Nearly everyone in the tiny mountain town of Queduro, New Mexico wishes Rose Devonic would find someplace else to live. A headstrong loner, Rose just couldn’t seem to fit in; but it wasn’t because she didn’t try. In her latest book, Remember Me, Laura Hendrie documents a young woman’s fascinating journey toward finding a place in life and the love and acceptance she has craved for so long.

Rose grew up in Queduro and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Even after her entire family died in a tragic auto accident, Rose hung around, living in her car during the summers and in a lonely cabin at a mostly abandoned motel during the long, cold winters. Like most people in town, Rose makes her living selling her embroidery work to the summer tourists. But she has never shared the passion or felt the pride most other locals consider necessary to be a truly successful trade-embroiderer. She knows there has to be something more to life than threads and needles.

When her mentor, motel owner Birdie Pinkston, is struck down by a debilitating stroke, Rose jumps in to take care of her old friend and former embroidery teacher. But Birdie’s sister Alice, who is beginning to exhibit the preliminary stages of Alzheimer’s disease, comes onto the scene determined to sell the Ten Tribes Motel and drag Birdie off on an African safari. In the ensuing upset, Rose has her hands full just trying to keep everyone from ending up in the loony bin.

Laura Hendrie weaves the threads of her story, alternating the voices of Rose and Frank, to create a masterful story. Her previous novel, Stygo, won numerous awards, including the prestigious Mountains and Plains Regional Bookseller’s Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Philip Tate is one of the lucky ones. At 45, he has everything good looks, a devoted family, a distinguished medical career. But something is wrong. Something has prompted him to return to the most secret, thrilling act of his adolescence housebreaking. He has no intention of stealing anything. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. So why would he do it? Why would he risk everything to commit a truly irrational act? Herein lies the heart of John L’Heureux’s wry, witty, and engaging new novel.

The story begins with a cozy but dreadful dinner party to celebrate Philip’s appointment as the new Chair of Psychology at the prestigious university medical school where he works. Looking around the room at his handsome, affluent friends, Philip is struck with the overwhelming urge to escape his straitjacket life and run away screaming.

The moment passes, but not for long. Later that night, after Philip’s smart and beautiful wife Maggie has once again passed out from too much alcohol and too many pills, he slips out of bed and goes for a drive. He ends up at the home of Hal Kizer, a new psychiatrist at the medical school, and his beautiful young wife Dixie. With his heart pounding, Philip finds the key, turns the lock, and steps inside.

It is a foolish risk, and Dixie catches him. However, she is bitterly unhappy in her own marriage, and the unexpected encounter leads Philip to a one-night fling, not criminal prosecution.

Wracked by guilt, he eventually confesses his infidelity to Maggie. Her addictions worsen, and begin to attract the attention of the couple’s two beautiful and intelligent children, Cole and Emma. Yet, as the family gets closer, Philip and Maggie realize that their perfect children are far more complicated than they had ever imagined.

Through realistic dialogue and careful characterization, L’Heureux brings this troubled family to life. He also provides a colorful cast of supporting characters, including the wife of one of Philip’s older colleagues, who serves her husband cold cereal for dinner every night but helps keep Maggie afloat with her warmth and compassion.

Readers will find themselves pulling for the Tates as they struggle to put their lives back together. Having Everything is a fascinating exploration of what happens when having it all isn’t nearly enough.

Beth Duris works for The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.

Youth isn’t easy for any of the young in this book, but then life is no great shakes for the older ones either. At least, that may be the reader’s first lesson from this first novel. Happily, it will not be the last one, for in the end both young and old balance on the cusp of fateful steps into the future.

Rosie, an American girl with a past (and the book’s sometime narrator), has come to France as an au pair to the Tivot family, who live on a Parisian houseboat. The job is tolerable: the three children are not obnoxious; their mother is cool but friendly; and their father, a hard-working, insecure doctor who looks like Abraham Lincoln, seems detached enough, certainly not the stuff of romantic dreams. Nevertheless, fleeing her own self-made tragedy, Rosie finds him attractive. For a short, forbidden time in the course of a family trip to Spain, each allows the other to fill a need hardly even acknowledged before they are discovered. The need itself recedes in the face of other more important necessities — like understanding, with the help of an old woman who is herself on the edge of a new experience, how even the most difficult people became what they are.

Day is not heavy-handed about all this; she flits about her subject with the light touch of a hummingbird. Indeed, language seems to be her primary interest — both in using it delicately herself, and in the psychological power it bestows on those who communicate effectively in strange countries. As for "the pleasing hour," it seems to call up the moment of special light that glows when the sun falls below the mountains. In the novel this is called "the mauve hour." Perhaps, like "red sky at night, sailors’ delight," it predicts good weather ahead for all the Tivots, and Rosie too.

