In his suspenseful but unremarkable debut novel (after the story collection We're In Trouble Now), Coake explores how a tragic past can threaten a happy future. Years after the accidental death of his seven-year-old son, Brendan, and the subsequent dissolution of his marriage, Mark Fife is finally ready to move on with his life. On a snowy morning, he even considers proposing to his girlfriend, Allison, but he gets spooked by a middle-aged woman who seems to be following him. That woman, Connie Pelham, bought his old house, and her son says he can't sleep because Brendan's ghost is calling out for his dad. Mark doesn't believe in ghosts but the idea of his dead son needing help unnerves him. He struggles to find a way to tell his ex-wife Chloe about Connie's claims, while grappling with his own grief, regret, and frustration. Meanwhile Chloe's maternal love and internal conflicts form a maelstrom that tempts Mark to abandon his and Allison's dreams of a shared future. Allison has a powerful secret of her own, but as Chloe and Brendan draw Mark back into the past he becomes deaf to the pleas of those who need him most in the present. In competent prose, Coake teases out the ways that people can be faithful--not only to spouses, but to the past, the future, and themselves. (June)

In several of the 16 inventive tales that make up Wyckoff's first collection of weird fiction, characters sidestep effortlessly--and, to their dismay, obliviously--from the world of everyday normality to dark and dangerous realms that about it. In "The Highwall Horror," a hole in an office cubicle's padding proves a portal to a dimension inhabited by insectoid entities. "Panorama" tells of a man who loses himself in an alternate reality painted by an artist friend. In "The Trucker's Story," movers packing up exhibits from a museum of oddities discover afterwards that each has unaccountably "lost" several years of his life. Though most of these stories skirt the surreal, a number are straightforward tales of horror, including "Raise Up the Serpent," in which children rescued from a Satanic cult prove not to be the innocent victims their benefactors take them for, and "Intermediary," a clever exercise in psychological horror. Although somewhat stilted in their telling, these tales are the work of a writer skilled at navigating the twists and turns of his unconventional horror themes. (June)

Poet Percer's fiction debut is an intimate portrait of an intelligent, tender girl with a deep wish to protect those she loves. With a depressed mother and an ailing father, Naomi Feinstein found comfort and peace in her only friend: Teddy. But when he disappears from her life when she is 15-years-old, Naomi is devastated. To distract herself from the loss, Naomi dives into her studies, desperate to get into Wellesley College and become a cardiac surgeon, a dream she's had since age eight when she witnessed her adored father suffer a near-fatal heart attack. Naomi is finally accepted at Wellesley, and she arrives with the hopes of finally having a social life, but finds herself awash in loneliness. When she rescues a fellow student from a freezing lake, the heroic act opens the doors to the clandestine Shakespeare Society, an exclusive all-women group with a passion for Shakespeare and secret rituals. It is within "Shakes" that Feinstein begins to let go of her past and form new friendships. But with these new relationships, Naomi finds herself entangled in a scandal, just as her understanding of her past comes crashing down around her. (May)

Trigiani's page-turning newest (after Viola in the Spotlight) is a sweeping saga that stretches across the World Wars, from Italy to America and back again. Ciro Lazzari and Enza Ravenelli grew up in nearby villages in Italy, but only meet when Ciro is hired to dig the grave for Enza's baby sister. Though they come from different backgrounds--Enza is the eldest daughter in a family of eight, while Ciro and his brother are raised by nuns after their father's death and mother's mental breakdown--the two nevertheless bond. But when Ciro catches a priest embracing a young girl, he is banished from the convent and must depart for New York City, where he apprentices as a shoemaker. Soon thereafter, Enza and her father journey to the U.S. to send money home to their struggling family. There, Enza becomes a talented seamstress and gets involved in the lushly detailed New York opera scene by making costumes for the Met. While in New York, Enza and Ciro reconnect, but Ciro is soon swept away to fight in WWI. When he returns and seeks Enza's hand in marriage, Enza, who is set to be betrothed to another man, must now weigh her possible futures: "A life with Ciro would be about family, a life with Vito would be about her." More than an epic romance, Trigiani's work pays homage to the tribulations of the immigrant experience, and the love that makes the journey and hardships worthwhile. (May)

Fifty-something Clover has long felt invisible to her husband and children, but when she wakes one morning to discover she can't see herself in the mirror, her fears become reality. Initially, she panics and worries that she is going blind, or even worse, insane--her son, Nick, and husband, Arthur, don't seem to notice. Clover soon realizes, however, that she isn't imagining her invisibility and her family had simply stopped seeing her years ago. When browsing the classified section of the newspaper, Clover finds an ad for an upcoming meeting: "Calling Invisible Women." She soon discovers a community of other middle-aged, invisible women, who inform Clover that their condition is caused by a reaction between three drugs made by Dexter-White pharmaceuticals: an antidepressant, a hormone replacement therapy drug, and a calcium supplement. Meeting more afflicted women inspires Clover to embrace her invisibility rather than hide it. She shadows her husband at work, polices the school buses to stop bullies, and even thwarts a bank robbery. With other women in the support group, Clover decides to take action against Dexter-White and demand justice for the drug interaction that caused their condition. While Ray's concept of middle-aged women feeling overlooked by society may not be new, the characters in this fast, fun read are empowered and proactive. (May)

