By Erika Swyler
St. Martins  $26.99
Simon Watson, a young librarian on the verge of losing his job, lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home--a house, perched on the edge of a bluff, that is slowly crumbling toward the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. On a day in late June, Simon receives a mysterious package from an antiquarian bookseller. The book tells the story of Amos and Evangeline, doomed lovers who lived and worked in a traveling circus more than two hundred years ago. Erika Swyler's moving debut novel  is about the power of books, family, and magic. ~Recommended by Jill Webb

By Mardi Jo Link
Grand Central  $26.00, due July 14
An inspiring and heartfelt memoir about the friendship between eight women forged over two decades. The eight Drummond Girls first met in 1991 at Peegeo's Food & Spirits in northern Michigan where, at the time, they were all waitresses, bartenders, or regular customers. When one of them got engaged, they celebrated with a trip to Drummond Island--their first trip together to the remote 36-mile chunk of rock, dive bars, dirt roads, and beautiful forests--and it's where they became bonded forever.
~Recommended by Jill Webb

By Charles Kaiser
Other Press  $26.95
This heroic true story of the three youngest children of a bourgeois Catholic family who worked together in the French Resistance is told by an American writer who has known and admired the family for five decades. In the autumn of 1943, Andre Boulloche became de Gaulle s military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the nine northern regions of France only to be betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner. His sisters carried on the fight without him until the end of the war.. Since then, silence has been the Boulloches s answer to dealing with the unbearable. This is the first time the family has cooperated with an author to recount their extraordinary ordeal.
~Recommended by Sue Boucher

The Seven Good Years
By Etgar Keret
Riverhead  $26.95
A brilliant, life-affirming, and hilarious memoir from a genius and master storyteller.  The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life. What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar s three-year-old son s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds.
~Recommended by Bonnie Foley