In The Round House Louise Erdrich threads a gripping mystery and multilayered portrait of a community through a deeply affecting coming-of-age novel.

In her riveting novel, Accelerated, Bronwen Hruska skewers the parenting habits of affluent Manhattanites through the perspective of suddenly single dad Sean Benning.

In T.C. Boyle's San Miguel, two strong women generations apart are seduced and mistreated by the same powerful entity—not a man but a starkly beautiful, barely inhabited island off the California coast.

Bettina, the adolescent narrator of Ashley Prentice Norton's darkly comic novel, The Chocolate Money, portrays her mother in sardonic terms—"Babs makes up her mind about people and doesn't allow for upgrades"—meant to mask a deep loneliness. At 15, Bettina enrolls in boarding school, where she goes on a self-destructive spree, drinking, having sex, and eventually doing the one thing she knows will get her mother's attention, however briefly.