"We know what you did," an ominous warning, proves pivotal in Ameera Patel's electrifying debut novel, Outside the Lines. In a predominantly white middle-class neighborhood of Johannesburg, South Africa, the threatening phrase inextricably links five disparate characters.

"You took the money from the vase," the drug-addicted, university dropout Cathleen Joseph accuses an innocent man, deflecting her own culpability. Her father, Frank, who has devolved into a pathetic, aimless alcoholic since his wife's recent death, chooses to believe Cathleen as she condemns Runyararo, a recently arrived Zimbabwean hired to paint the Joseph house; his muteness renders him incapable of self-defense. Flora, the Josephs' longtime live-in housekeeper and nanny, silently bears witness to the accusation from a distance. "There are too many lies flying through the room," but no one is ready to face the truth. The deceits don't end there--across the city, accounting student Farhana prepares to break the Ramsaan [Ramadan] fast with her extended Indian Muslim family, even as she plans to sneak out to meet her drug-dealer boyfriend, with whom she has a relationship based mostly on dual-sided deceptions.

Originally published in 2016 in her native South Africa by actor and playwright Ameera Patel, this dysfunctional family drama has unexpected moments of dark comedy to disrupt the unfolding, inevitable tragedy. While exposing the multilayered inequities of the haves vs. have-nots, Patel slyly ridicules white entitlement, religious hypocrisy, clueless parenting, casual racism, ineffective rules and breakable laws. In clipped, often unadorned sentences, Patel skillfully presents a raw narrative of careless disconnections and scathing verity. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

With straightforward prose, a single first-person point of view and seamless world-building, The Obsidian Tower is a fast-paced and riveting start to Melissa Caruso's Rooks and Ruin series.

All her life, Ryx has lived by the family motto: "Guard the tower, ward the stone." The novel begins as Ryx works to broker peace between two other domains. The first envoy to arrive breaks into the eponymous Tower, and because Ryx's magic works backward, killing anything she touches instead of guiding and shaping life, Ryx accidentally kills them while trying to avoid setting off the powerful obelisk inside. Learning of this, Ryx's grandmother, the Witch Lord of Morgrain, sends Ryx to the nearby Rookery encampment--an international group that deals with magical problems--for aid, and she disappears. Then the other envoy arrives.

"Everything was sliding into the Hell of Nightmares, and I had no idea how to stop it." After upending everything Ryx knows, Caruso slows things down a bit to help Ryx and readers make sense of things before building the pace and tension again with a complex series of twists, betrayals and surprising alliances.

While The Obsidian Tower ends in a satisfying way, readers will be glad to know that Rooks and Ruin is a planned trilogy, because Caruso has left so many threads unwoven that they'll be eager to read what comes next for Ryx and the Rooks. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels

Yoshiharu Tsuge abandoned making manga in 1987, and yet his legacy has only expanded--deservedly so--during the decades since, far beyond his native Japan. Considered one of the originators of the graphic 'I-novel' (shishōsetsu), he eventually "abandoned what had been considered one of the bare minimum requirements of the comics medium--storytelling--by exploring the possibilities of the irrational and the surreal," writes noted manga editor and researcher Mitsuhiro Asakawa in his compelling, indispensable introduction. "His work did nothing less than redefine the comics medium for readers, creators, and the world of Japanese manga."

The dozen shorts gathered here are a contrasting showcase of both unexpectedly mythic and seemingly quotidian tales, each bearing signs of post-World War II hardships and tragedy; many end without resolution or closure, considerably raising the intrigue factor. In "The Phony Warrior," a mysterious samurai bears "the heavy weight of simply getting by." In "Destiny," a young couple's suicide is thwarted by an unexpected baby rescue. An aimless young man finds "An Unusual Painting" that guides him to endless free drinks. A couple adopts "Chirpy," a Java sparrow that will never fly away. A bibliophilic boy gets an unexpected gift in "The Secondhand Book." Revenge requires utmost patience in "The Ninjess."

