Hot Type

All-Too-Familiar Tragedies. With dementia overtaking her mother, Alex Witchel attempted to combat the cruelty of losing her by cooking the dishes of her youth. In All Gone (Riverhead), Witchel shares the comfort of food and the gift of her mother. The rage and cutting anguish Benjamin Anastas expresses in Too Good to Be True (New Harvest)—a memoir of infidelity, loss, and fatherhood—still feel fresh.

V.F. contributor A. M. Homes, notorious for her incendiary depictions of the suburbs as perfectly manicured hotbeds of perversity, devilishly pits brother against brother in May We Be Forgiven (Viking). A single dad's snooping pries the child-proof top off the students' secret to success at his son's Upper East Side private school in Bronwen Hruska'sAccelerated (Pegasus). Lawrence Norfolk spices John Saturnall's Feast (Grove), an enthralling tale of an orphan kitchen boy turned master of culinary arts, with sumptuous recipes and intoxicatingly gorgeous illustrations. Paul Johnson charts the intellectual evolution of the world's greatest scientist, Darwin (Viking). A shotgunslinging terrorist in a bridal gown crashes a wedding and takes the guests hostage in novelist Lisa Zeidner's explosively funny satire, Love Bomb (Sarah Crichton). Screenwriter Hampton Fancher morphs into a creepily entertaining surrealist-story writer in The Shape of the Final Dog and

Other Stories (Blue Rider). The naive-philosopher hero of Antoine Wilson's clever and wisely funny novel Panorama City (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), afraid he'll die before the birth of his son, tape-records the life lessons he's learned. William J. Mann belts out Barbra Streisand's praises in Hello, Gorgeous (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Salman Rushdie relives the madness of living under a fatwa as Joseph Anton (Random House). Will Schwalbe and his dying mother bond over books in The End of Your Life Book Club (Knopf). Eric Meola lights up the life of "the Boss" in Streets of Fire: Bruce Springsteen in Photographs and Lyrics 1977-1979 (HarperCollins). A standing O for theater critic Ben Brantley's staging of Broadway Musicals: From the Pages of The New York Times (Abrams)—the newspaper's most influential reviewers, from Brooks Atkinson to Frank Rich, the "Butcher of Broadway." Scary, isn't it? One critic with the power to make or break a career...

ELISSA SCHAPPELL