Free love reigns in the United States of 1969, but 16-year-old Lucy Gold, "the pretty towhead" and "live wire" of her tiny family, isn't going to its hub in San Francisco. Instead, her passionate affair with her high school English teacher, William Lallo, has turned into an invitation to run away with him to rural Pennsylvania, where he'll teach at a self-directed private school and Lucy will stay out of sight until she turns 18. To Lucy, a romantic idyll beats staying home, where she has always felt like the odd one out next to her brainy, responsible big sister, Charlotte, and their loving aunt Iris, who raised them from childhood when their parents died in a car accident. With Charlotte ready to graduate high school and talking nonstop about college, Lucy can't stand the thought of being left behind.

Bonded for years by their love for Lucy, Charlotte and Iris panic when they find her farewell letter. As time passes with no sign of their prodigal child, Charlotte leaves for Brandeis University, but comes home to care for Iris with increasing frequency. A big-hearted, sensible woman, Iris hides a bittersweet past and a secret--she isn't the girls' aunt.

In Cruel Beautiful World, Caroline Leavitt (Is This Tomorrow) perfectly captures the essence of the teen years adults tend to look back on fondly through the lens of nostalgia, reminding the reader of the uncertainty, insecurity, naive expectations and broken dreams that came with growing up. Deeply resonant and quietly powerful, this novel has the heart-pounding moments of a thriller and the heart-warming moments of a perfect coming-of-age story. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

The previous three volumes in Lian Hearn's feudal Japanese epic, The Tale of Shikanoko, served as character study and setup for a conclusion focused on the much-anticipated battle between the series' two opposing forces--warrior and sorcerer Shikanoko of the Kakizuki (the deposed and rightful heirs to the throne) and Lord Aritomo and Masachika of the Miboshi clan (ruling party of the Eight Isles). Twelve years have elapsed since the warrior-sorcerer Shikanoko began his journey to protect and restore Hidden Emperor Yoshimori to the throne. In that time, Shikanoko has betrayed those who have loved and mentored him, raised and abandoned a mystical band of orphan boys, and forsook humankind to mourn in grief over a lost love, hovering in spiritual purgatory with a magical deer mask fused to his face.

Lord of the Darkwood (Book 3) alternated among the viewpoints of the children that Shikanoko abandoned in his grief. In The Tengu's Game of Go, they have matured and are seeking him out, either for revenge in the ongoing power struggle with the Miboshi clan, or with intent to restore his humanity so that he may fulfill his destiny of bringing peace back to the Eight Isles. The novel's climax is the final showdown between the warring clans.

Hearn infuses her narrative with the usual episodes of mysticism, violence, sword and sorcery. More surprising, however, are the brief interludes that provide comic relief to the tragedies that will certainly befall some of the key players. As a result, The Tengu's Game of Go provides a satisfying conclusion to an epic series. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

With style and intrigue, Patrick Hoffman's Every Man a Menace proves that his top-flight debut San Francisco crime novel, The White Van, was no fluke. Here, the drug of choice is Molly (aka MDMA or Ecstasy), and Hoffman's dealers are occasionally hapless, but more often just plain ruthless. A former Bay Area private investigator, Hoffman unwinds his story from the murder of a small-time ex-con caught in a high stakes double-cross deal. He later adds in a San Francisco Filipina Molly queen's cross-border drug chain, the Miami club owners who broker the product and the Asian packagers who manage global distribution. Set largely in San Francisco, Miami and Bangkok, Every Man a Menace vibrates with punchy prose reminiscent of authors like Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard and John Burdett, who made those cities their own.

There is no sentimentality along Hoffman's drug chain--it's all about the money. The ex-con in the novel's first of five parts sets the tone: "He liked making money from drugs, from illegal s**t. It made him feel high." Handshake agreements are only good if the money follows, as when the Miami brokers assess a deal with the Molly queen: " 'Can she be trusted?'... 'Of course not. But she has the money.... She'll buy it, come back, buy it again.' " No surprise--when the size of the deal gets big enough, handshakes and a table of comped drinks give way to betrayal, Glocks and bodies buried at sea. There are no heroes here. Hammett, Leonard and Burdett will need to make room for the new gunslinger in town. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In 1992, Danish investment banker Annette Herfkens traveled to Vietnam to visit her fiancé, Willem. From there, the couple decided to take a romantic getaway. En route to a coastal resort, their plane crashed into the side of a mountain and plummeted deep into the Vietnamese jungle. Twenty-nine passengers and crew aboard the aircraft died, including Willem, leaving Annette as the sole survivor. Immobilized by serious injuries, Annette was trapped among the dead and dying, and existed on rainwater, aiming her focus away from her pain and fear. She concentrated, instead, on the green beauty of the jungle. Thus, positive energy provided sustenance that manifested into spiritual nourishment for eight days until she was finally rescued.

Herfkens's survival narrative is supplemented with photographs, official crash documents and first-person accounts by friends and loved ones of how Herfkens's ordeal affected them. The memoir further chronicles her grief and arduous physical recovery. Herfkens longed to integrate her experience and get on with "normal" life, but the incident impacted every aspect of her being, even after she returned to work, fell in love again, married and gave birth to two beautiful children, one of whom was later diagnosed with autism. The eight days Herfkens spent in the jungle--and the profound insights and spiritual gains imprinted upon her psyche--continue to guide and steady her through the often dark uncertainties of life. By navigating harrowing tests and challenges with trust, surrender and gratitude, Herfkens's meaningful story will uplift and inspire readers. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Already well acquainted with wilderness at 20, Pete Fromm spent seven months in Idaho babysitting salmon eggs. He published his memoir of that experience, Indian Creek Chronicles, 13 years later, in 1993, beginning a career that combines outdoor adventure and strong writing (he's written for Gray's Sporting Journal and published numerous books and short stories). In The Names of the Stars, Fromm returns to an egg-tending gig, but this time as a very different man.

A storytelling, lunch-packing dad of nine- and six-year-old sons in 2004, Fromm sees the month-long job as an opportunity for an extended outing with the boys: fishing, hiking, chopping wood. The Forest Service, citing liability, nixes that plan. But when his wife points out, "This is who you are. You need to do this," he leaves for Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness alone, with anticipation as well as regret.

The winner of five Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association awards, Fromm demonstrates his love of nature through shining descriptions of early spring in the wilds: bluebirds "almost aglow"; a "clot of elk"; rains "pelting, with furious gusts." His dry humor sparkles. During his daily trek through the "Hansel and Gretel" woods between his cabin and the fish eggs' Spruce Creek, Fromm repurposes his repertoire of bedtime kids' songs into grizzly-deterrent music, "rattling the cowbell, keeping time with Burl Ives, the Big Rock Candy Mountains."

Fromm considers his Wisconsin youth, college years in Montana, lifeguarding in Nevada and a season on the Rio Grande. It all leads to a life devoted to nature, and to his family; The Names of the Stars honors both. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

In The Spoils of War, New York University historians Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith codify their thesis when they write about Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, "Like most successful politicians, Roosevelt was willing to risk long-term disaster... for America to avoid short-term political defeat." It's an unpopular view of Roosevelt, who is largely seen as a fearless wartime leader, but it's a perspective they apply equally to some of the United States' most popular presidents.

They explore the executive decisions that led to some of the country's most definitive foreign and domestic conflicts. Their claim throughout is that while every president may have had genuinely altruistic motivations for involving the country in war, there were always ulterior motives that benefited their own political or personal ambitions.

Mesquita and Smith endeavor to redefine and deconstruct the heroic mythology surrounding some of the country's most celebrated wartime presidents. They explain that, due to American history's tendency to romanticize its historic leaders, the true causes of war are often shrouded.

The approachable and detailed historical context Mesquita and Smith provide is enlightening and effective. They assert, with operative facts and concise language, George Washington's duplicity in advocating for a war with the Crown not, as is believed, for independence but rather for access to fur-trapping territory. They argue that Lincoln's Civil War was built on a political strategy not to ensure abolition so much as to drive a wedge through a southern, anti-Republican voting block.

The Spoils of War demonstrates that, while history smiles upon its wartime leaders, the facts can be far less kind. --Josh Potter

Poet, professor, critic and prose stylist Mary Ruefle has been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, as well as a Whiting Award. Her work, however, has largely appeared in the sheltered world of small presses and in her celebrated erasures, poems created by altering a published text. The exquisite collection My Private Property showcases her eclectic tastes and wry observations in a surprising array of prose poems.

It opens with "Little Golf Pencil," about making a simple police statement, which leads into her elaboration that "in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world." In the powerful "Pause," Ruefle tackles menopause, recognizing the harsh realization that "You will feel as if your life is over and you will be absolutely right about that, it is over"--only to learn in time about the freedom of a new beginning, where "Happy old age is coming on bare feet, bringing with it grace and gentle words, and ways that grim youth has never known." The title poem is a dip into the mysteries of shrunken heads, triggered by reading Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki. Christmas trees, a trip out to lunch with friends, keys, household servitude, mail-order packages--there is no subject that doesn't attract Ruefle's attention and lead her into a lively discursion. My Private Property has a provocative revelation hiding around every twist of her remarkable imagination. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Published shortly after his death at age 25, Max Ritvo's collection of poetry, Four Reincarnations, is a sobering yet joyful examination of life and its unraveling. Ritvo battled cancer for nearly 10 years, and he breathes in the full tragedy and routine nature of death simultaneously: "The new day is slid underneath/ the old days:/ the clouds can hear only themselves." He has an astounding ability to wring varied emotions, physical sensations and ambiguities out of each poem. They scramble the senses by painting sprightly, synesthetic landscapes: "The sound of burning vegetables/ is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets." He twists joy and sadness around one another until the reader can't distinguish between the two and quietly experiences both. Ritvo wrestles with the mutability of memory and the subjectivity of time. In "Afternoon," he visualizes his own death as both inevitable and already having happened. In "Plush Bunny," he pictures his small future stored in the same shoebox where he kept a stuffed animal he'd outgrown as a child.

As the poetry community grieves Ritvo's death and celebrates his work, it's clear that the poet has already begun to reincarnate. One can only hope that his leaping imagination and clear-eyed psyche will reach widely into the living world. Ritvo dispenses bleak perspective and a generosity of spirit throughout Four Reincarnations, making this a collection to be savored and held close. As he writes in "The Watercolor Eulogy": "I know this isn't the heaven we wanted./ What ever is?" --Richael Best, bookseller, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, Wash.

For his 12th birthday, British-Indian Al (Albert Einstein Hawking Chaudhury, to be precise) gets a huge surprise when his mother gives him a letter from his deceased dad. It says: "You are about to learn, Al, how to travel in time." Could it really be possible to travel back in time and stop the fateful childhood go-kart accident that eventually killed his father? Either way, Al will have to tend to his other birthday surprise, too: a baby hamster named Alan Shearer.

The thought of having his dad back again gets Al so excited it makes him "feel a bit sick." But part of him senses that the journey through time may be a "truly epically bad idea." Before Al can even consider warping the space-time continuum, he'll have to retrieve his father's time machine that's still at their old house, 10 miles down the English coast. In a fresh, funny, first-person voice, Al describes a series of schemes involving "borrowing" Grandpa Byron's mauve moped and getting help from his snarky gothed-out stepsister, Carly, by promising a séance.

The plot of Time Traveling with a Hamster bears a passing similarity to the '80s film Back to the Future, but debut author Ross Welford's spin on it is impressively sophisticated. He addresses time travel's complicated questions head-on, including the grandfather paradox, the butterfly effect and the question of whether the same person can exist twice in the same moment. Al's devotion and bravery, together with the message that a kid can make a difference for a beloved adult, will grab tweens and young teens by the heartstrings. --Jaclyn Fulwood, lead librarian at Del City Public Library, Okla.

The Liszts, a rather sober lot, make lists. Lists of ghastly illnesses, small winged insects and shades of black. Indeed, "They made lists in winter, spring, summer, fall. They made lists every day except Sundays, which were listless."

The youngest child, Frederick, makes lists of fun things to do, such as drawing the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The oldest, Winifred, is fond of "top ten lists" (#1 on her cheese list is Roquefort). The middle child, Edward, makes 31-page lists "to quiet the swirl of his midnight mind." One day a large adult visitor who, inexplicably, is carrying a bouquet of helium balloons, enters the Liszts' stately home through the open front door and tells Mama, "I'm here." He's not on her list, so she can't be bothered. The visitor tells Papa--and almost everyone else--"I'm here"--with similar results. But when he finally approaches Edward, the boy greets him with a shy "Hi." Edward has a list of questions, and so does the visitor; between them their questions fill three pages with handwritten capital letters. Visitor: "HOW DO I KNOW MY LIFE IS NOT A DREAM?" and "WHERE ARE MY PANTS?" Edward: "DOES ANYONE OWN THE MOON OR THE SKY?" and "WHY AM I RIGHT-HANDED?"

The Liszts, by Toronto resident Kyo Maclear (Julia, Child), is a welcome reminder to stay open to the unexpected, and Barcelona resident Júlia Sardà's lovely, surprise-filled, comical, autumnally hued illustrations could not be more perfectly suited to the story. Fans of Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest (also about an uninvited guest who never, ever leaves) should immediately add this delightful book to their list. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness