Anthony Marra's stunning, dazzlingly good first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, is set in Chechnya in 2004, a place suffering horribly under the brutal rule of Russia. The novel begins when an eight-year-old girl, Havaa, wakes the morning after "the Feds" have burned her house and taken her father away. A neighbor, Akhmed, finds the girl hiding in the forest, sitting on the already packed suitcase her father had told her always to keep by her door. They must leave before the Feds return; they step out into the cold and snow and begin walking, careful to avoid mines.

He takes her to the hospital in Volchansk where Akhmed was born; the city looked as though it were "made of shoeboxes and stamped into the ground by a petulant child." Here he meets Sonja Andreyevna Rabina, an ethnic Russian and an accomplished surgeon, the last of a staff of 500; she has amputated 1,643 legs. Living on pills, she's as devastated as her hospital. Akhmed, a barely capable doctor in his village, can help her.

The novel takes place over five days, but the telling weaves in and out of the past eight years, as Marra takes us on an extraordinary journey into a world little known to many of us. He slowly unfolds his story with a balanced sureness and subtlety rare in a first novel, with a rhythm that is graceful and welcoming. Although it's sometimes horrific, it's also beautiful, heartbreaking and filled to the brim with the vital "human matter" of life. It may be the best new novel you'll read this year. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

It may be difficult to picture the bespectacled and wigged founding father as a dynamo between the sheets, but Sally Cabot's Benjamin Franklin's Bastard gives us a glimpse of a young, virile Franklin who was just as passionate about women as he was about electricity. One of these passions led to a son born out of wedlock in 1730, William Franklin.

Drawing upon the historical record--including excerpts from Franklin's letters--Cabot's debut novel relegates both Franklin men to the periphery and instead focuses on the two women responsible for William's eventual rise from "base-born brat" to the last colonial governor of New Jersey (and a Loyalist who eventually settled in Britain). There's Deborah Franklin, a "ruined" woman whom Benjamin took as his wife and who reluctantly raised her husband's bastard as her own child. And, since William's birth mother was never revealed, Cabot has created the clever and bold Anne, a character so intriguing that you miss her sorely whenever she's not present.

The true heartache and courageous gumption in this story belong to Deborah and Anne. Cabot shows her readers how cruel and limiting colonial American society could be to women, and her descriptions of the cultural mores of that time are as riveting as the stirrings of the American Revolution. Her account of the unsinkable Anne clawing her way up from a prostitute to a respectable business owner, while yearning for her lost son, is unforgettable. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Bill Cheng, a New Yorker inspired by a love of the blues, offers a debut novel of astonishing mood and vision set in the Jim Crow-era South. Music plays a small role in the narrative, but the mysterious and heady language of Southern Cross the Dog is thrillingly alive with an otherworldly mix of accursedness and transcendence that echoes the blues.

Robert Chatham is Cheng's modern-day Odysseus, moving through the stations of post-slavery privation and heartache. After the great flood of 1927, his parents, still grieving his lynched brother, send him off to be an errand boy at a brothel. Later, he joins a crew clearing land for an electric dam that promises to bring cold milk and bright-kitchen modernity to the South in exchange for denuding huge swaths of the Mississippi wild. Then, after nearly drowning in the river after a suicidal attempt to rescue some of the crew's equipment, he's saved and imprisoned by a near-feral family of French trappers. When he is finally reunited with two childhood friends, Robert finds them too broken and insane to offer much solace or help him with the devil on his own tail.

If Cheng hadn't crawled so deeply into the part-real, part-mythical world of the music he loves, Southern Cross the Dog could have been a pretentious work of cultural appropriation. But this young writer has instead, with a complete lack of guile or affect, written a new masterpiece of the South. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic

M.J. Rose's Seduction is the second installment in the story of perfumer and mythologist Jac L'Etoile (after 2012's The Book of Lost Fragrances). Reeling from emotional loss in the wake of her last adventure, Jac reconnects with a troubled childhood friend, Theo Gaspard, on the Isle of Jersey. Though she plans to investigate Celtic ruins, Theo has a very different sort of mystery in mind. The island was once home to French novelist Victor Hugo, who, after the death of his oldest daughter in 1843, became deeply entrenched in spiritualism in an effort to communicate with her spirit. Hundreds of the séances that Hugo participated in were transcribed and published, but Theo believes that there are additional transcripts, left hidden by Hugo on the island, that detail a monstrous offer made by a spirit Hugo called the Shadow of the Sepulcher.

