A thought-provoking investigation into which truths feel most meaningful to us

Ron Currie Jr. begins his second novel with a clear invitation to call him a liar: “Everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T true,” he claims, and then proceeds to relentlessly throw that statement in our faces. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is presented as the memoir of one Ron Currie Jr., but very quickly we doubt that it is — while the book’s Currie, taken for dead, recuperates in Sinai after a failed suicide attempt, his manuscript sells millions of copies based on the erroneous public belief that he died tragically. This narrative intertwines with one much more authentically autobiographical: Currie’s father’s death from cancer (the title refers to the nicotine patches people use to try to quit smoking).

If this sounds like melancholy stuff, well, at times it is, but in Currie’s capable hands, this wide-ranging novel balances its poignancy with hilarity and outright wonder. It even gets vaguely utopian in the novel’s fascinating third strand, when the author turns his attention to the Singularity, the theorized techno-apocalypse that will come from runaway artificial intelligence, which Currie the narrator thinks is a sort of salvation. It all ties together in a thought-provoking investigation into which truths feel most meaningful to us, those that come from “real life” or those we get from stories.

Narrated in short bursts — often just a paragraph in length — Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles slips past with beguiling ease but is not easily forgotten. This robustly entertaining, lightly philosophical quest proves Currie’s widely lauded first novel, Everything Matters! was no fluke.

A masterful biography of a mobster folk hero that disentangles his convoluted history

Some Bostonians used to like to paint James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, Jr. as a wicked-awesome folk hero. “He robbed and murdered drug dealuhs and mobstuhs!” they said. “Whitey kept Southie safe!” They seemed to forget Bulger was a mobster himself, a man who robbed and killed lots of regular people, burying them all over Beantown since the ’60s.

The authors of this masterful new biography, Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, dispel the modern-day-Robin Hood storyline early, kicking things off with the sickening strangulation of the young and happy Debra Davis — just a lady who got in Whitey’s way. That kind of thing sticks with you, even as the book loops back to the beginning to trace his immigrant roots, working-class upbringing and cruel treatment as a guinea pig in the CIA’s program testing LSD on prisoners. Once he’s out of jail (thanks in part to his politician brother Billy Bulger), Whitey becomes America’s most wanted man — part criminal genius, part reckless psychopath. And the most amazing thing? Until going on the run in the mid ’90s, he was moonlighting as an FBI informant. Turns out the feds were almost as crooked as he was.

Lehr and O’Neill have made a career out of mining Boston’s colorful criminal underworld; in Whitey they make equal use of the official paper trail and anecdotal interviews to turn a would-be procedural into a thriller. Clinical and precise, they lead you through every confrontation, close call and corpse disposal, right up to the worldwide manhunt and his heart-pounding arrest in 2011. By now even Southie has to be happy about that.

A comedy of manners with a dark moral heart

Don’t read this review before listening to Herman Koch’s novel, The Dinner. Instead, try to imagine the love child of Hitchcock’s single-take thriller Rope, a New York Times Magazine cover story on the evils of helicopter parenting, and the prissily detailed menu from the latest farm-to-table eatery. OK, have you got the picture? No? Well then read on, but beware of spoilers.

Though it’s actually set in the Netherlands, Koch’s home country, the story could just as easily take place in Brooklyn or Berkeley. Two couples, of youngish middle age, meet for dinner at a well-regarded restaurant. The narrator, Paul, seems resentful of the evening ahead; the husband of the other couple, Serge, is a flashy guy of some celebrity (we soon discover he is Paul’s brother and the leading candidate for Prime Minister). Paul is annoyed by Serge’s need to show off and the fact that he can’t just enjoy a quiet night at a local café with his wife, Claire. At first it seems The Dinner will be a comedy of manners: Serge shows off his wine knowledge by gargling his first sip, and the restaurant’s host points a pinky finger at every carefully sourced item on their plates.