Since making his English-language debut in January 2020 with The Man Without Talent--translated by comics historian and professor Ryan Holmberg, who returns here--Tsuge's Western success has expanded. The Swamp is the first in a projected seven-volume series from indie graphic publisher Drawn & Quarterly, with volume 2 in the Complete Mature Works of Yoshiharu Tsuge planned for winter 2021. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

K is a monster. He is also a savior, a spark amid author Nina Renata Aron's otherwise cold days of drudgery and postpartum depression after the birth of her children. And he is an addict, hooked on seemingly every incarnation of drugs from heroin to methadone--a man who, ever since a cancer diagnosis derailed his life, seems to care only about the next fix. Yet even as he repeatedly abuses Aron, both figuratively and literally, throughout her shattering memoir, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls, readers will understand why she is hooked on him, too. She wants to save him. She wants to be capable of saving. Even the way she writes about him is tender, mothering: she will refer to her boyfriend only as "K," never a full name.

Aron plumbs her memories, which are as raw and visceral as movie stills, to understand how her codependent personality developed throughout adolescence. She frequently draws on psychological research and fishes for meaning in materials from Al-Anon, meeting groups for those affected by a friend or family member's addiction. She lays out her childhood years, during which she became parentified while caring for her heroin-addicted eldest sister. And she sifts through the debris of her marriage, which she blew apart while having an affair with K. Throughout the book, Aron is ruthless with herself, both self-deprecating and self-punishing, and yet she always comes back to her story's central theme: learning how to love--and how to love yourself--is a practice. You have to work at it.

Hers is an exquisite though demanding story, one so brutally honest it transforms into something beautiful. A master class in memoir. --Lauren Puckett, freelance writer

The phrase "Girl Scouts" conjures images of camping, female empowerment, girls in sashes and vests and, of course, the popular cookies. "Homelessness," in comparison, evokes people sleeping on the streets, jobless and in dire circumstances. In Troop 6000, however, journalist Nikita Stewart complicates matters: she asks readers to reconsider both of those images as she brings them together in her account of the first Girl Scout troop to serve families in homeless shelters in New York City, founded within a shelter in Queens.

The narrative follows Giselle Burgess, mother of five, as she--like many others in New York City--slipped from barely scraping by to falling behind financially. Her family ended up in the shelter system, but getting involved in the Girl Scouts helped her to find a new purpose amid her new reality. Stewart's writing blends the history of the Girl Scouts and its founder, Juliette Gordon Low, with the formation of this new and unconventional troop, as she highlights similarities across time, culture and circumstance.

Troop 6000 is accessible and inspirational. Stewart is uncompromising as she makes visible the stark reality of what homelessness in the contemporary United States can look like--and how quickly someone might find themselves in that position when just a handful of things goes wrong. This book is about strength, hope and leadership, and the empowerment of these girls and their families as they came together in Troop 6000. Burgess's work shows how much more can be given through the traditions of scouting, if only people think a little less traditionally. -- Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

An eel's testicles don't usually leap to mind when one thinks of Sigmund Freud. Yet Freud discovered this "holy grail of natural science" when the answer had eluded many before him. The eel is unusually difficult to study-- "Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel." Some of the most famous natural scientists in history have tried to find answers, mostly in vain.

In The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson, a Swedish arts and culture journalist at the newspaper Sydsvenskan, traces the history of efforts to unfurl the enigma of the eel. Though we know more today than when Aristotle gave it his best shot, the eel remains a fascinating puzzle in the modern era. "Somewhere in the darkness and mud, the eel has managed to hide away from human knowledge," forcing scientists to rely, to some extent, on faith. 

An eel can live 50 to 80 years, during which time it metamorphosizes multiple times, dictated not by time, but by migration location. We "know" the eel procreates in the equally curious Sargasso Sea, yet no one has ever seen a mature eel or eels mating there. Answers seem only to create more questions, rendering the eel a perpetually interesting riddle with no end. Winner of the 2019 August Prize for nonfiction, The Book of Eels is nature writing at its finest. Svensson's memories of eel fishing with his father speak to the intersection of life and science, and add to its heart. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Thoroughness and depth are hallmarks of Howard Means's long writing career. In Splash!, he delivers a fascinating, compulsively readable history of swimming, dating back to the dawn of humankind.

All "life began with water," Means states, launching his immersive narrative in remote Egypt where, in 1933, a Hungarian explorer discovered a small, ancient cave and multiple painted figures "floating effortlessly on the rock wall... caught midstroke doing some highly relaxed version of the old-fashioned doggy paddle." These mysterious images of swimmers, estimated to be approximately 8,000 years old, gave birth to new ideas about the Earth and its prior gravitational shifts, orbits and bodies of water.

Means probes the relationship of wildlife and humans to water over centuries. He weaves in biblical passages, religious doctrine and Darwin's theory of evolution, among others. Swimming has held different meanings over time. The Greeks, while more interested in the humanities and the arts, took their swimming seriously, as a "civic virtue," while the Romans, a more practical people, treasured swimming and let it drive engineering and architecture.

Along the way of this meticulously documented and comprehensive history, Means cites examples of notable thinkers and their relationships to swimming--from Lord Byron to Ben Franklin--along with aquatic themes in literature penned by greats from William Shakespeare to Michael Ondaatje. The reach of the narrative is vast, and the research impeccable. The passion and enthusiasm of Means (67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence; Instructions for a Funeral), a life-long swimmer himself, shines on every page of this exceptional aquatic exploration. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Avid cyclist Hannah Ross delves into the history of cycling and feminism in her first book, Revolutions. Cycling for competition or leisure has long been a male-dominated sphere: the vast majority of riders (at least visible ones) and celebrated cycling pros are men. But women have been riding--quite capably--in huge numbers for decades, and their love for the bicycle has become intertwined with other social transformations.

Ross begins with a scene from Cambridge University in 1897: a group of male students protesting a resolution to grant women students degrees (which failed), then tearing an effigy of a female cyclist to pieces. During that era and ever since, women on bicycles have been seen as "liberated," forward-thinking and sometimes dangerous. At the very least, they've shown their unwillingness to stay where they are and do what they're told, which has unnerved the men in charge of business, politics and other areas of society.

Revolutions is part cycling history, part feminist rallying cry. Ross has done her research, and her narrative brims with information about specific types of bicycles and the groups of women who used them. Suffragettes, especially in England and the U.S., were known for their championing of "rational dress" (i.e., sensible clothing that did not restrict movement), which dovetailed nicely with their desire to hop on a bike.

Cycling, Ross says, should be for everyone. Revolutions is an informative, entertaining and inspiring look at what it means to be a woman on a bike. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

In Jasbinder Bilan's absorbing debut, Asha and the Spirit Bird, 11-year-old Hindu Asha and her 12-year-old Sikh friend, Jeevan, venture on a long, arduous trek.

Anchored in realism and enriched by Asha's belief that her dead nanijee (grandmother) is looking after her in the form of a lamagaia (a bearded vulture), Asha's first-person account describes a harrowing mission: she must find her father in northern India in hopes he'll pay off a loan her mother took out on their farm. Asha knows her father's address because he used to write her letters--but those stopped arriving in the spring, and it's now fall. Asha and best friend Jeevan travel by cart, train, foot and horse; they struggle through illness and storms. They visit the temple at the origin of the Ganges River to ask for blessings and endure the horrors of being temporarily imprisoned as child laborers, a grim reminder of the perils still present in the contemporary world. The two often spar about Asha's belief in reincarnation and things that cannot be seen, while Jeevan believes in what he can observe. Jeevan, however, cannot always find rational explanations for all that happens to the two in their travels.

Asha's determined nature and Jeevan's growing trust in her strengths (realistic and magical) provide young readers with both a growing relationship and a stirring quest chronicle. The mixture of authentic slices of Indian life and the mystical elements of Nanijee's influence blend together to form an exhilarating narrative that carries readers through the Himalayan landscape. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance book reviewer