What's best about Brooklyn Heights is the view, says Kate, the young wife in Peter Hedges's third novel, which is as much an ode to a beloved neighborhood as a tale of contemporary marriage. "Standing on the Promenade, a slight breeze blowing, the whoosh of traffic racing below on the BQE, looking across New York Harbor.

At majestic Manhattan and where the Twin Towers had once been, I had the distinct feeling this place could be home." This tony cluster of historic brownstones, cobblestone streets and quaint eateries is just as important a protagonist as the hedge-fund-manager dads and stroller-pushing moms depicted in this quirky, amusing book.

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This extraordinary novel is a fantastic glimpse of what life is like for a profoundly disabled girl whose body constantly betrays her fine mind. Melody, 11, has spastic bilateral quadriplegia (cerebral palsy) that silences her voice and puts her in a wheelchair. She communicates with a word board, but it's a conscious effort to summon her arms and hands to do her will.

Melody wishes she could control her body when it spasms, wishes she were normal like the kids who ignore her at school, and wishes she could talk. One wish comes true in this affecting novel. A type-and-speak computer allows Melody to talk for the first time in her life, and she has a lot to say. Her prowess at knowledge quizzes leaves teachers and classmates stunned.

This powerful story by a two-time Coretta Scott King winner offers a wrenching insight into so many vital lives that the able-bodied overlook. If there's only one book teens and parents (and everyone else) can read this year, "Out of My Mind" should be it. (Ages 9 and up.)

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This book is the third in the brilliantly addictive new series of murder mysteries by an acclaimed and popular writer. Poppy Fields and best friend Graham are astonished to be given parts in a musical production of "The Wizard of Oz".

Even more astonishing is the series of murders that occurs at the theatre, targeting the leading lady. When Poppy and Graham investigate, little do they know that they are next on the murderer's list...

That great woman of letters Mary McCarthy once described playful, intricately structured novels -- like Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and Felipe Alfau's "Locos" -- as her "fatal type." She couldn't resist them. "Hocus Bogus" would have left her swooning, faint with palpitations, madly in love.

Beautifully produced by Yale University Press, the book is the perfect length -- just under 200 pages. Roughly the size of a trade paperback, it fits nicely in the hand. The black matte-finished dust jacket catches the eye with its cover image of.

A man's face, half in shadow, half outlined in spooky white, like an old-style photographic negative. The sturdy binding opens easily without cracking; the paper is a faint cream and thick enough to avoid see-through; and the page layout is airy, with good margins. Even the chapters are invitingly short.

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In "Land of Marvels," Barry Unsworth captures the world on the cusp of momentous change. World War I has not yet started, but the major Western nations already have begun to ally themselves around economic concerns. Further, England has felt the pulse of the future, and it lies not in steam or coal but in oil.

One of the richest untapped oilfields in the world is in the Mesopotamian region of the Middle East. Home to the ancient civilizations whose story is largely hidden below layers and layers of sand, dirt and rubble, this land holds the key to the world's past and its future.

Before Iraq, before oil cartels, when Shell was just a wisp of a company, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers was the home to many foreigners, but they were mostly there to dig up the artifacts of the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Akkadians, and the Assyrians, not to drill for oil. Unsworth puts us in front row seats to witness the turning point.

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It is a good omen for the cover of a book intended to tell the story of the great emigrant trails across the far western frontier, to feature an illustration of a covered wagon pulled by the appropriate numbers of the appropriate draft animal.

The cover art for all too many works of fiction about the California/Oregon trails appear to feature a huge covered wagon hitched to two horses, an arrangement as impossible in practice as it was historically inaccurate. The unvarnished fact was that most emigrants crossing to California or Oregon prior to the Civil War hauled their worldly goods there in relatively small wagons pulled by at least three yoke of draft oxen  for.

It was a brutally wearing journey, where there was often not much of a road at all, and horses were too fragile and expensive to serve as team animals. Having written my own novel about a wagon-train party, venturing to California in the early years, I can attest that having an accurate cover is a promising start for readers hoping to learn more about the wagon-train emigrants.

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Deep Creek" is a gripping, spooky historical novel, told in a way that closely resembles real life. What happens isn't laid out for us in a pretty and accessible way. We come across a character's name and can't quite place him. We have to wait and figure it out later.

A mass murder occurs, but it happens over time and in several different places; it's hard, even with the aid of a map, to puzzle out exactly what happened.

A family scandal boggles the mind (surely, half that amount of scandal would have done the fictional trick), but in real life scandals do sometimes run to excess.

This novel is like that, full of the unknown and unknowable, but at first the background looks straightforward enough: The story takes place in 1887, in a particularly beautiful patch of.

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In an Antique Land was a unique book for me, as its two threads focus on a small town that I grew up in for the first 20+ years of my life and a Country that I have lived in for the last 3 years. So I had a unique connect with this book.

Not so surprisingly, the description of my hometown did not ring a bell as it focused mostly on the town as it existed 800+ years ago. The description of rural Egypt created a veritable clang in my head as I kept thinking to myself "How true" or "Yes, I know someone who would have reacted the exact same way"

This is a book of non fiction. Amitav Ghosh chanced upon a letter between Abraham Ben Yiju, a Jewish merchant living in Mangalore, India, and Khalaf ibn Ishaq from Egypt, written in 1132AD. Part of this narrative focuses on Ghosh's search for more documents relating to Ben Yiju and part of the narrative tries to imagine the world that Ben Yiju lived in.

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Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic is a timely, even prescient, work of fiction. Finished in September 2008, the very week that Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, the novel offers a lucid perspective on the manner in which the greed and venality of a privileged few can drive the economy toward and beyond the brink of collapse.

To paraphrase the words of one of the principal characters, a retired historian, Union Atlantic is an effort to portray “history’s reckless imagination” of the 21st-century world.

The novel begins with a prologue set in the port of Bahrain in early July 1988, shortly after the USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner as it was crossing the Straits of Hormuz.

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In naming roustabout, lumberjack, ironworker, and dairy farmer America's “worst jobs,” CareerCast.com omitted one whose awfulness is counterbalanced only by its public-spiritedness: fact-checking Bjørn Lomborg.

The Danish political scientist won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists—that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic are bogus.

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