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Forget for a moment the spooky, restless dead. In Rebecca Makkai's inventive novel The Hundred-Year House, the ghost is just one of the many residents looking for new lives — and finding them.

NPR's Renee Montagne visited Coolhaus Ice Cream Shop in Southern California to find out what architecture and frozen desserts have in common, and how to stack up a mean ice cream sandwich.

Roddy Doyle's new The Guts revisits the Commitments three decades later, grown up and dealing with life's blows. Mastermind Jimmy Rabbitte is out of the hospital after cancer surgery, and he's living life one day at a time. Critic Alan Cheuse says the dialogue-heavy novel is both foulmouthed and bursting with joie de vivre.

Travel Light is an unjustly forgotten fairy tale about a wandering princess who goes from bears and dragons to the real world of medieval Constantinople — and back again. Writer Amal El-Mohtar says she encountered the book as an adult and "felt, very powerfully, that I had been waiting for it."

Author Denise Spellberg's book draws parallels between the beliefs of the founding father and religious tolerance in the United States today.

The Food Network was intended for cooks, but it wasn't run by them. In a new tell-all book, Allen Salkin takes an unsparing look at the channel's progression from struggling cable startup to global powerhouse, and the people who rose and fell along the way.

In Little Failure, the novelist recounts his emigration from the USSR to the U.S. when he was 7. For the first few years, he says, he would sit alone in the school cafeteria, talking to himself in Russian "in this gigantic fur hat and fur coat." It wasn't long before a teacher advised, "Children won't play with you if you have that much fur on."

Industrial musicals were like Broadway shows, only written and performed for corporate sales meetings or conventions. And as ridiculous as the songs were — "My bathroom, my bathroom is a private kind of place" — they were often delivered by very talented people.

This week's Must Read, our topical book recommendation series, usually focuses on events in the news. But today, with an eye on the dropping thermometer, book critic Parul Sehgal suggests a seasonal text. Kenneth Grahame's classic children's novel offers a cozy, eccentric depiction of winter — perfect for curling up with as the snow comes down.

South Africa's Mponeng gold mine is a 2.5-mile-deep network of chutes and tunnels that employs about 4,000 miners. Of course, that number doesn't include the miners who wander its tunnels clandestinely, stealing and refining ore. In a new book, journalist Matthew Hart investigates why gold and crime sometimes go hand in hand.