An eclectic assortment of dive bar owners, staff and patrons constitute "sixteen characters in search of a play on St. Patrick's Day, 1968" in the opening of Richard Wiley's Tacoma Stories. Following its heyday, Pat's Tavern is coasting into oblivion in Tacoma, Wash. The 13 stories that follow the introductory installment, "Your Life Should Have Meaning on the Day You Die," examine the lives of the players as they branch into the acts of their lives between 1958 and 2012.

One woman, daughter of two famous parents, visits Tacoma because "it's comfortable, it's beautiful, and it leaves me alone," wondering if a town can replace people and "hedge against the unabated loneliness of the human heart." Although place infuses Wiley's stories, it's the longing and wounded hearts that give them full color.

The search for meaning and connection is a common thread. In "The Man Who Looks at the Floor," retired spy Jonathan can't leave his spook days behind, enlisting his wife to be a "mole" and befriend a suspicious disfigured man. When Millie takes to the stranger, Jonathan begins to understand he's been paying attention to the wrong people all along. In "The Dancing Cobra," Wiley uses an accidentally misappropriated vibrator with humorous and touching effect to explore the relationships of several teens and adults.

Winner of the PEN/​Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction (Soldiers in Hiding), Wiley shines in the short form, absorbing the reader in slices of one town and its inhabitants while rendering them universal. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

It starts with the bread: a dark sourdough rye called Borodinsky. Then tins of fish. Cucumbers. Meat stewed until it falls off the bone, its original shape mere suggestion. Cold vodka or a fiery shot of Metaxa.

These are some of the many flavors of Boris Fishman's life, which he shares in his vibrant Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (A Memoir with Recipes). "Some people don't leave home without umbrellas or condoms," Fishman writes, "mine, without food."

Fishman (Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, A Replacement Life) often tackles Jewish identity and displacement in his fiction. In Savage Feast, he addresses his family's emigration from Soviet Belarus in the long shadow of the Holocaust. The decision to leave is a heavy one, plagued by the risk of being denied permission and branded "refuseniks." But in 1988, when Fishman is nine, the family makes it to the United States.

In the new country, comfort comes from the familiar--flavors in particular. The family remains tightly knit, spoiling only-child Fishman with bountiful food, love and expectations even once he's an adult. It's easy to feel at home in Fishman's writing; it's warm, reflective and frequently funny. Even more than a story of hunger, this is a story of love. Love of family and companionship. Love of romance and lore. Love of garlic, fish and the feeling of finally learning to identify and satisfy the simple but crucial loves for which everyone hungers. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer

Reading iconic fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi's witty and disarmingly candid memoir is like sitting down with a smart, warm and opinionated friend who effortlessly captivates with tales of triumphs, failures and perseverance. Mizrahi begins his memoir as a pudgy and insecure gay boy growing up in a Syrian Jewish Orthodox family in Brooklyn, N.Y. "I've always identified more as a woman than anything," writes Mizrahi, "and if times were different I might have chosen to become a female in appearance; in a lot of ways I operated in the family like a third daughter more than an only son." After eight years at a yeshiva school, Mizrahi was accepted at a Manhattan performing arts high school and began to bloom.

At 15, he launched his own fashion line, creating clothing so outrageous that the outfits gained him and his teenaged friends entrance to the notoriously exclusive dance club Studio 54. During these years, he writes, "The gay culture in that world nourished me in some ways and fed my self-loathing in others." The workload of designing also hindered his sex life. "One traded one's sex life for a life of fashion servitude," he writes. "We were referred to as 'Fashion Nuns.' " Then, his friends and coworkers began dying from a mysterious new disease called AIDS.

There's plenty of star-studded gossip and insider information (he and Sandra Bernhard considered having a child together). But mostly I.M. is a heartfelt and inspiring memoir told with candor and style. It'll be catnip for book clubs. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

With Women Warriors, Pamela Toler (The Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War) reveals a history many readers will meet with surprise as well as fascination. It is a broad examination that spans from the second millennium BCE through the present, and across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Toler details dozens of examples, from the better-known (Matilda of Tuscany, Njinga, Begum Sahib and, of course, Joan of Arc) to the obscure (Ani Pachen, Mawiyya, Bouboulina), in two- or three-page summaries. Plentiful footnotes serve an important role, too, and have a certain wry humor. For instance, Toler repeatedly and impatiently points out the tendency to compliment women as behaving like men and to denigrate men as behaving like women (a habit consistent throughout history and common to women as well as men).

Double standards are likewise emphasized, as in the way historians and archeologists have examined evidence. For example, the grave known as the "Birka man," from 834 CE, had long been considered that of a male because of the martial burial items found with him. In 2014, a bioarcheologist determined that the bones were actually that of a female. Despite follow-up DNA testing, scholars, archeologists and historians continue to argue about the identification of the Birka woman. As Toler points out, the scholarly contortions now employed to deny her status as a warrior were never mentioned while her skeleton was assumed to be that of a male.

With such copious content, Toler has been careful to keep her book a manageable length. At just over 200 pages, Women Warriors is an easy entry into an expansive topic. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Say Nothing ticks all the boxes of an extraordinary work of nonfiction. This particular story of the political and nationalist conflict in Ireland (the Troubles) highlights a handful of spellbinding individuals whose actions changed the course of Irish history. Through meticulous reporting captivatingly relayed by investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing offers a thrilling history lesson told through the lens of an unsolved mystery.

