Ashley Winstead's propulsive seventh novel, The Future Saints, follows the titular rock band--singer/lead guitarist Hannah, bassist Ripper, and drummer Kenny--as they navigate newfound fame and complicated relationships, including the one with their new manager, Theo. Winstead (This Book Will Bury Me) layers in the emotions of the band's journey like an achingly emotive rock song: grief, longing, anticipation, misunderstanding, and a persistent spark of hope.

When Theo, who has a reputation as "the Fixer," meets the Saints, they've hit rock bottom: playing gigs in dive bars and constantly arguing with one another. Since Ginny, the former manager and Hannah's sister, died in a drowning accident, the band has floundered. Hannah's clinging to what scraps of Ginny's presence she can still feel, but when she unleashes a new, darker sound with a song about Ginny's death, the Saints unexpectedly skyrocket to fame--though no one knows if it will bind them closer together or break them apart for good. As Theo wrestles with growing feelings for Hannah, his hopes for the band, and his burgeoning sense that his bosses at the label are playing a dangerous game, he must decide whether and how he's willing to help the Saints stay on top of the charts--even if it means betraying the fragile trust they've built.

Winstead explores the glamour and grit of life on the road, and she plumbs the complexities of grief. With compelling characters and surprising emotional depth, The Future Saints pays tribute to the glitz and guts required for a life dedicated to music. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

As far as fictional Manhattan private-investigator couples go, the heirs apparent to Nick and Nora Charles, who lit up Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man in 1934, must be Lydia and Bill of S.J. Rozan's Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series (Family Business; The Mayors of New York). Although they're not married--Lydia's ultratraditional Chinese mother isn't sold on "white baboon" Bill--the couple have been bantering Nick-and-Nora-style through one investigation after another. First Do No Harm is among the sturdiest and drollest installment in the series.

River Valley Downstate Medical Center morgue assistant Jordy Kazarian did the right thing: he phoned 911 after he found a nurse dead with a needle in her arm in the Manhattan hospital's basement. Now Jordy is being accused of killing her. One theory is that Jordy, a former addict, helped the nurse shoot up and, when she OD'd, freaked out and called the cops--never mind that Jordy says he never met the woman. Jordy's lawyer hires Lydia and Bill to nail down what really happened.

As Lydia and Bill tear through Manhattan interviewing hospital staff and associates, the storied city becomes a character, but the fun of this series is that Rozan strays so far from the beaten path in every book that New York is like a different city each time around. Throughout First Do No Harm, Lydia's narration reflects her bubbly tenacity, and her conversations with Bill (about the case, about his cigarette habit) capture the couple's easy rapport--Nick and Nora in a flirty-squabbly downtown incarnation. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Peabody Award-winning Cameroonian documentary filmmaker Osvalde Lewat's dynamic debut novel, The Aquatics, translated from the French by Maren Baudet-Lackner, tackles disturbing subjects in its excoriating focus on grief, friendship, injustice, and government-endorsed homophobia in the fictional African nation of Zambuena. All four themes hinder 33-year-old narrator Katmé Abbia.

An unsettling prologue establishes the triggering plot point: Katmé buries her mother in a fumbled funeral. Twenty years later, the body must be exhumed and reburied to make way for a new highway. At the same time, Katmé's high school friend, Samuel "Samy" Pankeu, an activist sculptor, is arrested while putting on a significant solo show. His Ante Mortem exhibit includes a series of photographs called The Aquatics, which depict "terrified faces emerging from wastewater and flooding, ID cards floating, women hoisting babies, lamps, or suitcases overhead, the swollen face of a drowned man."

In Zambuena, it's not illegal to express disagreement with rulers but it is a criminal offense to be gay. After a newspaper outs Samy, he is imprisoned and suffers horrifically brutal attacks. Katmé enlists her abusive, serial adulterer husband, Tashun, to intervene. It gets complicated because Tashun is a prefect running for governor.

