Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body --- how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Brysonesque anecdotes, THE BODY will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you in particular.

It was a warm April in Pleasant Valley when Margaret Korda dropped her horsewhip while she was riding. Such a mild slip was easy to ignore, but when other troubling symptoms accumulated, she confided to her husband, “Michael, I think something serious is wrong with me.” Within a few rapid weeks, the fiercely independent, former fashion model was diagnosed with brain cancer, while Michael became her caregiver, deciphering bewildering medical reports and packing her beloved toiletries for the hospital. An operation performed by a renowned surgeon allowed Margaret to ride her favorite competition horse, Logan go Bragh, a few more times, but Margaret’s tumors quickly returned --- leaving her to grapple with the reality of impending death.

In 2003, already an older father, Tim O’Brien resolved to give his young sons what he wished his own father had given to him --- a few scraps of paper signed “Love, Dad.” Maybe a word of advice. Maybe some scattered glimpses of their rapidly aging father, a man they might never really know. For the next 15 years, the author talked to his sons on paper, as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from a father who was no longer among the living. O’Brien traverses the great variety of human experience and emotion, moving from soccer games to warfare to risqué lullabies, from alcoholism to magic shows to history lessons to bittersweet bedtime stories, but always returning to a father’s soul-saving love for his sons.

For the past year, John U. Bacon has received unprecedented access to Jim Harbaugh’s University of Michigan football team: coaches, players and staffers, in closed-door meetings, locker rooms, meals and classes. OVERTIME captures this storied program at the crossroads, as the sport’s winningest team battles to reclaim its former glory. But what if the price of success today comes at the cost of your soul? Do you pay it, or compete without compromising? In the spirit of HBO’s "Hardknocks," Bacon's book follows the Wolverine coaches, players and staffers through the 2018 season, including Harbaugh, offensive stars Shea Patterson and Karan Higdon, NFL-ready defensive standouts Rashan Gary, Devin Bush Jr. and Chase Winovich, and second-stringers striving to find their place on the team.

TALKING TO STRANGERS is a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology and scandals taken straight from the news. Here, Malcolm Gladwell revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland --- throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.

College senior Parveen Shams feels pulled between her charismatic and mercurial anthropology professor and the comfortable but predictable Afghan-American community in her Northern California hometown. When she discovers a bestselling book called Mother Afghanistan, a memoir by humanitarian Gideon Crane that has become a bible for American engagement in the country, she is inspired. Galvanized by Crane's experience, Parveen travels to a remote village in the land of her birth to join the work of his charitable foundation. When she arrives, however, Crane's maternity clinic is mostly unstaffed. The villagers do not exhibit the gratitude she expected to receive. And Crane's memoir appears to be littered with mistakes, or outright fabrications.

Calvin Bledsoe has never grown up. His mother, an internationally known theologian, was the dominant force in his life. Now she is gone, and at her funeral, Calvin meets an aunt he never knew existed, who immediately takes charge of his life and whisks him off to Europe for a grand adventure. As Calvin and his aunt traverse the continent, it becomes apparent that her clandestine behavior is leading him into danger. Facing a menagerie of antiquities thieves, secret agents and religious fanatics, as well as an ex-wife who is stalking him, Calvin begins to suspect there might be some meaning behind the madness. But there’s little time for soul-searching, as Calvin first has to figure out why he has been kidnapped, why his aunt has disappeared, and who the hell burned down his house in Maine.

In MAGGIE BROWN & OTHERS, Peter Orner chronicles people whose lives are at inflection points. Whether it's a first date that turns into a late-night road trip to a séance in an abandoned airplane hangar, or a family's memories of the painful mystery surrounding a forgotten uncle's demise, Orner reveals how our fleeting decisions between kindness and abandonment chase us across time. These stories are anchored by a poignant novella that delivers not only the joys and travails of a 40-year marriage, but an entire era in a working-class New England city.

In THE PORPOISE, Mark Haddon calls upon narratives ancient and modern to tell the story of Angelica, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her father. When a young man named Darius discovers their secret, he is forced to escape on a boat bound for the Mediterranean. To his surprise, he finds himself traveling backwards over 2,000 years to a world of pirates and shipwrecks, of plagues and miracles and angry gods. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, Haddon conjures the worlds of Angelica and her would-be savior in thrilling fashion.

Toward the beginning of PLACES AND NAMES, Elliot Ackerman sits in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, across the table from a man named Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and whose connections to the Islamic State are murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after establishing a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a Marine special operation officer. It turns out that they had shadowed each other for some time, a realization that brought them to a strange kind of intimacy. The rest of Ackerman's memoir is in a way an answer to the question of why he came to that refugee camp and what he hoped to find there.