In this sweeping prequel to his Dagger Award-winning Norwegian by Night, Derek B. Miller traces the momentous arc of Sheldon Horowitz's young life in the 1930s and '40s as he pursues revenge for his father's death.

Orphaned after his father's murder, Sheldon is living in Hartford, Conn., with his cousins Abe and Mirabelle, whose mother died in the same fire as Sheldon's mother, one year earlier. As Sheldon tracks down his father's murderer, his fierce cousins support him. "If his death was as equally meaningless as Mom's," Mirabelle says, "I'm going to scream and never stop." Abe agrees: "Jews wait too long to throw a punch.... We're getting squeezed. And I'm not going to stand around." Eventually, Abe enters World War II, preferring "to die for one's actions rather than inactions"; Sheldon moves in with Lenny Bernstein, an up-and-coming comedian whose "too Jewish" material condemns antisemitism. Meanwhile, Mirabelle combats sexism in "fabulous and dangerous" ways, knowing that "being a Jewish woman is tougher." With everyone around him pushing back against wrongs, Sheldon must decide what real justice means.

How to Find Your Way in the Dark is a powerful exploration of right and wrong. Through a jewel heist, fraudulently becoming a bellhop and plotting against a mob boss, Sheldon evaluates his loved ones' different expressions of bravery, demonstrating how the person one plans to be isn't always the person one must be. This historical coming-of-age crime novel is filled with heart and heartbreak, timely discussions of immigrant life, fun era-marking pop culture references and thoughtful characters who refuse to stay silent. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

British novelist Richard Roper has the uncanny ability to embroil quirky characters in heart-wrenching situations, rendering their predicaments into immensely appealing fiction. In How Not to Die Alone (retitled and reissued as Something to Live For), a grief-stricken man grappled with his sad lot in life. In Roper's second novel, When We Were Young, he again mines the theme of how breaking the shackles of the past can lead to transcendence.

As teenagers, Theo and Joel--would-be writers--were best friends until a life-changing accident drove a wedge between them. Now, estranged for more than 10 years, the two men lead separate lives. Hard-driving Joel, from a sordid family background, is a successful TV writer who harbors secrets. Floundering, lovesick and bitter Theo is barely scraping by, living in a backyard shed at his parents' house. Things take a turn when Joel crashes Theo's 30th birthday party, hoping to reconnect with his long-lost friend and to convince him to make good on a promise made in their youth: to hike all 184 miles of the Thames Path, from Gloucestershire to south east London. As the two set out on the long, arduous journey, they wind through episodic memories of the past--what united and divided them. What will it take for them to bury the hatchet and make peace?

Roper delivers an enormously moving and surprising story about the rarely documented bond of male friendship, focusing on the lengths some must travel in order truly to forgive and sacrifice for another. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Leah Weiss's ear for dialogue and her expert balancing of multiple narrators captured readers of her first novel, If the Creek Don't Rise. Her second novel, All the Little Hopes, uses two 13-year-old narrators to tell a lyrical, often gripping story of wartime struggle, small-town mysteries and what it means to be a family.

As World War II drags on, Lucy Brown's tobacco-farming family in eastern North Carolina receives a government contract to produce beeswax for the war effort. Soon, they gain an unexpected addition: Allie Bert Tucker, who came from the state's western mountains to care for her pregnant aunt. When her aunt starts behaving oddly and her uncle disappears, Bert turns to the Browns for help and eventually becomes part of their household. Lucy, bookish and fond of using "ten-dollar words," is thrilled to have a new friend and sleuthing partner (she fancies herself a Nancy Drew). Bert, grieving her mother's death and always conscious of the class gap between herself and the Browns, is thrilled to be welcomed but doesn't quite trust that her new situation will last. Telling their story in alternating chapters, Weiss shows how both girls struggle to navigate their teenage years while going to school, helping Lucy's mama with the housework and laboring alongside her father and brother on the farm.

Filled with vividly drawn characters of all ages, All the Little Hopes is a warm, sensitive story of family during wartime, as well as a glimpse into rural life in the North Carolina coastal plain. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Louisa Leaman (The Second Chance Boutique) turns her art history credentials to lovely use in The Lost and Found Necklace, which traces a distinctive art deco necklace through five generations of an English family.

As The Lost and Found Necklace begins, Jess Taylor is trying to start her life over. Jess has always been a thrill-seeker, an adrenaline junkie who is obsessed with jewelry. But a recent injury has been difficult to overcome, and Jess is trying to settle down. She's started a mail-order jewelry business, and she's dating a charming teacher named Tim.

But Jess's grandmother Nancy, another free spirit, is dying in her care home, and she's begged Jess to find the family's dragonfly necklace. The necklace was made by Nancy's grandmother Minnie, who was a rare female designer in the early 20th century. Jess finds it at an auction, but loses in the bidding to a charismatic, curly-haired man named Guy. Desperate to acquire the necklace, Jess finds herself rising to meet several absurd challenges from Guy, and traveling to Wales and to California seeking more answers, much to Tim's dismay.

Leaman does a delightful job weaving the lives of five women into the story of the dragonfly necklace, all the way from Minnie down to Jess. As Jess slowly uncovers the secrets of her ancestors, she not only learns more about the Taylor women, but also about herself. A perfect summer read, The Lost and Found Necklace is an absorbing family saga. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Flagstaff, Ariz.

In Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, & Los Angeles, California, novelist and screenwriter Matthew Specktor (American Dream Machine) offers an empathetic and eloquent set of portraits of nine Hollywood artists and creators of varying prominence, gracefully blending their stories with an account of his own artistic challenges and glimpses of his family's connection to the entertainment industry.

At a time he doesn't specify, but after he had "suffered a kind of crash," Specktor returned to Hollywood, the city where he had grown up and from which he'd "departed in a nervous panic at eighteen." He rents an apartment at the "stone center of Hollywood's mythological grid," 30 yards from the Sunset Strip and across the street from where F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940.

Though Specktor thinks of this dwelling as a "launching pad toward a greater, more hopeful future," it seems fitting that the melancholy atmosphere of the place serves as the inspiration for what he calls "meditations on people who soared and then collapsed...." Most of Specktor's subjects are drawn from the film industry, and include well-known figures like Academy Award-winning directors Hal Ashby (Coming Home) and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter), whose careers imploded with dizzying speed, along with talented but less prominent artists like actress Tuesday Weld, writer Renata Adler and screenwriter Carole Eastman. One of the most interesting chapters offers a retrospective on musician Warren Zevon.

Specktor's is an affecting reflection on the lure of fame and of how it often eludes those most determined to cling to it. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

A quick perusal of the table of contents in Sophia Benoit's debut essay collection, Well, This Is Exhausting, provides a sense of what's to come: "Section One, in which I try really hard to be a good kid for my parents, miss out on a normal youth because I was fat, and then date someone who sucks"; "Section Two, in which I try really hard to impress shitty men, discover Skinnygirl pina colada mix, and learn how to do eye makeup"; and "Section Three, in which I get very tired of trying so hard, realize I was wrong about almost everything, and save my boyfriend's life."

These headers provide a loose chronological framework for Benoit's 30 essays, which are as hilarious and biting as their subtitles suggest. Benoit chronicles her early childhood spent as a well-behaved people-pleaser, the many lengths to which she has gone to impress men not worth impressing, and then inches closer to the present day, in which she lives in Los Angeles with her long-time boyfriend and has mostly stopped tying herself in knots to please other people. It's a classic millennial tale, but in Benoit's hands, this story of coming into one's full and honest self feels fresh and new. Perhaps it's her ability to balance self-deprecating humor with a white-hot rage against the cis-het white patriarchy, or to combine razor-sharp jabs at terrible ex-boyfriends with smart and reflective thoughts about what it feels like to live in a woman's body in the 21st century. Whatever the secret may be, Well, This Is Exhausting is exhilarating to read. (And the footnotes are not to be missed--they are somehow even funnier.) --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald (H Is for Hawk) showcases her affinity for the essay in her quest for readers to see "the glittering world of non-human life around us," and see it through other eyes, to realize the world does "not belong to us alone. It never has done."

Topics include a captive wild boar provoking introspection about Macdonald's place in the world; the territorial anxiety over wild animals "intruding" in human spaces; an autistic boy's mutual delight with Macdonald's parrot; a young refugee smuggled into the U.K.; and the complexity of avian navigation.

The poet in Macdonald moves these subjects toward mystery. A night flight of migrating birds delicately amazes: "Watching their passage is almost too moving to bear. They resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire." A peregrine falcon seems to make the atmosphere heavier as it flies, "the barred feathers of his chest, his black hood, a faint chromatic fringe ghosting him with suggestions of dust and rainbows. He's exquisite, the colour of smoke, paper and wet ash."

She crafts brilliant descriptions, drawing wisdom from her observations: "It's true that time walking in a forest can be beneficial to our mental health. But valuing a forest for that purpose traduces what forests are: they are not there for us alone." She takes hard-won emotional solace from "knowing that animals are not like me, that their lives are not about us at all."

Helen Macdonald set the bar high with H Is for Hawk; with Vesper Flights, one of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2020, she still soars into the ether. --Marilyn Dahl

After making history as the first writer to win the Hugo Award for best novel three years in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy, N.K. Jemisin kicks off another ambitious trilogy with The City We Became, an urban fantasy that transforms New York City into a multiversal battleground. The author--a 2020 MacArthur Fellow--has written a paean to a much-celebrated metropolis, though it is far from an uncomplicated portrait. The supernatural threats facing her protagonists often piggyback on some of the very real challenges facing the city, from racist policing to gentrification. The City We Became is about New York fighting for its life in more ways than one.

In Jemisin's novel, "great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn." The City We Became is about New York City giving birth to itself, becoming a "living, thinking entity shaped like a big-ass city." The city is vulnerable in the process, necessitating the help of human avatars it imbues with the power of each of the five boroughs. When something goes wrong with the city's birth, the avatars--Jemisin's protagonists--must learn to wield the city's strength against an otherworldly entity bent on its destruction.

The novel's imaginatively realized battles against Lovecraftian evil exist alongside Jemisin's interpretation of New York City, which is bound to both raise hackles and inspire recognition among New Yorkers. A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2020, The City We Became is a fierce, opinionated vision of a storied metropolis facing down existential threats. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine

Two shipwrecked sailors confront preposterous woes with varying degrees of optimism in Einat Tsarfati's delightfully farcical picture book It Could Be Worse.

Perched upon the floating wreckage of a ship, two men survey a blue sky and calm ocean. George, smiling beatifically, appears pleased; Albertini, scoffing, shoos at a gull. As a storm cloud descends, the contrast in their attitudes becomes clear: " 'This is so unfair!' shouted Albertini. 'It could be worse...' said George." And, indeed, it does get worse, as a stream of indignities befall the friends, including ghost pirates, an ark of famished animals and a smelly, bubble-gum pink whale that swallows the men whole. After facing a threat that daunts even George, the pair reunite with their jovial and eclectic crewmates. In a satisfying about-face, Albertini assures the captain that his night may have been rough, but "trust me--it could have been much, much worse."

Tsarfati (The Neighbors) here expounds on a Yiddish folk tale (translated by Annette Appel) offering a comical take on the relative scale of misfortune. Intricate digital illustrations in candy-colored hues include impressively detailed nautical pastedowns and lend a cheerful air to the daytime travails, while velvety blues dominate the climactic nighttime scenes. Minimal text is kept to one page when it appears at all and allows the expressive full-bleed artwork to shine. Optimists and alarmists both will relate to this entertaining adventure as George and Albertini navigate laughably bad situations before finding safe harbor. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf