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Peter Carey, His Illegal Self (Knopf)

It’s New York in the late 1960s and Che is seven years old, dreaming that his radical activist parents will come back for him. A woman arrives in the apartment he shares with his grandmother and steals him away. Brought up in isolated privilege, denied all access to television and the news, he is willing to accept the adventure until it becomes apparent that things are not as they seem. “In book after book, Peter Carey has proven that he’s incapable of writing a dull page. . . . He’s one of the greatest storytellers alive” (Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor).

Hillary Jordan, Mudbound (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

City-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband’s Mississippi Delta farm-a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family’s struggles, two men return from the war to work the land. It is the unlikely friendship of these “brothers-in-arms” that drives this powerful novel. In 2006 Jordan was awarded the Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingsolver to recognize literature of social responsibility. Of Jordan’s Mudbound, Kingsolver says: “Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still.”

Sue Miller, The Senator’s Wife (Knopf)

Can you imagine what it might be like to love a handsome, accomplished husband, a charmer who by his own effort has risen to the highest levels of government, who clearly adores you, but who at the same time pursues other women, often with a lack of discretion that borders on intentional cruelty?

This is the question that Sue Miller explores in her latest novel. “From The Good Mother on, she has used her fiction to explore the artificially tamed emotional wilderness inhabited by husbands and wives” (Jay Parini, New York Times Book Review).

T. Jefferson Parker, L.A. Outlaws (Dutton)

Los Angeles is gripped by the exploding celebrity of Allison Murietta. Her real identity unknown, she is a modern-day Jesse James with the compulsion to steal beautiful things, the vanity to invite the media along, and the conscience to donate much of her bounty to charity. Nobody ever gets hurt-until a job ends with ten gangsters lying dead and a half-million-dollars worth of glittering diamonds missing. Now, a well-connected crime lord is hot on her trail, while LAPD Deputy Charlie Hood investigates. “L.A. Outlaws is hard, fast, and etched with characters so sharp they’ll leave you bleeding. This is the best T. Jefferson Parker novel yet” (Robert Crais).

Cokie Roberts, Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation (HarperCollins)

Roberts’s 2004 book Founding Mothers paid homage to the women who helped establish our nation. In Ladies of Liberty, she continues the story of women and their achievements in moving the fledgling nation forward, from the election of John Adams in 1796 to that of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Roberts comments: “When I became a journalist covering politics, my mother ran for office, serving nine terms in Congress. I became interested in what happened when a woman went from being behind the scenes to the person in power. When you think about women and politics in this country, the official period of time when women have participated in politics is still unbelievably short.”