The previous titles in Peter Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series have focused on writers (Chaucer and Poe), scientists (Isaac Newton) and painters (J. M. W. Turner). Now he turns to cinema with this engaging biography of Charlie Chaplin. Ackroyd’s narrative covers it all: Chaplin’s early years growing up in poverty in South London; his unprecedented fame in Keystone and First National comedies and, later, those of his own studio; and the temper and egotism that vexed his collaborators.

Michel Faber’s latest novel is about the search for comfort in the face of life’s tragedies. Peter Leigh is a Christian missionary recruited by an organization known as USIC to be the pastor on a distant planet called Oasis. He leaves behind his wife to work with both the USIC employees stationed on Oasis and the planet’s natives. THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS is a meditation on the meaning of faith and the consequences of devotion.

The latest work from the celebrated author of the historical novels WOLF HALL and BRING UP THE BODIES is a collection of 10 stories, Hilary Mantel’s first collection since 2003’s LEARNING TO TALK. Many of these contemporary tales play with the conventions of genre; there’s even a vampire tale. But the title story, about an imagined attempt on the former Prime Minister’s life, will, not surprisingly, get the most attention.

Two days after her husband of 30 years tells her he plans to have an affair, Fiona Maye, a High Court judge who regrets her childlessness, must decide whether or not to grant a hospital’s emergency request to give a blood transfusion to a 17-year-old boy dying of leukemia. He and his parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses who have refused the treatment on religious grounds. McEwan’s latest novel is a powerful reminder that one’s actions often have unforeseen repercussions.

It’s the 2050s, and Cal and Frida, married refugees from a California devastated by earthquakes, live in a shack in the northwest US. When their neighbors are poisoned and the couple learns that Frida is pregnant, Cal and Frida venture toward a nearby settlement run by “Spike People,” a collective that has secured its borders with tall metal spikes, in the hope that the group will protect them from pirates that ravage the countryside.

Thomas is in his mid-30s and furious at the world. America isn’t doing all it can to be the best, and he wants restitution for the murder of his friend, Don Banh. So he kidnaps seven people, including his mother and a disabled former Congressman, takes them to an abandoned Army barracks, and interrogates them. Dave Eggers’s latest, written entirely in dialogue, chronicles Thomas’s attempt to find out what happened to his friend, and to America.

This collection of short essays, Christopher Buckley’s first since WRY MARTINIS, contains 89 pieces written for publications such as Forbes, the New York Times and The Daily Beast. Some of the pieces are serious, most notably his tributes to deceased friends and a report on his visit to Auschwitz. But most of the essays contain the sardonic humor one expects from a writer who, while riding a train’s quiet car, appoints himself “Shush, Destroyer of Conversation.”

Marie-Laure is a young blind girl living in Paris with her father, who is a master of locks at the Museum of Natural History and is in charge of some of their most valued works. When she is 12, the Germans move into the city, and they are forced to flee to the town of Saint-Malo, where a reclusive uncle lives by the sea. In a parallel story, a young orphan boy named Werner lives with his sister in Germany and is tapped to be part of the Hitler Youth, eventually given a role to teach the Resistance.

Ellen Gilchrist’s first collection of short stories since 2005 consists of 10 pieces that take place in the American South, mainly in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Her characters are good-hearted Southerners, many of them wealthy, who are forced to confront life’s toughest challenges --- from natural disasters to terrorist threats to multiple sclerosis and untimely death --- and who emerge from each experience with a renewed belief in the goodness of human nature.

Most of the stories in David James Poissant’s debut collection are set in the American South, and all are melancholy tales of domestic discord and loss. A cook at a diner pitches his gay teenage son through a window. A couple’s baby dies from SIDS. A wife is killed in a car accident. A teenager loses a limb. This is grim subject matter, but Poissant’s work is distinguished by his compassion and his gift for the well-turned phrase.