But some details are sinister: Babette, Serge’s wife, arrives with sunglasses covering red-rimmed, puffy eyes; Paul is preoccupied by an incident with his son Michel. Earlier that afternoon, he snooped on Michel’s phone, and whatever he saw there haunts him. Claire doesn’t know — or does she? And Serge and Babette’s own children may be involved as well. Especially suspicious to Paul is his sibling’s adopted son from Burkina Faso, Beau. It is Paul’s lack of empathy toward Beau’s very existence in his family — he refers to the adoption as a “rent-to-own agreement” — that tips the reader off. Something is very wrong here, though Paul may not be a reliable narrator. The evening darkens, the courses come and go, and the true moral vacuity of The Dinner’s diners becomes as obvious as the warm goat cheese appetizer.

The Dinner has been a bestseller in Europe for several years already. However, the issues it raises — social responsibility, class conflicts, racism, violence, and the use of new technology — feel universal, as do Paul, Serge, Claire and Babette’s ultimately selfish and self-protective form of parenting.

A love story for our hysterical, borderless times

Manil Suri’s enormous, hysterical opus tells two seemingly disconnected stories: a plausible apocalypse and a broken marriage. It’s the near future, terrorists are exploding dirty bombs, the globe is descending into chaos, and India and Pakistan are on the brink of nuclear war. What worse time for Sarita’s husband, Karun, to run off without a word? And why is a gay Muslim named Jaz following her? Might it have something to do with Sarita and Karun’s two years of unconsummated marriage?

Suri has wisely set this larger-than-life, Bollywood-esque tale in the megacity Mumbai, the vastness of which makes it an utterly insane place for a vulnerable woman to go off in search of a man in the midst of total chaos. It’s the perfect locale for Suri to unfurl his expansive canvas, from blockbuster movies that incite nationalist fervor to a Hindu shrine to a child born with extra arms, plus a hair’s-breadth escape made on elephants — The City of Devi does not skimp on action. Yet the core of this book are Sarita, Karun and Jaz, all flawed, interesting and quite human enough to carry Suri’s oversized tale. In the end it becomes evident that this is a love story for our times, blending nationalities, religions, sexualities (yes, reader, there are three-way sex scenes here), all set amidst a manic frenzy whose energy is equal to our world’s.

Seeking a plan for the end of the world

Sam Sheridan could have been Batman. The dude is a former wilderness firefighter, merchant marine and EMT who graduated from Harvard, studied with a muay thai master in Thailand, and did construction work in Antarctica — and all of that came before he started working on The Disaster Diaries.

A renaissance man’s guide to surviving the end times, this book depicts Sheridan jumping through all kinds of hoops in pursuit of preparedness — not just shooting ranges and firebuilding, either. We’re talking stunt driving, knife fighting, bugout-bag packing, elk hunting, igloo building and more. He traipses through bleakest Arizona with primitive-living expert Cody Lundin. He learns how to steal cars from an ex-con in Los Angeles. He gets some long, hard lessons on dog sledding from Inuit guides in Nunavut. Still, The Disaster Diaries transcends its straight-up usefulness at every turn. A skilled storyteller with a journalistic mindset, Sheridan is always sneaking in some telling details about this survivalist’s paranoid monologues, or that thief’s regret, or some tough guy’s considerable ego. And the author’s own wild flights of fancy — chapters frequently begin with him battling zombies, escaping super-quakes, beating back mutant gangs, or dodging alien spider robots — give the book an occasional touch of the surreal that’ll either heighten your own paranoia or put your mind at ease.

As readers, we can enjoy the book as a true-life first-person adventure story while taking solace in the fact that Sheridan is preparing for an apocalypse that will probably never happen. Probably.

