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"Christine Falls," by Benjamin Black. (Picador). In a fog-draped 1950s Dublin, a pathologist named Quirke is conducting an autopsy on the corpse of a young woman ("well named," as he says) called Christine Falls. When the body disappears and it develops that Quirke's adoptive brother, also a doctor, has tampered with the death certificate, Quirke is forced to become a detective; many of the other characters are also keeping secrets.

"The Collected Poems, 1956-1998," by Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles (Ecco/HarperCollins). Herbert, who died in 1998, was one of the major figures in postwar Polish poetry -- a competitive field considering that the country has had two Nobel Prize-winning poets since 1980 -- but his lucid, ironic work has been difficult for American readers to find.

"The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring," by Richard Preston (Random House). Before 1987, scientists believed that redwoods, among the earth's oldest and tallest trees, had no life at their tops. But then a 19-year-old Reed College student climbed 300 feet into a California coast redwood and discovered a giant canopy filled with plant and animal life: "earth's secret ocean," Preston calls it. He introduces us to this midair world and the oddball characters who explore it, and even describes a wedding 30 stories up.

"Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays," by Joan Acocella (Vintage). In these 31 essays, written mostly for The New Yorker over the past 15 years, Acocella mixes biography and criticism to illuminate lives in the arts. Her subjects include Mikhail Baryshnikov, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag and Dorothy Parker. "Those who end up having sustained artistic careers are not necessarily the most gifted," Acocella writes. "The ones who survived combined brilliance with more homely virtues: patience, resilience, courage."

"Caesar: Life of a Colossus," by Adrian Goldsworthy (Yale University). "The story of Julius Caesar is an intensely dramatic one," Goldsworthy, a British military historian, tells us, as he presents Caesar's "skill as an orator and writer, as framer of laws and as political operator ... his talent as soldier and general." He evokes the "charm that so often won over the crowd in Rome ... and the many women whom he seduced."

"Lost City Radio," by Daniel Alarcon (Harper Perennial). In this first novel, set in an unnamed Latin American country 10 years after the end of a brutal civil war, the most popular radio program attempts to reunite families separated by the conflict. The program's host resumes her search for her missing husband when she receives word that he may be alive.

"Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother," by Peggy Orenstein (Bloomsbury). Orenstein, a journalist who writes about family issues, unsparingly revisits her sojourn in the community of the subfertile.

In his memoir of new fatherhood, "Alternadad" (Anchor), Neal Pollack describes his experience of raising a child while attempting to remain a hipster.

"Inheritance," by Natalie Danford (St. Martin's Griffin). This first novel moves between the perspectives of an Italian immigrant in America and his daughter, who travels to his hometown in Italy in the 1990s after his death. The deed to a country villa she discovered in her father's bedside table turns out to have belonged to a Jewish family who entrusted it to him for the duration of the war; he betrayed them. The father succumbs to Alzheimer's, his Italian friends and family to amnesia about the Fascist past.

"Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State," by Goetz Aly. Translated by Jefferson Chase (Metropolitan/Holt). The provocative thesis of Aly, a German historian, is that the German people embraced Nazism not because of Hitler's charisma or their anti-semitism but out of economic self-interest -- they enjoyed the plundered items sent home by soldiers and the chance to swipe goods and real estate from murdered Jews.

"Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir," by Bich Minh Nguyen (Penguin). Nguyen was a baby when most of her family fled Vietnam in April 1975. Here she recalls the strains of growing up Vietnamese and American in the Midwest and struggling to achieve an identity of her own.