Translator Emanuel Bergmann's first novel, The Trick, shifts settings between his birthplace in Germany and home in Los Angeles in a cross-generational tale of love, heartbreak and magic.

When Max Cohn, a 10-year-old boy in Los Angeles, listens to his father's decades-old record of the Great Zabbatini performing a spell of eternal love, he knows the magician can use his powers to bring Max's divorcing parents, Deborah and Harry, back together. Since a scratch in the record has destroyed the magic words, Max goes in search of the real deal, finding the crass, eccentric 80-year-old man who used to be Zabbatini in a local nursing home. In flashbacks to World War II Europe, readers learn the history of Zabbatini, born Moshe Goldenhirsch, son of a rabbi in Prague. After running away to join the circus as a young man and taking up with a beguiling magician's assistant, Moshe finds fame as a mentalist partly by faking Persian, and therefore Aryan, ancestry. Eventually discovered as a Jew and sent to a concentration camp, Moshe needs all his cleverness and magic to survive.

By turns sentimental and quirky, The Trick has much to love, most notably a charming intergenerational friendship between a boy who clings to his magical thinking and a disillusioned old grouch. While the secret revealed in the end might feel like a particularly strong coincidence, Bergmann packs in enough minor magic and miracles along the way to leave the reader willing to fall under his spell in an entrancing diversion. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Twenty years after her bestselling Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman returns to the Owens family, exploring the history of sisters Frances and Bridget (known in their younger days as Franny and Jet) and their brother, Vincent, in her spellbinding new novel, The Rules of Magic.

The Owens women aren't like other women. Descendants of a highly unusual family, they have certain powers and gifts, but they also struggle against a longstanding family curse. Despite Susanna Owens's best efforts to raise her three children in a non-magical, non-accursed fashion, one summer spent with their great-aunt Isabelle in Massachusetts will change everything.

Like many fairy tales, this story begins with "Once upon a time," and the narration does have a timeless quality. Wild birds fly into Franny's hand; daffodils bloom in all seasons under Jet's; Vincent discovers a mysterious book with powers he doesn't quite understand. But the characters also feel complex and sympathetic, especially when they wrestle with the weight of the Owens legacy. Their fierce, often fractious love for each other proves to be their greatest strength when tragedy strikes not once, but many times.

While Hoffman's story is shot through with magic, it is undeniably real: marked with heartache and loss, and the need to reckon with one's own choices and those of one's family. Hoffman explores loss, love and hope through her characters' lives, all while weaving a spell strong enough to make readers believe that magic--of several kinds--is right around the next corner. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Second Acts by Teri Emory depicts the enduring friendship among three women who met as students at Buffalo College in the late 1960s; now in middle age, each narrates one of three sections of this vivid first novel.

The story begins when New York City marketing writer Sarah Roth learns that her ex-husband--the father of their daughter, Elle--has died of a sudden heart attack. The news forces Sarah to take stock of her life--her work and her current post-divorce relationship--through the prism of the past while trying to formulate a vision for the future. The 30-year marriage of Beth Gillian, a psychotherapist, is tested after she and her husband, a "Wall Street Wunderkind," bury a child. Beth reconnects with an old college flame who rallies her spirit and inspires her to contemplate the road not taken. Miriam Kaplan, a teacher in Manhattan, has remained single over the years; her life changed after a passionate romance with a charming photographer from the South. This experience left her reluctant to engage in a new relationship with a man whose sweetness helps her through a difficult passage in life.

Emory's unhurried prose braids the complex personal stories of these three women as they come to grips with loss, choices and compromise. All the while their bond of friendship flourishes in a changing world. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In a helter-skelter cornucopia of voices and formats, the stories of Daniel Olivas's King of Lighting Fixtures are set on the streets of Los Angeles, focusing on characters as diverse as the city. The collection cements his place in the magical realism tradition of García Márquez and Urrea, and showcases his skills as a master stylist and self-aware observer of life's little vignettes. Grandson of Mexican immigrants, converted Jew in the Reformed tradition, Olivas (The Book of Want; Things We Do Not Talk About) works as a lawyer in the California Department of Justice and works miracles on the page. "He will have to call it 'fiction' otherwise he will be rejected by the publishing industry as a lunatic," as Olivas writes of a character in "The Three Mornings of José Antonio Rincón" who wakes in different bodies on three consecutive days.

God bless Olivas's lunacy. His stories chronicle the lives of writers, lawyers, administrative clerks, baristas, panhandlers, dopers and the more fantastic but nonetheless believable goat-footed Satan, sex-fixated female devil and 12-fingered boy. The titular metafiction, about a self-made lighting store magnate and his love life, includes interviews with each character by a journalist hired by a man named Olivas. The only story set outside Southern California, "Imprints," is the marvelous monologue of a Latina literary agent sitting at a New York City café with a friend and lamenting a publisher's request that she provide him with more ethnic work: "I hate that word. Hispanic. It's so government-talk and sounds like white liberal-ese." Olivas is a literary marvel, and The King of Lighting Fixtures is dazzling fiction. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

A collaboration between Stephen King and his son Owen, Sleeping Beauties is another of the horror master's works where the supernatural incites and exacerbates the violence innate in men. After the arrival of a mysterious stranger, Evie, in a small Appalachian town, women across the world start falling asleep and forming cocoons, becoming violent if they are awoken. As women go under, one by one, the world falls into chaos. Only Evie seems immune, and the town's men soon begin to turn on one another--some believing she's the key to bringing the women back, others that she must be destroyed.

While there are truly villainous characters, and Evie's actions run the gamut from noble to profane, the Kings are more interested in regular people, neither perfectly good nor bad, who begin to crack under the weight of what's occurring in this small town. Evie is an expert manipulator, creating situations that pit the remaining residents against each other in an experiment to see whether men can maintain order without the opposite sex. Sleeping Beauties is at its most horrifying when that order falls, and characters that the reader has grown to like or respect begin to commit acts of atrocity. There are no true sides to root for, which makes the story all the more compelling.

Fans of either King will thoroughly enjoy Sleeping Beauties, but it should also serve as a good entry point for new readers as well. The novel is fast-paced, thrilling and the right amount of scary. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

In her moving memoir Nine Continents: A Memoir in and out of China, Xiaolu Guo (Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth) draws an open portrait of her life as a young woman in China.

She begins by delving into her impoverished childhood in the coastal fishing village of Shitang. Her early life with her grandparents is characterized by a hardscrabble existence in which she's ravenous. Her finely tuned prose captures the austerity of peasant life: "When the wind came and blew through the windows, the long and pale-coloured ribbonfish were like a row of hanging men, swinging weightlessly in the stale air." A Taoist monk in a nearby decrepit temple identifies Guo as a "peasant warrior" and prophesizes that she will travel great distances and helm her own fate. When a group of young artists visits the village to sketch and paint the coastline, revealing the transformative power of art, Guo recognizes her calling.

Guo's artistic journey leads her to London. Though the West offers more individual freedom, Guo is alienated by its contradictions: "A feeling of being a 'second-class citizen' dominated my every day in Beaconsfield, and made me hang my head in despair." To mitigate this dislocation, Guo pushes herself to learn English and soon succeeds as a novelist in her adopted tongue. Piercing and poignant, Nine Continents serves as a bridge between two worlds and demonstrates the hardship of immigration but also the value of multiculturalism. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset

Bibliophiles should prepare to settle in with librarian Annie Spence and the collection of letters she's written to the books in her life. This compilation of witty, heartwarming, sometimes startling missives is hard to put down. Talking to literature she's loved, hated or hasn't even read--really Annie, To Kill a Mockingbird?--Dear Fahrenheit 451 is a delightful gem for readers who experience stories as friends, not just words on a page.

The fortunate recipients of Spence's messages are wide-ranging: current and classic, fiction and nonfiction, children's lit and adult, even some poetry. As she pulls from library shelves, her own home bookcases and those of her friends and family, Spence communicates with them intimately, honestly and hilariously. The novel that inspired Spence's title receives a philosophical communiqué: "The modern-day 'firefighters' are armed not with kerosene but snarky Internet memes, reality TV, and the ability to simultaneously see more or less of the world around them... there are people who don't believe libraries are necessary anymore." Meanwhile, her undervalued thesaurus is treated to a tongue-in-cheek love note, and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series receives a sharp tongue-lashing.

In the heartfelt words Spence addresses to The Namesake, "once a book is written, it's in the hands and minds and hearts of the reader." Readers aren't likely to agree with all of Spence's feelings, but they're certain to enjoy conjuring up their own reactions, and might even start crafting dispatches themselves. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

As the most dominant species on Earth, humans have understood their past through storytelling and, more recently, biology, anthropology and other disciplines. In A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, geneticist and BBC science contributor Adam Rutherford illustrates that genomics--the study of the DNA in our genes--reexamines our history, upending commonly held beliefs about who we are and what the future holds for us.

Rutherford begins 100,000 years ago with the "evolutionary shrub of humankind" and the origin of Homo sapiens--modern humans--tracing their migration out of Africa and intermingling with the now extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans. Along the way, Rutherford identifies whether DNA can explain commonly held beliefs and assumptions, from the profound (who were the first Americans?) to the less momentous (are redheads going extinct?). Rutherford also tackles thorny contemporary issues, including race ("genetically, two black people are more likely to be more different to each other than a black person and a white person") and whether "bad" genes can be responsible for a person's violent behavior.

While genomics is both thrillingly new and exceedingly complicated, Rutherford manages to reveal fresh (and controversial) assessments of human history and dispel long-held beliefs with clarity, enthusiasm and humor. Fans of popular science writers such as Mary Roach will be delighted by amusing footnotes throughout. And with DNA testing widely available, readers will be swabbing their cheeks to find out how their genes tell their story. --Frank Brasile, librarian

In Marked, Unmarked, Remembered, brothers Andrew (a photographer) and Alex (a historian) Lichtenstein combine their skills to memorialize the physical locations of traumas throughout American history. Fifty-seven black-and-white photos accompanied by short descriptions highlight massacres, lynchings, killings, pogroms and other horrors of the past. Some are easily recognized: the balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; Japanese internment camps in World War II. Others are more obscure: the ruined home of a farmer who participated in the 1845 No Rent Rebellion; the site of the Pequot Massacre in Mystic, Conn.; the town square in Waco, Tex., where Jesse Washington was lynched.

The photographs, alongside a handful of more in-depth essays on these events by a series of American historians, are grouped by their present-day characteristics, giving the collection its name. This structure proves crucial in understanding the places presented. Assembling sites that are marked, sites that are unmarked and sites that host memorial events, Alex Lichtenstein argues in the introduction, provides an intentional "foregrounding of the active process of competing forms of memorialization."

Individually, Andrew's haunting images (and the stories that accompany them) are horrifying reminders of the trauma in the collective past, especially as it relates to the treatment of indigenous peoples, people of color and the poor in the U.S. Taken as a whole, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered is a call to both see and recall. As Andrew said of his own photography, "It's always about how we are viewing the past in the present." This is where we are, this book reminds us. This is how we got here. Don't look away. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Jason Reynolds's (As Brave As You; Ghost) newest YA novel begins "I haven't/ told nobody the story/ I'm about to tell you./ And truth is, you probably ain't/ gon' believe it either.../ but I'm telling you,/ this story is true."

The day before yesterday, 15-year-old Will's older brother, Shawn, purportedly crossed rival lines to go to the other side of their largely black neighborhood. During Shawn's absence, Will and his friend heard shots. We waited, Will says, "for the rumble to stop,/ before picking our heads up/ and poking our heads out/ to count the bodies./ This time/ there was only one": Shawn. Now, two days later, Will abides by "The Rules" he's been taught. He won't cry, he won't snitch and, most importantly, he will follow the third rule: "if someone you love/ gets killed,/ find the person/ who killed/ them and/ kill them." He finds a gun in Shawn's dresser and sets off.

Will gets on the elevator at 9:08:02 a.m. The next 200-plus pages of action take place between the time Will enters the elevator and when it reaches the lobby a moment later, at 9:09:09 a.m. At each floor on Will's long trip down, a friend or loved one from Will's past boards; each new passenger is dead, a victim of gun violence. As the ghosts of those killed tell Will their stories, their interconnected tales are untangled; Will begins to understand why The Rules are the rules and how they perpetuate the cycle of violence.

Reynolds's work is rich with symbolism, the verse lending a feeling of immediacy to the 300-page, 60-second journey. Long Way Down is an intense read with an ambiguous ending that highlights the humanity of those who are regularly touched by and contribute to gun violence. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness