By Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, $24)
In Ward’s trim, fiercely poetic novel, winner of a 2011 National Book Award, four devoted siblings face Hurricane Katrina. In the simple lives of these poor people, Ward evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. — RC
By Julian Barnes (Knopf, $23.95)
With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes tells the story of a 60-something retiree living near London who has taken on a difficult project: discerning what role, if any, he may have played in a decades-old tragedy. Winner of the Man Booker Prize. — Jeff Turrentine
By Patrick deWitt (Ecco, $24.99)
This bloody buddy tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush is weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness — a reaffirmation of the endurance of the Western. — RC
By Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press; paperback, $14.95)
The heart of this novel — a sweeping tale of a young man’s journey from America back to Europe and into the maw of World War I — is a harrowing portrait of men at war, as powerful as Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories. — MD
By Alan Hollinghurst (Knopf, $27.95)
Hollinghurst recounts the century-spanning aftereffects of a single weekend in a saga that is part social history, part social comedy — and wholly absorbing. — MD
By Dana Spiotta (Scribner, $24)
In this darkly comic novel, Spiotta explores the effect of broad social ills in the lives of a pair of siblings: a washed-up Los Angeles musician penning a self-inflating autobiography and his endearingly neurotic sister. — RC
By Amy Waldman (Farrar Straus Giroux, $26)
An alternative history of the memorialization of the 9/11 victims that features a rich ensemble cast and a thoughtful exploration of the debates surrounding it. — Chris Cleave
By Karen Russell (Knopf, $24.95)
The heroine of Russell’s charmingly quirky novel is a 13-year-old alligator-wrestler determined to save her family and their business — a run-down theme park on an island off the Gulf Coast of Florida. — RC
By Ali Smith (Pantheon, $25)
At the heart of Smith’s clever and subtly wrenching novel is a dinner party guest who locks himself in his hosts’ spare bedroom between the main course and dessert and refuses to come out . . . for months. — Heller McAlpin
By Téa Obreht (Random House, $25)
Obreht’s swirling first novel about a young doctor in a war-torn land infused with legends manages to contain the conflicts between Christians and Muslims, science and superstition. — RC
By Charles Cumming (St. Martin’s, $24.99)
Inspired by the true story of the Cambridge Five, a ring of spies who infiltrated British intelligence and betrayed their country to the Soviet Union during and after WWII, Cumming’s masterful novel bears comparison to the works of Alan Furst and John le Carre. — PA
By Alice LaPlante (Atlantic Monthly, $24)
The narrator of LaPlante’s gripping literary thriller is a retired orthopedic surgeon with dementia who might have murdered her best friend. The suspense of this unique book comes not so much from seeing if the prime suspect is guilty as from finding out whether she’ll learn the truth about herself before her mind slips away. — Stephen Amidon
THE UNREAL LIFE OF SERGEY NABOKOV
By Paul Russell (Cleis; paperback, $16.95)
The title of Russell’s splendid novel hints at its contents: Sergey Nabokov was the younger, homosexual brother of Vladimir, and in this fictional biography, we learn of his mingling among the greats in Parisian salons and of the difficulty of living in his brother’s shadow.— DD
By Steven Millhauser (Knopf, $27.95)
Illusion and reality, the power of the imagination, the nature of storytelling, childhood wonders, romantic yearnings — these themes recur throughout this enchanting story collection by a master of the form. — MD
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $18)
This slender, powerful novel is narrated by a half-white, half-Puerto Rican Brooklyn boy being raised — abusively — in Upstate New York along with his two older brothers. — JT
By T.C. Boyle (Viking, $26.95)
Boyle’s terrifically exciting story — which propels us through 60 years of tumultuous history involving the Northern Channel Islands off the coast of California — demonstrates that it’s possible to write an environmental novel that provokes discussion instead of merely thumping away on conventional wisdom. — RC
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