Lucy Foley crafts a subtle, dramatic story of guilt, desire and long-held secrets in her second novel, The Invitation. Professionally and personally adrift after World War II, Hal Jacobs escapes to Rome to build a new life as a journalist. He spends his free time wandering the streets of the Eternal City, mostly content in his anonymity. When he meets an enigmatic woman, Stella, at a glamorous party, Hal expects their chance encounter to remain just that. But a year later, Hal and Stella both end up on a yacht making its way down the Italian Riviera, sailing toward Cannes for the premiere of a new film. 

Foley (The Book of Lost and Found) narrates her story through both Hal's and Stella's voices, occasionally shifting between them mid-chapter. Hal suspects there is much more to Stella than her marriage to a wealthy American. Readers learn about Stella's childhood, and the guilt and grief she carries, long before he does. Foley also moves between 1950s Italy and 1930s Spain, when Stella's homeland and her family both fell apart. However, Stella and Hal aren't the only ones keeping secrets, and by the end of the voyage, several characters are facing a sea change. (Foley's minor characters, especially a regal contessa and an elderly film director, are also well drawn.) Lushly described settings and Foley's keen but compassionate eye for her characters combine to make The Invitation a beautiful, bittersweet journey of loss and redemption. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel, Giuseppe Catozzella's Don't Tell Me You're Afraid is based on the true story of Samia, a Somali girl whose passion is running. Set primarily in Mogadishu during the civil war, the eight-year-old begins to train with the help of her neighbor and best friend, Ali, who is also eight. Over the course of several years, they run through the streets of Mogadishu, or in the bullet-ridden stadium, always wary of the militant soldiers who lurk everywhere, always mindful that what they are doing is frowned upon by the militant Al-Shabaab. But nothing will stop Samia's determination to represent her country in the Olympics. Despite the lack of proper equipment, food and training, but with the support of her parents, Samia's dedication to becoming a world-class runner is rewarded when she runs the 200-meter race at the 2008 Beijing games. What transpires after her race only enhances her resolve to succeed regardless of the costs.

Catozella has carefully blended Samia's thoughts and actions with descriptions of her family members as they struggle to live a normal life in a war-torn country, sharing the plight of the thousands of refugees who have fled Somalia because of the conflict. He has taken a little-known story and turned it into a powerful message that portrays life, for women in particular, under the strict rules of an extreme Islamist regime, and also what ordeals people will go through in order to fulfill their dreams. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

When Hetty Deveraux's last living relative dies, she becomes the newest owner of Muirlan, her family's aging estate in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. Fed up with her life in London and eager for a fresh start, she leaps at the opportunity to visit the old manse, dreaming of changing the historic building into a luxury hotel. But the realities of her inheritance--a crumbling edifice that can be accessed only when the tides are just so--leave her uncertain how to proceed. The discovery of human remains buried in the foundations further complicates matters, and sends Hetty on a quest to understand what really happened in her family's checkered past.

As Hetty digs deeper into Muirlan's history, Sarah Maine moves The House Between Tides smoothly from past to present and back again. The constant throughout both time periods is the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Outer Hebrides, "where the skies were wide and open, and the island recognized only rules of its own devising." Maine brings the region to life on the page: birds swoop and soar on ocean breezes, waves crash on rocky shores, and sunlight slants through darkened clouds as Hetty and her ancestors attempt to lay claim to this untamed corner of the world. The stark setting proves to be the perfect backdrop for Maine's well-plotted debut. The novel weaves secrets from both past and present with a bit of a romance and the feel of the Outer Hebrides to build a mystery that is as eerie and complex as the house of Muirlan itself. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Mignon F. Ballard's cozy mysteries are set in the World War II era and are infused with the charm of life in small Southern towns. Ballard has written four mysteries that feature Miss Dimple Kilpatrick, a veteran first-grade teacher, and seven with earthbound guardian angel Augusta Goodnight. In Miss Dimple and the Slightly Bewildered Angel, both heroines work together to solve a mystery.