A lyrical, insightful investigation of the ways hate and love come together in a small-town New England family

The painful tension between hate and love, the two strongest and most complicatedly intertwined of emotions, drives See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s newest novel. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet live in a small New England village with their two children, “the young Heracles” and “the beautiful Persephone.” Mr. Sweet hates (or loves) his wife enough to compose a nocturne entitled “This Marriage is Dead,” or, “This Marriage Has Been Dead for a Long Time Now.” Mr. Sweet also hates the young Heracles enough to engage in frequent fantasies of his beheading, but he makes clear that he doesn’t want to murder his son, only to kill him. Heracles worships his mother, who loves gardening and writing and who arrived from an island in the British West Indies on a “banana boat,” yet at the same time finds her deeply ridiculous. And Mrs. Sweet? She is at once a victim of her families’ enmity and a conscious participant in it: She knows what she does to make herself hated, and, though she won’t apologize for her ways, she doesn’t blame her family for the hate her ways inspire in them.

Readers with a cursory knowledge of Kincaid’s story will recognize the Sweet family as bearing a deep resemblance to her own: Mrs. Sweet’s first name is Jamaica; she quotes from Autobiography of My Mother and Kincaid’s other previous books; and Kincaid, like Mrs. Sweet, grew up in Antigua, and lived in a small town in Vermont with her two children and composer husband, who she later divorced. This unignorable resemblance adds to the novel’s tension, which is both heightened and balmed by Kincaid’s precise, lyrical sentences, heady with repetition.

It is hard to imagine the audiobook being voiced by anyone but Kincaid, who reads the text the way she wants us to understand it; words like hate and kill sound as casual as the weather, while words that define our contemporary lives — Crate and Barrel, Verizon, Ninja Turtles — are pronounced with a kind of denaturalized incredulity. It is this pervasive denaturalization of what we have come to expect as normal — that family members should love and not hate each other, that one should not accept hate as if it were love — that makes See Now Then a source of great insight and wonder.

A sharp, funny book about the perils of the music industry

Even at 11 years old — almost 12, he’d tell you — tween-pop phenom Jonny Valentine is afflicted with a certain Hollywood ennui. The singer, who shot to fame thanks to YouTube videos and a ferocious dipsomaniac of a momager, might be not-so-patiently waiting for puberty to arrive, but he’s already well versed in sleeping pills, publicity stunt relationships and websites that count down the days until he’s 18 and therefore “legal.” He’s also juggling lagging concert attendance, life on the road, and the sudden reappearance of a father who’s been missing for most of his short life.

In Teddy Wayne’s sharp, funny book, young Jonny serves as a carb-counting, video game-obsessed ragdoll for the music industry, consumers included, to play with until boredom — or a voice change — sets in. Valentine’s thisclose to being a Justin Bieber stand-in (he does have a signature haircut), but in the book he lags in popularity behind Tyler Beats, a slightly older, acne-prone crooner whose career he wants to emulate. Being second place — as well as lacking the professional and personal structure that seems to let Tyler function as more teen than machine — gives Jonny something for which to strive, giving the book a satisfying arc. A journey as smooth as Jonny’s own yet-to-explode skin wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable to read.

And while some of our protagonist’s observations seem beyond his years and parallels between his life and the hard-to-complete video game he can’t stop playing are a bit heavy-handed, it’s not hard to forgive these missteps and let Jonny Valentine‘s sugary charm win you over. That’s the whole idea.

A discerning, unforgiving look at the absurd world of advertising, through the eyes of a flawed character trying to grow up.

Finbar Dolan, the sexually frustrated, commitment-phobic, 30-something protagonist of Truth in Advertising, is an archetypal beta male. He works in advertising, where he’s carved out a reputation as a competent but not exceptional copywriter, and he sucks at sustaining loving relationships — he spontaneously canceled his engagement and has cut off contact with his dysfunctional family.

Author John Kenney breathes new life into the emotionally-stunted-guy narrative, infusing it with humor and generosity. The book turns a discerning, unforgiving eye toward the absurd world of advertising, in which people earnestly say things like “diarrhea should be aspirational.” Over the course of the novel, Finbar comes to understand his abusive father, learning in the process how to commit to big decisions.

