The men in Lily Tuck's new collection of stories, The House at Belle Fontaine, don't come off well. They drink too much, sleep with younger women, ignore their children and abuse their domestic help--but, mercifully for their wives, they also often die young.

The women in these stories, on the other hand, are largely self-aware, adventurous and stoic. They don't dwell on their own disappointing behavior or impulses, but, like the university student seduced and impregnated by her Greek professor in "Sure and Gentle Words," they take some pride in themselves "not merely as a wife and mother... but as someone with a past, someone who had had an adventure."

Tuck's fiction, including the 2004 National Book Award winner The News from Paraguay, is filled with strong worldly women who travel or live wherever they want--whether their men join them or not. Her work is elegantly concise, capturing intimacies and emotions with just a few words of description and telling dialogue.

In the same way that unsatisfactory sex and marriage dominate the stories of The House at Belle Fontaine, random fatal disease and accident destabilize the characters' relationships. The stories take place across the globe, but their settings don't change Tuck's focus on the vicissitudes of relationships between men and women--and in this she is a master. If her women usually come out on top, perhaps it's because they have figured it out better than men. As she notes in the story "Lucky," concerning one character and her former art teacher and ex-husband, "She had surprised herself and learned a lot from Alec. If only, she thinks, she had not married him." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Complex, layered and utterly original, debut novelist Derek B. Miller's Norwegian by Night is one of the most surprising and unusual novels to emerge in recent years. While there are always exceptions, a certain homogeneity has overtaken suspense novels of late, especially those set in Scandinavia. The landscape, both internal and external, is oppressive, dark, and relentlessly unforgiving. The protagonists of these novels tend to be predictable as well; brooding, troubled types on a mission who seek to reconcile their pasts while solving crimes. While Norwegian by Night has a great deal of tension and suspense, it cannot easily be classified as a thriller. And while it offers a unique insight into the country and character of Norway, it is of a very different type than such Norwegian writers as Karin Fossum or Jo Nesbø. Moreover, Sheldon Horowitz, as unusual  a character to ever carry a novel, bears no resemblance to the kind of hero we've come to expect. It is to Miller's great credit that he has managed to retain all the elements of a first-rate Scandinavian thriller while turning the genre--and our expectations of it--on its ear.

Imagine falling madly in love with an aspiring actor in college, marrying him and, then, just before he achieves mega-stardom, he divorces you. You're left heartbroken, broke and forced to watch him become ridiculously wealthy and famous. This is the premise of Lian Dolan's second novel, Elizabeth the First Wife, but what begins as a rather bleak set of circumstances becomes a joyous and delightful tale of a woman scorned reclaiming her mojo.

It hasn't been easy for the jilted Elizabeth Lancaster since the Brad Pitt-esque FX Fahey did her wrong. She's found solace in underachieving--teaching Shakespeare at a community college and wearing sensible shoes--but this is unacceptable to her overachieving family, and they make much ado about nothing as they try to snap her out of her funk. Poor Elizabeth; she just wants to be left alone to grow tomatoes in the dirt and moon over her lost love.

When FX suddenly reappears in Elizabeth's life desperately needing her help, Liz suddenly holds all the cards. This sets into motion a series of events that makes for a delicious journey of self-discovery that will leave you shaking your head happily at what fools these mortals can be. And the rub? The novel is interspersed with snippets of Shakespearean dialogue (and how they'd work as come-on lines) along with modern assessments of timeless characters. Perhaps it's the likable and resilient Elizabeth, but Dolan's invigorating take on this material proves once again that the Bard never goes out of style. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Dead Lions is a sequel to Mick Herron's Slow Horses. When Britain's MI5 intelligence service agents grow old and less effective, the "slow horses" depart Regents' House for Slough House, where they're given uninspiring paperwork to do with antiquated equipment. They're not supposed to catch anyone; they're "supposed to get bored and go join a security firm."

