropout and drug addict in his early 20s. “Mizzy,” as the couple secretly refers to him (short for “The Mistake” – he was born much later than his siblings) serves as a replica of Matthew, Peter’s much worshipped older brother who died young. Now Peter’s faun-like gaze is trained on the young man camped in the spare bedroom. As with observing a piece of fine art or contemporary curio, Cunningham asks us to question the façade – whether it’s a wealthy collector’s Connecticuthome or a man’s love for his wife. Narrated by actor Hugh Dancy and peppered with Peter’s neurotic inner dialogue, By Nightfall is as much a puzzle of a marriage as a portrait.

With extensive research to back up her imagination, Beattie aims to “animate a character against a stage set believable enough to transcend its artifice.” On stages both theatrical (an appearance in the 1935 film Becky Sharp, based on Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair), and political, Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan Nixon (who died in 1993 at age 81) is a complex figure: a romantic, a hard worker, a stoic and devoted wife. Beattie, who narrates, clearly delights in old letters and magazine profiles as she reconstructs the romantic heart of a famous Washington marriage.

Can a dog live forever? In the case of Rin Tin Tin, the early screen star and television hero, yes. Not only is the German shepherd’s kin still with us, but Rin Tin Tin the icon — strong, loving, brave, “the companion of the companionless” — never went away. Author Susan Orlean first discovered the Hollywood dog as a child, in the shape of a figurine on her grandfather’s desk. Years later, memories of the dog led to a 10-year study of Rin Tin Tin’s life and legacy — a history which spans 100 years. Weaving together her own personal journey with that of an Army lieutenant and his dog, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, narrated by Orlean, is a tender, sweeping tale of love and loss.

While stationed in France during WWI, Army lieutenant Lee Duncan discovered a litter of German shepherd puppies in an abandoned French Kennel. The native Californian grew up orphaned and lonely, a natural dog lover who left more than one dog behind as a child. He would keep two, naming them Rin Tin Tin and Nanette, after handmade dolls popular with French children. Almost from the beginning, Rin Tin Tin, with masculine features, a screen star’s emotional range, and ability to jump 12 feet, was something special. When Duncan returned to the States, he tried in earnest to get Rin Tin Tin into movies, even writing a screenplay for him. Rin Tin Tin would appear in 23 silent films and, along with his reluctant master, lived the life of a movie star. His death in 1932 was a national event, unparalleled for an animal actor. But his bloodline continued. Rin Tin Tin Junior found fame on television.

Orlean travels to France to find the site of Rin Tin Tin’s birth and discovers that the small village was practically wiped off the map after WWI. A visit to the town’s cemetery leads to an eloquent reflection on life’s intangibility: “Could it be that we fill out our lives, experience all that we experience, and then simply leave this world and are forgotten? … Maybe all that we do in life is just race against the idea of disappearing.” A later trip to the 19th-century pet cemetery where Rin Tin Tin is memorialized (and possibly buried), offers rumination on companionship and grief: “Dogs, it was believed, remained loyal even after we were gone. In the nineteenth-century imagination, dogs were the most indefatigable mourners. They were said to visit their masters’ graves on their own, lying on the freshly turned dirt for days, inconsolable.”

Between meditations, Orlean finds curious detours into the history of dog obedience as we know it, popular animal actors in the silent film era, and the origin of the German shepherd. Pedigrees are important to dog people, she notes, “but in the continuing story of Rin Tin Tin, pedigree doesn’t seem as important as the idea of a character continuing, and lasting, across time.”

