May 24, 2012 A drunk (and dying) sportswriter embarks on a journey to track down Sri Lanka's greatest and most elusive cricket star in Shehan Karunatilaka's irrepressible debut, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew.

Summary

May 16, 2012 After a museum conservator's lover dies, she becomes consumed with reanimating a 19th-century silver swan automaton. Critic Heller McAlpin says that Peter Carey's new novel is part historical, part fanciful and completely wonderful.

Summary

May 15, 2012 Toni Morrison's latest novel revisits the story of the prodigal son, as a Korean War veteran returns to his hometown in the pre-civil rights era South. Critic Heller McAlpin says Home is as accessible and visceral as anything Morrison has written.

Summary

May 10, 2012 The new novel reimagines Moby-Dick in a future where the oceans have become barren wastelands teeming with fantastical carnivores, and crisscrossed by a network of railroads.

Summary

May 9, 2012 A Chinese poet-turned-detective investigates a slaying seemingly linked to industrial dumping. Don't Cry, Tai Lake is the politically charged seventh novel in Chinese expatriate Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen series.

Summary

May 8, 2012 In Nobel laureate Herta Muller's take on one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, a starving man in a Soviet labor camp hallucinates that hunger is an otherworldly being out to destroy him.

Summary

May 3, 2012 In Nell Freudenberger's new novel, a young Bangladeshi woman marries an American man she meets online and struggles to adjust to life in Rochester, N.Y.

Summary

May 3, 2012 The new collection offers small treasures of wry amusement, elegance and effortlessness, but critic Joel Whitney wonders if Strand is just rehashing themes — and even lines — from his best books.

Summary

May 2, 2012 Robert A. Caro's multipart study of President Lyndon B. Johnson is hailed as one of the greatest biographies of the 20th century. Reviewing his latest, critic Michael Schaub writes, "Even at more than 700 pages, there's not a wasted word, not a needless anecdote."

Summary

May 1, 2012 Alison Bechdel follows up her smash success Fun Home, a graphic memoir about her closeted gay father, with Are You My Mother? another beautifully crafted "comic drama," this time focusing on her emotionally distant mother.

Summary