All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories by E.L. Doctorow. (Random House) From "Ragtime" (1975) to "Homer & Langley" (2009), Doctorow is best known for his madcap, slightly skewed novelizations of American history. This story collection moves from the 19th century to an unidentified future, evoking gothic horrors and outsiders who, as Doctorow puts it in a preface, "are distinct from their surroundings - people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world."
Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche by James Miller. (Picador) Have history's great philosophers lived up to their ideals? Taking Diogenes Laertius and his third-century biographical compilation "Lives of the Eminent Philosophers" as a model, Miller selectively explores 12 thinkers, placing each subject within the social and political currents of his time.
The Lady Matador's Hotel by Cristina Garca. (Scribner) Global mongrels and expatriates - a Japanese-Mexican-American bullfighter, a suicidal Korean manufacturer, an exiled Cuban poet - make up the cast of Garca's novel of linked stories, set in a luxurious Central American hotel. In six chapters, an "interlude" and an epilogue, their lives become entangled against the backdrop of a presidential election, insurgent bombs and an impending hurricane.
American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt by Daniel Rasmussen. (Harper Perennial) This chilling account of a three-day slave revolt on sugar plantations around New Orleans in January 1811 also traces the white fear of black violence that pervades our national history, from the Declaration of Independence through the Constitution to the coming of the Civil War.
Embassytown by China Mieville. (Del Rey/Ballantine) In Mieville's richly conceived novel, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the Ariekei: large, insectile creatures that speak only in objective truth. But the introduction of a destructive new habit - lying - threatens their civilization and the fragile equilibrium between aliens and humans.
My Father's Fortune: A Life by Michael Frayn. (Picador/Metropolitan/Holt) Forty years after his father's death, Frayn, the British novelist and playwright, recalls the dignified restraint that embodied their complicated relationship. "My father moved lightly over the earth, scarcely leaving a footprint, scarcely a shadow," he writes in this charming family history.
The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly. (Penguin) Karen Clarke, the narrator of Kelly's first novel, cannot face the reality of her new life as the wife of a convicted murderer who has just been released from prison. To ease the emotional strain, Karen relives the intoxicating summer when, as a student in London, she lived in bohemian abandon with her future husband and his sister, heedless of intimations of danger.
How I Killed Pluto: And Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown. (Spiegel & Grau) Brown, the Caltech astronomer behind the discovery that led to Pluto's demotion from planethood in 2006, discusses family life and his quest to find new planetary bodies.