In this sequel to 2002's The Beach House, Southern writer Monroe revisits South Carolina Lowcountry with another domestic tale built around the protection of sea turtles. At the end of her life, Olivia "Lovie" Rutledge looks back on the woman she was in 1974, revisiting her troubled marriage and her beloved Isle of Palms summer home, where a fascination with loggerhead turtles becomes the catalyst for changing her life. While Monroe adeptly captures the lives of women raised in the conservative South before the impact of the woman's movement and the sexual revolution, sentimentality and predictability dilute this potentially powerful story of love and redemption. Lovie and her abusive husband, Stratton, both come from strong Southern families with names reaching back into American history, but Stratton's cruelty maroons Lovie in an unhappy marriage with two beloved young children. Enter handsome Russell Bennett, hired to evaluate the environmental impact of pending real estate developments on local sea turtle conservation efforts, and the proverbial sparks fly. Lovie soon blossoms into a respected turtle expert, as well as the strong, intelligent, sexual woman she was meant to be, and their ensuing affair is no surprise. Monroe's personal experience as a board member of the Leatherback Trust and involvement with the Isle of Palms/Sullivan Island Turtle Team brings authenticity and a sense of wonder to the plight of the endangered sea turtles and their miraculous capacity for survival. (May)

Sarah is a Jew in ancient Persia, cousin of Nehemiah, and the daughter of the scribe Simeon, whose attention she wins only when she proves to possess literary abilities of her own. In this latest by Afshar (Pearl in the Sand), the Bible's ancient Near Eastern context is the setting for an engaging story of pluck, friendship, and faith. Sarah becomes a professional scribe and wins the affections of the queen only to find herself bound to marry a man she doesn't know and forced to give up the job that she loves. When she botches her wedding, and is abandoned to a rural estate, it would seem that all is lost. But Sarah finds wisdom and strength in the texts and traditions of her people, and knits together an unconventional community of support. Afshar's story challenges misconceptions about harem life and the roles of ancient women while introducing readers to a lovable heroine whose good heart wins out over bumbling ways to prove a boon to others, too. Agent: Wendy Lawton, Books and Such (May)

Adams's debut, the first of a trilogy, presents a dystopian future in which a fatal disease--the titular "White Horse--" has been unleashed on humanity. The novel opens with 30-year-old Zoe passing through "what used to be Italy" on her way to Greece. The story flips between "Date: Then" and "Date: Now" at head-spinning speed. Amid the whir of flashbacks and flashforwards, we learn that prior to the outbreak, Zoe, whose husband died in a car accident, went to work as a janitor at Pope Pharmaceuticals in an effort to assuage her grief. While employed at Pope, she receives a mysterious sealed jar, which may have something to do with the deadly epidemic. Rather than taking the jar to the police, she takes herself to therapist Nick Rose, with whom she longs to violate her doctor-patient relationship. Now, Zoe is heading to Greece in search of Nick, who has disappeared. Along the way, she collects an abused blind girl named Lisa, a threatening Swiss man, and a donkey. Early on, Zoe manages the rescue of Lisa from her abusers in a couple of scenes that are written with gut-wrenching verve, but as the corpses pile up, they overwhelm the novel. The jumps between "Now" and "Then" are so frequent that it's difficult to get involved in either narrative, and when the two threads converge and the puzzle pieces are all fitted together, the resulting picture strains credibility. (Apr.)

The final battle against the Void looms in this Gnostic mix-up as the champions of Existence, the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, travel the globe to seek the hidden Keys that will unleash magic and undo the Mundane Spell. Jack "Church" Churchill (from 2012's Jack of Ravens) and companions follow cryptic clues to confrontations with Norse, Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese gods, before taking a stroll off the Empire State Building through an invisible cloud maze. Faced with betrayals and the suspect reformation of nemesis Ryan Veitch, Church and his team have to decide who to sacrifice and who to save as the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders starts to overrun reality. Chadbourn again blends humor, horror, and mythology in a dimension-hopping epic that could use a few scorecards to tell players and teams apart, especially where scenes like those involving the Burning Man (as in the real annual counterculture festival) are undermined by muddled moralizing. Still, readers looking for hard-nosed heroes will enjoy a bunch who adopts the motto, "No Happy Endings." (Apr.)

This collection (first published in 1978) from the late Portuguese Nobel Prize for Literature-winner Saramago (The Cave) presents some of the author's early work. Here, the literary lion experiments with shorter, more inventive forms, and the results are lucid and impressive, if occasionally uneven. Political allegory and its frequent bedfellows (the absurd and the Kafkaesque) are easily discernible here--in the excellent and unsettling "Things," we follow an anxiety-ridden civil servant living in a dystopian state in which objects begin behaving ominously. The story, wonderfully reminiscent of Gogol's "The Nose," opens with a nurse who must administer to a settee that has been overheating--"He prepare[s] the syringe, suck[s] in the contents of a large ampoule and briskly [sticks] the needle into the settee." In "Embargo," a shortage of petrol and the attendant "panic, the hours of waiting, [and] the endless queues of cars" causes a man's vehicle to ruthlessly immobilize him, like Gregor Samsa in the dawn of his metamorphoses vainly attempting to roll over. Though not every story is successful--"The Chair"'s exhausting fragmentation and heavy-handed politics may test some readers' patience--Saramago's considerable talent is clearly manifest. (Apr. 25)