Blue Nights' 'does what memoirs can do best: illuminate a crucial portion—and not the entirety—of a human life. In this case, prose master Joan Didion focuses on her relationship with her daughter, Quintana Roo, who she adopted in the late 1960s.

While writing her best-selling memoir—and the first Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection—Wild, author Cheryl Strayed penned an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus. There, she worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readers suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's.

In Amor Towles's debut novel, Rules of Civility (Viking), post-Depression Manhattan—the glittering metropolis of cocktails, jazz clubs, and glamorous apartment towers guarded by knowing doormen—is also the city of profound reinvention.

In this collection of eight revelatory, risky stories, we meet the girls that all mothers fear their daughter might become—or, to varying degrees, the girls we might have become ourselves.

The newest in a list of popular historical circus novels centers on two gifted young magicians who go from being rivals to lovers, despite the disapproval of their controlling mentors.

A family confronts its own ignorance about the Third Reich.

In this nostalgic, seagoing adventure story, a boy crosses from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England without the burden of parental supervision.

Suffering from writer's block, Miranda July found diversion from her stalled screenplay in an unlikely place—the' 'PennySaver.

A thought-provoking horror novel from Colson Whitehead.

This haunting story about middle-aged siblings explores the nature of art, obsession, and family ties.

Ann Patchett's new tragicomedy, State of Wonder (Harper), dares to send women into decidedly masculine territory—violence and corruption in the jungle—but with a 21st-century twist.

The all-true adventures of two Eastern debutantes who set out for Colorado in 1916—told by The New Yorker's executive editor, whose grandmother was one of them.

If you do nothing else this summer, read the title story of Berg's funny, thoughtful and so terrifically true (!) short story collection, which is tailor-made for any person on the planet who's had to survive maple-frosted coffee rolls as well as the occasional moment of loneliness.

In quiet, spare prose, Michael Knight introduces us to Van, a newly married, morally upright loner who just happens to be the fastest U.S. army typist in the occupied nation of post World War II Japan.

In Richard Morais' food-centric world, nights are as "black as a boudin noir"; the sun sets like "a mango sorbet dripping over the horizon"; and there are few things more elegant than a "coal black teenager from Kerala dicing coriander."

"We were a family of bad citizens," Mary Murphy, narrator of Elegies for the Brokenhearted explains early on in the compulsively readable novel. "Drunk drivers and tax evaders, people who parked in handicapped spaces and failed to return shopping carts to their collection stands."

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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Gary Shteyngart's postapocalyptic black comedy, Super Sad True Love Story, poses the question: Can two people come together as the world is falling apart?

Learn more about the book and the author.

Learn more about the book and the author.