Grace and Mike Covey are living a charmed life in contemporary London—she’s a part-time journalist for a local paper, and he’s a sought-after BBC filmmaker. Their son Adam is enrolled at the posh Sidley House Preparatory School; their daughter Jenny, 17, is working there as a temporary teaching assistant after failing her A-levels, and trying to decide whether to attempt them again.

On Adam’s eighth birthday—also Sports Day for the elementary students—a fire breaks out on the school’s second floor, quickly engulfing the old building. Grace, a volunteer mom that day, realizes Jenny is still inside on the upper floor, and rushes into the building to try and save her. When the ambulance arrives, they are both whisked off to the ICU—Jenny badly burned, with serious damage to her heart, and Grace in a coma.

Using a unique literary device, author Rosamund Lupton allows these two main characters to escape their unconscious bodies—to move around and communicate with each other, though no loved ones or medical staff see anything but their severely damaged physical selves, bedridden and mute.

When Grace hears Sarah, Mike’s sister and a police detective, tell him that the fire was arson, she begins to connect that horrific act to the hate mail Jenny had received over the last few months—some of which she had neglected to reveal to Mike. In her out-of-body state, Grace follows Sarah as she interviews potential suspects, and soon realizes that Jenny is still the arsonist’s target.

In Lupton’s debut, Sister, she wrote of the bond between sisters: one whose death was called a suicide, the other struggling to disprove that charge. In her second family-centered thriller, she explores the fierce love of a mother for her children, while at the same time unraveling a case of attempted murder fueled by jealousy and a history of abuse. With its hint of a Jodi Picoult family saga blended with an eerie Ruth Rendell mystery, Afterwards should appeal to readers of both genres.

The author of such critically acclaimed books as Aquamarine and Lucky in the Corner, Carol Anshaw returns with a sure-to-be breakout novel, Carry the One. Between the opening, at a country wedding, and the ending, at an unfortunate funeral, Anshaw tells the story of three siblings who are bonded together not only by blood, but also by the tragedy of having accidentally run over an unknown girl.

Carry the One begins with Carmen and her spur-of-the-moment hippie wedding. She is unexpectedly pregnant, yet eager to begin her life with Matt. However, Carmen’s sister Alice and their stoned brother Nick (along with his postal-worker girlfriend Olivia) manage to take the night in a different direction on their ride home, when Olivia (the driver) accidentally strikes and kills a young girl. The ensuing, interlocking stories follow each of them in the aftermath of this catastrophic event.

Readers will become invested in Alice, the soon-to-be-famous painter who not only struggles with emerging from the shadow of her misogynist, famous father, but also carries an endless torch for Maude, Matt’s sister. Their battle of a love affair rises and falls over the years, as their careers—Maude’s as an actress and Alice’s as an artist—take turns eclipsing the other person’s role in their lives. While Olivia—after taking the rap and being sent off to jail—becomes straight edge, it is Nick who is most haunted by the death they inadvertently caused. He squanders his genius in astronomy with endless cycles of alcoholism and addiction. And the eldest, Carmen, struggles to remain true to herself as a political women’s activist in her faltering marriage.

These stories perfectly capture the changes within the characters as they grow older, shedding their more light-hearted attitudes toward sex, drugs and work. Tied together by that roadside tragedy, this makeshift family struggles to protect and support one another through heartbreak, addiction and even violence.

Anshaw’s prose in Carry the One is delicate and effortless, flowing from one beautifully believable scene to another. Its quiet power lies in her observation of how easy it is to destroy something and how much effort it takes to focus on keeping everything—and everyone—together.

Surprise may be the last thing readers expect from the third book in a trilogy. Then again, when a trilogy is as unpredictable and riveting as Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 series, set as it is both in the harsh Russian landscape and the dense thicket of the human soul, expectations quickly evaporate in a page-turning frenzy.

Agent 6 sends former Soviet secret police agent Leo Demidov forward in time to 1965. It's been 13 years since he stalked a serial killer in Child 44 and a decade since he saved one of his two adopted daughters from a vicious female gang leader in The Secret Speech. Having reached an uneasy truce with his horrific past, Leo and wife Raisa strive to be good Moscow parents and model citizens as they walk a narrow political line in post-Stalinist Russia.

Their new normal comes suddenly unglued, however, when Leo's wife and daughters depart for New York on a youth "Peace Tour" designed to foster relations with their Cold War enemies. Since Leo is not allowed to leave the country, he can only wait and worry—for good reason, it turns out. Something does go terribly wrong on the tour, so wrong that it will take Leo the rest of his life to come to terms with it.

Driven to find out what happened in New York, trying every trick in his extensive arsenal to escape to the West and hunt down the answers, Leo eventually accepts a suicide mission to train a new Soviet-style secret service in Afghanistan in the 1980s. When this opium-fueled self-exile ultimately presents him with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Leo fights his way to New York, only to find that the answers he seeks pose a moral dilemma unlike any he's ever encountered.

Smith, a young British screenwriter turned best-selling novelist, has created in Leo Demidov a Kafkaesque modern hero for our times, a good man trapped in a corrupt, manipulative system, forced to choose between loyalties to family, country and conscience. With a cinematographer's eye for settings and historical detail, Smith uses Leo's journey to examine larger issues, especially the political, social and religious systems that both unite and divide us.

Like the previous novels, there are moments in Agent 6 that seem to burn on the page with Leo's heartbreak and longing. That's a most generous return for our emotional investment into this troubled, fascinating Everyman, and one readers will look forward to in whatever comes next from his gifted young creator.

