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Author Ann Kirschner first read Anthony Trollope's Palliser series as a graduate student. Now, returning to it after more than 20 years, she finds her impression of the Victorian tale has transformed along with her life.

Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard's latest book, Confronting the Classics, takes a gleefully contrarian approach to marble-bust greats like Homer and Thucydides. Reviewer Annalisa Quinn says the work "expertly straddles the line between scholarly and accessible."

More adult fairy tale than conventional novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods follows an unnamed husband and wife who leave their home to start a new life in the wilderness. Reviewer Michael Schaub says this debut from author Matt Bell is a joy to read.

In Israeli artist Rutu Modan's The Property, a young woman accompanies her grandmother to Warsaw to reclaim an apartment building their family had to abandon in World War II. As they search through dusty records, family secrets soon come to light in this wryly funny and ultimately wrenching graphic novel.

Mary Louise Kelly used to cover national security for NPR, but lately she's turned her attention to fiction. Her new novel, Anonymous Sources, draws on Kelly's own reporting experiences, including things she couldn't say when she was a journalist.

Donald Justice's poems are not interested in making us feel comfortable or special. Yet author Mary Szybist says there is something about them that she finds profoundly consoling.

"Stories are compasses and architecture," says author Rebecca Solnit. "We navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of the world."

Karen Joy Fowler's haunting novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, draws on arguments she used to have with her father, a psychology professor, over how closely connected humans and animals really are. Fowler is also the author of the 2004 best-seller The Jane Austen Book Club.

Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan was inspired by a real-life gorilla who lived in a mall in Tacoma, Wash. The author says humans have "a real obligation" to care responsibly for animals in captivity.

The novel is about two sisters, aged 12 and 15, who travel cross-country after their mother abandons them. Reviewer Meg Wolitzer says that not only the characters are adrift in this book, the story itself seems unsure of what it wants to be.