By Alex Shakar (Soho, $25)
Something like an adult version of “Sophie’s World” for readers clicking between “Mortal Kombat” and Immanuel Kant, Shakar’s metaphysical novel explores different facets of belief and the manipulation of consciousness. — RC
By Lev Grossman (Viking, $26.95)
In this sequel to his 2009 bestseller “The Magician,” Grossman riffs on classics of the fantasy genre, infusing it with cool. This is not your father’s Narnia — or your younger sister’s Hogwarts. — Keith Donohue
By J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf, $25.95)
Three generations of guilt-ridden, willful, scheming women unload their psychological baggage at their family’s summer home. Sullivan’s ruthless and tender novel shows us how love can sometimes redeem even the most contentious families. — Howard Frank Mosher
By David Lodge (Viking, $26.95)
A mesmerizing novel-cum-biography of H.G. Wells that that looks closely at how the Edwardian novelist and ideologue’s erotic life affected his career and the people close to him. — Michael
Dirda
By Felix J. Palma (Atria, $26)
In this science fiction, historical, fantasy doorstopper, Spanish writer Palma mingles fictional characters with real ones, including H.G. Wells, in pursuit of Jack the Ripper. — Yvonne Zipp
(Farrar Straus Giroux, $28)
In Eugenides’s sophisticated novel, a bright English major and her post-college friends struggle with romance and novels — and the romance of novels. — RC
By Elisabeth Gille (New York Review of Books; paperback, $14.95)
Irene Nemirovsky, acclaimed author of “Suite Francaise,” died at Auschwitz at age 39, leaving an incomplete record of her life. In this fictional memoir, her daughter imagines her mother’s experience — a vivid picture of her inner life and the tumultuous world that shaped her. — Nora Krug
By Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday, $26.95)
Morgenstern captures the enchantment of circus life in a whimsical love story about two magicians competing in 19th-century London.— RC
By Charles Frazier (Random House, $26)
Frazier’s anxiously awaited third novel is a cleverly knit thriller about a tough young woman in the 1960s who has given up on the people of her small town and gone to live alone in the woods.— RC
By Eoin Colfer (Overlook, $24.95)
From the author of the “Artemis Fowl” series, a bang-up crime novel for adults starring an Irish bouncer at a seedy casino in New Jersey. — Lisa Scottoline
By Mat Johnson (Spiegel & Grau, $24)
Part social satire, part meditation on race in America — and a rollicking fantasy adventure — “Pym” brilliantly re-imagines and extends Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” — MD
By Amitav Ghosh (Farrar Straus Giroux, $28)
Set amid the 19th-century opium trade, the second thrilling installment of Ghosh’s trilogy at times reads like a cross between a Horatio Hornblower tale and a Victorian epistolary novel. — Shashi Tharoor
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