Truth in Advertising wants to be both a satire and a heartwarming story of recovery from childhood trauma. Though the latter effort is touching, its pace can grow tedious and the tonal shifts are jarring. Reader Robert Petkoff exacerbates Kenney’s tendency to stereotype, bestowing a Japanese businessman with a Mr. Miyagi-like accent and reading love interest Pheobe with a breathy, vapid voice.

In trying to reconcile cynical humor and humaneness, Truth in Advertising sometimes leads the two perspectives to clash. Though Kenney might not inspire epiphanies in his readers, he’s all but guaranteed to provoke laughter.

A funny, subtle, and honest long dark night of the soul, with a Canadian accent.

Gordon Rankin, aka Rank, the protagonist of Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist, has the body of a comic book villain. His huge, hulking physique defines him before he has a chance to understand his own psyche, and so he finds himself overwritten by the expectations of others. Coady is a particularly Canadian writer, and so Rank’s body leads him to that most northern of sports: ice hockey. He excels in the brutally physical role of enforcer, but beneath the mountainous surface lies the heart of an introspective — and guilt-ridden — man.

In the hands of a less gifted writer, this central dichotomy would be saccharine, verging on Nicholas Sparks-level sobcore stuff. Coady, however, frames the novel in an epistolary fashion, with Rank inadvertently bearing his soul to an old college acquaintance he believes has betrayed him by writing a novel that seems to be based on Rank’s life. Over the course of his emails, we’re introduced to his petty (and physically tiny) anglophone father, who only valued Rank for his size, his long-dead francophone mother, and the act of violence he fears has marred his humanity.

There’s a certain pan-anglo-Canadian sense of location in The Antagonist, with specific nods to that culture that will have citizens of the Great White North nodding in recognition but may confuse U.S. listeners. But who cares? It’s a funny, subtle, and honest long dark night of the soul. Those don’t observe geographic borders.

An unexpectedly inspiring look at the difficulties of parenting children who are different.

There may be no perfect time for a parent to listen to Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree — any number of terrifying challenges can arise in a child’s life, regardless of age. But listening while a child is in utero, when expectant parents’ emotions and fears are running high, is especially scary. This isn’t to say that Solomon’s exhaustive but engaging book is meant to frighten. Certainly, its tales of children who are significantly different from their parents — children who suffer from autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities — can be frightening, heartbreaking and disturbing, but Solomon’s stories of the parents who love them are truly optimistic.

For the few incidences of parents who give up on or fail their children, there are many more who surprise themselves with their capacity to love — including Solomon himself, who became a father over the course of writing the book. The book is an enlightening look at parental hardship, community and endurance, and the hopeful decision to turn illness into identity. While it may alarm, overall this tome inspires and will lead parents and children alike to count their blessings.

A seminal coming-of-age novel of the 20th century.

Go Tell It on the Mountain is James Baldwin’s seminal, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. John Grimes, Baldwin’s 14-year-old protagonist-slash-proxy, lives in a world structured by punishing dichotomies: salvation vs. sin, white violence vs. black survival. John, though tentatively at first, pushes at these seemingly fixed contrasts, mainly by way of his gift for reading and writing. His bookishness is a burden and a weapon, a passport and a mark of difference. He wants to swagger and play sports, but instead he “sins with his hand” while thinking about other boys, or pines after Elisha, a young teacher at church. At home, John is expected to become a preacher like his father, and yet his father shows him only rage and cruelty.

In the middle section, Baldwin unravels the backstories of John’s father, mother and aunt, but as the reader becomes privy to these characters’ buried histories, their anger and sorrow remain indecipherable to John. Still, John comes into his own as, finally, he is called to “the threshing floor.” Baldwin’s prose becomes porous and prophetic as John has visions of ancestors lost to slavery rising in resistance, and finds the strength, at last, to face himself and enter his own moment.

Originally published in 1954, Go Tell It on the Mountain remains fresh and essential, and the audiobook does justice to the subtlety and power of Baldwin’s prose.

