To most readers, Melissa Fay Greene is the prizewinning author of such journalistic gems as The Temple Bombing and Praying for Sheetrock. To her neighbors in midtown Atlanta, she's also known as the lady who, in 1999, the year before her oldest child left for college, decided to adopt more kids, at least partially to ward off empty-nest syndrome. At last count, she and her husband, Don Samuel, a defense attorney, have added five kids to their "bio" group of four: one from a Bulgarian orphanage and four from Ethiopia. Why they did it—and how they do it—is the subject of Greene's moving, enlightening, and surprisingly funny new memoir, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (Sarah Crichton/FSG), which folds an adoption primer into a meditation on family.

This manifesto of Chinese motherhood sparked major controversy. No slumber parties? Unthinkable. Except that Chua really made us think.

The lives of four bold, sensuous, and magical Jewish women in ancient Judea intersect when their desert community is attacked by Roman soldiers.

When I heard Tina was pregnant again [Fey had a second daughter in August], I thought, That's great, but I hope she's writing a second book."

Oh, come all ye Anglophiles. Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English—a comedy of manners reminiscent of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand—tells of two people in the same home in the same 20-year-old marriage, their lives grazing past each other like young lovers, unsure how to make the first move.

Set among the glamorous literati in bohemian 1920s Paris, this novel celebrates the life of Hadley Richardson, the first Mrs. Ernest Hemingway.

Cathleen Medwick reviews You're Wearing That? by Deborah Tannen for O, The Oprah Magazine.

Set in the Florida Everglades, this impressively self-assured debut novel may be the best book you'll ever read about a girl trying to save her family's alligator-wrestling theme park.

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A memoir that flings open the kitchen door to expose the backbreaking toil and passionate obsession of a world-class chef.

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Learn more about the book and the author.

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The cultural critic looks at how beauty pageants, Disney princesses, and Miley Cyrus are shaping young minds. Hint: It isn't pretty.

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Fort Hood, Texas, is the largest military installation in the free world—340 square miles, as Siobhan Fallon notes in her fascinating You Know When the Men Are Gone. Fort Hood also functions as a small town; everyone in these eight interconnected tales knows everyone else's business—or tries to.

This best-seller set in the author's native Korea examines a family's history through the story of the matriarch, mysteriously gone missing from a Seoul train station.

In lyrically elegant prose, Mira Bartók's The Memory Palace explores not just relationships but the slippery nature of memory itself.

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Screenwriter Jackson is laugh-out-loud funny in these essays about turning you-know-what.

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Learn more about the book and the author.

Learn more about the book and the author.

Learn more about the book and the author.

One family, six months, zero digital devices. Read this true story for inspiration. Read it for laughs. Maybe even read it on your iPad.

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Amanda Lovell reviews To My Dearest Friends by Patricia Volk for O, The Oprah Magazine

"After a loss, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn't come naturally." That seemingly simple observation is just one of the many profound thoughts in Meghan O'Rourke's The Long Goodbye (Riverhead), an achingly moving memoir about her mother's death in 2008 at age 55.

Cathleen Medwick reviews Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison, the elegiac and emotionally precise story of life with and without the author's late husband, scientist Richard Wyatt.

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Mixing wry wit and gritty realism, Atkinson deftly smudges the border between literary and detective fiction—with complex, compelling characters negotiating a maze of grisly violence, dark secrets, and shadowy dangers.

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Learn more about the book and the author.

The author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue here imagines a woman torn between art and love in a novel based on the real-life creator of the iconic Tiffany lamps.

Girls go wild for David Cassidy in this funny, tender novel about first love—and whether we ever really grow out of it.

Cathleen Medwick reviews The Widows of Eastwick, a mischievous updating of Updike's 1984 book, The Witches of Eastwick.

Little Princes is the story of Conor Grennan's accidental career as a rescuer of displaced kids in Nepal.

An American mother recounts her struggle to adjust to a new life in Beijing—and then face another challenge, this one medical.

When a baby's mother dies, a Dublin community bands together to care for the infant and keep her out of foster care. Joyful, quintessential Binchy.

A 25-year-old debut novelist ponders the wisdom of the ages.

The best-selling writer's ambitious 18th novel mixes topical issues—gay marriage, in vitro fertilization—with timeless themes of love and family. Bonus: It comes with a soundtrack CD.

These insightful stories, some set in a beauty salon, explore the moving, often clueless relationships between Ghanaian and American women.

In her memoir of science and medical miracles, Ackerman writes affectionately of her husband's battle to recover from a stroke that robbed him of language.

Good people make all the right moves, and still, things fall apart.

Francine Prose reviews Interior Exposure by Jessica Todd Harper, Sarah Anne McNear, Larry Fink for O, The Oprah Magazine

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