"The Gravedigger's Daughter," by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco/Harper Perennial). The daughter of a Holocaust survivor (the gravedigger of the title) who commits an incredible murder, Oates' heroine endures enough violence to fill a slasher movie. But she is able to reinvent herself as a peppy salesclerk with a jazz-musician lover.

"Infidel," by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Free Press). Born in Somalia and raised in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, Hirsi Ali has had a range of experiences as a Muslim woman. At 22, she fled from an arranged marriage and took refuge in the Netherlands, where she fell in love with the society's order and rationality, down to its houses "laid out in rows." As a member of the Dutch Parliament, Hirsi Ali warned about unassimilated Muslim immigrants and defended women's rights, making her a sort of feminist Salman Rushdie and drawing death threats.

"The Lizard Cage," by Karen Connelly (Spiegel & Grau). This first novel by an award-winning Canadian poet takes us inside a Myanmar jail called the Lizard Cage, where a political prisoner studies ants, reads the newsprint that wraps cheroots and develops a relationship with an orphan boy who eventually smuggles out his writing.

"All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone," by Myra MacPherson (Lisa Drew/Scribner). Best known for I.F. Stone's Weekly, the four-page newsletter he published from 1953 to 1971, "Izzy" Stone was a tough-minded left-wing journalist and a genius at the close reading of government documents. "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out," Stone wrote. MacPherson read government documents too: some 5,000 pages of Stone's FBI files.

"I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman," by Nora Ephron (Vintage). These sharp, funny essays cover subjects from being a parent to the failings of Bill Clinton to Ephron's search for the perfect cabbage strudel. "Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth," Ephron asserts.

"Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand," by Benita Eisler (Counterpoint). We remember the names of Sand's lovers (Chopin, de Musset) better than the titles of her novels, and this entertaining biography describes her sexual adventures and political fervor. In later life, she spent 15 happy years with a lover 15 years her junior and developed an epistolary friendship with Flaubert.

"Helpless," by Barbara Gowdy (Picador). In this literary thriller, a pedophile becomes convinced that a lovely 9-year-old is being molested and decides to save her by locking her in his basement. Gowdy writes tautly, and her characters -- the girl's single mother, the kidnapper's girlfriend, even the man himself, who is unsympathetic but not a monster -- are realistically drawn.

"Virgin: The Untouched History," by Hanne Blank (Bloomsbury). From the medical to the pop-cultural to the scholarly, this well-researched history of virginity ranges widely.

"A Handbook to Luck," by Cristina Garcma (Vintage Contemporaries). In Garcma's fourth novel, three teenagers growing up in different parts of the world (Cuba/Los Angeles, El Salvador and Iran) in the late 1960s experience geographical, cultural, political and personal estrangement; their paths eventually cross decades later in Las Vegas.

"The Last Empress," by Anchee Min (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). The turn of the last century was a time of enormous change in China. Min's second novel about Tzu Hsi, who ruled the country from the mid-19th century until 1908, envisions the empress, who was forced to flee Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, as a woman of compassion and ambition.

"The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish," by Elise Blackwell (Unbridled Books). Set on the eve of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in New Orleans, Blackwell's second novel recalls the flood of 1927 (real) in Cypress Parish (fictional). Her protagonist looks back as an old man at events in "the strange and wet spring I turned 17."