If you would never imagine that an orchard full of peach trees could be the lodestar of a man’s life, or that a young woman would pass up a perfect marriage to preserve her ancestral home, or that a shy and solitary boy could find the courage to fight the forces of prejudice and fear, then you haven’t read this gorgeous new novel, set on a peach farm in post–Civil War Maryland. Tilghman has an uncanny ability to lay bare the hearts of his characters, whether they’re male or female, landed gentry or former slaves. “Love is about overcoming,” muses a young white man named Thomas about his forbidden romance with a black woman. “Love is not a state of mind or spirit, it is a reward.”

—Cathleen Medwick

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At first glance, Carmen Garrett may seem an unlikely heroine, a beautiful middle-aged woman who is greatly (if guiltily) relieved by the death of her dorky, nice-guy husband and the “whole false happy life” she has endured for two decades. But just as she gets a whiff of freedom, she’s diagnosed with breast cancer, leading her to re-examine not only her marriage but also her ongoing affair with a married man and other thorny relationships. Funny, surprising and gratifyingly honest, this novel poses unsparing questions about love and betrayal and the reasons we make the choices we do.

—Lori Gottlieb

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This deliciously inventive spy thriller riffs on a wild what-if. The FBI has uncovered a Nazi plot to keep the U.S. out of the coming war by rigging the next election, but President Roo-sevelt doesn’t trust that weasel J. Edgar Hoover to foil the scheme. So he taps an unlikely undercover man to do the job: smooth but scrappy Harvard junior John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Dad Joe, ambassador to England (and perhaps in cahoots with the Germans), considers his sickly second son a wuss—but he doesn’t know Jack. As charming and complex as its hero, the novel offers a hot love affair, a young man’s brave struggles with physical and moral peril and a Gestapo goon with a grudge. A beachside scene involving five of the eight Kennedy kids—Jack; chubby eight-year-old Teddy; the favorite, Joe Jr.; intense Bobby; and bouncy Kathleen, known as Kick—can’t help but evoke the real futures awaiting the doomed dynasts.

—Judith Stone

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Not your usual girl group: New York debutante turned first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, intellectual powerhouse Susan Sontag and radical activist Angela Davis. Yet all three women spent their formative years in Paris—albeit in different decades—drinking in the city’s romance and fashioning the personas they would later reveal to the world. Sontag, for one, left behind her husband and son and found in the City of Light “a zone of intense sexual freedom and discovery,” which allowed her to shed her “scholar’s cocoon” and become a cultural renegade. Kaplan follows these women’s singular trajectories in lively and brilliantly lucid prose.

—Jeanne Mcculloch

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An unexpected death can unite a -family—or explode it to bits. In this deeply human novel, it does both. On a July Fourth weekend in 2005, one year after Leo, a journalist, was killed in Iraq, the Frankels gather for a memorial service at their summer place in the Berkshires. The numbing loss has pushed Leo’s mother to leave her husband of 42 years, as she now reveals to their three daughters: Noelle, a former bad girl whohas found religion in Israel; Clarissa, 39, who has arrived late, having stopped at a motel to have sex with her husband in yet another failed attempt to conceive; and Lily, a combative lawyer who just wants to get the weekend over with. Into this volatile mix comes Thisbe, Leo’s widow, who has arrived from California with her three-year-oldson and a head full of secrets. Henkin skillfully portrays the exhausting emotional skirmishes that, surprisingly, help this grieving family survive.

—Liz Welch

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If that old tea set could talk, what would it say? This endearing memoir takes an assortment of otherwise ordinary possessions and turns it into a series of delicate, resonant stories, some no longer than a paragraph—perfect little mint-on-the-pillow reads. A set of Balinese frogs holds the secret to a happy marriage. The $15 moonstone ring Raffel’s future husband bought in India on a romantic impulse finally fits her—and turns out to have real sapphires. The tea set, pristine, unused, pours out a tale of postwar anti--Semitism and unrealized potential. Things aren’t just things, Raffel seems to be saying. They’re fragments of our history; they underline the chapters of our lives.

—Amanda Lovell

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Sheldrick has bottle-fed baby elephants, donned cricket gear to ward off charging baby rhinos and shared bathtubs with dik-diks (tiny antelopes no taller than a ruler)—all in a quest to save Kenya’s endangered species. She would trade none of it, she reports in her new memoir, despite the dangers posed by ivory poachers and political unrest. Now in her seventies, the Kenyan-born author is herself a rare bird: Her Scottish forebears arrived in Africa in the mid-1820s, making her a third-generation white “settler.” Sheldrick never ducks the dark implications of her colonial past, but what shines through is her authentic love for the land and its creatures.—Lise Funderburg

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It’s almost always true, at least in fiction, that bad guys are more compelling than good ones; they’re more complex, more psychologically intricate. Much is made of such truths in this clever novel dissecting one of Shakespeare’s darkest and most impenetrable characters. The delights of this book, lushly set in Renaissance Venice, lie in Galland’s ability to take a series of tiny mistakes, deceptions and wrong turns and roll them into a juggernaut that Iago must ride to the end. He doesn’t exactly become sympathetic, but he does become fully human as the betrayals mount and his skin toughens to a monstrous carapace.— Elaina Richardson

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Full disclosure: Virtually every character in this subtle, intricate novel desperately craves intimacy—and reliably deflects it. There’s Mitch, who flees to the Arctic to escape his needy girlfriend and her autistic son, and Mitch’s ex-wife, Grace, a therapist like him and so intense, she makes the men in her life duck for cover. There’s Grace’s onetime patient, Anne, a fledgling actress who safeguards her solitude with an artfully constructed “mask of indifference,” and suicidal Tug, the charming, despairing man Grace desperately wants to rescue, even as he keeps her at bay. “The gap between what he said and what she didn’t know swelled between them like a bubble that kept expanding; sometimes, when she reached out her arms to hold him, the bubble felt like all she could touch.” As these lives intersect over a decade, barriers crumble, secrets emerge, and this fictional jigsaw puzzle locks satisfyingly into place. —C.M.

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I am woman, hear me roar—but wait, that’s a real live lion in Ephron’s daring new novel. Two young hotties, fast friends since their difficult childhoods, are on the lam from their untenable lives. When the flat tire on their ailing convertible is fixed by a “once-trim, gone round” mystery lady, the duo becomes a threesome. Enter Marcel, the ex–circus lion who resides in the broken-down nightclub where the three women hide out. This wistfully wacky story features a stolen wedding dress, AA meetings, a driving instructor as romantic hero, a cranky nightclub owner and a God-fearing villain. As Marcel roars his wisdom, each woman becomes brave enough to free herself from her own cage.—Molly Peacock 

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