When agent Dickie Bow is found dead on a bus (without a ticket) outside Oxford, Slough House's boss, the irascible and rotund Jackson Lamb, is convinced it's murder. He travels to Reading to examine the bus Bow was riding on; wedged in the seat crack, he finds Bow's cell phone. It has a one-word message on it, never sent: "cicadas."

Lamb is of the opinion that a spy from the past, Alexander Popov, is somehow involved in Bow's death--although it's also possible Popov never existed, an imaginary agent created by MI5. River Cartwright, another character from Slow Horses, returns to provide some excellent detective work. Meanwhile, two other Slough House agents are assigned to escort a wealthy Russian oil magnate, Arkady Pashkin, during his visit to London.

Things get complicated as Herron's tale unfolds and the threat of bombs going off in London becomes a distinct possibility. If you like your suspense novels told with a smart dash of wit and sarcasm, filled with lots of twists and turns, Herron's your man. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

From the labor camps of Mao's China to the streets of Chicago and California, Anchee Min's The Cooked Seed offers readers a rare, honest account of being a poor, non-English-speaking immigrant in the U.S. Constantly fearing deportation, Min worked five jobs to pay for her schooling, rent and food. She learned English by watching Sesame Street and reading Gone with the Wind, lived in run-down storage spaces and cold apartments for the cheap rent and suffered a rape in silence, all the while struggling to grasp the American dream and the longed-for green card. She "envied the [American] homeless," she writes; "they spoke English and had the right to work." Min lived with a man for years, forced him to marry her and eventually gave birth to a daughter, the one person who finally helped her connect to her new country.

Min's story is one of overwhelming personal strength amidst extreme adversity as well as self-induced deprivations and numbing self-doubt. Graphic, lyric and candid prose illuminates her struggles as she battles exhaustion and racism as a landlord of dilapidated apartment buildings in bad neighborhoods. However, love, both parental and spousal, recognition as an acclaimed author (Red Azalea) and the simple knowledge that she could make her own decisions, in her own house, eventually bring fulfillment and satisfaction. Her vivid, behind-the-scenes descriptions of Communist China and her life in the U.S. as a foreigner offer a gripping story of persistence and determination. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

In The Ghost Horse, Joe Layden (The Last Great Fight) has crafted an inspiring, and true, love story infused with fate and coincidence, second chances and hope.

Tim Snyder was a gruff, nomadic horseman who fled hardscrabble beginnings to train "cheap horses." While working in a second-tier horse barn in upstate New York, a runaway colt in his care knocked over his quiet, unassuming co-worker, Lisa Calley, with whom he became instantly smitten--and vice versa. Lisa, 10 years younger than Tim, had already survived a broken marriage, cancer and a traumatic brain injury from a previous horse-riding incident. Their shared passion for horses united them as they built a married life together; her emotional sensitivity ultimately softened his unsentimental rough edges.

When Lisa's cancer returned, she promised Tim, "I'll see you again. I'm coming back as a horse." Her death left a gaping hole in her husband until, years later, he scraped together enough money to purchase a filly whose winning pedigree was offset by a blind left eye and congenital abnormalities in her left foot and shoulders. No one but Tim believed she would make it to the starting gate. But "Lisa's Booby Trap," as Tim named her, took the racing world by storm, and their bond helped Tim rebound from grief and loneliness. He came to believe the filly's personality reflected the sweet, resilient disposition of his late wife.

Layden has teamed up previously with a variety of superstars, from Kobe Bryant of the NBA to heavy metal's Dave Mustaine, as a co-author. In The Ghost Horse, Layden's writing shines on its own--insight and compassion weaving the narrative threads of this dual love story. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In 1900, archeologist Arthur Evans uncovered a cache of clay tablets in an unknown script on Crete. For 50 years, scholars across the world struggled to decipher that script--Linear B--without knowing what language it encoded. In 1952, an amateur named Michael Ventris solved the puzzle with what is often presented as a single stroke of inspiration. Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth adds a new layer to this story.

Ventris's inspiration, it turns out, was based on the work of another, largely forgotten, scholar--classicist Alice Kober. Working alone in her Brooklyn, N.Y., home, Kober created a new methodology for decoding the unknown script without the benefit of a bilingual text or a computer. She also identified the keys that allowed Ventris to make his imaginative leap.

Fox (Talking Hands) divides her story into three parts, focusing on the charismatic digger Evans, the methodical detective Kober and the brilliant architect Ventris in turn. She handles the mix of biography, archeology, cryptology and linguistics with a sure touch. Technical discussions of how to decipher an unknown script written in an unknown language are as engaging as the lives of her protagonists.

In a satisfying conclusion, The Riddle of the Labyrinth ends where it begins, with the tablets themselves and what we have learned from them. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Laurence Leamer's The Price of Justice offers convincing evidence that readers don't have to turn to the fiction of John Grisham for an engrossing story about a legal battle between the forces of light and darkness. It's a fast-moving, intelligent account of the fierce struggle against a rapacious coal magnate, waged over the course of more than a decade in courtrooms from Boone County, W.Va., to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The heroes of Leamer's book are David Fawcett III and Bruce Stanley, close friends and litigators at two elite Pittsburgh, Pa., firms. In 1998, they agreed to represent Hugh Caperton, the owner of the bankrupt Harman Mining Company, against the coal giant Massey Energy. They alleged that the decision of Massey CEO Don Blankenship to breach a contract with Harman was intended solely to destroy the much smaller company, break its union and seize its coal reserves. While the $50-million verdict the lawyers eventually secured was on appeal to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, Blankenship contributed $3 million toward the election of a friendly justice. After Blankenship got the result he wanted, the case eventually went to the Supreme Court, where former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson argued for a new judicial conflict of interest standard.

Leamer effectively navigates the byzantine course of the original Harman litigation and other cases spawned as a result of Fawcett and Stanley's work. He's able to breathe life into arid legal arguments about contract law and economic damages. In 1971, Leamer spent several months working in a mine, and his book is enriched by an empathy for the struggles and pride of the coal mining life. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

After frequently hearing patients wonder, "Why do I behave this way?" throughout his 30-year psychiatric practice, D. Theodore George applied his background in internal medicine, psychiatry and neuroscience to finding an answer. Untangling the Mind begins with his investigation into how emotion is produced in the brain, revealing the link between emotion and survival, as well as the difference between a legitimate emotion and a pathological one.

George's research leads to the PAG (periaqueductal grey) neurological model, which he describes as a panel of on-off buttons in the brain that generate behaviors to handle survival situations based on a specific stimulus (anger = fight, for example, while depression = shutdown). The brain possesses neurological switches that can be flipped at the right--or wrong--time. Individuals often lose control over these switches.

George's use of diagrams and neurological terms (the survival-driven amygdala and rational cortex are key players) are accessible and easily understood, and his case studies illuminate how genetics, environment, upbringing and biology contribute to how an individual reacts to certain situations. Although the focus of Untangling the Mind is on the neurological reasons for why people behave as they do, George concludes by affirming the personal responsibility we all have for our actions--especially once armed with neurological knowledge. He believes that treatment is possible in most cases and provides helpful direction in how to get the right type of help. --Kristen Galles, blogger at Book Club Classics

Terry Eagleton wrote the book on literary theory--Literary Theory: An Introduction--along with more than 40 other volumes about postmodernism, politics, ideology and religion. But don't be intimidated by How to Read Literature. This is no snoozy graduate school textbook. It's an accessible, thoughtful good read for those interested in the nuts and bolts of literature. It's an interesting peek behind the curtain of storytelling to reveal not only how it works, but why it works.

