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Charlie Huston's new thriller is a fast-paced and action-packed tale of a retired assassin who rejoins the game to protect a roboticist as she tracks a computer virus. But reviewer Alan Cheuse says "the action comes bracketed with a load of rhetoric," which ultimately put him to sleep.

Jennifer Lin-Liu's On the Noodle Road takes readers on a journey along the former Silk Road, looking for the origins of the noodle. But reviewer T. Susan Chang says that the book gets tied into knots when the quest turns cold.

Patrick Flanery's taut new novel, Fallen Land, delves into the housing crisis, creeping corporate surveillance and a "crisis of neighborliness" in American life. The backdrop: a half-built and crumbling subdivision outside of an unnamed American city.

In Shot All To Hell, author Mark Lee Gardner explores the roots of James' life of crime following the Civil War.

Samuel Scheffler, a philosophy professor at New York University, presents a secular interpretation of life after death. In his book Death and the Afterlife, Scheffler argues that our belief that humanity will outlive us — our faith in the existence of future generations — gives meaning to our lives.

Bridget Jones has grown up — a bit, anyhow — in our exclusive First Read of the new Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy. A widow (shocking!) with two young children (even more shocking!), she's struggling to balance motherhood and her own needs — not to mention a hot, much younger boyfriend.

In his new book, Average Is Over, Tyler Cowen predicts that America will become a new, more creative meritocracy. Though he believes a rise in income inequality is inevitable, he hopes that "happiness inequality isn't going up in the same way."

In his new memoir, Julian Barnes contemplates 19th century photography, the metaphorical exhilaration of ballooning and the sudden death of his beloved wife. Reviewer Heller McAlpin says the book is beautifully written, if a little disjointed.

In The Story of the Human Body, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman explains how our bodies haven't adapted to modern conditions. The result is "mismatch diseases" — ailments that occur because our bodies weren't designed for the environments in which we now live.

A chance encounter with a little girl in an ice cream store inspired R.J. Palacio to write a novel about a boy born with distorted facial features. She says it got her thinking about what it's like to "have to face a world every day that doesn't know how to face you back."