In 1944, a strange newcomer--nervous, 30-something Dora Westbrook--arrives in Miss Dimple's hometown of Elderberry, Ga. She is warmly greeted at Phoebe Chadwick's rooming house, only to turn up dead at the Presbyterian church the next morning. It appears Dora fell from a ladder leading to the church steeple. Why was she climbing the steeple, and what was she doing in Elderberry in the first place?

Dora's mysterious death rocks the town and the lives of the rooming house boarders, who are also suffering the departure of their reliable, beloved cook, on leave to tend to an aging aunt. Then tart-tongued Augusta Goodnight shows up on their doorstep; the guardian angel offers domestic help and doles out practical wisdom and guidance in assisting Miss Dimple to solve what turns out to be a very puzzling crime that might be murder.

As the war rages on, misadventures abound, and Miss Dimple and her friends travel to Dora's hometown to learn more. Ballard (Miss Dimple Picks a Peck of Trouble) adds another enjoyable installment to her nostalgic cozy series. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

A young woman, recently returned home to care for her dying father, tells a story of family, loss and supernatural visions. She's the middle of five siblings: Penny the anxiously beautiful, Paul the overly successful, Davey and Simon the two sides of the same substance abuse coin. Dad lies in a hospice bed in their old home, struggling with death. The father keeps trying to get out of bed; "terminal agitation," the nurses call it. His movements bring the entire family's mourning to a devastating head, causing the siblings to leave the narrator alone with him.

The Language of Dying is addressed to this foundering patriarch. The narrator has plenty to say to him, to her brothers and sister, and--perhaps most of all--to herself. She's never been sure of her tenuous connection to reality, having seen visions of an impossible beast both in her past and now again as she sits at night in her father's room. It's not a beautiful creature, but something dark, violent and angry. Is this monstrous presence real or imagined? Does it matter? What does it portend?

This short novel is dark and candid, full of conflicting emotions: love, fear, anger, joy. The prose is evocative and moody, making The Language of Dying a perfect novel for those nighttime hours at home when everyone else is fast asleep. The darkness of the storyteller's inner world echoes on every page. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

During Terry McDonell's four-decade career working at Esquire, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and a half-dozen other magazines, he edited an impressive number of literary lions, including Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. In his perceptive and intoxicating memoir, The Accidental Life, McDonell proves his writing skills are equal to his legendary editing prowess.

McDonell forged friendships with most of the writers he edited, and The Accidental Life is filled with revealing anecdotes about their writing processes, their willingness to be edited and their private lives. Whether he is playing golf (after dropping acid) with Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton, taking Jann Wenner to court for not honoring his contract, or pitching a TV series to Aaron Spelling with Richard Price, McDonell is a captivating raconteur. McDonell also has a knack for astute and funny pegs for people: P.J. O'Rourke is "a pants-down Republican"; Helen Gurley Brown was "a feminist in fishnet stockings and a minidress"; and Jim Harrison "could look a bit weathered, but he was still handsome in the manner of a mahogany stump." 

McDonell offers clear-eyed advice for those who want a career as a writer or editor. One salient bit possibly explains his successful friendships with those he edited: "Good editors, like doctors, develop a bedside manner." The Accidental Life is a supremely entertaining memoir that succeeds as both an instructional guide to writing and an insider's confessional about the outstanding writers he has known and edited. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Aptly subtitled, Navigating Life: Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me is a collection of life advice written by a mother to her eldest daughter, who is just leaving home for university. "The natural order of things is for you to teach yourself now how to be a complete human being and lead a life of meaning," Margaux Bergen explains to her daughter. "And for me to keep reflecting back to you some of my experience, without preventing you from accumulating your own."

That's exactly what Navigating Life sets out to do, as Bergen offers advice concerning work, family, learning, friendship, money and passion. Obvious but ever-important lessons (you can't change anyone but yourself; your morals are your own to keep; be kind to others) sit beside more specific suggestions (when to leave a terrible job; how to build a friendship; the importance of reading the newspaper). These sage ideas are then embedded in the context of her own experiences.

