Much as there's a place for novels about the extraordinary and fantastical, some of the most rewarding stories mirror reality directly. This is the case for John Holman's Triangle Ray, a collection of short stories that trace the life of the titular character through his days as an African American caterer, paramour and aspiring writer in Durham, N.C., over the course of decades.

Holman's tightly focused stories reflect Ray's existence through the phases of his life like shards of a broken mirror--small snippets that, pieced together, form an arc. He chooses quiet moments that are both poignant and illustrative about Ray's character--the luncheon in which he discovers that his first wife will ultimately leave him, the professional breaks that give him the highest hopes, and the subtle, racially charged interactions that taint his workaday existence. The collection shares common ground with Richard Linklater's film Boyhood, whose focus on a young man in a different era carries the same melancholy sense of time's passage. Through Holman's wry, observant prose, we see more than just a highlight reel of births, deaths and loves gained and lost. We see, instead, the multi-faceted nature of a man's persona, and how that changes in the face of dreams thwarted and rearranged.

The beauty of Triangle Ray is its attention to the details that inform Ray's life, the same details by which any of us measure the passage of time. Experiences shape, erode and transform Ray, and it's the reader's privilege to witness his myriad transformations. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer

In My Name Is Lucy Barton, an introspective and largely independent writer looks back on a pivotal time in her life, the 1980s, when she was a patient in a New York City hospital for nine weeks. A bacterial infection after a "simple" appendectomy kept then-30-year-old Lucy Barton away from her husband, two daughters and their home in the West Village. While the writer lay hospitalized, her mother--whom she hadn't spoken to in many years--came to visit from Amgash, Ill., Lucy's rural hometown. With mother sitting vigil at her daughter's bedside--the Chrysler Building gleaming through the hospital window like a beckoning lighthouse--Lucy mentally navigates her way through the darkness of her illness, her New York City existence and her estrangement from her Illinois upbringing. Mother and daughter pass the time by reminiscing and telling stories, painful remembrances that gradually reveal their strained, emotionally distant relationship and the difficult childhood Lucy endured amid poverty, loneliness and ostracism.

In short, stream-of-consciousness flashbacks, Lucy reconstructs experiences from her past in a seamless narrative. She recalls people who made impressions on her as she grapples with her identity, her place in the world and choices that ultimately shaped her destiny. As in her other novels (The Burgess Boys, Olive Kitteridge), Strout probes the imperfect nature--and limits--of love, memory and forgiveness. The idea of how little we really know about people, and often even ourselves, is a central theme of this expertly crafted and deeply thought-provoking short novel. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Fallen Land, Taylor Brown's debut novel, takes readers back to the final year of the Civil War--a year of cruelty and violence set against the hard, barren landscape of the soon-to-be defeated South. In this harsh new reality, Callum, a 15-year-old orphan, has teamed up with a band of brigands to roam the countryside in search of food and riches. "They had long ago forsaken the war of newspapers for the one they carried everywhere with them, and which had no colors, no sides, and which could be fit neatly into any opportunity that presented itself: ambush, pillage, torture."

Against his better nature, Callum forces himself to accept the violence of his new crew--his survival depends on it, and he relishes feeling a part of a group. He continues with the band until he meets Ava, a young girl left alone on her family's farm, whose honor he intends to defend at any cost against the cruelty of the men. As Callum and Ava flee their bleak and lonely pasts together, an unexpected romance blossoms between the two.

Brown writes with a strong, clear voice, conveying the difficulties of the broken countryside of the South in the wake of Sherman's "total war." Fallen Land moves seamlessly between the broad history of the Civil War and the very personal, individual struggles of Callum and Ava, resulting in a historical novel that is astounding in its depth, rooted deeply in its time while proving timeless. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Detective Chief Inspector John Marvel is obsessed with the disappearance of 12-year-old Edie Evans, who went missing more than a year earlier while riding her bike, but Marvel's boss, the superintendent, wants the detective to look for a poodle belonging to the superintendent's wife.