The tense novel plays out Katmé's "corset of indecision and fear" as she struggles with split loyalties and tests Samy's cautious proviso that "one should only ask from a friend what he is capable of." Lewat's brisk, crisp, straightforward prose elevates the gut-wrenching material of The Aquatics into a compulsive read. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic

Fans of "agnostic/atheist" Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending; The Noise of Time) know that his major obsession is death, which he has written about in such works as the brilliantly titled memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of. For Barnes, as he states in the intricately layered novel Departure(s), life "is a farce with a tragic ending, or, at best, a light comedy with a sad ending." This work, he says, "will definitely be my last book--my official departure, my final conversation with you." In it, a 77-year-old British writer named Julian Barnes has a form of blood cancer that "isn't curable, but it is manageable." Not surprisingly, he's thinking about departures, not just his inevitable demise but also friends and family who, through death or estrangement, are long gone. Two in particular are the subject of this work: university friends Stephen and Jean.

Events are rarely straightforward in Barnes's fiction, and that remains gloriously true here as he recounts their days as Oxford classmates in the 1960s, when he helped unite Stephen, "a scholarship boy of middle-class background," and "slightly posher" Jean. The couple soon broke up, and the trio lost touch. Forty years later, divorced Stephen contacts Barnes out of the blue and asks him to help reconnect him with Jean. The results are anything but smooth. As always with Barnes, references to French literature are plentiful, and the prose is enviably elegant, as when he writes that fiction "requires the slow composting of life before it becomes useable material." Literary nutrients abound in this generous work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Baby envy gets out of hand in The Day I Lost You, Ruth Mancini's dexterously plotted sophomore thriller. At its heart is a vexing practical question: Whose baby is it?

As the novel begins, Lauren Hopwood, an Englishwoman living in a Spanish fishing town, finds two policemen at her door: "We've come about a missing child.... An English child," one cop tells her. Lauren says she knows nothing about a missing kid and that the toddler sleeping in the bedroom is her son--and she has the birth certificate and passport to prove it. Regardless, the cop tells her that "the police in the UK were given your name by his parents, who say that fifteen months ago, you abducted their child from their home in England." Not long after the cops leave, Lauren and the toddler hightail it out of town. What happened seems obvious. But is it?

The novel hops back in time one year, when Hope Dunsmore, the Englishwoman claiming that Lauren kidnapped her child, takes up the point of view, after which the book continues to jump chronologically backward, alternating between Lauren's and Hope's perspectives until Hope's husband finally weighs in. Although everyone's voice sounds alike, the three different viewpoints afford the pleasures of watching a hypothetical three-sided tennis match. The Day I Lost You finds its three central characters at least thinking about doing the right thing; meanwhile, Mancini (The Woman on the Ledge), a lawyer, uses her expertise to show that morality and the law aren't always natural allies. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

What's the most entertaining way to skewer clickbait culture? If you're L.M. Chilton (Don't Swipe Right), it's by writing a horror-inflected, mordantly funny thriller, namely Everyone in the Group Chat Dies.

As the novel opens, narrator Kirby Cornell, a journalist, receives a notification from an old group chat: "Esme" texts "miss me?" Missing Esme isn't unthinkable, given that she's been dead for 12 months. From here the novel springs back a year, when Kirby is living in "the arse-end of the English countryside" and reporting for the Crowhurst Gazette. The moribund town has a claim to fame: "Thirty years ago," notes Kirby, "Crowhurst was home to the UK's seventeenth-worst serial killer," who is believed to have died by suicide. And yet this put-to-rest story brings charismatic influencer Esme Goodwin to town: "I've come here to catch a serial killer," she informs Kirby.

Kirby's narration flits between her observations about Esme's investigation and, in the one-year-later present, her own detective work while whoever has Esme's phone proceeds to threaten everyone in the group chat. Although humor abounds--the chatter among Kirby and her roommates has the rat-a-tat of a prestige sitcom--Everyone in the Group Chat Dies has serious points to make, including about the importance of local media. (Kirby and the Crowhurst Gazette are up against a news organization that runs click-generating stories such as "22 Celebrities Who Don't Look Alike.") A few readers may anticipate the novel's big reveal, but they'll probably miss the clues with which Chilton sneakily seeds his paralleling creepy-crawly narratives. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Set in the English countryside, this horror-inflected, mordantly funny thriller finds a journalist trying to figure out how a dead influencer appears to have revived an old group chat.

In a satisfying departure from her numerous dark Scottish mysteries, Val McDermid (Queen Macbeth) offers Winter: The Story of a Season, a charming memoir of sorts to treasure for all seasons. Her supple prose, engaging regional descriptions, and thought-provoking observations, tinged with sparkling humor, follow festivals from Halloween through New Year's Day. McDermid renders her reflections on her cherished Fife childhood and Edinburgh adulthood with nostalgic affection.

