Big things come in pairs, good things in small packages. Arundhati Roy has opened up shop for the first time in 20 years with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf), a lustrously braided and populated tale woven with ribbons of identity, love, mourning, and joy—and tied together with yellow mangoes, damask roses, and cigarettes. Also this month: Maile Meloy'sDo Not Become Alarmed (Riverhead) tells the suspenseful story of two families vacationing together; their casual bliss is broken when their respective offspring vanish somewhere in Central America. Poet and novelist Nick Laird'sModern Gods (Viking) takes off like a shot and pierces the lives of two Irish sisters, one engaged to be married, one en route to documenting a new religion in Papua New Guinea, both about to discover the steep price of faith. Meanwhile, parenting is no fairy tale in Victor LaValle's The Changeling (Spiegel & Grau).

Try not to get burned: Mandy Berman delivers a duffel full of drama and DEET in her debut, Perennials (Random House). Sun-soaked sin is now being served on the foredeck in Christopher Bollen's The Destroyers (Harper). Rosecrans Baldwin drives a modem murder mystery with 'Ihe Last Kid Left (MCD). There's nothing semi about Finn Murphy's trucking tales of The Long Haul (Norton). And funny factory Jenny Allen has 35 points and one question: Would Everybody Please Stop? (Sarah Crichton).