The 10 stories in George Saunders’s latest collection demonstrate why he is considered a modern master of short fiction. From “Victory Lap,” the tale of an attempted abduction, to “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” in which families employ Asian women as live garden ornaments, Saunders’s gift for inventive plots and vivid detail, and his ability to home in on moments that quickly define character, have never been used to more stunning effect. Believe the hype.

In this well-researched and highly entertaining biography, Paula Byrne gives us a Jane Austen many readers may not recognize: a woman who enjoyed black humor and was well aware of the political scene of her time. Byrne uses artifacts from Austen’s life as a starting point for her engaging chapters on the events that shaped Austen’s worldview and inspired some of the most beloved scenes and characters in all of English literature.

In Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal known for its vast agricultural estates, the Mau Tempo family --- poor landless peasants --- faces changing fortunes in the midst of the coming of the Republic of Portugal, the two World Wars, and an attempt on the dictator Salazar's life. Yet nothing really impinges on the grim reality of the farm laborers’ lives until the first communist stirrings.

Julian Barnes’s follow-up to THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, last year’s Man Booker winner, is this collection of 17 essays and one short story --- all of them previously printed over the past 15 years --- about writers and the art of writing. His ruminations on writers as diverse as Penelope Fitzgerald, Michel Houellebecq and Joyce Carol Oates are as incisive as one expects from the keen intellect that gave us FLAUBERT’S PARROT.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.

On March 18, 1990, 13 works of art worth over $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It remains the largest unsolved art heist in history, and Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there’s more to this crime than meets the eye.

T. C. Boyle returns to the Channel Islands for his latest work of historical fiction, which is comprised of two short novels. In the first, set in 1888, Marantha Waters moves to the island with her husband and daughter to run a sheep farm, with the hope that the climate will cure Marantha’s consumption. In the second, set in the 1930s, Elise Lester and her husband, the latter shell-shocked during World War I, take over the land.

Bob Spitz, the author of a well-regarded biography of the Beatles, has now given us a hagiography of another 20th-century icon: Julia Child. His affection for television’s French Chef comes through on every page. This comprehensive book covers Child’s life from her privileged upbringing in Pasadena to her work in the OSS during World War II to her four decades as one of America’s preeminent cooking teachers.

Drew Silver is 44, divorced, and living alone at the Versailles, an apartment complex off the interstate and home mainly to divorced men. His ex-wife is about to marry a respected surgeon. His 18-year-old daughter, headed to Princeton in the fall, is pregnant. And now a heart ailment forces Silver to begin to take life seriously before it prematurely ends.

Mollisan Town is a dark alternate world populated by stuffed animals that lie, cheat, dream, despair, love and kill. Yok, the seediest district, is a unique place where a cast of damaged animate plush toys explore provocative questions of life, death and morality. The handsome fox yearns for true love, the gecko seeks redemption and freedom from his abusive brothers, the chimpanzee burns for success, and the hare seeks the secret to a meaningful life.