Sometimes lightning does strike the same place twice. Sometimes it strikes a whole bunch of times. In Orange Award winner Naomi Alderman's chilling The Power (Little, Brown), women across the globe discover a sudden ability to harness their aggression by inflicting electric shocks through their fingertips. Fans of speculative fiction (see also: Margaret Atwood and Ben Marcus) about empowered youth will be struck by Alderman’s speedy and thorough inhabitation of a world just different enough from ours to jolt the imagination. Mothers, lock up your boys.

Checking in? Here are your room keys: John Hodgman's Vacationland (Viking) is a tour through the wilds of one’s 40s given by a man who once resembled “a bushy nineteenth-century president who also happened to be a baby.” Order room service and tuck into some emotional reading with beloved author Amy Tan's marvelous memoir, Where the Past Begins (Ecco).

Dine a la carte with The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (New York Review Books), selected by Darryl Pinckney and brimming with bite. You’ll need the freight elevator for Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, a collection of the illustrious writer-illustrator’s original pages (Fantagraphics). Take a look beyond your own balcony with Gold Star parent Khizr Khan's patriotic and personal narrative of An American Family (Random House). Stay up all night partying with the narcos and rock stars of Roben Farzad'sHotel Scarface (Berkley)—you can check out anytime, but you can never plead.