With traces of Dickens and Roald Dahl’s macabre, Celia and Marco are an attractive young duo who haven’t escaped childhood unscathed. As a girl, Celia’s father sliced her fingers and taught her to heal them with her mind. Marco, an orphan trained in telekinesis, is closely watched by a guardian and squired by girlfriend Isobel, a tarot reader. (She has thoughts of her own about Celia.) As Le Cirque des Rêves travels the globe, Marco and Celia encounter the realistic obstacles that come with love. The debut from Morgenstern — also a tarot card creator — is lushly descriptive, and full of more fantastical flights than a trapeze artist. Divided into diary-like vignettes, the reader gets a taste of an old-world circus

Familial roots are exposed and tangled in Tayari Jones’s spirited coming-of-age tale, set in mid-’80s Atlanta. Teenagers Dana Yarboro and Chaurisse Witherspoon may be raised on pop music and television, but even a “modern” family like the Bradys can’t prepare them for a harsh reality. When the girls meet in a drugstore and bond over faux hair and handbags, Dana knows Chaurisse is her sister. This is no Parent Trap-style farce, however. James Witherspoon, a car service owner and driver, has kept Dana and her mother out of his daily life for years. James has worked hard to keep the girls apart — he forbids Dana from taking a coveted summer job at Six Flags when Chaurisse applies, and discourages them from choosing the same college. While sweet Chaurisse sees her father at the dinner table every night, the younger Dana is used to feeling slighted. “When most people think of bigamy,” she says in the novel’s opening passage, “if they think of it at all, they imagine some primitive practice on the pages of National Geographic.” Far from a foreign landscape or scripted dramedy, Silver Sparrow tells the story of two working families. Divided into two narratives (told by Heather Alicia Simms and Rosalyn Coleman Williams), the novel offers a funny and affecting glance at haves and have-nots. From Dana’s need for a father’s love (“Who doesn’t want to be loved? Anyone who has been cast off knows the pain of it”), to Chaurisse’s mother’s Scarlett O’Hara fantasies and a desire to run a successful hair salon, the women are feisty and filled with desire. Their stories are fresh and nostalgic as an icy Coca-Cola from the bottle.

On New Year’s Eve 1987, Lintonburg teens Jude and Teddy crash a party with Eliza, a visiting New Yorker who is just barely their senior. By the end of the evening Eliza will become pregnant with Teddy’s child and Teddy will succumb to a drug overdose. Reeling from Teddy’s death and itching for the boho life in New York, Jude moves in with his father, a popular St. Marks pot dealer. Parental figures are largely in the margins of the story — like a punk rock Peanuts, the adults are scattered; many have skipped town and abandoned their children. Meanwhile Teddy’s half-brother, Johnny, assumes responsibility for Eliza and her unborn child. At 18, the high school dropout and popular tattoo artist is a Tompkins Square institution. Johnny, Jude and a few teenage friends form a hardcore band and set off with Eliza for the summer on a Northeast tour before her baby arrives. As a straightedge musician, devout Krishna and neighborhood activist, one might think Johnny lives an open life, but he has secrets of his own.

Narrated with quiet reflection by Steven Kaplan, Ten Thousand Saints covers broad ground in its limited span (largely taking place during Eliza’s pregnancy), including the early spread of AIDS in New York and the arrival of “yuppie scum.” With a keen ear for teenage dialogue, as well as hardcore music, Henderson might be an ’80s kid with Sharpie marks on her hands. Whether or not the author experienced Minor Threat firsthand, her knowledge and passion for the music runs deep in this motley crew.

While Paul and Julia’s story alone could sell the book, journalist Jennet Conant broadens the canvas to a group of agents stationed in China and Indonesia in the mid-’40s. (Founded after WWII, the OSS preceded the CIA.) She focuses on Jane Foster, a mercurial woman of great beauty, intellect and social pedigree who briefly supported Communist causes in the late ’30s. At the height of Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunts Foster was accused, along with her husband, George Zlatovski, of engaging in Soviet activities while working for the U.S. government.

Conant has carved out a delicious niche reporting on cultural figures during wartime (her last book, The Irregulars, detailed Roald Dahl’s brief career as a British spy). Jan Maxwell’s tempered narration helps unravel a fascinating story that we thought we knew.

