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The third in Kevin Baker’s cinematic trilogy spotlighting momentous episodes in the history of New York City, Strivers Row brings to vivid life all that was Harlem in 1943 the country in the midst of war overseas, the city seething with crime, poverty and politics fueled by racism.

As a teenager, Malcolm Little escapes from Lansing, Michigan, to Harlem, where amazingly he discovers color everywhere . . . like in the Wizard of Oz. Working on the train from Boston to New York, Malcolm encounters Jonah Dove, a young Harlem minister. When Jonah is harassed by a group of intoxicated white soldiers, Malcolm intervenes the first of several times their paths will fortuitously cross.

Malcolm’s newfound world leads him to the roles of hustler, numbers runner and drug dealer, with forays into the writings of the nation of Islam that gradually lead to his transformation into Malcolm X. Jonah lives on Strivers Row, the formerly white enclave now populated by blacks on the rise. The son of a biracial preacher, Jonah is losing his ability to preach; he’s depressed by the poverty surrounding him and horrified by stories of the genocide of Jews overseas.

Encompassing these two loosely connected portraits is Baker’s kaleidoscopic evocation of Harlem itself. His renderings of this oasis, simultaneously mired in poverty and throbbing with music and high fashion, burst from every page, as vivid to the reader as an exhibit of photographs. From the mobs of promenaders strolling down Seventh Avenue on a Sunday, to the drug-infused haze of the after-hours clubs, his camera’s eye is there. The background is laid for the novel’s culminating Harlem riot, stoked by the seething, random hatred that Jonah feels all around him.

Baker’s research for this novel was meticulous, beginning, obviously, with The Autobiography of Malcolm X and continuing with journalism and literature of the day. As both a historical treatise and an empathetic portrait of a pivotal black figure in American history, Baker’s concluding volume in his masterful trilogy succeeds on every level. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati.

How many people could you remember, if you sat down and tried to make a list? We’re not just talking about folks you know well, but anyone whose face you can conjure up your mail carrier, that girl at the coffee shop, an old teacher. In Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel, an ever-shifting city of the dead is populated by the souls of those who have died but are still remembered by the living. These folks hang around in an afterlife that’s pretty much like regular life reading, eating, working, possibly changing but never aging until the last person who remembers them dies. Then they vanish. It’s a city built on memory, and memory makes a fragile building block.

The city’s already impermanent population is threatened when, back in the living world, a bio-engineered virus starts to spread. Journalist Luka Sims, who runs the dead city’s only newspaper, hears and publishes the early reports of the plague from new arrivals. With incredible speed, the virus kills millions. Wave after wave of the dead arrive in the city only to vanish hours later. Before long, Luka finds himself without a single reader, apparently alone in a desolate city. Meanwhile, back in the living world, Laura Byrd is on a research expedition in the Antarctic. When the radio dies, her two partners venture out to the nearest research station in an effort to contact headquarters. When they fail to return and Laura’s supplies start running low, she has no choice but to go after them. Her epic journey across the frozen landscape and, simultaneously, through her own memories is utterly gripping and beyond suspenseful. This novel began life as a short story in The New Yorker, and a feature film based on that story is said to be in the works. But Brockmeier’s tale is so vividly imagined that filming it seems almost superfluous. He writes with cinematic clarity but never sacrifices one speck of mystery. The book may serve as an indictment of such contemporary threats as biological weapons and unfettered corporate power, but it’s also simply a beautiful story. If there’s one key lesson here, it is that all actions have consequences and people can leave indelible impressions. Kevin Brockmeier certainly has. Becky Ohlsen writes from the living city of Portland, Oregon.

Gilbert Selwyn is the sort of friend you’d love to have . . . tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail. But when he calls his somewhat hapless pal Phil Cavanaugh with an offer of Hollywood-size lucre, the only sound Phil hears is the Zen-like thud of One Shoe Dropping, and even that is obscured by the ring of the cash register. So he corrals his writing partner, Claire Simmons, drops his gig as a bicycle messenger and jets off to Tinseltown.

My Lucky Star, Joe Keenan’s third novel, comes after a 15-year gap during much of which he penned and co-produced the television series Frasier. The author has resurrected Star’s central trio of characters from his previous two books, Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz.

The tangled web in which our protagonists find themselves ensnared starts out don’t they all? with a lie. It seems Gilbert has procured a screenwriting assignment for the trio using a purloined script of Casablanca, which he claims they wrote, and which a historically challenged director doesn’t recognize as having already been filmed.

