Four Freedoms, by John Crowley

One of the most admired and honored of our contemporary literary artists, author John Crowley brilliantly re-creates a time in America when ordinary people were asked to sacrifice their comforts and uproot their lives for the cause of freedom.  In the early years of the 1940s, as the nation's young men ship off to war, the call goes out for builders of the machinery necessary to defeat the enemy. To this purpose, a city has sprung up seemingly overnight in the windswept fields of Oklahoma: the Van Damme airplane factory, a gargantuan complex dedicated to the construction of the B-30 Pax, the largest bomber ever built. Laborers—some men, but mostly women, many of whom have never operated a rivet gun or held a screwdriver—flock to this place, eager to earn, to grow, to do their part. Many are away from home for the very first time, enticed by the opportunity to be something more than wife and homemaker. In the middle of nowhere they will live, work, and earn their own money, fearing for the safety of their absent fighting men as the world around them changes forever.

The Food of a Younger Land, by Mark Kurlansky

A remarkable portrait of American food before World War II, presented by the bestselling author of Cod and Salt.   Award-winning author Mark Kurlansky takes us back to a time before the national highway system brought the country closer together; before chain restaurants imposed uniformity and low quality; and before the Frigidaire meant frozen food in mass quantities.  The nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it.  In this period, the Federal Writers' Project dispatched a number of brilliant writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the war and never completed. The Food of a Younger Land unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life, capturing remarkable stories, authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and Kurlansky's own musings and analysis, evoking a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future.

Wonderful World, by Javier Calvo

A bravura performance by a groundbreaking new writer—a novel set in contemporary Barcelona and made up of multiple storylines, including a fictional manuscript by Stephen King.  Wonderful World is the story of a son trying to make his father proud—by becoming an international criminal.  Lucas Giraut inherits the family company, but this inheritance comes with a lot of unanswered questions and one archenemy: Lucas's mother, Fanny, an ambitious and ruthless entrepreneur who believes Lucas is as useless as his father.  Following clues found in a windowless secret apartment and in his dreams, Lucas ends up deep in Barcelona's underworld, far from the comforts of his home, working with and against a huge cast of unforgettable characters, including an adult film star, a gargantuan but insecure comics enthusiast, a Russian Rastafarian, and a troubled seventh grader, the self-proclaimed Top European Expert on the Work of Stephen King.  A dazzling novel in which reality and fantasy entwine, it hails the arrival of a powerful and original voice.

Home Game, by Michael Lewis

When he became a father, Michael Lewis found himself expected to feel things that he didn't feel, and to do things that he couldn't see the point of doing. At first this made him feel guilty, until he realized that all around him fathers were pretending to do one thing, to feel one way, when in fact they felt and did all sorts of things, then engaged in what amounted to an extended cover-up. Lewis decided to keep a written record of what actually happened immediately after the birth of each of his three children. This book is that record. But it is also something else: maybe the funniest, most unsparing account of ordinary daily household life ever recorded from the point of view of the man inside. The remarkable thing about this story isn't that Lewis is so unusual. It's that he is so typical. The only wonder is that his wife has allowed him to publish it.

Road Dogs, by Elmore Leonard

Jack Foley, the charming bank robber from Out of Sight, is serving a thirty-year sentence in a Miami penitentiary, but he's made an unlikely friend on the inside who just might be able to do something about that. Fellow inmate Cundo Rey, the extremely wealthy Cuban criminal from LaBrava, arranges for Foley's sentence to be reduced from thirty years to three months, and when Jack is released just two weeks ahead of Cundo, he agrees to wait for him in Venice Beach, California.

Also waiting for Cundo is his common-law wife, Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap, a professional psychic with a slightly ulterior motive for staying with Cundo: namely, she wants his money. And with the arrival of Jack, she sees the perfect partner in a plan to relieve Cundo of his fortune. Cundo may be Jack's friend, but does that mean he can trust him? And can either of them trust Dawn? Road Dogs is Elmore Leonard at his best—with his trademark tight plotting and pitch-perfect dialogue—and readers will love seeing Cundo, Jack, and Dawn back in action and working together . . . or are they?

The City and the City, by China Miéville

New York Times bestselling author China Mieville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other—real or imagined.  When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.  Borlu must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel's equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlu is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman's secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

I'm Down, by Mishna Wolff

Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black. "He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. You couldn't tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried," writes Wolff. And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter "Down."  Unfortunately, Mishna didn't quite fit in with the neighborhood kids: she couldn't dance, she couldn't sing, she couldn't double dutch and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team. She was shy, uncool and painfully white. And yet when she was suddenly sent to a rich white school, she found she was too "black" to fit in with her white classmates.  I'm Down is a hip, hysterical and at the same time beautiful memoir that will have you howling with laughter, recommending it to friends, and questioning what it means to be black and white in America.

Showing Up for Life, by Bill Gates, Sr.

A heartfelt, deeply personal book, Showing Up for Life shines a bright light on the values and principles that Bill Gates Sr. has learned over a lifetime of "showing up"— lessons that he learned growing up in the Great Depression, and which he instilled in his children and continues to practice on the world stage as the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Through the course of several dozen narratives arranged in roughly chronological fashion, Gates introduces the people and experiences that influenced his thinking and guided his moral compass.  The book marvelously translates one man's experiences over four score years of living into an inspiring road map for readers everywhere.