I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (famed writer of The Hundred and One Dalmatians) is one of those overlooked gems that manages to touch on everything that is exquisitely painful about falling in love with someone who's not in love with you and yet make it sound so delightful that you want to do it all over again.

It's rare that a rollicking good read is executed this eloquently. The novel involves a 6-year-old boy in New York City whose imaginary friend (though, spoiler alert, his imaginary-ness is up for debate) turns against him. Even as the story delivers on a nail-biting, page-turning level, it manages also to be a tender depiction of childhood and a moving portrait of a family in crisis.

Learn more about the book and the author.

These completely original tales—told in completely original language—take you back to those moments, whether in adulthood or childhood, when you were trying to figure out how the world worked or if it even worked at all.

Kamchatka? Is it a foreign candy? A Native American tribe? For 10-year-old Harry, it's a frozen Russian peninsula—the last stronghold in his favorite game of Risk—and the last thing his father whispers to him before disappearing like so many other political activists during the 1970s Argentinean Dirty War.

If you have an undying passion for John le Carré (think: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), run directly to the bookstore and pick up former CIA agent Charles McCarry's Tears of Autumn. Originally published in the '70s and reissued in 2005, the book follows Paul Christopher—an American spy so cool and competent he makes James Bond look like a buffoon—through Vietnam as he pursues an unauthorized investigation into JFK's assassination.' 'McCarry's writing is so vivid and lush, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to appreciate all the twists and turns.