Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House, $27)

 “Novelists get called master storytellers all the time, but Curtis Sittenfeld really is one,” said Maggie Shipstead in The Washington Post. A tale about clairvoyant twin sisters may sound like an excursion into soapy melodrama, but the author of Prep and American Wife makes readers feel as if they’re listening to the long, candid outpouring of “a matter-of-fact but mesmerizing friend.” As adults, Violet and Kate Shramm have adapted to their shared gift in diametrically opposed ways—one becoming a professional psychic while the other, the book’s narrator, has chosen to suppress her premonitions and live as conventionally as possible. But after Violet appears on national TV predicting that a catastrophic earthquake will soon strike St. Louis, Kate is forced to decide what she truly believes in. In the suspenseful tale that follows, plain, likable Kate serves as an indispensable “anchor of realism,” said Trine Tsouderos in the Chicago Tribune. This is what Sittenfeld has always done best: “She makes plain riveting.”

The Fall

The Fall by Albert Camus
You enter a bar in Amsterdam. A man begins to speak to you, his strange, seductive confession suggesting that you are somehow complicit. This 1956 novel is a masterpiece. It taught me that the relationship between reader and writer could be explored explicitly on the page. I’ve practiced my craft differently ever since [Mohsin Hamid’s acclaimed new novel, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” charts the rise of a young man in today’s Pakistan. Here, the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” names six books that taught him how to write.]

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.”