Finding inspiration in questions from the nature of perfection to the icing on carrot cake, actor B. J. Novak’s debut short story collection has at its heart the most human of phenomena: love, fear, hope, ambition, and the inner stirring for the one elusive element that just might make a person complete.

Anna Quindlen’s latest novel begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. After fleeing the city for the middle of nowhere, she discovers --- in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates --- that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

Benjamin and Bockarie are two longtime friends who return to their hometown of Imperi after the civil war in Sierra Leone. As more villagers begin coming back, they try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they’re beset by such obstacles as a scarcity of food and a rash of murders, thievery, rape and retaliation. As Benjamin and Bockarie search for a way to restore order, they’re forced to reckon with the uncertainty of their past and future alike.

As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, readers are telescoped into three different worlds in various states of disrepair --- a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included.

Jody is a likable young man getting by in New York City at the turn of the millennium. On the surface, he seems to have it together. But a secret history has left him scarred and broken inside, lacking faith in the future or himself. Jody’s buried secrets hold him back until his trajectory crosses the path of three very different women, who, in their own ways, hold out the tantalizing possibility of healing, connection…or self-destruction.

Bertie Wooster (a young man about town) and his butler Jeeves (the very model of the modern manservant) return in their first new novel in nearly 40 years. P.G. Wodehouse documented the lives of the inimitable Jeeves and Wooster for nearly 60 years, from their first appearance in 1915 to his final completed novel in 1974. Now, four decades later, Bertie and Jeeves return in a hilarious affair of mix-ups and mishaps.

By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, T. C. Boyle’s stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The 58 stories in this new volume, written over the last 18 years, reflect his maturing themes. Along with the satires and tall tales that established his reputation, readers will find stories speaking to contemporary social issues, from air rage to abortion doctors, and character-driven tales of quiet power and passion.

In DAVID AND GOLIATH, Malcolm Gladwell challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages. He offers a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, cope with a disability, lose a parent, attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks.

Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commander.

Minna Bernays, an overeducated lady’s companion with a sharp, wry wit, turns to her sister Martha, a mother struggling with six children and an absent, disinterested husband named Sigmund Freud. While Martha and the scientific community are shocked and repulsed by Freud's "pornographic" work, Minna is fascinated. She and Freud embark on what is at first simply an intellectual courtship, but hides something deeper beneath the surface, a desire that Minna cannot escape.