Rose's work tends to be complex, resisting easy genre classification. Part thriller, part historical mystery, with supernatural elements and a dash of romance, Seduction is, first and foremost, a damn good read. It is also a nuanced, evocative portrait of the human mind beset by sorrow and uncertainty. Juggling many threads, Rose weaves three seemingly disparate plots to a shared ending that is as inevitable as it is surprising. Seduction will leave longtime M.J. Rose fans pining for the next installment and send newcomers scrambling to get her previous titles. --Judie Evans, librarian

In The Secret Lives of Baked Goods, Jessie Oleson Moore does more than bring together the recipes for more than 40 favorite American desserts; she details the historical evolution of each confectionary from its conception to its modern status as a much loved and tasty treat. From light, fluffy birthday cakes brought to us by the Industrial Revolution to the gingerbread men of 16th-century England, the chronology of each sweet is as fascinating to read as the recipe is to make.

If you've ever wondered how pineapple upside-down cake was invented or what the difference is between "blondies" and "brownies," Moore has the answers. She explains that chocolate chips were invented after the Toll House cookie became famous and that we owe Cherries Jubilee to Queen Victoria and the chef Auguste Escoffier. Joe Frogger cookies "were first made in Marblehead," she tells us, "and took their name from the plump, dark little frogs that lived in a pond near the cottage of a fellow known as Uncle Joe," while Whoopie Pies have caused "a sort of sugary civil war between Maine and Pennsylvania, who both argue that the other state stole the treat in a case of confectionary larceny."

Moore provides readers with recipes that are "respectful to the original," but still easy to make using modern equipment and ingredients. History and sweet treats combined with mouthwatering photographs make Moore's book a delight to read and use. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Barbara Graham's life might have sprung from the pages of a pulp crime novel. Born in northern California to a single mother, she was in and out of trouble for loitering, gambling and similar small-time crimes. Then, at the age of 28, she went on trial for murder, along with two male accomplices. All three were sent to the San Quentin gas chamber in 1955, but of the trio, Graham endured in both the popular and the political imagination.

Women were sentenced to death and executed in the 20th century much less frequently than men. In Proof of Guilt, Kathleen A. Cairns explores some of the reasons for this discrepancy. She notes that, in openly expressing her anger and frustration during her trial, Graham failed to live up to the jurors' often sexist notions of how a female defendant "should" behave--and that she likely paid the ultimate price for that, even though her trial was riddled with rights violations, including a confession obtained under illegal and possibly coercive circumstances. Yet Graham's story also helped the growing movement to abolish the death penalty, particularly after it was memorialized in the 1959 film I Want to Live!

Cairns, a historian who often focuses on the incarceration of women (The Enigma Woman; Hard Time at Tehachapi), underlines that narratives have extraordinary power to shape public perception and public policy. Yet she never loses sight of the humanity of her subject and the importance of certainty when using the death penalty. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket

Ripley's Believe It or Not has become a part of the American vernacular; A Curious Man, Neal Thompson's comprehensive biography of LeRoy Robert Ripley, delves into the life of the man behind the pop-culture phenomenon.

A shy, buck-toothed, stuttering child and a chronic doodler, Ripley grew up humbly in the early 1900s with dreams of becoming a big-league baseball player. Although he was clumsy and socially awkward, his athletic ability helped him excel at the sport. When an injury sidelined Ripley from playing ball professionally, he turned to his second love--drawing. A self-taught artist, he started working as a newspaper cartoonist in San Francisco, eventually migrating to the New York Globe, where he pitched his editor an idea about sports oddities. Thus the Believe It or Not series was launched, later expanded to include strange, bizarre facts and exotic curiosities that fascinated readers and ultimately propelled the column into worldwide syndication.

Ripley's cartoons and essays were an extension of his own personality, and his work made him a popular, wealthy celebrity and a pioneer in several media. He traveled the world, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful while seeking out new material about underdogs and outcasts. Despite his success and fame, Ripley was an enigmatic misfit. Thompson (Light this Candle) traces the trajectory of Ripley's ascendency and those who influenced him, fleshing out a fully realized portrait of Ripley's life and legacy with vigor and vitality. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Robert M. Edsel's Saving Italy is a fascinating, engrossing and impeccably researched history that reads like a first-rate suspense thriller.

Forty-eight men and women served with the U.S. Army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section in the Mediterranean theater during World War II. Captain Deane Keller, a painter and Yale art professor, assisted by art historian Lieutenant Fred Hartt, led the "Monuments Men" as they protected Italy's great artistic treasures from the Nazis. (And from Allied bombs, too; Da Vinci's The Last Supper was nearly destroyed by a 1943 assault on Milan.)

As Florence's beautiful bridges were systematically blown up by Hitler's retreating army, a tireless civil servant in Florence helped organize an evacuation of many of the city's priceless paintings to the Tuscan countryside, while several sculptures, including Michelangelo's David, were entombed in brick. Many great works of art went missing; Edsel recounts that the Monuments Men traveled all over Europe trying to track them down. He also tells about the secret peace talks between a German SS officer and the Allies, with art works as hostages, and the great risks that another SS officer--an archeologist before the war--took to protect other antiquities.