James and Anna Buck's son, four-year-old Daniel, is also missing, and Anna's grip on reality has been slipping in the months since he disappeared. She seeks out a so-called psychic named Richard Latham, but soon after, Anna thinks she's having visions herself.

Though chapters in The Shut Eye (a term meaning psychic) are from different points of view and at first seem to be telling separate stories, Belinda Bauer eventually weaves the threads together while keeping readers guessing all the way. As with her previous U.S. release, Rubbernecker, Bauer excels in developing her characters, giving each a distinct and believable voice, whether it's a grieving mother with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a gruff detective, a black lesbian female police officer (the "Holy Grail of Equal Opportunities") or a Hmong immigrant.

Bauer can also write from a child's view as convincingly as an adult's. Her prose is tight, conveying wonder and heart-gripping emotions without verbosity. In barely 300 pages, she manages to pack in social commentary, cultural insight and dry humor along with the suspense of a police procedural and perhaps even the supernatural, depending on how readers interpret certain revelations. Crime-fiction fans can expect little shut-eye after picking up this thriller. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Even the Dead, the seventh novel in the Quirke series by Benjamin Black (Holy Orders), quickly draws readers in--even readers new to the series. Quirke has been on leave from his pathology duties for two months, as he recuperates from a psychological semi-breakdown. Dublin is sweltering in the summer heat when a young man named Leon Corless dies in a fiery car crash. At first glance it seems like suicide, but Quirke's assistant pathologist is doubtful, and calls the big man back in to examine Corless's body.

After getting a glimpse, Quirke is drawn inexorably into the investigation. He and Inspector Hackett quickly discover that Corless had both a Communist father and a mysteriously vanished (and possibly pregnant) girlfriend. In looking into the death, Quirke is unwittingly bringing himself back into the orbit of an old foe, and potentially endangering those he loves most.

Reminiscent of the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear or Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge series, Even the Dead is a slow-paced, psychologically introspective mystery. Set in the close-minded, very Catholic milieu of 1950s Dublin, it's a glimpse into an era difficult to imagine now. Benjamin Black (a pseudonym of John Banville) has a gift for finely drawn characters and small details. And Quirke's undeniable eccentricity lends him an irresistible charm that will keep the reader engaged until the very end. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Many of the main characters in Nicholas Petrie's debut crime novel are veterans. Cops, criminals, shelter workers, the unhinged homeless--they were trained to kill in the military. The Drifter is set in Milwaukee, Wis., in the weeks before Veteran's Day, when the weather is turning cold. Former Marine Lieutenant Peter Ash is "living in his truck and [doing] his personal grooming at a car wash.... Operational necessity." Ash is an itinerant carpenter with a bad case of what he calls "the white static" (a claustrophobic reaction to confined spaces), brought back from multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan along with a battle-hardened knack for thinking on his feet and for lethal violence--useful in door-knocking war missions maybe, but a problem for living a "normal" civilian life.

Guilty that he wasn't there when his closest friend and platoon sergeant Jimmy committed suicide, Ash comes to Milwaukee to provide Jimmy's wife with home repairs and moral support. Under her falling-down front porch, he finds a huge ugly dog ("Like a timber wolf run through the wash with a pit bull, a Great Dane, and a fuzzy orange sweatshirt"), a suitcase with $400,000 in cash and four slabs of C-4 explosives. He soon uncovers a bombing plot cooked up by angry vets, crooked cops and a ruthless hedge fund manager. Backed by a sympathetic local gang criminal with an Army Ranger background, Ash fights his personal white static paralysis to do what's right by Jimmy. A page-turner with a shout-out to vets everywhere, The Drifter is a first-class crime novel set in a second-tier city with plenty of third-rate lowlifes. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In May 2013, Paul Kalanithi was an ambitious sixth-year resident in neurosurgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Twenty-two months later, he was dead at age 37 of lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air is the frank and moving account of this young doctor's striving to excel in one of medicine's most demanding specialties while his life was shadowed by the terror of a terminal illness.

