Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art’s mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art is seeing things himself. When four people, strangers and family, converge on a 15-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone? Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith’s shapeshifting WINTER casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.

Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula’s blog, NO TIME TO SPARE presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

The 1968 U.S. Presidential election was the young Lawrence O’Donnell’s political awakening, and in the decades since it has remained one of his abiding fascinations. For years he has deployed one of America’s shrewdest political minds to understanding its dynamics, not just because it is fascinating in itself, but because in it is contained the essence of what makes America different, and how we got to where we are now. PLAYING WITH FIRE represents O’Donnell’s master class in American electioneering, embedded in the epic human drama of a system --- and a country --- coming apart at the seams in real time.

An appreciation of wine --- along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature --- was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman’s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. THE WINE LOVER’S DAUGHTER traces the arc of a man’s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his 80th birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.

Overlooked by his father and overshadowed by his war-hero brother, Bobby Kennedy was the perpetual underdog. When he had the chance to become a naval officer like Jack, Bobby turned it down, choosing instead to join the Navy as a common sailor. It was a life-changing experience that led him to connect with voters from all walks of life. They were the people who turned out for him in his 1968 campaign. RFK would prove himself to be the rarest of politicians --- both a pragmatist who knew how to get the job done and an unwavering idealist who could inspire millions. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Chris Matthews pulls back the curtain on the public and private worlds of Robert Francis Kennedy.

While at Donnelly’s for his usual pint, Victor Forde is approached by a man in shorts and a pink shirt. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, and also dislikes the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories --- of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who would say the unsayable on the radio. But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular brother, that Victor cannot control and that eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.

In the Negev desert, a nameless prisoner languishes in a secret cell, his only companion the guard who has watched over him for a dozen years. Meanwhile, the prisoner’s arch nemesis --- The General, Israel’s most controversial leader --- lies dying in a hospital bed. From Israel and Gaza to Paris, Italy and America, Nathan Englander provides a kaleidoscopic view of the prisoner’s unlikely journey to his cell.

When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left the comforts of home in Montreal for New York, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. AT THE STRANGERS’ GATE builds a portrait of this particular moment in New York through the story of this couple's journey --- from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family.

At 14, Turtle Alveston roams the woods along the northern California coast. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother. Her social existence is confined to her middle school and her life with her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her.

Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by. After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife and their young daughter? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter. Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. But in the nervous days after 9/11, he flees New York and hires Mark to turn his Howland home into a year-round “secure location” from which he can manage billions of dollars of other people’s money. The collision of these two men’s very different worlds --- rural vs. urban, middle class vs. wealthy --- is the engine of Jonathan Dee’s powerful novel.