Edsel's dedication to this story runs deep; he's also the founder and president of the Monuments Men Foundation, which serves both to honor their work and to raise awareness about the importance of protecting great art from armed conflict--for which he received the National Humanities Medal. Saving Italy is a superb work of history and a riveting tale. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (Open Veins of Latin America) has built his career by blending history, fiction and political analysis into a form that he describes as "obsessed with remembering." In Children of the Days, he compresses that obsession into a form modeled on the medieval book of days.

Instead of a typical "today in history" almanac, Children of the Days is a series of one-page responses to historical events, people and ideas--closer to riffs than essays--each tied more or less to a specific day of the year. Beginning with the reminder that January 1 "is not the first day of the year for the Mayas, the Jews, the Arabs, the Chinese or many other inhabitants of this world" and ending with the Hebrew meaning of "abracadabra," Galeano's compendium of facts is unabashedly multicultural. There's a strong bias in favor of historical anecdotes from Latin America, Africa and Asia, but he never romanticizes the non-Western world.

He celebrates not only well-known historical figures, but forgotten heroes and martyrs. He draws unlikely connections and ignores mainstream high culture, discussing the significance of Tarzan's howl at greater length than responses to major works of Western art. Some themes recur: lost libraries, new knowledge, old prejudices and daring acts of resistance to tyranny. Even when his subjects are familiar, Galeano's conclusions are always surprising. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Since Marc Mauer first published Race to Incarcerate in 1999, American prison populations have stabilized and, in the last couple of years, even declined modestly. This is mostly due to recent economic downtrends and consequent cost-saving measures that impose constructive versus punitive approaches to sentencing. Yet, as a new edition of this landmark work--featuring the starkly drawn imagery of graphic artist Sabrina Jones--shows us, much more can be done.

Mauer's first edition took a hard look at the policies influencing rising prison populations in the 1990s, the result of "tough on crime" movements that funneled streams of money into the prison industry while doing little to address underlying social problems and inequities. Little has changed; disparities are still apparent within minority populations, particularly in area of drug enforcement where a two-tiered system offers a slap on the wrist for the "haves" and incarceration for the "have-nots."

Jones's gritty illustrations punctuate Mauer's main points. The result is a searing indictment of divisive policies and empty rhetoric. Throughout the short narrative, it is obvious that Mauer and Jones still believe that change can prevail--and that if politicians would only remove the blinders and make much needed investments toward the future, they would see that continued incarceration does nothing to heal the demographic divide. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

"One bright night in the middle of the day, a silver ship sailed down to stay...." This catastrophe marked Doloria's first birthday and changed the course of humanity. Thirteen ships, the so-called Icons, landed on Earth, destroyed major population centers and killed billions of people by stopping their hearts with an electrical pulse. But Doloria ("Dol"), marked on the inside of her wrist, was spared for reasons beyond her understanding. Now, at age 17, she lives on Grass Mission in southern California with her best friend, Furo ("Ro"). They share a primitive life with the old Padre except for their uneasy suspicion that their marks and their uncontrollable emotions brand them as different and possibly dangerous, but to whom?

The Icons brought the House of Lords, who now rule the world, and keep humans under a cruel enslavement. They've never been seen outside of their ships. Dol and Ro discover that they are Icon Children, and find themselves swept up in dueling plots either to protect the Lords from the teens' own potential power or to strike against them in a risky bid for freedom. Their telepathic and telekinetic skills could be the Icons' undoing and humanity's salvation. Which will they choose?

Margaret Stohl (Beautiful Creatures) moves from the gothic to the realm of science fiction with this series opener. Readers may find the parallel plot structure challenging initially, but their imaginations will be quickly engaged. The cover will attract both crossover appeal and fans of both sexes. --Jessica Bushore, former public librarian and freelance writer

Author Jennifer Berne (Manfish) and artist Vladimir Radunsky form the ideal team to tell of the early childhood and late blooming of Albert Einstein.

With a minimum of text and artwork that moves smoothly between the abstract and the concrete, the duo demonstrates the way Einstein's mind also traveled fluidly between his imagination and setting down his ideas in a way that others could understand. Young Albert said nary a word until he turned three. When he was ill, Albert's father brought him a compass, and the boy's observations led to a breakthrough: "Suddenly he knew there were mysteries in the world--hidden and silent, unknown and unseen." The book's design also supports this transition. As Albert reads and wonders and learns, Radunsky fills the pages with swirls of colors and crossed-out formulas, alluding to the scientific process of trying hypotheses and eliminating theories that don't work. Enlarged phrases in red type give readers the gist of the major ideas Berne presents.

Most of all, the book awakens a sense of curiosity and mystery in youngsters. As Albert watches a lump of sugar dissolve in his tea, he wonders, "How could this happen?... How could one thing disappear into another?" This observation eventually leads to his hypothesis about everything being made of atoms. The book ends by posing to readers this very idea ("Questions that someday you may answer... by wondering, thinking, and imagining"), along with Einstein's main discoveries and a list of books for further reading. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness