This powerful memoir, which chronicles Johnson’s 20 years as a lay sister in Mother Teresa’s order, reads like a novel—a racy, dishy, passionate one—but is also an exacting account of a woman growing into her own soul. It’s moving, even harrowing, to watch Johnson stand up for her own intelligence and sexuality in an environment where women are forbidden even casual touch, where a kiss from a predatory novice brings on a flood of physical need for which there’s no outlet except self-flagellation. Ultimately, Johnson learns compassion for her own imperfections and those of others—including Mother Teresa, whose portrait she draws indelibly. When at last she leaves the order, it’s not with bitterness but with love.—Marcia Menter

Jennifer White, a once-brilliant hand surgeon now grappling with Alzheimer’s, might not be able to tell her daughter from her dead mother, but she still knows her pha-langes from her metacarpals. So when her best friend, a sanctimonious busybody (you’d want to kill her, too) is found murdered, the evidence—four expertly amputated fingers—points just one way. Told from Jennifer’s increasingly erratic point of view, this dazzlingly adroit debut novel is full of suspense, rueful humor and scalpel-sharp insights into the intricacies of love and friendship—as well as the resilience of the human spirit.—Amanda Lovell

Harry Quirk has never had to try very hard. A man of a certain age with a talent for writing poetry, the charming and introspective narrator of this novel has always found women willing to pay his bills, publish his poems and meet his carnal, physical and psychological needs. That is, until the day his editor moves to London, his best friend falls for a man half her age and his wife (and muse) kicks him out of their Brooklyn apartment. Harry is left with no choice but to contemplate change, the kind that’s happening to his beloved neighborhood, to his fractured family and maybe, if he is smart and lucky, within himself. —P.H.

Could there be a more unreliable narrator than a teenage girl? Precocious, introspective 15-year-old Ginger Pritt is mesmerized by the flamboyant married couple who have taken up residence in Wick (a nod to Updike’s witchy Eastwick), her quiet New England town. Ginger is young, but is she really clueless? And what does she want from you, her reader? “Does it seem obvious to you, too, that I required protection? How embarrassing,” says Ginger, describing the way she circled Raquel and Theo like a determined moth, craving his provocative touch and her seductive conversation (“I did not understand so much as absorb, like meat in a marinade”). What makes this fictional debut so intriguing is the way Wolff evokes the dark enchantment of nascent sexuality, its imperative to morally self-destruct. A magic spell relieves its victim of re-sponsibility: That is why “childhood’s fabled innocence” is both a blessing and a curse.—C.M.

As any woman spurned can tell you, rage and self-doubt will make you crazy. Madness befalls Mia Fredrickson, the woman at the center of Hustvedt’s amusing new novel, when her husband leaves her for a busty brunette: “[It] was enough to turn me into a lunatic whose thoughts burst, ricocheted and careened into one another like popcorn kernels in a microwave bag.” Through a series of encounters with her teenage poetry students, among others, Mia astutely examines infidelity as well as the enduring power of love. As she puts it, “Only the most hard-hearted among us have no use for mush or blarney or those old ballads about lost and dead lovers.”—S.S.

A century’s worth of Eden seekers (people intent on inpointing the biblical garden on a map) supplies the land lust in this smart social history, which covers theories both crackpot and credible. Prompted by her great-uncle’s obsession with the hunt Wilensky-Lanford aims to track the progress of his fellow crusaders—including scholars of religion, irrigation engineers and an intrepid Norwegian explorer—who locate the seedbed of original sin everywhere from the South Pacific to Ohio. The quest for a palpable paradise is a basic human urge, the author says, so Eden will forever tempt us, even if we can’t set our GPS to its coordinates.—Lise Funderburg

In 1916, undeterred by the prospect of primitive conditions and the fact that they “knew not the slightest thing about teaching,” two sheltered young Smith graduates lit out for the still-wild West to preside over a one-room schoolhouse in Colorado. In this enthusiastically researched account of her grandmother’s adventures, Wickenden rounds up a cast (with cameos by Harriet Tubman and Isadora Duncan) of rebels and reformers, ranchers and dancers, hardscrabble homesteaders, rapacious rail barons and children who (no joke!) really did slog three miles through the snow to get to school—and captures a moment in time when the country seemed as punky and full of optimism as this dauntless duo.—A.L.

