"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Mohsin Hamid (Harvest/Harcourt). Hamid was born in Pakistan and educated at Princeton and Harvard Law. The protagonist of his second novel is a lot like him -- a cultivated young Pakistani, working in New York in 2001 after graduating from Princeton, who finds himself sympathizing with the attackers.

"Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War" by Tara McKelvey (Carroll & Graf). McKelvey's work of reportage is more interested in showing what exactly went on at Abu Ghraib than in exploring how such a moral and institutional failure came to pass. She advances this well-covered story by interviewing one of the scandal's key whistle-blowers, a former Bible college student, and by illuminating the deranged culture of the soldiers posted to the prison.

"The Master Bedroom" by Tessa Hadley (Picador). A 43-year-old academic who has left London to care for her mother at her childhood home in Wales is pursued by the 17-year-old son of a childhood friend in this "chess game of slow-burn erotic maneuvers that produce tantalizingly unpredictable outcomes," Liesl Schillinger wrote in The New York Times Book Review.

"The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic" by Melanie McGrath (Vintage). In 1953, looking for permanent residents for an island where it ran a weather station, the Canadian government uprooted several Inuit families from the Ungava Peninsula and moved them 1,200 miles north, where the air was nearly 30 degrees colder and they couldn't hunt by kayak. McGrath makes the story come alive by focusing on one family, with ties to the American who made "Nanook of the North."

"Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr" by Nancy Isenberg (Penguin). This biography takes a fresh look at the bad boy of the early American Republic. Everyone knows that Burr, while Jefferson's vice president, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. But Isenberg's Burr, the author writes, is "far more sincere, and far more enlightened, than he has been given credit for." She challenges popular historians to stop using Burr to make the other founders look good: 'History is not a bedtime story.' "

"The Savage Garden" by Mark Mills (Berkley). A villa in the Tuscan hills is the setting for this gracefully executed literary puzzle. A Cambridge student wins a fellowship to study the villa's Renaissance garden, built by a Florentine banker in memory of his wife. Consulting sources like Ovid and Dante, he is able to unlock the garden's shocking secrets.

"The Day of The Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire" by Alessandro Barbero. Translated by John Cullen (Walker). At the battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378, Gothic tribesmen overran the army of the Eastern Roman Empire, setting in motion the chain of events that led to the sack of Rome in 410. But the Goths had come as immigrants first, and the Romans' inability to deal with them was "a colossal failure of crisis management," Steve Coates wrote in The New York Times Book Review, praising Barbero's "elegant and pleasurable little account."

"A Model Summer," by Paulina Porizkova (Hyperion). Porizkova, a Czech-born supermodel now in her 40s, has written a semiautobiographical bildungsroman about the first few months of a young woman's modeling career. Her narrator is brought to Paris by an agency at the age of 15 and plunges into a world of drugs, drink and sex. Porizkova, who has been critical of the modeling industry, shows how damaging it can be for young girls whether or not they succeed.

"The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co.," by William D. Cohan (Broadway). Cohan, who worked on Wall Street for 18 years -- six of them at Lazard -- tells a sprawling, gossipy tale about the legendary investment firm, describing deals, intrigue and human foibles.

"A Pig in Provence: Good Food and Simple Pleasures in the South of France" by Georgeanne Brennan (Harvest/Harcourt). This memoir of 30 years of living, working and vacationing in Provence focuses on farm work and regional cuisine rather than the neighbors' quaintness.

"The Architecture of Happiness" by Alain de Botton (Vintage International). What makes one building beautiful and another horrible? Great buildings "speak of visions of happiness," de Botton argues in this beautifully illustrated romp.