Amy Scribner

Portia Nathan has been a college admissions officer for more than a decade. And not at just any school—she works behind the gilded gates of Princeton University. The life she’s made is comfortably predictable, down to which New England prep schools she visits to recruit the next freshman class. There are no surprises, which is just how Portia likes it.

But there’s nothing predictable about what happens when her longtime boyfriend—a professor of English—leaves Portia for another woman. Suddenly, her intricately planned existence is gone, and during the busy “reading season” when thousands of applications pour into the nation’s colleges and universities, Portia is forced to confront the reason she lives solely to avoid the past.

A one-time admissions officer at Princeton, author Jean Hanff Korelitz shows her first-hand experience in the details of this superb, beautifully moody novel. The kids so desperate to gain admission into the Ivy League don’t just send an application—they send home-baked goodies, first drafts of novels, recordings of their own musical compositions. At this moment in their young lives, nothing matters more than being accepted by a handful of elite schools.

Portia’s job is to convince the best and brightest students in the nation to apply to Princeton, and then to turn down thousands of hopefuls. And it’s a job she takes seriously. Where others might just see a stack of applications to wade through, Portia sees a duty:  “She stood for a long moment, merely looking . . . she was entirely alone, except for the kids in their thick and suppliant folders. She felt a kind of duty to them, but not only a duty. She truly preferred to be with them, these fleshless people, their best selves neatly in black and white on the two-dimensional paper and primly contained within each orange file.”

By the time the newest Princeton freshman class has been selected, many thousands of orange files later, Portia makes a choice that will affect many people. Saying more would ruin the rich surprises this book holds, but Portia herself hints at it: “Admission. It’s what we let in, but it’s also what we let out.”

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

For those of us who have only been to Los Angeles to visit Disneyland—and whose main source of information about the City of Angels is supermarket tabloids—it seems a mysterious and slightly bizarre place with a tan, thin and vacuously blonde population.

While Maria Semple's provocative, searingly funny portrait of life in La La Land in This One Is Mine does little to change the city's image, it does make for a surprising and often hilarious debut novel about happiness and consequences.

Violet Parry was a successful television writer until she met her husband, career-obsessed rock band manager David, and traded in her job for a mansion and a baby. Violet now spends her days aimlessly roaming Beverly Hills, buying things she doesn't need or want while her baby is home with the nanny. On one such pointless trip, she accidentally walks into a men's bathroom and finds Teddy Reyes, a down-on-his-luck bass player who "had blood-shot eyes and lint in his hair. It was hard to tell if it was full of gel or in need of a shampoo. His clothes smelled like a Goodwill."

Violet finds herself inexplicably drawn to Teddy, a recovering addict who is everything her husband isn't—spontaneous, funny and unpredictable. She begins a relationship with him that changes everything for her, her husband and their entire family.

A onetime Los Angeles resident herself, Semple wrote for TV sitcoms including "Mad About You" and "Ellen." She has a wholly original voice and deftly infuses humor into This One Is Mine (you'll laugh out loud at the sayings on the nanny's secondhand T-shirts) while capturing the bittersweet moments of motherhood and a marriage teetering on the edge. The result is a novel that is both entertaining and unexpected—a little bit like L.A. itself.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

It is said that marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly. But is it fair to say that Jon Kepilkowsky is a coward because he's cheating on his wife, Ginny, with a cute young co-worker? Or is he a victim doomed to repeat the same mistakes made a generation ago in this same Wisconsin town? These are the delicious questions posed by Christina Schwarz (Drowning Ruth) in her wonderfully moody new novel, So Long at the Fair.

At first glance, Jon is your average walking cliche – the man who has it all and doesn't realize it. A nice home, a good if not fabulous job in advertising and, most importantly, a beautiful wife who married him even though he arguably caused an accident that left her seriously injured. Still, Jon can't help feeling something is missing from his perfect-on-paper life. His marriage to Ginny feels stale, even their arguments forming a predictable pattern: "By this point in their marriage, they'd locked themselves into that roller coaster so often, said and done so many unforgivable things, hashed out and made up so many times, that the ride was no longer sure to be a thrill. Sometimes now, it was better just to short-circuit the whole thing, bypass the ups and downs . . . and just skip to the end, where in any case they always got off right where they'd gotten on." But as in any small town, secrets are everywhere, scattered just beneath the surface like pebbles under the soil. Years ago, Jon's own parents and Ginny's parents became enmeshed in a scandal that changed each of their lives.

So Long at the Fair drifts back and forth between a hot day in July during which Jon must decide whether to end his marriage, and the night in 1963 in which similarly irrevocable choices were made. It all sounds so dramatic (and it is) but Schwarz masterfully captures small-town life in all its gossipy glory. Wry, keenly observed and surprising, So Long at the Fair will leave you somewhere between heartbreak and laughter.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

We've seen "Sex and the City." Now it's time for sex in the suburbs. The Position isn't exactly the frothy take on love offered by the famous HBO series. Instead, Meg Wolitzer's smart new novel delves into much heavier stuff, examining how sex is inevitably intertwined with all the moments of life that happen outside the bedroom.

Roz and Paul Mellow wrote the ultimate 1970s how-to sex manual, complete with a new sexual position and graphic illustrations. It's a national phenomenon, but the book causes no end of embarrassment for their four children. Fast-forward three decades, and the all-grown-up Mellow kids still face the legacy of their parents' foray into erotica. They're constantly asked if they're related to those Mellows.

Despite their obvious and very publicly documented affection for one another, Roz and Paul split soon after the book became a sensational bestseller. But now Roz is determined to reissue the book, and she wants her children to convince Paul it's a good idea.

Paul is living listlessly with his third wife in Florida when he starts getting the pitch from oldest son Adam. It's the last thing Adam wants to do; he has his own problems (sexual and otherwise) back in New York City. And besides, cajoling his bitter dad into doing anything that will benefit his mom seems far too difficult an undertaking. But the task is Adam's alone: his sisters Holly and Claudia are simply drifting along in life, and his brother Dashiell is incapacitated by a serious illness.

Wolitzer writes with the same palpable intensity she brought to her critically acclaimed novel The Wife, proving once again that she is among the most satisfying of contemporary authors. The Position is at its wry best when it explores the strange ways that families crack and reform over the years. The Mellow children struggle to put their parents' past behind them so that they can have their own future. They all feel the impact of that infamous book, but the body, they learn, is only temporary. It's the other stuff in life that leaves a lasting impression.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.