The rich live in mansions, the poor live in slums, elections are marked by fraud, and garbage is filling the sea. Sound familiar? In the Jezebel.com writer’s gripping dystopian vision, North America has succumbed to a second ice age. Eighteen-year-old Darcy has grown up on the treacherous island of the title, where jellyfish is a common cuisine, birds are stained with soot and education is a privilege for the lucky (and wealthy) few. She and her mother, Sarah, are close: “She wished her mother were something she could keep in a closed fist, like a coin.” So when Sarah goes missing, Darcy sets off to find her, discovering the truth about the island’s origins and its diabolical dictator. What’s most chilling here is that North’s fantastically imagined fiction seems oddly, disturbingly possible.—C.C.

Hansen (Exiles, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) has a knack for transmuting history into superb fiction. In his latest, set in 1920s New York, reckless, manipulative bombshell Ruth Snyder falls into a consuming affair with mar-ried hosiery salesman Judd Gray, a natty gent in his early thirties with “flannel-blue eyes” and “walnut-brown hair so wavy it seemed corrugated.” After Ruth pressures Judd to murder her husband, the lovers’ illicit relationship takes a turn for the gruesome. Based on a true story, this unabashedly steamy novel explores the toll of betrayal at its most extreme.— C.C.

Is there anything that Tina Fey can’t do exceedingly well? Don’t ask; just read her viciously witty, almost absurdly down-to-earth essay collection, Bossypants. —Carmela Ciuraru

Follow Barack Obama’s principled, gutsy mother to Indonesia and beyond in the biography A Singular Woman by Janny Scott. —R.A.W.

Try not to lick the pages of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, by Jeni Britton Bauer, a charming confection of dairy and sorbet desserts in wild flavors (Star Anise with Candied Fennel Seeds, Riesling-Poached Pear, Goat Cheese with Cognac Figs). —R.A.W.

Fruits that are bright, colorful and downright Plum Gorgeous star as the ingredients in Romney Steele’s delectable ode to orchard fare. —R.A.W.

In The Chicken Chronicles, The Color Purple author Alice Walker bills and coos with her “girls”—that is, her flock of eight backyard fowl (the fine-feathered Gertrude Stein and Agnes of God among them), breathtaking creatures who stir her curiosity, revive her maternal instincts and delight her with the “wonder and spontaneity of Nature.” —R.A.W.

Japanese sensation Banana Yoshimoto crafts an alluring love story about a woman who discovers her paramour’s troubled past at a creepy country house in The Lake (Melville House). —R.A.W.

Mini Excerpt: “Every generation has its life-defining moment. If you want to find out what it was for a member of the Greatest Generation, you ask: ‘Where were you when Hitler invaded France?’ Or ‘Where were you on D-Day?’ If you want to find out what it was for a baby boomer, there are three possible questions: ‘Where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ Or ‘Where were you when you heard about Kent State?’ Or ‘Where were you when the Watergate story broke?’ For most of my generation—Generation X—there is only one question: ‘When did your parents get divorced?’ ”

Mini Excerpt: “Rose crossing a square in Spain, could be Valencia or Granada or any of the places where two girls stay the summer after high school, sleeping under rowboats or in flowerbeds, in hostels or pensions with balustrades and mites made venerable and happy by tourists, but it happens to be a less trafficked areaof Barcelona, not far from where Senegalese vendors pray, and Rose is all chrysalis, bruisable and diffident, aware of contours, thrilled by the people she will meet, the ones who will reveal all her possible faces, still hidden in magic invisible cloaksleeves.”

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