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River of Stars - Guy Gavriel Kay
In River of Stars (Roc, $26.95) Guy Gavriel Kay returns to Kitai, a country like China, which was the setting for his earlier novel, Under Heaven. But now this grand empire is in trouble. Trade roads...
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2312 - Kim Stanley Robinson
The plot of 2312 (Orbit, $10), by Kim Stanley Robinson, is simple: Swan Er Hong, a former biosphere designer, investigates the death of Alex, her step-grandmother, which may not have been accidental....
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The Shining Girls - Lauren Beukes
There are some books you just cannot stop reading. The Shining Girls (Mulholland, $26), by Lauren Beukes, is like a maelstrom—drawing you in from the first scene, and then inexorably hurling you toward...
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman’s knack for making the impossible seem all too probable makes The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Wm. Morrow, $25.99), his first adult novel since 2005’s Anansi Boys, worth waiting for. Set...
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NOS4A2 - Joe Hill
“….and there was something awful about Christmas music when it was almost summer.” This sense of unease permeates Joe Hill’s new novel, NOS4A2 (Wm. Morrow, $28.99). Charles Manx likes to take children...
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Midnight in Peking - Paul French
Set in an eve-of-war 1937 China that today is both mysterious and somehow romantic, Midnight in Peking (Penguin, $16), by Paul French, is everything that a true-crime narrative should be. It transports...
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Death in the Vines: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery - M. L. Longworth
The third in M.L. Longworth’s excellent Provence series, Death in the Vines (Penguin, $15), is a mystery that takes serpentine twists while focusing on day-to-day life and the region’s encroaching...
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Don't Cry, Tai Lake: An Inspector Chen Novel - Qiu Xiaolong
In Don’t Cry, Tai Lake (Minotaur, $14.99), by Qiu Xiaolong, Chief Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police has been given a week-long vacation at a luxury lakefront resort ordinarily accessible only to...
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Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway - Sara Gran
Following her debut in Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Sara Gran’s hard-edged and wry private detective is back. Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $20) sees our...
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Capital - John Lanchester
Set on the fictional Pepys Road on London’s South Bank, where real estate prices are on the rise but the fortunes of its inhabitants are in flux, John Lanchester’s Capital (W.W. Norton, $15.95) offers...
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Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
Whenever Ursula dies, she is immediately born again in Surrey on the same snowy night in 1910. The regenerations that make up Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (Reagan Arthur, $27.99) provide more than...
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Ghost Moth - Michele Forbes
In 1949 Katherine is starring in a local Belfast production of Carmen and hoping for a career on the stage. She’s engaged to one man, in love with another. Cut to 1969. Katherine has married her fiancé...
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City of Bohane - Kevin Barry
Welcome to the new Irish literature: its capital is the City of Bohane (Graywolf, $15), Kevin Barry’s dystopian vision of a town in the West of Ireland. This decrepit and malevolent metropolis is ruled...
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TransAtlantic - Colum Mccann
Colum McCann’s eighth novel turns the hyphen of Irish-American into an arrow pointing both ways. The heart of Transatlantic (Random House, $27), which opens with a harrowing 1919 flight from...
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The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker
The Golem and the Jinni (HarperCollins, $26.99) is an utterly captivating and descriptively evocative historical novel. Chava and Ahmad are folkloric beings who, at the close of the 19th century, have...
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HHhH - Laurent Binet and Sam Taylor
HHhH (Picador, $16,) by Laurent Binet, tells the true story of two heroic Czech patriots, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, who parachuted behind enemy lines to assassinate Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich, the...
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Alif the Unseen - G. Willow Wilson
G. Willow Wilson’s energetic Alif the Unseen (Grove, $16), the first literary fiction by the writer of the graphic novels Cairo and Vixen, starts with computer hackers and a forbidden love in a...
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We Need New Names - NoViolet Bulawayo
Darling, Bastard, Chipo, and their friends are the focus of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel, We Need New Names (Reagan Arthur, $25). They spend their days in Paradise, a shantytown in Zimbabwe where people...
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Three Strong Women - Marie Ndiaye
Three Strong Women (Vintage, $15) is heart-wrenching and beautifully written. Set in Senegal and France, this compact book reads like three separate novellas and details the relationships and nearly...
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The People of Forever Are Not Afraid - Shani Boianjiu
The defiant bumper sticker declaring that The People of Forever are not Afraid (Hogarth, $14) may describe some Israelis today, but the protagonists of Shani Boianjiu’s stunning first novel are often...
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