Murders were part and parcel of the Troubles, with more than 3,500 killed between the late 1960s and '90s. But only 16 were "disappeared"--abducted, murdered and secretly buried. Among them was Jean McConville, a 38-year-old mother of 10 when a gang of masked intruders took her from her home in Belfast in 1972. It took 30 years to recover Jean's remains.

The hows and whys of her death are spun through decades of violence, jailbreaks, movie star romance, former-felon politicians, hunger strikes, double- and triple-agents of the IRA and British police. Most incredibly, a secret cache of IRA confessionals lies waiting in the special Treasure Room enclosure of a Boston College library. Truth is undoubtedly stranger than fiction.

Any retelling of the Troubles worth its salt is necessarily lengthy and complex. By sandwiching it between arcs on the Treasure Room, the mystery of Jean McConville and how all the secrets came unraveled, Keefe breathes new life into history. As evidenced by the nearly 100 pages of notes and secondary sources, this was no small feat. Keefe's work is both anguishing and triumphant. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Life--and the love and absurdities therein--has proved fertile ground for acclaimed author-illustrator Lucy Knisley (Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride). In five published graphic novels, Knisley has turned her "pen inward to map the shifting tectonic plates" of her life and find meaning, purpose and silver linings--even with the curve balls thrown her way.

She continues in this vein in Kid Gloves, which intimately documents the thoughts and discoveries she made in conceiving and carrying a child, while also outlining the many challenges that plagued her on the rocky road to motherhood. Knisley shares her teenage experiences volunteering for Planned Parenthood. In college, she began an odyssey to find the right method of birth control, a hormone-dispensing rod implanted under the skin. Years later, the device is removed when she and John set out to conceive a child.

The graphics that accompany the travails of her hellacious morning sickness--"exorcist levels of puke" and even frightening, "insane" dreams of Donald Trump--along with her difficult labor and the harrowing complications after the baby's delivery are vivid, profound and visually imaginative. Throughout the story, Knisley adds levity by presenting illustrated factoids, myths and research about women's reproductive health. These include how Emily Brontë died from pregnancy sickness, how sexism has affected women's lives for centuries, the rise of the women's movement, and pregnancy, miscarriage and "conception misconceptions."

Knisley is a lively storyteller, and the encapsulated charm of her graphics holds equal appeal. In both arenas, her inimitable style builds suspense and ultimately oozes with hopeful optimism. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In Soaring Earth, a companion to Margarita Engle's Pura Belpré Award-winning Enchanted Air (a poetic memoir about her early childhood), Engle recounts high school, her first failed experience in college and her eventual successful return.

Margarita dreams of travel, independence and someday returning to her mother's homeland in Cuba. Her wild heart longs for adventure and new lands but, "before [she] can finish college and become independent, [she has] to start high school." Cuban-American Margarita begins her freshman year at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, Calif., in 1966 with the Vietnam War and troubled U.S.-Cuba relations in the background. As Margarita becomes politically active throughout high school and early adulthood, her wanderlust and yearning for the summers once spent with her Abuelita in Cuba grow stronger. U.S.-Cuban struggles, farmer's rights movements, anti-war activism and support for revolutions and counterrevolutions swirl around her, making Margarita wonder where she can possibly belong in such a complicated world. 

Soaring Earth is told in beautiful, brief poems. From Berkeley's tumultuous campus to a rat-filled apartment in New York, Margarita's thirst for adventure is strong and bold, even when she sees herself as anything but daring or courageous. By holding other characters at an arm's length, never naming with more than an initial, Engle keeps her narrative intimate, as though readers are viewing pages of her diary. Introspective and inquisitive, Soaring Earth traverses adolescence and early adulthood with grace, grit and unflinching realism. --Kyla Paterno, former YA and children's book buyer

Delia, whose father left when she was young, knows that she's unlikely ever to roam far from Jackson, Tenn.--even with three jobs between the two of them, she and her mom make just enough to squeak by. Delia plans to go to community college and keep filming her cable access TV program, Midnite Matinee, with best friend Josie, who has dreamed of working in TV since she "was old enough to remember." Even though she doesn't love the terrible scary movies that Delia adores, Josie enjoys playing Rayne Ravenscroft to Delia's Delilah Darkwood on their Elvira-style show. But Josie has been offered an internship at the Food Network, which would do more for her career than performing for an audience "too high to operate Netflix." When the girls are invited to a horror convention, Delia becomes convinced that Jack Devine, the producer of a famous horror/comedy show, can be talked into producing Midnite Matinee. The girls set off on a road trip that could make or break the show--and their friendship, too.

Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee is a change for Zentner, whose The Serpent King and Goodbye Days featured teens in significantly more tragic situations. Josie and Delia are quirky, sometimes veering toward Manic Pixies, but since they and their internal lives are the focus, the trope is happily subverted. Throughout, Zentner keeps the spotlight firmly planted on his two female protagonists and their experiences growing up, creating a novel as funny as it is bittersweet. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness