Heller McAlpin

Dani Shapiro, at age 54, is shocked to learn that the man she thought was her biological father wasn't a blood relative. Her memoir, a quest for the truth, reads like an emotional detective story.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic is the still point at the center of Heather Rose's new novel, as a motley cast of characters come to see her sitting at a table in New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Degas's sculpture "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen" is known the world over. But who is that young lady he depicts? Camille Laurens aims to find out — and realizes something about herself in the process.

Marina Benjamin's book is more impressionistic and personal than scientific: Don't look here for an explanation of the chemistry or biology of nocturnal wakefulness.

Idra Novey's taut second novel focuses on the silencing of assault victims and the remorse that comes from not speaking up to power. It's not as winning as her first, but there's plenty to admire.

In its searching honesty and multi-layered, visual and verbal storytelling, Nora Krug's memoir investigates mixed feelings about being German and her family's role in the Holocaust.

John Kaag extracts ideas from Nietzsche and his followers — but also from his own experience — in this stimulating book about combating despair and complacency with searching reflection.

Written in light of Nabokov's famous novel, the book stands out for its captivating mix of tenacious reporting, astute literary analysis and passionate posthumous recognition of a defenseless child.

Written with more enthusiasm than literary panache, fashion and society photographer Bill Cunningham's memoir, discovered after his death, is a charming ode to being true to oneself.

Patrick DeWitt's new novel is a sparkling dark comedy about an Upper East Side society matron and her large adult son (and their cat) who take off for Paris to escape financial and social ruin.

Jessie Greengrass' novel is packed with shimmering sentences and poetic paragraphs from a narrator who's never content to drift along, but must probe "the convoluted crenellations of the mind."

Kate Walbert's new novel follows a young woman who goes to a posh boarding school after tragedy upends her life — only to find she's no safer there than she was at home.

Anne Youngson's debut novel is the charmer of the summer. Told in epistolary form, it follows a dissatisfied farmer's wife and a lonely museum curator who find it's never too late for a fresh start.

Ottessa Moshfegh's bizarrely fascinating new novel follows a young woman in Manhattan who decides to sleep her life away with a combination of pills, waking occasionally for bad bodega coffee.

Rachel Cusk's trilogy about a peripatetic writer and her many conversational partners winds up with Kudos. The books are essentially plotless — but there's plenty of joy to be found just in talk.

Sedaris' new story collection is earthy, to say the least — concerned with all the gross things that happen as we live and age — but also full of wonder at his life, and appreciation for his family.

Caryl Phillips' new novel, set in the waning years of the British Empire, follows the perpetually alienated Rhys from her birthplace in the West Indies to England and then the Continent.

Set during and after World War II, Warlight follows a young man trying to find out what really happened when his parents disappeared and left him and a young sister in the care of two mystery men.

Stephen McCauley's new novel is a charming comedy of manners about second chances and fresh starts, full of zingers about eternal targets like divorce settlements and college admissions.

Julian Barnes' latest novel concerns the pained recollections of an aging Englishman's life-changing only love — the "only story" that really matters about him.