Heller McAlpin

Bill Hayes was Sacks' partner during the renowned author and neurologist's last years, and Insomniac City is a charming, intimate portrait of their relationship, full of sweet, unguarded moments.

Ali Smith kicks off a seasonally-themed quartet with this ultimately uplifting look at the lifelong friendship between a young woman and her unconventional childhood soulmate, an artistic gay man.

What price love? In Lara, Anna Pasternak chronicles her famous great-uncle Boris's relationship with his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya — whose connection with the author landed her in the gulags.

Rachel Cusk's latest — the second in a trilogy that began with Outline — follows a writer unmoored by the breakup of her marriage, and the people she meets as she goes about her strange new life.

Dava Sobel's new book is a history of the unheralded women — called computers, rather than astronomers — who worked at the Harvard College Observatory, studying, cataloging and classifying stars.

Moonglow is a playful, fictional take on the family memoir. Set in 1990, it stars young author "Mike" Chabon, who's visiting his dying grandfather. Grandpa, it turns out, has led a remarkable life.

April Ayers Lawson's debut story collection features young, often sheltered characters struggling with intimacy in a world where ordinary uncertainties are amplified by a fundamentalist upbringing.

Francine Prose takes a comparatively light comic turn in her new novel, about the disappointing lives of a group of people involved in an off-off-off-off-Broadway musical based on a children's book.

John Kaag's new memoir-slash-philosophical treatise begins at a low point in his life, and follows his quest for answers to a dusty old library that proves to be a treasure trove of American thought.

When New Yorker writer and native North Carolinian Lauren Collins married a French man, she set herself to the task of learning French. Her new memoir is a meditation on language and identity.

Jonathan Safran Foer returns with a door-stopper of a meditation on family, identity and Judaism. It's the story of a crumbling marriage set against the backdrop of a crisis in Israel.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal's latest requires a high tolerance for whimsy; billed as "not exactly a memoir," it's a kind of noisy activity book for adults that's more Mad Libs than Speak, Memory.

Maggie O'Farrell's novel jumps among multiple storylines, points of view, times and places to tell the story of an American professor who meets a reclusive French actress on a lonely Irish road.

Jonas Karlsson's clever parable follows an average guy who Is uncommonly content with his lot in life — until he gets an astronomical bill from a sinister entity trying to redistribute happiness.

Anne Tyler's latest is part of a series of Shakespeare plays turned novels; she's turned The Taming of the Shrew into a modern screwball comedy about an absent-minded scientist and his daughters.

Alain de Botton returns to a long-standing fascination — the arc of relationships — in his new novel. But despite its fictional trappings, the book seems more like a class on maintaining a marriage.

Cathleen Schine's new novel stars that literary rarity: a functional family. But matriarch Joy is struggling; her husband is ailing and her worried children don't like seeing their parents' decline.

Max Porter's darkly funny, fiercely emotional new novel centers on a family — a husband and two sons — devastated by the loss of their wife and mother. And then the crow appears.

Jill Lepore digs into the story of Joe Gould, a legendary Greenwich Village writer and eccentric — and discovers that his missing magnum opus, long thought imaginary, may actually have existed.

Julian Barnes' slim but powerful new novel chronicles the difficulties composer Dmitri Shostakovich suffered under repressive Soviet regimes, and mourns what is lost when tyrants try to control art.