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The relationship between 19-year old Griff and her aging grandfather anchors a story that involves brothers and sisters, children and step-children, spouses and exes, marriages frayed to nothing, bonds stronger than bone built from love and loyalty. There’s the sheriff, a dying man who longs for an old love; Kenneth, a boy who longs not for his blood father but for the man who loves him as a father would; Paul, the young man who loves Griff; Marin, the sister who might again love Einer—and, at the novel’s heart, there are Griff and Einer, granddaughter and grandfather. These interrelated people, portrayed with unsentimental honesty and entwined by blissfully good writing, make Bone Fire the elegant, heartfelt, and incandescent novel that it is. Spragg is a wonder.

Global in scope, epic in size and style, and chock-full of characters who get into the readers’ blood, Cutting for Stone moves us from a mission hospital in Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City. As we turn page after frantic page in pursuit of the once-conjoined twins, now doctors, who are the protagonists, get to know their parents, adopted and actual, a childhood friend whose place in the tale is central, we sink into this big lush novel and never want to surface. Steeped in both medicine and history, Verghese’s latest book not only entertains but also marks new territory, re-framing the world in the process. Imagine a novel that combines the story-telling skill and the social and cultural acuity of Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry with the urgent imagination of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and you have some idea of the magnitude of the genius of Cutting for Stone—it will surely go down as one of the major books of our time. Note: Abraham Verghese will be at TKE Thursday, January 28, 7 p.m.

Adam, a prepossessing young scientist who has come to London to apply for a job he has every chance of getting, becomes a murder suspect because of his well-intentioned attempt to return a case to a stranger. After seeing the corpse, Adam runs. So begins a saga that takes an innocent man into the netherworld of the homeless and the even darker world of corporate skullduggery. Boyd, author of the literary and heart-stopping thriller Restless and the remarkable novel Any Human Heart, is a literary treasure who has won nearly every literary prize Great Britain has to offer. In this stunning mystery he manages to lay bare human character even while he dissects society from its highest reaches to its depths. Brilliant and impossible to put down.

This broken world we live in is fragmented in as many ways as we can think of to use the word. Community is the opposite of fragmentation and whether observing a clan of prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, a village in Rwanda torn and bloodied beyond comprehension, or hundreds of seemingly unrelated tessera waiting to become whole, Terry Tempest Williams manages to find meaning where none seemed possible in this brilliant and timely book. Her unadorned presentation lends power to the unthinkable, dignity to individuals and to whole communities. No one can really make sense of our ragtag population of animals nearing extinction, humans who react with incredible savagery one minute, kindness the next, but Terry Tempest Williams comes as close as anyone could.