Kalanithi's memoir divides into two distinct narratives: first, about the road to early success in the medical profession, a journey that included a detour to obtain a master's degree in English literature from Stanford; the second is the tragic tale of his losing battle against cancer. His account of the "black hole that is neurosurgical residency" features familiar stories of 100-hour workweeks and the emotional stress brought on by the feeling of inadequacy at dealing with life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. One especially striking aspect of When Breath Becomes Air is the speed at which Kalanithi moves from the mental outlook of being a doctor to that of being a patient when he must face "the same existential quandaries my patients faced."

It's impossible to reach the end of this all-too-brief memoir, which includes a moving epilogue by Kalanithi's physician wife, Lucy, without mourning the loss of a brilliant, compassionate doctor, and wondering what contributions he might have made to medical science had he lived. Failing that, we can only be grateful that at least he's left behind the inestimable gift of this book. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

They vanished from beaches, from their European universities and vacations, and walking home after school. In his second book, The Invitation-Only Zone, Robert S. Boynton (The New New Journalism) pieces together the disturbing and still-unfolding story of North Korea's abductions of Japanese, South Koreans and other foreign citizens, from the 1950s to the present day.

In 1991, a Japanese TV producer investigated the stories of Korean-Japanese whose relatives were among the 93,000 who accepted Kim Il-sung's offer of "repatriation" in 1956. Those interviews led him to the story of the abduction of a Japanese chef. He produced a documentary on the chef's abduction that was met with disbelief; he investigated further and wrote a book. The arrest and confession of a North Korean terrorist finally motivated the Japanese government to confront the question of the abductions project, and in 2002 five abductees were allowed to return to Japan.

Japanese public opinion turned from denial to outrage and panic. Why did the North Koreans make these abductions? A variety of reasons seem to have existed at different times: to train or breed Japanese spies, to obtain skilled professionals or find wives for terrorists. Boynton writes that "ultimately, there was no single explanation or motivation. The most plausible explanation is that the abductions were part of a bold plan to unify the two Koreas, spread Kim Il-sung's ideology throughout Asia, and humiliate Japan." Anyone with an interest in the history and politics of these nations will find this a fascinating read. --Sara Catterall

In Stringer: A Reporter's Journey into the Congo, Anjan Sundaram covered the Democratic Republic of the Congo's descent into civil war and near-anarchy. In Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, he documents Rwanda's transition from the horrors of genocide into an Orwellian dictatorship. The memoir ostensibly covers Sundaram's time running a training program for journalists in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. However, the author takes a backseat in the narrative to his students, some of whom channel their training and idealism into a heroic last stand for free, independent journalism in Rwanda.

Early on in the book, one of Sundaram's most talented students explains the cruel deceit at the heart of Rwandan society by pointing to the street lights: "You would think from the street lights that Rwanda is a resource-rich country. But only four percent of Rwanda's people have electricity in their houses.... But this is the first thing visitors see. And this is impressive, they are stunned by the small country in Africa that has come through a genocide, and now has such roads, such lights." Sundaram notes again and again the vast amount of financial aid given to Rwanda's government by well-meaning but ignorant foreign countries and organizations, money that President Kagame uses to throttle dissenting voices. Bad News is an attempt to shed light on a side of Rwanda hidden to most foreigners, but also a memorial to those who give their lives, well-being and even their sanity to the cause of free speech. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

All Monsters Must Die: An Excursion to North Korea is a strange, discursive book. Originally published in Sweden in 2011, the book is ostensibly an account of Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman's tour of North Korea in 2008. However, the book turns out to be more of a companionable sprawl than a simple travelogue, weaving in chapters about the notorious abductions of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee and director Shin Sang-ok, the making of a North Korean Godzilla rip-off film called Pulgasari, the devastating mid-'90s famine known to North Koreans as the "Arduous March," the strangely close relationship between the ruling Kim clan and the incredibly wealthy South Korean cult leader Pastor Moon Sun-myung, and much, much more.

