THE COMPLICATED CHILDHOODS and eccentric adult lives of Charles Dickens’s nine children, engagingly related.

DREAMLIKE TALE OF an 1890s New Yorker in China, haunted by the ghost of his first love in a time of strife.

RAZOR-SHARP THRILLER TAKES on the supernatural, mean girls, and class divisions in the small-town South.

GRACEFUL COMEDY OF manners set in the insular world of the French old-money elite; crisply translated fun!

TOUCHING, POETIC MEMOIR of a life spent studying a group of endangered orcas in Alaska. Vivid, impassioned.

ENTERTAINING, ACCESSIBLE LOOK at particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider, the search for the Higgs Boson.

COMPLEX, ALLUSIVE META-NOVEL plays with structure, yet captures the poignancy of a father/son relationship.

TWO FRENCH WOMEN from very different backgrounds do what they must to survive World War II. Haunting, incisive.

MARVELOUSLY CLEVER EPISTOLARY novel: a rant from a man angry that a writer friend has hijacked his life story.

SWEET LATE-VICTORIAN COZY stars an Indian princess living at Hampton Court with seedy gentry for neighbors.