Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel is set in the 1970s and alternates between two radically different environments: the violence-torn landscape of Idi Amin’s Uganda, and the bucolic Midwestern college town to which one of the refugees from Kampala immigrates. As in his two earlier novels, Mengestu’s elegiac writing dramatizes the struggles of African exiles trying to conform to American life while grappling with memories of the horrors they witnessed in their home continent.

In 1989, three teenage friends are among the residents of a Beijing quadrangle in which all the neighbors know one another. It’s four months after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Twenty-two-year-old Shaoai, one of the residents, was among the Tiananmen protesters. One day, the friends discover that someone has poisoned Shaoai. This mystery is the backdrop of a novel about jealousy and the ways in which the traumas of adolescence can devastate one’s adulthood.

The 1898 Omaha World’s Fair has just concluded. In a small Nebraska town, a Civil War balloon formerly on display at the Fair lands on the home of two elderly sisters. The pilot is Ferret Skerritt, a young ventriloquist. In THE SWAN GONDOLA, Ferret tells the sisters the story of his romance with an actress who worked at the Chamber of Horrors, and of the wealthy magnate who tried to insinuate himself into their affair.

Peter Els is a retired music professor with a unique hobby: He has set up a microbiology lab in his home to find music in the modified DNA of the bacterium Serratia marcescens. When Federal agents find out about his laboratory, they suspect he may be a bioterrorist. ORFEO is the portrait of a man so obsessed by the need to create that he’ll sacrifice just about everything for the sake of his quest.

Greg Baxter’s debut novel is the story of an Iraq War veteran who moves from his American hometown to an unnamed European city. On a snowy December day, a young woman the narrator met weeks earlier helps him look for an apartment. The book, which takes place over the course of that day, is a chronicle of regret and a meditation on violence and those who would exploit it for personal gain.

Two brothers born in Calcutta during World War II share a close childhood but separate from one another as adults. Subhash, the older, quieter brother, moves to the US to study marine chemistry. Udayan, the younger and more volatile, stays in India and becomes active in the Naxalite Communist movement. The circumstances that draw them apart and eventually bring their families together form the drama of Jhumpa Lahiri’s second novel.

REPORT FROM THE INTERIOR is Paul Auster’s follow-up to last year’s WINTER JOURNAL, a memoir in which, at age 64, he looked back on joyous as well as painful memories of his life. In his latest book, he writes about the salient events of his childhood, analyzes films that affected him in middle school, and shares letters he wrote in his late teens and early 20s to Lydia Davis, who would become his first wife.

THE MOST OF NORA EPHRON is just that: a 550-page collection of the late director’s writings. Included in this volume are Ephron’s nonfiction from her days as a journalist for Esquire and New York magazines and as a blogger for The Huffington Post; the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally…; the novel HEARTBURN, a thinly disguised chronicle of her marriage to Carl Bernstein; and witty essays on food, politics, breasts, and her aging neck.

An explosion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art kills Audrey Decker while she and her 13-year-old son, Theo, pay an afternoon visit. Theo survives, but before he stumbles to safety, a wounded elderly man encourages him to steal the Museum’s 1654 Carel Fabritius painting of a goldfinch and to deliver a gold ring to the Hobart and Blackwell antiques shop. Thus begins an 800-page adventure involving Vegas gamblers, underworld criminals, and Park Avenue privilege.

J. M. Coetzee’s allegorical new novel tells the story of David, a boy of around five who sails to the Spanish-speaking town of Novilla in search of his mother. A man named Simón, also aboard the ship, looks after the boy and helps him in his quest. The result is a novel that is part philosophy, part adventure, and a thoughtful questioning of the meaning and wisdom of the gospels.