"What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng," by Dave Eggers (Vintage). Valentino Achak Deng was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, among the tens of thousands of children who were displaced by the civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2005. Deng told Eggers his story of wandering from his ruined village through the war zone to resettlement camps and finally to the United States, where he found opportunity but not safety.

"The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa," by Adam Roberts (Public-Affairs). The book describes a failed attempt, planned by a British aristocrat whose accused supporters included Sir Mark Thatcher, the former prime minister's son, to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and install a puppet who would let them exploit the country's oil.

"St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories," by Karen Russell (Vintage Contemporaries). Russell, 26, was named one of Granta's best young American novelists earlier this year. These 10 inventive stories, set mostly in the Florida Everglades, mix satire and sophisticated whimsy; in the title story, the daughters of werewolves are sent to boarding school to learn human behavior.

"William James. In The Maelstrom Of American Modernism: A Biography," By Robert D. Richardson (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). James, a founder of modern psychology, a philosopher of pragmatism and radical empiricism, and a religious thinker who insisted on the importance of individual experience, is the subject of this absorbing biography, which won this year's Bancroft Prize.

"Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong." by Marc D. Hauser (Ecco/Harper -Perennial). Hauser argues that people are born with a moral grammar, analogous to the grammar described by the linguist Noam Chomsky, wired into their neural circuits by evolution.

"Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: Twenty-four Stories," by Haruki Murakami. Translated By Philip Gabriel And Jay Rubin (Vintage International). This career-spanning grab bag includes several stories that were among Murakami's first, as well as five that were written recently.

"The Mystery Guest," by Gregoire Bouillier. Translated by Lorin Stein. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). In this sad and funny memoir, Bouillier is invited, by a girlfriend who left him some years before without explanation, to be the mystery guest at an artist's birthday party.

"Unconfessed," by Yvette Christianse. (Other Press). Sila, the protagonist of this historical novel, has been accused of murder. She is a slave in the Cape Colony, which preceded South Africa. Sila describes her imprisonment and recalls her crime and life of servitude in this first novel by Christianse, who was born in South Africa and now lives in New York.

"Queen Of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, by Caroline Weber (Picador). Marie Antoinette may have been the first celebrity to imagine that by controlling her image she could shape her fate.

"The Light Of Evening," by Edna O'Brien (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). O'Brien's 20th book evokes the love between mother and child, as a famous Irish writer returns home to visit her ailing mother. The mother's passive-aggressive letters to her estranged daughter are based on the ones O'Brien received from her own mum.

"The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations," by Paul Kennedy (Vintage). Kennedy, a Yale historian, surveys the world body from its founding toward the end of World War II through the present. He looks not only at the United Nations' work in peacekeeping but also at its efforts to promote the rights of women, children and refugees.