RELATED CONTENT
Author Tom Rob Smith goes Behind the Book with Agent 6.

Read an interview with Smith about Child 44.

Read a review of The Secret Speech.

Like many a literary gumshoe before him, private investigator Ray Lovell has a weakness for women, strong liquor and hard-luck tales. Thus, the tortured hero of Stef Penney’s luminous second novel, The Invisible Ones, finds himself swept up in the mystery and mayhem of a pack of traveling Gypsies when he is hired to find a young Romany woman, Rose Janko, who has disappeared from northern England without a trace.

To those with a penchant for Romany-themed literature—books like Colum McCann’s Zoli, for example—The Invisible Ones is sure to prove enchanting. For this reader, it was absolutely impossible to put down. From the opening chapter, when Ray awakens in a London hospital bed, stricken by hallucinations and paralysis, Penney’s formidable literary gifts will hypnotize readers. The tale is told as a dual narrative, in chapters that alternate between the musings of middle-aged private investigator Ray and the angst-drenched reflections of an adolescent boy, JJ. Torn between his love and loyalties for his Gypsy/Romany family and his fervent desire to assimilate with his gorjio—non-Romany—peers at school, JJ portrays his plight with a young boy’s curiosity, wit and idealism.

Ray, who is half Romany himself, finds himself forced to reckon with ghosts from his past as he investigates the Jankos. Simultaneously smitten by and wary of the inhabitants of this mystical netherland of hardscrabble trailer homes, Ray forges a friendship with JJ, providing the youngster with a much-needed male role model, and himself with a sense of fatherhood.

While the novel’s rich subplots are brimming with romance, family pathos and details of Romany culture, The Invisible Ones remains a mystery at heart. Author Penney, who lives in Scotland, won the Costa Award for Book of the Year with her 2007 debut, The Tenderness of Wolves, set in 1860s Canada. Her very different but equally absorbing second novel is sure to mesmerize readers from page one until its shocking, albeit deeply satisfying, ending.

The Night Swimmer is about a young American couple who move to Ireland and open a pub in a small coastal village outside of Cork. But Matt Bondurant’s suspenseful third novel is more Hitchcock than A Year in Provence. Like his second novel about bootlegging in Virginia, The Wettest County in the World (soon to be a major movie starring Guy Pearce, Shia LaBoeuf and Mia Wasikowska), The Night Swimmer tells a familiar, almost archetypal story of an outsider trying to adapt to an impenetrable and violent rural community.

Soon after 9/11, Elly Bulkington and her husband Fred move to the West Coast of Ireland where they have won a village pub, The Nightjar, in a contest. Both Bulkingtons leave trouble behind; Elly’s parents are obsessed with the destructive life of her older sister Beatrice and Fred is consumed by the guilt of surviving the devastation of the Twin Towers, when so many of his colleagues did not.

Running an Irish pub is less than idyllic for Americans Elly and Fred.

Elly, an open-water swimmer, looks forward to exploring the coastal waters, especially those off of the small neighboring island, Cape Clear. As Fred labors to fix up the pub, Elly moves to the island part time, baffling the locals with her interest in navigating the rough tides and lengthy night swims in the frigid waters. She becomes involved in the island community’s conflicts, especially those of an enigmatic organic goat farmer and the Corrigan family, who have controlled the island for centuries. Fred faces similar problems on the mainland, and soon the native resistance to these well-­meaning outsiders puts their relationship, their pub and even Fred’s sanity in jeopardy.

The intensity of Fred and Elly’s experience is more than matched by Bondurant’s vivid descriptions of the Irish coast with its icy waters, rolling hills and merciless storms. Unfortunately, their problems can’t always compete with the grandeur of the setting and the richness of the Gaelic culture; the gradual unraveling of their marriage is almost lost in the Gothic details of the feud. But when Bondurant explores what it is like to push yourself to the brink, whether with physical activity, drugs and alcohol, or lust, he captures an intensity of experience the reader won’t soon forget.

There is a perfect future. No disease, no hunger, no war. Zed is a time-traveler, come from this utopia. He is one of the few from his time who know the quagmire humans slogged through in order to arrive at their perfect present, and he has been sent to guarantee that our darkest night, worst of the worst—the genocides, disasters, assassinations, all of it—happens just the way history says it did. It’s the only way to ensure humanity is led to the perfect future born from the flames of the past.

Naturally, this isn’t as simple as watching ships sink and planes crash, since there is another faction determined to avert the horrors of the past, regardless of what this may do to the future.

Superficially, this is a time-travel book, and as such the attendant paradoxes and questions of parallel timelines and determinism are all in the back of one’s mind, but forget about that for a moment. What The Revisionists really offers, at its heart, is a chance to see our crazy, mixed-up world at arm’s length. The observation is often keen, even razor-sharp, and author Thomas Mullen—whose previous books have been historical novels—manages the deft trick of the insider writing as an outsider without sounding smug or disingenuous, or falling into any of the other traps that have snagged lesser observers of human nature.

The Revisionists meanders through the interconnected lives of Zed and those around him, each one in turn struggling with the Big Questions of morality and absolutes. Of course, the reality presented within its pages is one of nuances, and is ultimately far less simple than we like to pretend, but Mullen makes no bones about that. When all the layers are peeled back, this novel is about choice and consequences, and it just so happens to involve time travel. This is an excellent, thought-provoking read that checks boxes for sci-fi lovers as well as students of humanity.