by Sarah Addison Allen

The Waverleys have always been a curious family, endowed with peculiar gifts that make them outsiders even in their hometown of Bascom, North Carolina. Even their garden has a reputation, famous for its feisty apple tree that bears prophetic fruit, and its edible flowers, imbued with special powers.

Emmeline lives an enchanted childhood on a remote island with her father, who teaches her about the natural world through her senses. What he won't explain are the mysterious scents stored in the drawers that line the walls of their cabin, or the origin of the machine that creates them. As Emmeline grows, however, so too does her curiosity, until one day the unforeseen happens.

 

by Aimee Bender

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake.  Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

 

by Edward Carey

Observatory Mansions, once the Orme family's magnificent ancestral home set on beautiful grounds, is now a crumbling apartment block stranded on a traffic island, peopled with eccentrics. Thirty-seven-year-old Francis Orme lives here with his peculiar parents and a collection of misfits. By day he is a street performer, earning money as "a statue of whiteness" in the park, wearing white gloves to ensure that his skin never touches anything.

While reading about the attempts to construct a mechanical duck that would appear animated, practically alive, Catherine feels herself turning into a machine: "Ingest, I thought, digest, excrete, repeat." For what it's worth, the thematic key would seem to be a Latin epigram, which translates, "You cannot see what you can see."

The Great Stink
 

by Clare Clark

It is 1855, and engineer William May has returned home to his beloved wife from the battlefields of the Crimea. He secures a job transforming London's sewer system and begins to lay his ghosts to rest.  

 

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

Human and animal misery are evoked in unsparing detail in a dark saga of ruinous husbandry practices. This novel is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Brilliantly, lyrically descriptive whether evoking the natural world or a decaying farmstead, the book traces the terrible evolution of rural ways of life into cruelty and abuse via the history of one unhappy family. 

 

Shades of Grey : the Road to High Saffron
 

by Jasper Fforde

In a colortocracy where you are what you see, young Eddie Russett has no ambition to be anything other than a loyal drone of the Collective. But everything changes when he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes to the painful truth behind his seemingly perfect, rigidly controlled society.

 

Fourteen freestanding but consecutive stories trace the life of the town of Blackwell, Mass., from its founding in 1750 up to the present, as the founders' descendants connect to the land and each other.

 

by Caroline Lea

Rósa has always dreamed of living a simple life alongside her Mamma in their remote village in Iceland, where she prays to the Christian God aloud during the day, whispering enchantments to the old gods alone at night. But after her father dies abruptly and her Mamma becomes ill, Rósa marries herself off to a visiting trader in exchange for a dowry, despite rumors of mysterious circumstances surrounding his first wife's death.

 

by Karen Maitland
 

Nine pilgrims try to outrun the Black Death in this sensational take on The Canterbury Tales. It's 1348, and nonstop rain has been soaking England for months.  With echoes of The Seventh Seal and a nod to The Decameron, Maitland describes an England mired in superstition and paranoia as, destabilized by famine, pestilence and climate change, feudal society breaks down. 

by Josh Malerman

In a surreal, Wild West take on Sleeping Beauty, storied outlaw James Moxie must save his one-time lover Carol Evers from being buried alive.  Only a few people aside from Carol's shifty husband, Dwight, know that she suffers from a condition that periodically sends her spiraling into a coma resembling death and a place she calls Howltown.

by Jenny Offill

"Malodorous," "Defacing," "Combative," "Humming," "Lonely": These are just a few of the categories in a pamphlet called Dealing With Problem Patrons that Lizzie's been given at work, Also, her knee hurts, and she's spending a fortune on car service because she fears she's Mr. Jimmy's only customer. Then there are the complex mixed messages of a cable show she can't stop watching.

 

A fictional reimagining of real-life murders so infamous they earned its alleged perpetrator her own playground rhyme and ax-wielders everywhere a catchy chopping song, even if the killer's guilt was never firmly established.  A dazzling debut that is as unsettling as the sweltering summer heat that permeates the crime scene.

 

by James Scott

In the winter of 1897, a trio of killers descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York. Midwife Elspeth Howell returns home to the carnage: her husband, and four of her children, murdered. Before she can discover her remaining son Caleb, alive and hiding in the kitchen pantry, another shot rings out over the snow-covered valley. 

 

by Simone St. James

In 1919, Kitty Weekes, pretty, resourceful, and on the run, falsifies her background to obtain a nursing position at Portis House, a remote hospital for soldiers left shell-shocked by the horrors of the Great War.  Why do the patients all seem to share the same nightmare, one so horrific that they dare not speak of it?

 

by Miriam Toews
 

For the past two years women and girls have been repeatedly violated in the night by "demons" coming to punish them for their sins. Now the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community. These women -- all illiterate, unable even to speak the language of the country they live in -- must choose: Stay in the only world they've ever known, or dare to escape?