Maude McDaniel reviews for The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other major newspapers.

In novels such as Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, The Commitments, and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Roddy Doyle thrills readers with withering wit, modernist techniques, and the emotional and political realities of working-class Irish. His latest novel, A Star Called Henry, places those themes on a larger historical canvas, examining the fight for Irish independence in the late 1910s through the 1920s. While plenty of books and poems have documented the horror and lament of the 1916 Easter Uprising, and subsequent guerilla skirmishes between British troops and the rebels who eventually became the Irish Republican Army, none does it with the spirit, panache, humor, and heartbreak of Doyle.

Doyle’s star is Henry Smart, a precocious youth born to a sad mother and a one-legged tough guy/bouncer/hitman, who characteristically beats his marks with his prosthetic limb. Henry, named for a brother who didn’t make it past a year, is repeatedly told that a glimmering star was his late older brother. Doyle effectively uses the star as a symbolic device to represent hope in the face of poverty, violence, and the hardscrabble life of Henry. On his own from the age of three, Henry terrorizes Dublin, hurling profanity and insults while hustling for money. The kid is good charming his way into whatever he wants but lacks guidance and common sense until stumbling into a school at the age of nine to get an education. His foray lasts two days in the class of Miss O’Shea, before he is unceremoniously booted back to the streets by an angry nun. That set-up, the first third of the book, shows us the skills and anger that will eventually make Henry one of the most trusted and celebrated of the freedom fighters under Michael Collins.

Doyle skillfully balances the real history of the Easter Uprising with the braggadocio of the fictional Henry, and wonderfully captures the covert actions that the IRA conducted without being caught by increasingly sophisticated British troops. More than anything, though, Doyle’s book is a trenchant critique of the fight for Irish independence, showing us how Henry is not expendable because he is the one who uses his father’s old weapon to do the dirty work of Collins. This tension between ideals and reality provides the book’s best moments, as the naive Henry eventually comes to startling, heart-wrenching discoveries about the nature of power and what it means to be free.

Original, bold, and alternately hilarious and bittersweet, A Star Called Henry demonstrates once again Doyle’s trademark plucky prose and continued mastery of the written word.

Mark Luce serves on the board of directors for the National Book Critics Circle.

If you’re a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, then get ready to celebrate. In September comes Bagombo Snuff Box, a hilarious collection of 23 previously uncollected examples of the comedic gifts of this American original.

Reading Vonnegut like this, in miniature, within the parameters of the short story, one cannot help but sit agog at the color and depth of his characters. Vonnegut is a master caricaturist. In considering his work as a humorist, it is hard not to think primarily of his players, individuals like the indefatigable Kilgore Trout, who tirelessly amuse us as they appear and reappear in his novels. So the wide assortment of individuals found in this collection provides all the more reason to be excited by the publication of these stories. Throughout these tales, Vonnegut focuses on some genuine quacks. Whether it be financial Frankensteins or real estate blockheads, Vonnegut invests most of his energies in parodying individuals warped by their ambitions. Everyone in this book is dead set on being number one. Though there’s nothing wrong with exercising a drive for personal betterment, Vonnegut cleverly uses this tendency to show how gross ambition can mutate those it takes for its subjects. Take for instance the protagonist of The Package. Earl Fenton can best be described as nouveau riche. Everything in his life is new and as he tours his state-of-the-art domicile with his wife, he gloats aloud over their good fortune and wealth. Yet the crux of the parody of this vacuous couple lies in another character the humble, less materialistic Charley Freeman. The heart of this mesmerizing tale thus is two fascinating portraits. If we take character names for keys to workings of this dichotomy, it is the pride and moral bankruptcy of the falsely regal Earl, versus the simple joys of the monastic, unencumbered Freeman, that supply the thematic tension for this well-wrought vignette.

Elsewhere in this book Vonnegut highlights the fanatical drive of a high school marching band leader in order to further display his interest in ambition gone awry. George Helmholtz appears in three stories in this collection and serves best as the model for the ambition-blinded American. Helmholtz is consumed by a passion for success. Unfortunately he is a man mismatched with his profession. Such competitive zeal might be better spent on a Wall Street entrepreneur, but for Helmholtz the school marching band is the vehicle for his personal drive. Thus it is bass drums, coronets, and epaulets that fire his imagination and fuel his desire. Helmholtz is a baton-crazed grotesque, a hilarious example of Vonnegut’s take on the self-made man.

Throughout this book, through clever characterization and mischievous humor, Vonnegut shows his love for the underdog as well as his distaste for the fat cat. His predilections help show us the many laughable sides to our mercurial human character.

Charles Wyrick plays with the band Stella.