Antiquarian books meet Google in a race to crack a centuries-old code.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is just the kind of novel you’d expect to come out of San Francisco: a story that combines the bibliophile’s love of a nice, hefty book with the astonishing technology for which the city has become known. Down-on-his-luck web wizard Clay Jannon takes a job at the titular bookstore which, he soon learns, is a front for a library that lends tomes filled with mysterious strings of numbers. Monks have been at work for ages to crack the code in these books, but Clay has a better idea: enlist his tech-savvy friends and let high-powered computers do the math.

Sloan turns this engaging plot into a debate about digital vs. analog, as well as an inquiry into just what our computer-addict brains consider real and virtual these days. Part of the fun of Sloan’s book is how he translates real-world tech phenomena into Penumbra-esque equivalents (Google, for instance, is here run by randomly selected managers who feed their employees via an algorithm). At its heart, the book is full of deadly serious questions about where our technology is taking us and loads of sharp observations about tech culture. One could quibble with the novel’s too-tidy ending and occasional linguistic lapses, but there are more than enough nerdy pleasures to compensate in this thought-provoking, frequently delightful debut. And listening to the audiobook — which allows you to combine the warmth of Ari Fliakos’s bouncy narration with the latest mobile audio technology — is arguably the most appropriate way to experience it.

Delicate, deceptively profound stories about love, loss, and animal husbandry

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s debut collection opens, fittingly, with an epigraph from Charles Darwin: “We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.” The characters who populate the 12 stories that follow find their own private struggles inextricably bound up in their relationships with animals and the natural world. In “Housewifely Arts,” a single mother drives for hours to visit a parrot she hates because the bird can mimic her dead mother’s voice. In “Yesterday’s Whales,” a pregnant population-control activist fights to reconcile her environmental ethics with her sudden, overwhelming desire for a child. In the title story, a naturalist’s aging, ailing father succumbs to a heart attack while questing in a swamp for an elusive, likely extinct woodpecker. And in “Another Story She Won’t Believe,” a recovering alcoholic volunteers to work with lemurs on the off chance that she’ll do better with the animals than she has with humans.

Against a backdrop of dogs and sheep, bantam chickens and wolf hybrids, cats and fish, Bergman’s characters find and lose one another. Parenthood plays a prominent role: People wrestle with loving and hating and saying goodbye to their parents; with how and whether to become parents themselves. Mothers wince as they watch their children awaken to the world’s cruelties: “I don’t want him to know that people like Louis’s mom exist, that people fall into land mines of pain and can’t crawl back out,” the narrator of “Housewifely Arts” says of her young son. In “The Two Thousand Dollar Sock,” another mother buries her beloved dog — who has just died in a final, ecstatic chase after a black bear — and notes that her infant daughter, too, “better than any of us, understands the urge to have what you must have…She still trusts the raw pull of desire. One day it will tear her away from us, take her down a dirt road to a place she does not recognize, and there she will make her home.” We are all of us animals, toiling at the raw, lonely, transcendent task of being alive.

In these moments and others, where less skilled writers might feel compelled to flog and re-flog their thematically significant introspections, Bergman has the knack for tossing out a deft observation and letting it breathe. Deceptively profound but never overwrought, her language is witty, wry, rich, and delicate, offering meditative moments that leaven melancholy with hopefulness. Cassandra Campbell’s narration is smooth and accomplished, and her voice has a faint Southern lilt nicely suited to Bergman’s North Carolina narrators.

A gripping, fast-paced, determinedly hardboiled detective yarn

There’s no easing into Gun Machine — Warren Ellis’s ferocious and deliciously twisted crime novel aims for the solar plexus from the start. The moment weather-beaten New York City detective John Tallow peeks his head through the busted tenement wall, it’s clear that playtime is over. What’s in there? Guns. Lots of them — Berettas, revolvers, rifles, even a freaking flintlock — arranged in strange configurations all over the place. Curiouser: The forensics lab insists every single one of the firearms was used in an unsolved murder over the past two decades. And, oh yeah, one the guns belonged to the Son of Sam, stolen from an evidence locker for one last kill, apparently.