The enticing four-part collection of 20 brief reminiscences begins with the tradition of guising, a "forerunner of the anaemic trick or treat," with improvised costumes (nothing store-bought) and gutting neep ("rock-hard" Swedish turnips). Next comes November's celebration of "gunpowder, treason and plot" surrounding Guy Fawkes's failed 1605 coup against the English Parliament. Captivating Christmas "lightfests" at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden "hold the darkness at bay." McDermid bemoans the loss of traditional town square Hogmanay activities, replaced with "expensive corporate and heavily restricted events." Making soup sustains her, like "central heating for the soul," building out her recipes with "a good rummage" through whatever she has on hand.

With January, McDermid's literary imagination benefits from the perfect climate for a crime writer of "devious deeds done in the dark." It's also an ideal time "to snuggle indoors without guilt; to curl up on the sofa with a good book... or a wee whisky to hand." Readers can savor the same pleasures, along with Philip Harris's 15 delightful images that complement McDermid's already descriptive and winsome text--birds, barren woodlands, the "ghost ship" of Queensferry Crossing, a steaming pot of soup, youthful ice skaters. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic

Samantha Ellis's insightful memoir, Always Carry Salt, explores the complexities of the author's attempts to pass on her Iraqi Jewish heritage--food, mannerisms, history, and most of all, language--to her London-born son. Blending historical context, personal experience, and occasional recipes, Ellis traces her family's journey from Baghdad to the United Kingdom, and the joys and struggles they experienced while holding onto their culture. As she collects words in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, Ellis asks probing questions about language and power, noting the ways Iraqi Jews--like many other marginalized groups--have been erased from both religious and cultural narratives.

Ellis (How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned from Reading Too Much) describes the grief of realizing that her language is disappearing from her own psyche and the larger world, and she shares part of the history that reflects the "violence... in the vanishing of languages." As she mourns, she also tries to re-create and share her culture, making makhboose (date-stuffed pastries) for her son to take to school and planting nabug (an Iraqi fruit) in her London garden. Her attempts to pass down a "joyous, jumbled, multilingual life" that includes specific cultural practices (idioms, dances, favorite snacks) embodies a generous, openhearted curiosity about other people and their backgrounds. While she is honest about the pain of erasure, Ellis also continues to "insist on the possibilities of being an Arabic-speaking Jew," even or especially when that identity is fraught. Always Carry Salt is a thoughtful account of one woman's reckoning with cultural loss, and the hope and creativity to be found in moving forward. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Betsy Pauly's posthumous memoir collects 19 sassy, uplifting essays about rescuing stray cats and dogs. Jen Braaksma edited the sparkling sketches into shape, but Befriending Betsy does more than showcase Pauly's writing; it also reflects on what people leave behind, in life and on the page, and celebrates the connections that pets--and books--enable.

Pauly, a painter and entrepreneur, died of a rare lung condition at 58. Her epitaph says it all: "Sure Had Fun.... Spay Your Pets." Though an optimist, she railed against irresponsible pet owners who dumped unwanted animals at the roadside or didn't neuter them. She rehabilitated more than 100 abandoned pets and gave would-be adopters the third degree. However, when planned pairings fell through, the Paulys' menagerie grew--to 13 felines, plus a dog or two. Many rescues warrant a dedicated piece, such as Atticus Finch, a cat who appeared one Thanksgiving; and Marvelous Marvin, a boisterous mutt who bulldozed a nativity display. Pauly describes the animals and humans of her "own little Mayberry" (Carthage, Mo.) with equal dexterity. Not all endings are happy, but the charming stories highlight communion across species lines.

Braaksma values Pauly's authenticity and sense of humor and deems her a literary kindred spirit. Her editorial commentary adds autobiographical parallels, draws life lessons, and announces themes. A few essays seem thin or repetitive, but all benefit from Pauly's alliterative punning and colloquialisms ("my whiskery psych ward of maladjusted misfits"). Pauly was "all heart," Braaksma declares, and animal lovers will get the warm fuzzies from her altruistic adventures. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck

Robert Mgrdich Apelian makes his debut with the tantalizing YA graphic novel Fustuk, a sumptuous fantasy likely to be devoured by readers.