The book benefits from the authors' distinctly Scandinavian perspective, in part because it diverges from the Cold War-era narrative that persists in the West. When writing about the Korean War, for example, the authors note that to many Koreans at the time, "the North seemed like the true Korea" and refer to the American bombing campaign in North Korea as an "inexorable, drawn-out war crime." The authors always return to their own heavily guided, carefully choreographed tour of the "Hermit Kingdom" before the many tangents become distracting.

While the authors write about their frustration over North Korea's impenetrability, they still manage to carve a few human moments out of the rigid experience. Whether musing about Kim Il-sung's cult of personality or relating a particularly North Korean response to food poisoning, Bärtås and Ekman are wonderfully entertaining and frequently insightful. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Joseph Johnson may be only 12 years old, but he "ain't no boy." He's lost his mother and sister to typhoid fever, his father to a wagon accident, and his beloved pony, Sarah, to a conniving "old cuss" who sold her to a horse dealer. Indeed, "sadness can be a storm that's easy to get lost in." But Sarah is all Joseph has left in the world, and Joseph is determined to get his pony back, even if he has to take on a raging grizzly, white-water rapids and a cold-blooded murderer to do it. Dan Gemeinhart (The Honest Truth) packs nonstop thrills, chills and spills into Some Kind of Courage. Set in 1890, in the post-Gold Rush American West, the novel captures a real and dramatic era, a time of horse thieves and gunslingers, and a time when Chinese laborers were often despised and persecuted.

Joseph joins forces with a Chinese boy named Ah-Kee who is on his own mysterious odyssey--he speaks no English, so can't tell Joseph what, or whom, he's looking for, but their wordless, surprisingly effective communication makes for one of the finest and most unusual friendships in middle-grade literature. The two boys set out on what seems at times like a wild goose chase, tracking down Joseph's pony from Wenatchee to Yakima, Wash. Joseph's courage and cowboy spirit--and his rhythmic, nice-and-easy first-person voice--will keep pages turning, and fans of Gary Paulsen's Hatchet and Dogsong or Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain will love the suspenseful survival aspects of the boys' perilous journey. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

Preparing for one's society debut is stressful for any young Englishwoman of the Regency era, but 18-year-old Lady Helen Wrexhall is more nervous than most. Her late mother, Lady Catherine, was a notorious traitor to King George III; her dreadful, misogynistic uncle is eager to marry off his tainted niece quickly; and her body has been flooded by an "unseemly vigor" and other disturbingly unnatural powers that make it even harder than usual to concentrate on the work of finding a husband.

It is the Earl of Carlston, her disgraced distant cousin, a "handsome but repellent" man with "dark shark eyes," who tells her the truth about who and what she is. She is a Reclaimer, just as her mother was, one of eight in England who has the talents to identify and destroy Deceivers, the thousands of supernatural, tentacled creatures who disguise themselves, colonize human bodies "at all levels of society" and harvest the life-force of humans to survive. This revelation is terrifying for Helen, but soon enough, she is pulled into the work of the Dark Days Club (a shadow group to the city detectives called the Bow Street Runners) that fights Deceivers.

With The Dark Days Club, Australian author Alison Goodman (Eon; Eona) brings her usual meticulous world-building craft to her exploration of the historical and the supernatural. Her vivid descriptions of the clothing, society and conversation of 1812 London would perfectly recall Georgette Heyer, if Heyer had written dark fantasy, and the romance, though tamer than Sarah MacLean's books, absolutely smolders. Fortunately, Lady Helen's adventure has just begun--it's the first of a trilogy. --Stephanie Anderson, assistant director for public services, Darien Library (Conn.)