Focusing on various aspects of literature, including tone, plot and character, Eagleton reads deeply, providing commentary on a wide swath of literature we have come to know, love and sometimes revere--and now, through his insights, can know better. Take Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. "As [Marlow] moves upriver into the centre of Africa he is also journeying deeper inside himself," Eagleton writes. "At the same time... he is traveling into the primeval past." Thus, he explains, "the narrative moves forward and backward at the same time."

Eagleton looks at Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh and Samuel Beckett. As he picks apart the classics he delves into what makes literature good or bad and provides readers with the tools to analyze and interpret texts on their own. After reading How to Read Literature you'll be able to read any author--from Jack Kerouac to Judith Krantz--with a clearer understanding and a keener eye. --Jonathan Shipley, freelance writer

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong follows her tribute to The Mickey Mouse Club (Why? Because We Still Like You) with Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, a superb, highly entertaining history of one of television's most beloved sitcoms--the best show of all time, according to Entertainment Weekly.

In early 1970, Treva Silverman, along with producers and writers James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, began work on a show about a young, divorced woman who moves to Minneapolis to look for a job. They felt, Armstrong writes, that it was time for television "to push culture forward instead of holding it back." (Still, realizing that audiences weren't ready for a divorced leading lady, they eventually made it that Mary Richards was separated from her boyfriend.)

Meanwhile, Mary Tyler Moore's career after The Dick Van Dyke Show was in a "perilous" slump. MTM Enterprises, the production company she co-owned with her husband Grant Tinker, got behind the show, but early rehearsals fell flat. Test audiences had a problem with one of Mary's friends, Phyllis (played by Cloris Leachman), but after the writers eased up on her sardonic personality and gave her a daughter, everything fell into place.

CBS, which had previously been lukewarm, now committed fully to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, scheduling it for Saturday nights at 9:30 p.m. The rest--29 Emmys over seven seasons, including three consecutive awards for best comedy series--is television history. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Paul Rudnick (I Shudder) makes a smashing YA debut with this novel about what truly makes someone beautiful, the doors that beauty opens and the responsibility that comes with opportunity.

On Becky Randle's 18th birthday, her 400-pound mother dies. Before Becky left the house that morning, her mother told her, "Something is going to happen to you, and it's going to be magical." That magical something is a phone number for Tom Kelly, a world-famous designer. He offers Becky $1,000 and a plane ticket to New York, and she leaves behind her trailer park in East Trawley, Mo. Becky learns that Tom Kelly plucked her mother out of a crowd of schoolgirls when she was 16 and built her into an icon of fashion and beauty. He makes Becky a promise: if she'll wear three dresses he'll design for her, he will transform her into "the most beautiful woman who has ever lived." Partly to discover this secret past of her mother's, and partly to see if Tom can do as he promises, Becky agrees.

Rudnick delivers a timely novel that will draw in teens with its razor-sharp one-liners and observations about our culture of instantaneous social commentary, and keep them planted in these pages until they find out whether Becky will be brainwashed by fame and fortune or remain the girl from the Show-Me State. She grapples with the central dilemma of becoming an adult: as much as it seems like someone else is in charge, ultimately, you determine your own destiny. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Debut author Lauren Miller combines science fiction with destiny in Parallel.

Abby Barnes has her future all planned out. College? Check. Degree in journalism? Check. What she didn't plan for, however, is an earthquake that shakes not only the ground she's standing on, but also the world she's living in. Torn from the reality she thought she knew, Abby wakes up in several different moments of a life she doesn't quite know. She's forced not only to act like she's been there all along, but also to give up the life she had before. With the help of her best friend Caitlin, Abby begins to understand that there has been a cosmic collision of parallel universes, and she is somehow stuck in the middle.

Miller's clipped, detail-filled writing style captivates readers from page one. Combining both science and a contemporary story, the author draws readers into solving the mystery of parallel universes while also rooting for Abby to figure out how to live the life she desires. In the end, everything clicks together, leaving no questions or cliffhangers. An excellent debut. --Shanyn Day, blogger at Chick Loves Lit