The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America by Daniel J. Sharfstein. (Penguin) Sharfstein reconstructs the history of three families of mixed ancestry who crossed the color line from black to white. In alternating chapters he tells their stories - all three families began as unwilling African migrants to the New World - and unravels the complexity of racial experience, from Colonial South Carolina to 20th-century Washington, D.C.
The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto. Translated by Michael Emmerich. (Melville House) Yoshimoto's ruminative novel explores the beguiling relationship between Chihiro, a mural artist in Tokyo who has recently lost her mother, and Nakajima, a withdrawn neighbor pained by memories of his mysterious past.
Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton. (Random House) Hamilton, the owner and chef of the New York restaurant Prune, traces her unconventional journey: from a bucolic Pennsylvania childhood unmoored by her parents' divorce; to the European kitchens where, as a 20-something backpacker, she was fed by strangers; to her triumph at Prune, an irresistible nook praised for its rustic cooking.
Everything You Know by Zoe Heller. (Picador) At 50, Willy Muller, an unsavory celebrity biographer and the unlikely hero of Heller's first novel (originally published in 1999), isn't interested in redemption. But four months after his estranged daughter's suicide, her diaries turn up in his mailbox, leading him to re-evaluate his own life and myriad failures.
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran. (Norton) An inventive researcher, Ramachandran sees the workings of the mind in evolutionary terms. Using various case studies, he builds a picture of the specialized areas of the brain, and of the way many delusions appear to result from the brain trying to make sense of signals gone haywire.
Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson. (Ecco/HarperCollins) Henderson's raucous first novel winds its way through Vermont and New York's East Village, following a group of friends and lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander - Anabasis Alexandrou , translated by Pamela Mensch. Edited by James Romm. (Anchor, $25.) A military commander, philosopher and historian, Arrian lived 400 years after the events he set out to describe. His rousing chronicle of Alexander's Asian conquests - the fourth volume in the Landmark series - is supplemented with maps, illustrations and background essays by Alexander scholars.
The Terror of Living by Urban Waite. (Back Bay/Little, Brown) Waite's modern Western features drug smuggling in the Pacific Northwest and three men locked in a contest of will and endurance: a good man with a less-than-legal side job, a zealous deputy sheriff and a vicious killer.