So who’s the killer? Some shadowy wraith called the Hunter, a guy meticulous enough to pull off hundreds of murders without dropping a clue but primal enough to treat Central Park like his personal Habitrail, and batshit crazy enough to imagine himself a reborn Lenape warrior looking to reclaim Manhattan for his supposed people.

Now it’s finders-weepers for Tallow — a loner made doubly lonesome by the death of his partner and his outcast status in the force — who’s tasked with cracking the behemoth case and bringing in the psycho perp. Dude never should’ve stuck his head into that apartment.

In Ellis’s gripping, fast-paced, determinedly hardboiled detective yarn, Manhattan is wonderfully grimy and gas-slicked again, the kind of place where one sad-sack good guy can make a difference or honorably die trying. The old-school noir charm is only heightened by narrator Reginald E. Cathey — veteran of another chunk of modern urban crime mythology, The Wire — whose Orson Welles-via-Jurassic Five baritone strikes just the right (bass) tones.

An adventure through the surprisingly grown-up world of the beloved children's series

Though the 1970s TV series starring Michael Landon cemented its status as a classic, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie was also undone by that family-friendly program. When she tried to revisit the cozy inner life she created as a child in conjunction with the books, author Wendy McClure realized Wilder’s world was a lot more textured and adult than the happily-ever-after TV show — and the truth behind the books is even odder still.

McClure is at her best when she’s reveling with contagious giddiness in the strange backstory of Wilder’s books, but her return to what she dubs “Laura World” isn’t done solely via research. McClure also tries out authentic Little House recipes — the kind that call for two pounds of lard — and visits as many Ingalls family homestead sites as she can find. Her physical recreation of frontier life can drag the book down into navel-gazing hipster nostalgia — her trips to long-gone homesteads are self-consciously elegiac as she searches for meaning in her life from young adult novels — but McClure is so genuinely funny in recreating fellow fans’ strange love for a pre-electric-age world that the occasional dips are forgivable.

Hilarious, trenchant short stories from a master of human empathy

In Tenth of December, George Saunders uses satire to hilariously and trenchantly critique societal institutions and our roles in them (with a special emphasis on the class system, which many Americans still insist does not exist). But to focus on Saunders’s use of satire is to potentially overlook the deep faith in humanity that pervades these masterful short stories.

Put simply: It is clear that Saunders has never written a character that he does not, in some way, love. This goes for the self-involved teenager in “Victory Lap” as well as the man who comes to kidnap and rape her. Saunders’s empathy is apparent both toward the working-class mom who ties her unruly son to a tree in “Puppy” and to the middle-class mom who comes to buy a dog from the woman and is horrified to see the son straining against his tether. In one of the collection’s strongest stories, “Home,” a veteran of an unnamed Middle East war returns home to a penniless mom being evicted from her house and a sister and ex-wife shuttling quickly up the ladder to bourgeois comfort. In every “Thank you for your service” awkwardly uttered to him by numerous civilians who don’t know what else to say, one discerns Saunders’s respect for the plight of the platitude-giver and the plight of the destroyed veteran, for whom those words are more than meaningless.

Even the tone of Saunders’s reading voice, which is frequently witty but never mocking, makes clear that individuals, whether rich or poor, victims or perpetrators, are not to be blamed for the problems of Where We Are Now. We’re all caught up in the same oppressive systems, and we could do much worse than to take a cue from Saunders’s overwhelming generosity of spirit.

A frothy biography of the Georgetown hostess that focuses on the boldfaced names she knew.

Nancy Mitford modeled a character on her, but it was as a comically priggish American. As revealed in Caroline de Margerie’s bonbon of a biography American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop, however, Susan Mary Alsop was far from the typical American in post-World War II France. Married to an American diplomat, Susan Mary was enjoying an affair with the British ambassador – one that didn’t impede her friendship with his wife. Later, she would return to America and marry political columnist Joseph Alsop, despite knowing that he was gay.