Matt Haig, an author of adult (The Dead Fathers Club) and YA fiction (The Runaway Troll), appeals to both camps with a novel that cleverly sidesteps genre tropes. Donning the gray flannel suit (with conspicuous stains), Peter Radley is “trapped inside a cliché that’s not meant to be his. A middle-class, middle-aged man, briefcase in hand, feeling the full weight of gravity and morality and all those other oppressive human forces.” When his daughter Clara bites in self-defense and a schoolboy goes missing, the Radleys have to guard her. Vampirism is not taken lightly in Bishopthorpe, a small town outside of Yorkshire, where the police force contains a “countervampirism” unit. In swoops Peter’s brother, Will, the consummate bachelor, currently between jobs, who enjoyed a long-ago tryst with Helen, and now gets by drinking the bottled blood of his girlfriend, which goes down like Pinot Noir. When searching for fresh blood, Will amusingly points out how easy it is to go for “easily explainable disappearances,” like runaways, homeless, and the suicidal. But that’s not what he’s looking for. “It just seems to artificial, so fundamentally unromantic, to limit your desires to safe kinds of victim.” Crisply narrated by Briton Toby Smith, The Radleys is sprinkled with excerpts from The Abstainer’s Handbook, a self-help tome for vampires looking to curb their habits. After all, they’re only human.

Rachman’s series of comic narratives are interspersed with the newspaper’s brief history in Rome, where it was founded by a businessman in the ’50s. Editor-in-Chief Kathleen Solson is a true investigative journalist at heart. Her first feelings upon discovering her husband’s infidelity, before scorn or remorse, are a sense of satisfaction for having uncovered it. Lunching with a former boyfriend (who, to justify keeping her away from the newsroom, could double as a source), she’s forced to confront her alpha-ways, an aggressiveness that permeates every layer of her life. Obituary writer Arthur Gopal travels to Geneva to interview an obscure intellectual for her own post-mortem and suffers the debilitating death of his young daughter. When the piece eventually runs he’s at the mercy of an editor and the notice is relegated to a blurb. Perhaps the most indelible image of old-school journalism at work is the down-on-his-luck reporter Lloyd Burko faxing copy from a local phone center – dedication that’s lost on your average BlackBerry-addled blogger. While some professional struggles play out like small tragedies, others highlight the quirky personalities hiding behind every cubicle wall. Rachman shows great sympathy to his fussy, human cast, keeping them in orbit as they complete the Sysiphean task of getting the news out every day.

Bobby Fischer watched his first public chess match at age 11. Two years later, he was ranked 25th in the U.S., and at 14, he was officially a master. The charismatic young champion brought mainstream attention to the game and changed the public’s perception of a chess player. Far from tweedy and professorial, the avid swimmer and tennis player carried himself like an athlete. In 1972, Fischer challenged Russian Boris Spassky for the world title — he was the first non-Soviet to do so in three decades. He nearly quit the match over several demands, from prize money to complaints about the lighting in the playing hall. It took a call from Henry Kissinger to coax him back to the table.

After his historic win, Fischer became world famous, reluctantly. He eventually stopped playing in public and absorbed conservative Christian values and anti-Jewish literature with the same fervor as he had the game. In 1975, he refused to defend his world title against Anatoly Karpov when the World Chess Federation would not meet his request for new playing guidelines. Karpov was declared champion, but without the play to back it up (and Fischer still declared himself the champion).

Frank Brady delves into Fischer’s post-championship years with enthusiasm and empathy. Fischer refused press, fearing exploitation, and demanded exorbitant fees (money was at the center of most disagreements). He drifted penniless around Los Angeles before agreeing to a 1992 re-match with Spassky in war-torn Yugoslavia, though accepting millions in prize money defied U.S. sanctions and essentially made him a fugitive in the States. Fischer continued to travel in Europe, often with security, until the end of his life. Whether or not you’re a chess fan, Endgame is a page-turning read that illuminates the highs and lows in the life of a fallen man.

Carter, a New York Times media reporter, privies his audience to crucial deal-making and back-channeling among network brass, as well as thorough profiles of major players in late-night television, which has expanded in the years since that great Tonight shakeup to include Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert among ratings-grabbing competition. Carter traces Conan’s ascent from comedy writer to fledgling host threatened by cancellation, to folk hero “Coco.” O’Brien made national headlines In January 2010 when he refused to move Tonight to midnight to accommodate Leno and their troubled network, ultimately losing his job.

Like Shakespearean drama — had the Bard conceived of stupid human tricks and cigar-chomping puppet dogs — there are heroes and villains among agents, producers and network executives. Also, an oracle: Lorne Michaels. Jay is seen as the workaholic, joke-obsessed populist, a longtime ratings king with broad appeal; and Dave, the comic godhead that inspired a generation, including Conan and Jimmy Kimmel. Briskly narrated by Sean Kenin, The War for Late Night is entertaining to the slightest anecdote. Leno’s philosophy is, “Anytime you’re on the air, you’re winning.” But at what cost?

The honeymoon is barely over, and Emma Bovary is suffocating in her marriage to country doctor Charles. He is hardworking, loving and faithful, if a bit of a dullard who can’t follow an opera without whispering anxiously in her ear. Emma yearns for a life beyond provincial Yonville and her quotidian neighbors — she craves Paris and the widescreen romance of her favorite novels: filled with decorous balls, fine linens and dashing gentlemen who will sacrifice everything for her. “Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning.” With Charles, it’s a soggy patch of grass.

Emma takes up with two lovers, bookish Léon Dupuis and rakish Rodolphe Boulanger, each offering the passion and intellect she feels she’s missing. When Léon remarks, “What could be better, really, than to sit by the fire in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the windowpanes, and the lamp burns?,” her heart practically bursts into flames in front of her husband.

Lydia Davis has been the real story behind this new text. The author, poet and French scholar studied countless editions, as well as Flaubert’s letters, while putting together her own, and she writes dangerously close to his hand. In Flaubert’s famously deliberate prose you’ll find a cautionary tale of romance and deceit. Joined by Kate Reading’s soft, patrician narration, Madame Bovary is as much the fireplace book it was in 1856.

Elsewhere, Ira, a gay teacher, starts fresh at Elves & Fairies after being unfairly terminated at another school. His relationship with Anthony, an attorney, is a chatty highlight of the book. Glass’s tender story occasionally creaks with earnestness, but she flashes an unsparing eye on advisory board politics, same-sex marriage, gentrification and activism. Narrated by Mark Bramhall with a delicate brogue, Glass’s tale is a strong, traditional family story with charged generational shifts.

From folkie to poet-mystic and avatar of classic Americana, Dylan’s genius, writes the author, rests on “his ability to write and sing in more than one era at once.” His amalgamation of folk, country and blues styles — the “Old, Weird America” of Greil Marcus’s coinage — is key to his persona; a pastiche solidified upon the release of “Love and Theft” in 2001, Western suit and pencil mustache in tow. Wilentz traces Dylan’s artistic growth to key movements in popular music and culture, beginning with radical-left songwriters of the ’30s. He glosses over Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger (well-tread material), to discuss composers Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein. “It’s a rather delicate operation to put fresh and unconventional harmonies to well-known melodies without spoiling their naturalness,” wrote Copland, a Communist supporter whose scores for Billy the Kid and The Heiress brought popular acclaim. Like Copland, Dylan’s compositions, “[could appeal] to a mass audience without sacrificing his own vision.” As for lyrical appeal, Wilentz explores Dylan’s relationship with the Beat movement (arguing it faded in New York around 1961, just as the young songwriter arrived in the city). The poets’ influences — notably a lasting friendship with Allen Ginsberg, seeded in Wilentz’s uncle’s apartment above the bookstore, he notes — helped form the free-verse fragments that broke him from the traditional folksinger mold in the mid ’60s.

Among the author’s great strengths are his jazzy, vivid descriptions of recording sessions, culled from logs and tapes, including the long, exhilarating sprint to cut Blonde on Blonde with the Hawks and Nashville session men in 1965 and ’66. And the archivist is clearly at home discussing the evolution of folk and blues songs, from field recordings to staples of sets by Dylan and his peers. One treat is a chapter devoted to “Delia,” based on a 1900 Savannah murder case, which found its way into the blues tradition and eventually Dylan’s 1993 album, World Gone Wrong. Listening to Wilentz narrate his work, it’s hard not to reach for those classic records as a soundtrack.

You Lost Me There is a skilled he-said-she-said story that pits love against science. “More important than children,” Victor recalls, “more important than our careers to Sara was the singularity of our relationship, never compromised. Always growing, never-ending. Its own species, one that didn’t need millennia to evolve.” Dryly, he adds: “An unreasonable, unrealistic aspiration that I learned to share.” Only when Victor’s routine is threatened and he’s forced to confront emotion, does the façade begin to crack. Baldwin, editor of the long-running online magazine, the Morning News, populates the glassy Maine coast with fragile characters. Narrators JoAnna Perrin and Johnny Heller shine as the heart and mind of a marriage.

We first meet them on the occasion of their 1988 graduation, fumbling toward each other in the wee hours in her Edinburgh flat — the kind of place where “you were never more than six feet from a Nina Simone album,” Dexter observes. What follows is, if not love, then a powerful friendship. Sensitive yet vain (often wishing “there was someone on hand to take his picture”), Dexter becomes a minor celebrity and nearly loses his soul. Emma, his moral compass, is a late-bloomer with eyes on a writing career.

Nicholls (Starter for Ten, The Understudy) has a keen eye for period detail — anyone who remembers Cool Britannia will get an Oasis-size nostalgia fix from Dexter’s turn as a TV presenter. (What happened to Shed Seven, anyway?) But times change; mega clubs and acid jazz turn to children and e-mail. As they reach their mid-30s, Dexter seeks more than a “shoulder to sleep with,” and Emma fancies a child of her own. It doesn’t take a literature degree to figure out these two might rescue each other, but like any great romantic comedy, it’s hardly simple. Lacking as a lad, Anna Bentinck’s narration might be better suited to Jane Austen’s Emma than Nicholls’ Em and Dex, but she convincingly channels Emma Morley’s vulnerability. The author adds such depth to these two — as well as their satellite of lovers and flatmates — that we immediately welcome them as old friends.

As a young American girl, especially in New York, Eveline felt she “possessed what our culture valued most — independence and blind courage.” Rough stuff; like discovering the Northwest Passage with Ways of Seeing and Cosmopolitan as guides. Eveline’s bohemian upbringing — an East Hampton barn from which she and friends come and go; an internship at the influential Mary Boone gallery during the heyday of the downtown art scene — makes her seem canny and self-sufficient like many native New Yorkers (who seem to grow up a little faster than everyone else), but she’s not immune to the heartbreak and embarrassment that all of us endure. Hamann, who originally self-published American Girl in 2003, cuts through tangles of early adulthood with a sharp — even youthful — eye for romance, giving a fresh spin to a time-honored but mundane coming-of-age tale. Eveline’s desires and limitations are viewed through a series of loves: Jack, an amateur philosopher; Harrison, a disaffected preppy alpha with Edward Cullen’s propensity for just showing up and look intense; and Mark, a yuppie. (This is early ’80s Manhattan, after all — turn up the Genesis.) Somewhere in between she finds herself.

It’s easy to view Eveline as Holden Caulfield with a lobster roll, especially when you hear her quips: “Everything I did was pretty good but off-center”; “You’re old when you join the sticky, stenchy morass of concealed neediness that is society”; “The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage — the surest means to success, the surest course to failure.” But rich narrative adds new findings to this anthropological study. Throughout, Rebecca Lowman’s understated narration focuses on the delicate nature of growing up.