The candor with which Bergen explains to her daughter the struggles she has had with depression, the loss of an alcoholic father and the difficulties of being a single parent are ultimately what make Navigating Life as relevant for the author's daughter as it is for a wider audience. By cataloguing her own hardships and recognizing the places where she was unable to follow her own advice, Bergen offers readers not a strict how-to but an invitation. Come with me, she seems to say, and together we can figure out how to do this thing called life. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Bonds between mothers and daughters are often full of complicated twists and turns. Add in the mother's great achievements and a famous father, and the relationship can turn from complicated to downright ugly, especially when family history is subject to the shifting sands of time and memory. Unearthing those memories is what Eisner-nominated graphic novelist Nadja Spiegelman (Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework) sets out to do in I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This.

Young Nadja knew little about her mother, New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly, except the peripherals: that she left Paris at 18 to live in a squalid SoHo loft, and eventually married Maus creator Art Spiegelman. The mother known for smothering her children with affection in their childhood and indulging in antics like swimming during lightning storms eventually abandoned her daughter emotionally in adolescence, leaving a void that Nadja could neither understand nor reconcile. It wasn't until her daughter reached adulthood that Françoise finally unleashed her past: the neglected middle daughter in post-World War II Paris, whose high-society parents waged household skirmishes, pitting one child against the other until only emotional pain remained. As Nadja discovers by unraveling and reconstructing the hidden layers of memory and misunderstandings, that family pattern repeated itself across three successive generations: "The past reshaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past."

The "happy" ending that Nadja finds is acceptance, where the main players don't forgive and forget but meet on middle ground. It's this honesty in human emotion--what Nadja comes to term "the violent act" of interpreting memories--that ultimately gives her memoir its strength. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Enchantment, with its connotation of magical interference, is the perfect descriptor for love, and Leigh Stein's Land of Enchantment is a meditation on her experience in loving and losing the volatile and charismatic man she follows to New Mexico. In this memoir, love is a haunting, a bewitchment that never stops, even in death.

Prone to grand pronouncements and flights of fancy, Jason entangles Stein from their first meeting at a theater audition. Following a whirlwind courtship (replete with infidelity and the first signs of abuse), the pair embarks on a six-month stint in New Mexico. While the magical Sandia Mountains in the distance cast everything in their rosy glow, matters at home aren't so idyllic. Stein depicts Jason's verbal and physical violence with the foggy half-vision of one reaching for an old memory, occluded by pain, and her grappling is as moving as it is painful. Through levelheaded prose, Stein is a winsome, unflinching Virgil guiding readers through this labyrinth of remembrances.

Jason resurfaces continually after their failed attempt at southwestern bliss, only to die suddenly years later. This memoir is a testament to love's untidiness, its habit of fouling our best intentions and forcing us to ask ourselves, "How did I get here?" Stein, an alumna of the New Yorker's editorial staff and the founder of BinderCon, retraces her steps thoughtfully, in a book whose dark magic is as alluring as an O'Keeffe canvas. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer

Acclaimed British novelist, poet and essayist A.S. Byatt (The Children's Book) loves color. She also loves William Morris designs, and has filled her house with them on curtains, wallpapers, tea towels and kitchen tiles. She first encountered the work of Mariano Fortuny at the Palazzo Fortuny museum in Venice; back in England, she found his work intertwining with Morris's in her mind. Peacock & Vine is the result, a meditation on two "polymaths in the arts." Their houses were not only marvelous aesthetic creations, but the active studios of hardworking artists, integrating their domestic lives, philosophies and work. "They created their own surroundings, changed the visual world around them, studied the forms of the past and made them parts of new forms."

Fortuny was a Spanish aristocrat with a peaceful domestic life; he was most inspired by women and is best known for his multicolored, finely pleated couture silk and velvet garments, though he also worked in painting, architecture and lighting technology. Morris was an unhappily married, upper-middle-class Englishman and socialist--an artist, designer and writer who was most inspired by nature; he struggled between his desire for everyone to live with beautiful handmade things and the expense of creating them. Byatt meanders through their biographies, considering their similarities and differences, their homes and furnishings, tools and inventions, their approaches to textile design and her favorite texts and museums about them. Peacock & Vine will appeal to Byatt's fans, and to anyone interested in a light introduction to two brilliant and influential artists. --Sara Catterall

One of the wonderful things about two-time Newbery winner Kate DiCamillo (Flora & Ulysses; The Tale of Despereaux) is that she sometimes makes grown-ups the heroes of her children's books, as opposed to killing them off on page one or making them as nasty as a Roald Dahl aunt. In this charming third volume in her Tales from Deckawoo Drive series of stand-alone early-reader chapter books (Leroy Ninker Saddles Up; Francine Poulet Meets the Ghost Raccoon), the heroine is an elderly woman named Baby Lincoln. (No, Where Are You Going, Baby Lincoln? isn't a book about President Lincoln's childhood.)

Baby Lincoln is dreaming of a train, shooting stars and a "necessary journey," when her domineering sister Eugenia shouts "Baby!" with her hands on her hips. "It is late, Baby... Goals must be set. Lists must be made." Before either of them knows exactly what's happening, Baby hears a faraway train whistle, packs a suitcase and embarks on the "necessary journey" of her dreams. As she takes a right onto Deckawoo Drive, "The sun was shining, and Baby's heart felt like a hummingbird in her chest." She buys a train ticket to Fluxom.

Baby revels in her new freedom. On the train she reads a nice man's comics, remembers her real name is Lucille, tries a green jelly bean that tastes like leaves, consoles a very small boy who smells like "peanut butter and construction paper"... and misses her sister Eugenia. Chris Van Dusen's (Mercy Watson series) expressive illustrations add humor to this heartwarming story of both necessary journeys and the joys of coming back home. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Yoshio, equipped with his yellow umbrella, is making his way to school through the busy streets of Tokyo when he stumbles upon a sound he's never heard before, "high and then low, squeaky and vibrating--amazing! It was a koto player carefully tuning her instrument." When he asks the gray-haired street musician if she has a favorite sound, she says the most beautiful is "the sound of ma, of silence."

This throws the boy for a loop: "Where can I find silence? Yoshio wondered as he listened to the thwack of his boots on the pavement." For the rest of the school day he listens for silence, but it eludes him. Even the stalks of the playground's bamboo grove make a "takeh-takeh-takeh" sound in the wind. After school the bullet trains whoosh. At dinner, he notices "What a noisy family!" and even bath time isn't silent because "little droplets of water kept dripping off his nose." He falls asleep to a distant radio before he can hear the quiet of the night. It's not until he goes to school the next day and opens up a beloved storybook that the world around him seems to disappear. At last, silence: "It was between and underneath every sound. And it had been there all along."

Julia Kuo (Go, Little Green Truck) captures the sights of bustling Tokyo with clean, precise lines, fascinating details and a rich autumnal color palette. The Sound of Silence calls attention to the "symphony hall" of sounds that surround us every day, and the silent spaces in between them. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Reshma Kapoor is an Indian-American senior at a prestigious Silicon Valley high school where, as she says, "...I'm its number one student. Not its smartest student. Not its most beloved student. But, by the numbers, the best." To say she is not beloved is an understatement. "Once people meet me, they start to hate me." Reshma is aware but mostly unconcerned about how her drive to succeed has trumped any kind of meaningful relationships. She will stop at nothing--including lawsuits--to get where she wants: namely, Stanford University, then medical school, then a lucrative career. Seeking a hook that will lift her above the country's 31,000 other valedictorians, Reshma decides to acquire a literary agent and a book deal for a novel using her own manufactured life as material. To be able to write such a book, she needs to check some typical American girl things off her list: make a friend, go to a party, get a boyfriend and have sex. After blackmailing her drug dealer (she compulsively pops amphetamines to study) to be her friend and choosing a nice Indian guy who has a crush on her to be her boyfriend, not surprisingly, the trouble begins.

Many high school readers will recognize the intense pressure this ruthless anti-hero feels, if not her over-the-top manipulations. Moments of poignancy when one almost feels pity for Reshma will alternate with horrified awe at her cold-blooded grit. Rahul Kanakia's inventive, radically original debut Enter Title Here is not for everyone, but it will be fiercely loved by many. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor