Use of Weapons

Use of Weapons by Iain Banks (Orbit, $15). An engrossing meditation on love, relationships, betrayal, and the true price of winning at all costs. Banks uses well-drawn characters to make his science-fiction fantasy worlds compelling and believable. All of his books are excellent; this just happens to be my favorite [NFL punter Chris Kluwe, whose scathing letter to an anti-gay-marriage state lawmaker became an Internet]

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler 
(Marian Wood/Putnam, $27)

“This brave, bold, shattering novel reminds us what it means to be human, in the best and worst sense,” said Connie Ogle in The Miami Herald. Karen Joy Fowler, who’s known for the breezy 2004 best seller The Jane Austen Book Club, has this time created “a different sort of beast.” Rosemary Cooke, a 22-year-old student, is looking back on her upbringing to explain how her once-happy Midwestern family was torn apart. “Some startling facts emerge” before the story’s crucial reveal, said Michael Upchurch in The Seattle Times. Rosemary’s sister disappeared when Rosemary was 5, and her brother later went AWOL as a radical animal-rights activist. Fowler uses the mysteries of those events to explore weighty questions about the ways humans and animals differ, but the “big, warm, loudly beating heart” of the novel is in “its gradually pieced-together tale of family togetherness, disruption, and reconciliation.”