Hot Type

The traumatized heroine of Tom Rachman's ingeniously orchestrated novel The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (Dial) will travel hither and yon to solve the mystery of why a motley band of misfits abducted her from her home as a girl, only to heartlessly abandon her years later. The sinister side of privilege, female friendship, and desire feeds Katie Crouch's mesmerizing, tom-from-the-tabloids novel, Abroad (Sarah Crichton). Brando Skyhorse survives being raised by an audaciously dysfunctional grandmother, mother, and five stepdads, in his miraculous Take This Man (Simon & Schuster). John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge target ineffective government as the catalyst for The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (Penguin Press). A screwball author vanishes in Alessandro Baricco's highminded literary mystery novel Mr Gwyn (McSweeney’s), translated by Ann Goldstein. Jeffery Renard Allen's Song of the Shank (Graywolf) powerfully evokes the life of the 19th-century slave and enigmatic musical savant, Blind Tom. Curious (McSweeney’s) captures the dizzying absurdity of contemporary America. Bruce Allen Murphy profiles the Supreme Court’s dark lord, Scalia: A Court of One (Simon & Schuster). One of the handsomest, most elusive creatures on earth and its first photographer get their close-up in Matthew Gavin Frank's marvelous Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer (Liveright). Colorful Russian folklore infuses Josh Weil's speculative novel, The Great Glass Sea (Grove). VE reporter-researcher Mike Sacks talks shop with top comedy writers in Poking a Dead Frog (Penguin). Renegade journalist Andrei Netto joins with Libyan rebels in Bringing Down Gaddafi (Palgrave Macmillan). Ian Falloon and James Mann's Die Art of Ducati (Motorbooks) is a masterwork of Italian motorcycle history.

Novel debuts: Stan Parish transports readers Down the Shore (Viking); Lauren Owen sinks her teeth into Victorian London’s gothic vein in Die Quick (Random House); Tiphanie Yanique's Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead) is a feat of tropical magical realism; Lisa Howorth's Flying Shoes (Bloomsbury) is haunted by the unsolved murder of her nine-year-old stepbrother; and journalist Michael Hastings's novel, The Last Magazine (Blue Rider), will be published a year after his death.

The storied tradition of the Soviet writer-dissident took a dramatic turn with Boris Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago: in The Zhivago Affair (Pantheon), Peter Finn and Petra Couvee reveal that the C.I.A. (which knows the power of a great story) was secretly behind its publication and dissemination in Russia. Ahhh... — ELISSA SCHAPPELL

IN SHORT

Dave Eggers sticks to dialogue in Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (Knopf/McSweeney's). Elizabeth Mitchell raises Liberty's Torch (Atlantic Monthly Press). Sarah Payne Stuart grows up Wasp in Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town (Riverhead). Laurence Gonzales reconstructs the crash of Flight 232 (Norton). ABCDCS: David Collins Studio (Assouline) catalogues his influences. Lee Grant battles the blacklist in I Said Yes to Everything (Blue Rider). J. K. Rowling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, spins The Silkworm (Little, Brown). The late C. David Heymann's Joe and Marilyn (Atria/Emily Bestler) hits a homer. Florence Muller styles Dior: The Legendary Images (Rizzoli). Megan Abbott spreads The Fever (Little, Brown). Jojo Moyes entertains in One Plus One (Pamela Dorman).