"I never knew my father, but I have dreams of him.... like memories that don't belong to me." Unlike his older sister, Talar, and older brother, Garaked, 19-year-old Katah was too young to know their father, a chef whose food was so good it "won the heart of a div" (a creature from Persian myth). Additionally, Katah is the only child who didn't inherit his father's skills; although his aging mother needs more help as she suffers with a long-term illness, Katah can't make even simple food. But the young man's "really specific" dreams feel remarkable and he begins to wonder if he has jadoo (magic). When the dreams ultimately lead Katah to Az, a powerful div who knew his father, Talar, Gara, and Katah ask Az to try to save their mother. Az, however, is mischievous and unpredictable: it will save her "if--and only if--you can feed me a dish at least as good" as their father's.

Fustuk is a fascinating fantastical blend of Armenian and Persian culture in which Apelian displays the hybridity of the Middle East through traditions, lifestyle, food, and family. Each chapter is named after a food, and the family's identity as an ethnic minority is made visible through multiple languages and scripts. The blend of timelines and languages can be disorienting at first, with the layered narratives identified primarily by color palette. Once readers locate themselves within the story, though, the narrative is multifaceted and as fulfilling as khoresh-e gheysi. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

In the spirited, joyful picture book Zamzam for Everyone a girl, in Makkah with her family for Hajj, dedicates herself to sharing.

Mariam is "one of millions" in Makkah to perform Hajj, the once-a-year Islamic pilgrimage. The girl, in a light blue hijab and red polka-dotted dress, stands on the tips of her toes to see the Ka'aba "through the sea of people." When Mama tells Mariam, "Hajj is a time to do good, share, and be thankful," Mariam decides to share her Zamzam water (blessed water from the ancient Zamzam Well). As Mariam interacts with other pilgrims, she learns how to express gratitude in various languages ("Shukriya" from an older Pakistani woman; "Terima kasih" from Indonesian sisters). In exchange, Mariam is offered dates, "pandan cookies," "crunchy fried dough," and more. Pronunciations are included for every thank you and yummy treat.

Author Razeena Omar Gutta (Ramadan on Rahama Road) immerses readers in the bustle of Makkah during the annual pilgrimage by tracking every step and shared drink of Mariam's Hajj. She and her family "walk seven times around the Ka'aba," "walk between the mountains of Safa and Marwa," and camp "in the tent city of Mina"; Mariam shares Zamzam "on the wide plains of Arafah" and "under the stars in Muzdalifa." Illustrator Bassent Dawoud's digital collage shows the diversity of those at Hajj, depicting varying skin tones, hijab styles, clothing, and physical abilities. Her overlapping patterns and saturated colors capture the movement and activity. Ample back matter includes details about Zamzam and important information on Hajj, inviting non-Muslim readers to celebrate alongside Mariam. --Hadeal Salamah, blogger, librarian, freelance reviewer

Mixed-media artist and Coretta Scott King Honor Award winner Sean Qualls (John Was a Jazz Giant with Carole Boston Weatherford) makes his authorial debut with the middle-grade picture book Fros, Fades, and Braids, an ardent celebration of Black hair throughout history.

Qualls opens with an illustrated "Black Hair Style Guide," depicting Black people wearing different hair styles (Jheri curl, locs, cornrows) followed by a cinematic "featuring" list that includes items like curl activator and relaxers. Hair is important, Qualls says, because it is "the closest to heaven. And since it's all the way up there, some people consider their hair a crown." He begins with brief bios of hair-care pioneers Madam C.J. Walker, Annie Malone, and Garrett Morgan, then divides the book into six sections: "the conk," "the Afro," "the Jheri curl," "locs," "the fade," and "braids." Each chapter is further subdivided into topics including "Black Women with Straight Hair" and "The Natural Hair Movement."

Qualls's lyrical nonfiction demonstrates the many ways Black hair care, styles, and people have transformed the United States. He writes passionately about the role Black hair played in the advocacy for civil rights as a "powerful statement... that gave people permission to be themselves" and tells readers directly that "whatever you do with your do--do you." The author's acrylic paint, paper, colored pencil, and collage illustrations give the book the feel of a magazine composed entirely of gorgeous 1970s advertisements for Black hair. Although there is a lack of citation and further resources, big, bold letters, a newspaper font, short blocks of text, a casual tone, and illustrations of various hairstyles make Fros, Fades, and Braids highly approachable for young readers. --Kharissa Kenner, school media specialist, Churchill School and Center