De Margerie stresses her gifts as a hostess, intermingling different strata of first Parisian and then Georgetown society, and her book is similar. Susan Mary’s great skill was as an observer, not in making history, and de Margerie’s great skill is in combining the boldfaced names amongst which Susan Mary moved into an entertaining look at the second half of the 20th century. The result is frothy fun, light on interviews and quotes and heavy on the authorial voice. American Lady isn’t exactly scholarly, but for those interested in anecdotes about the Kennedy White House or newly liberated Paris, it’s a gossipy treat.

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.

Far-flung tales of immigration and exile linked by a common humanity.

Loosely organized around themes of displacement and exile, Emma Donoghue’s follow up to her shattering Room is something of a palate cleanser. Its 14 tales are historical in origin, spanning from the American Revolution to the 20th century, and most are set in or at least point toward the New World, mirroring Donoghue’s status as an expatriate Irishwoman living in Canada.

As one would expect from a collection whose origins span more than a decade – the earliest were published in 1998, the latest in 2012 – the stories vary widely in tone. The notes that follow each one, detailing their factual bases and often serving as an extra-textual epilogue, also serve as speed bumps, reminding readers to pause and reset before continuing on. From “Man and Boy,” in which a British elephant trainer’s prized animal is sold into P.T. Barnum’s care, to “What Remains,” wherein Canadian sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle cope with their descent into dementia, each brief episode is an undiscovered country with its own rules, its own way of being.

The stories in Astray never wear out their welcome, and the best use their brevity as a weapon. “Counting the Days” interweaves the thoughts of a husband and wife separated by a transatlantic crossing. As she flees the Irish famine, he lies dying, choleric, in Montreal, the story’s structure fashioning a reunion that will never be, a dream cut short. “The Hunt” finds its way into the redcoats’ ranks via a young German mercenary, little more than a slave himself. As the British soldiers systematically rape every woman and girl they come across, the young boy absents himself, leaving the worst atrocities outside his field of vision but well within the range of our imagination.

So it is too with the connections between Astray‘s far-flung tales. There’s little overlap, but together they form a partly finished map, leaving readers to chart their own course and navigate the wilds between them.

Marries poetry and prose in a straightforward, in-depth personal history of the little-discussed Nigerian Civil War

There Was a Country, Chinua Achebe’s firsthand account of the Nigerian civil war, which lasted for almost three years and claimed more than a million lives, marries poetry and prose to create a straightforward, in-depth history. No background knowledge of Nigeria is needed to understand the story – Achebe carefully explains every link in this complex chain of events.

In short, the Igbo ethnic group, of which Achebe is a member, emphasized education, which brought them prosperity and a pathway to assimilation under British colonial rule. Their successes made other Nigerians resent them, which culminated in widespread massacres that went overlooked by the Nigerian government. When the Igbo people pronounced Biafra, the eastern region of Nigeria, their own independent nation, it catalyzed a civil war and a series of scarring humanitarian tragedies.

Achebe’s passion is clear throughout the book, whether he’s discussing Nigeria’s potential for democratic rule or the artist’s role in contextualizing political conflict. At times, it can seem like Achebe is trying to cover too much ground. Still, his ambitious storytelling style makes sense in context: He’s a high-profile writer who’s been embraced by a Western media that isn’t exactly preoccupied with Nigerian politics. In a sense, his writing helps to fill a void. As Achebe puts it, “I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, ‘The novel is dead. The story is dead.’ I find this to be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.” In There Was a Country, Achebe both tells his story and emphasizes the right of others to do the same.

A wrenching look at the grey areas of justice, sex, family and ethnic identity.

Returning to the some of the same characters and geographies as in her 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning The Round House is a wrenching work centered on three members of the Native American Coutts family in the aftermath of the rape of Geraldine Coutts, wife of tribal judge Bazil and mother of Joe.

In a departure from Erdrich’s prior novels, The Round House’s sole narrator is the 13-year-old Joe, voiced with honesty and conviction by Canadian First Nations actor Gary Farmer (best known for his featured role as Nobody in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 acid western Dead Man). As his mother’s rape forces Joe to try to reconcile his own teenage desires with the reality of sexual violence, the crime finds itself in a dead zone of prosecution due to the overlapping jurisdictions of tribal, state, and federal law. The Coutts must balance their need for closure with their longtime efforts toward tribal sovereignty. As the investigation drags on, Joe remarks of his mother that “with all that we did, we were trying to coax the soul back into her. But I could feel it tug away from us like a kite on a string. I was afraid that string would break and she’d careen off, vanish into the dark.”

While Erdrich’s prose offers a compelling look at the grey areas of justice, sex, love, family and ethnic identity, in the end it is Farmer’s narration that truly allows the Coutts’s North Dakota reservation to creep slowly under your skin until you feel an integral – if silent – part of the community.

Short, melodic, to the point and just a little dark — just like a Duran Duran song.

For fans of the ’80s superpop group Duran Duran (and let’s be real: Who isn’t one?), John Taylor’s sweet autobiography is much like one of the band’s songs: short, melodic, to the point and just a little dark. The band’s cofounder and bassist whizzes through his life to date, paying homage to his hard-working, involved parents and moving on to the musical obsession that led him to form a band that experienced a dizzying rise to the top. Some of Taylor’s story feels a bit predictable – sex, drugs, booze, rehab, crazed fans – but Taylor (who narrates) comes off as so earnest, sincere and pleasant that the book is an enjoyable departure from celebrity memoirs where the author takes him or herself too seriously.

In the Pleasure Groove, with its lines of cocaine, appearances by Robert Palmer and the recording of Live Aid, is a look back at all that was bad, as well as all that was very, very good about the 1980s. The real meat of the book, though, is when Taylor talks about his parents, especially his World War II veteran father, whose wartime experience with lice led him to help his son cure himself of groupie-inflicted crabs. They always supported their eyelinered pop idol son; this book is in Taylor’s own way a love song to them.

A looping, far-reaching novel of voice and identity

The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (née Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”

NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelists task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy – her characters’ and our own.

A treat as bubbly and illicit as bootleg champagne

In this eponymous first installment of her new The Diviners series, YA favorite Libba Bray takes on a genuinely wild ride. It’s the height of the Jazz Age, and flapper Evie O’Neill has been “banished” to New York City by her conservative parents. Consigned to live with her stuffy Uncle Will, who just happens to run the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition and the Occult, Evie is thrilled to swill bootleg hooch, dance all night in Harlem speakeasies and…help solve a series of grisly murders? Beneath Evie’s Roaring Twenties slang and cloche hat, she hides a special power: She can divine (get it?) all sorts of information about people by holding objects that belong to them. Or – more importantly, in the case of the relevant murder victims – belonged.

Evie is just one of The Diviners‘ many characters. Clearly Bray is writing the first book in a series here, and while the main plot is resolved (no spoilers), almost too many threads remain tangled. How will our favorite Harlem numbers runner and poet, Memphis Campbell, help his possessed brother and make a life with Ziegfeld-girl-with-a-past Theta? Will young radical and Evie’s best friend, Mabel Rose, find love? And will Evie’s weird old lady neighbors, the Proctor sisters, ever explain why they’re sprinkling bags of salt in protective circles around their apartment?

No doubt, The Diviners‘ next installment will answer some of these questions while raising still others. In the meantime, Bray’s thriller is a kicky ride. Period details are delicious: Evie’s clothes seem to be exclusively peacock-patterned, and Mabel’s life changes when she bobs her hair. Silent film idol Rudolph Valentino has just died, and the girls love watching his pictures at red velvet-covered movie palaces. If your taste runs to historical fiction with just a soupçon of gore, The Diviners will be a treat as bubbly and illicit as bootleg champagne.