Our slightly witless trio becomes embroiled in the affairs of a truly dysfunctional family that includes two past-their-sell-by-date actresses, a manipulative (and flamboyantly homosexual) uncle and a deeply closeted superstar with a dim-bulb wife. Add to that volatile mix sibling rivalry, blackmail, a vengeful district attorney, gay prostitutes and the usual horde of Hollyweird gasbags and schemers, and you have a romp in the making. Keenan has a finely tuned ear for dialogue (one wonders how much of it is loosely adapted from meetings he’s attended), and a style that melds Noel Coward, Preston Sturges and Truman Capote in a frothy fusion.

Just when you think the wheels are about to come off, they do, but Keenan deftly guides us through the S-curves of Hollywood fortune with the aplomb of someone who knows that even the sturdiest-looking faade is propped up with sticks. Thane Tierney writes from Los Angeles.

On a bleak December day in 1907, Esther and Hersh Lipshitz and their four children complete their flight from Kishinev, Russia, and the pogroms that have plagued its Jewish community. As they arrive at Ellis Island, Esther and her husband are separated from their blond five-year-old son, Reuven, whose disappearance sets in motion the events recounted in T Cooper’s energetic and poignant second novel, Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes.

The Lipshitz family soon joins Esther’s brother in Amarillo, Texas, as participants in a program to relocate Jewish immigrants to sparsely populated areas of the country. Despite the distance that separates her from New York, Esther clings to the hope that someday she’ll be united with her beloved Reuven. Then, in May 1927, she spots a newspaper photograph of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Charles Lindbergh, the quintessential American hero who has just completed his solo transatlantic flight. The photograph convinces Esther that Lindbergh is the son she lost 20 years earlier. She spends the rest of her life in a passionate quest to communicate with her son, carrying on a one-sided correspondence with the Lindbergh family and accumulating a treasure trove of clippings and memorabilia of the famous aviator’s career. The final section of the book fast-forwards 60 years, to New York City in 2002. Esther’s great-grandson, T Cooper, is a novelist stalled in his attempt to recount the story of the Lipshitz family. Instead of writing, he makes his living impersonating the blond rapper Eminem at bar mitzvah parties. When his parents are killed in a car accident, T returns to Amarillo for the first time in more than 14 years to bury them. There, he confronts the Lindbergh legacy and other ghosts of the family’s past, with both hilarious and tragic consequences. The novel’s climax delivers a stunning, yet satisfying, resolution to the Lipshitz family chronicle. Whether it’s enjoyed as an immigrant saga, a multigenerational family tale or a sly commentary on the phenomenon of fame in our time, Cooper’s novel reveals a fresh, engaging voice that will capture the reader’s imagination from the first word and hold it to the last. Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

They’re back. Like a traveling circus whose painted trucks and trailers demand that we look, the Santerre family whom author Maile Meloy called both liars and saints in her first novel compels us to watch as their story unfolds . . . again. In this intriguing tale, we’re given clues to life’s largest riddles about the meaning of faith, the strength of family ties and the hope of real and lasting love.

It’s 1979, and seven-year-old Abby has the chicken pox. When her grandmother enlists Abby’s uncle to help entertain the bored and restless child, events are set in motion that will span decades, touch every member of the family and ultimately challenge the deceit that has lain at the heart of it. And even as she comes to terms with her elders’ notions of love and happiness, Abby must find a way to make her own.

Meloy is an exquisite writer: each chapter is practically a short story in itself, spare, elegant, perfectly composed (no surprise to readers of her critically acclaimed collection of short stories, Half in Love). A master of understatement, she speaks volumes with a single sentence, and never insults our intelligence with needless explanations; she knows we’re paying attention. In fact, we’re riveted.

One needn’t have read Liars and Saints to enjoy A Family Daughter (I hadn’t); it’s a beautiful book that I couldn’t put down at first and then rationed as I grew close to the end. But there are circles within circles here. The first book presents a family desperate to preserve the appearance of happiness, even as each member struggles privately with sorrow. A Family Daughter re-imagines the earlier story, as Abby begins to write a novel, trying to understand her complicated family ties. What at first appears to be a minor side story in the Santerre saga gradually reveals a paradox central to the story at large: when every family member lives in his own fiction, what is the truth? Jamie Chavez is a writer and editor who lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.