A young woman. An old chess player. A life-changing meeting. In Jennifer Dubois's astonishingly beautiful and brainy debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes (Dial), the causes in question are both personal and political.

An author hikes the trail to Oregon—and psychic peace.

Born in a Jamaican leper colony, an old woman struggles to understand her life story in this emotionally absorbing novel.

A memoir centered on a coffin? Yes, and it works. A Chinese journalist writes about honoring his grandmother's wish to be buried in defiance of government rules.

Eat, Pray, Love meets Up in the Air in this engaging novel about a woman whose craving for adventure (and jerk of a boyfriend) sends her flying.

Working-class boy meets rich girl, and forbidden passion flares, in this thought-provoking, unabashedly romantic novel set in the 1950s.

This chilling novel opens with a child left to die in a silty riverbed, a memory that no amount of later life success can erase.

A fashion editor fights for custody of her daughter in this glamour-drenched guilty pleasure set in swinging London.

A biography of the playwright whose controversial public persona nearly overshadowed her brilliant work.

As the Great Recession batters even the best and the brightest, Harvard's class of 1989 gathers for a reunion in this timely and entertaining novel.

Blindness inspires a novelist to write a dramatic memoir, which showcases her elegant voice.

Filled with the author's signature gentle humor, offbeat characters, and poignant moments...one of her best.

A new book argues that telling tales is as basic as breathing.

In Nick Dybek's When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man (Riverhead), 14-year-old Cal faces a moral dilemma after making a disturbing discovery: There's someone chained up in the basement of his home. And not just anyone, but the very unpopular Richard Gaunt, the son of Cal's father's late boss.

Throughout her powerful story collection, Other Heartbreaks (Engine), Patricia Henley lays bare the souls of women coping with the ache of losing love—whether the loss comes suddenly, through death or betrayal, or slowly, as intimacy fades. A devastated young widow briefly comforted by a male friend thinks, "Not now but someday. I'll want to speak a new man's name." Contemplating infidelity, a lonely middle-aged wife comes to realize that complaints about her husband "are little stories she tells herself to shore up her own desires." Such potent revelations, rendered with exquisite subtlety, pass quickly through the characters' minds—but will linger with the reader.' '

The girls in Amanda Coe's gripping and disturbing novel, What They Do in the Dark (Norton), are anything but sheltered. Set in a gritty Yorkshire town in the 1970s, the story's plot centers on the budding relationship—friendship would be too benign a word—between 10-year-old classmates Gemma and Pauline.

To come of age in the newly restored democracy of Argentina in the years following the country's military dictatorship is difficult. To grow up as the daughter of a naval officer responsible for the disappearance of an untold number of innocent people is beyond complicated.