Knopf

Much has been written about George Washington, but Fraser’s examination of the marriage between George and Martha is unique. Their decades-long marriage was punctuated by revolution, the creation of a new country and personal tragedy. Through the years their love and admiration for each other was apparent to all who knew them. Fraser has done a commendable job of revealing how they leaned on each other; whether it was domestic issues or a recalcitrant Continental Congress, George and Martha looked to each other for advice and sustenance. Fraser’s book is a revealing look at both the Mother and Father and the Nation. – Barbara Hoagland

Annie, an aspiring chef, finds the perfect gift for her former lover. It is a small painting found in a dusty junk shop. The painting, in the style of Watteau, eventually becomes the center of a major sale at a London auction house and attracts the attention of the international rich who are prepared to fight for it. As a chef Annie is an artist and is hired by the rich and famous to create themed dinners, but her knowledge of art is limited. She doesn’t realize that others are looking at her not as a cook but as the owner of an important art work and are plotting devious means of acquiring the piece. In the course of verifying the work, she meets a young guide at the Wallace Collection who falls in love with her and leads her through the maze of art scholars and greedy dealers who compete for ownership with whatever means available. The painting itself is also a narrator within the book and reveals its travels from France to Russia and into the world of Nazi Germany and stolen art. Author Hannah Rothschild offers a fictional look behind the curtains of the art world which can be read as a piece of crime fiction or a comment on the business of art. – Wendy Foster Leigh

Oliver Orme is both a successful and a failed artist. He's made enough money to return to his hometown with a beautiful young wife and buy the big house on the hill, but he has stopped painting, leaving him a bit listless. Oliver is also an admitted kleptomaniac—he likes to steal things that will certainly be missed, like one half of a set of ceramic figurines or a special book of poetry or, worst of all, his friend's wife. His muse gone and his philandering discovered, Orme becomes the bête noire of his small-town coterie, so he sits down to write his narrative as a way to hold together a life that seems to be unraveling before his eyes. It's a subtle novel, but it's classic Banville; it has a lot to say about art, love, deception, family, class and the shiftiness of human relationships. – Kenneth Loosli

Following last fall's reissue of his seminal In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, William Gass returns with a new collection of short fiction that looks at how we see things and, more provocatively, how things see us. Some of these stories are narrated by objects—in one story, the narrator is a folding chair in a men's barber shop and it shares its impressions of its fellow chairs and the people who sit on them; in another, the narrator is the piano from Casablanca who dishes about the actors' on-set drama and its life as a film prop. Displaying Gass' usual blend of the profound and the profane, Eyes shows he still has one of the best imaginations in the business. – Kenneth Loosli

Murakami’s newest release, a paired binding of his novellas Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, is actually not new at all. In fact, these two stories are the first that Murakami ever published in Japan, kick-starting his writing career. Together they make up the first two parts of the legend of an unnamed narrator and his friend, known only as “The Rat,” which is completed in Murakami’s later novel, A Wild Sheep Chase. They comprise a somewhat belated coming-of-age tale about two men in their late youth coming to terms with issues of love, loneliness, and mortality. In true Murakami form, they also delve further than most authors would dare into the depths of human emotion in a way that is at times uncomfortable but enlightening throughout. Unpublished in English heretofore, these are an absolute must-read for Murakami fans.  – Noble Williamson

Following last fall's reissue of his seminal In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, William Gass returns with a new collection of short fiction that looks at how we see things and, more provocatively, how things see us. Some of these stories are narrated by objects - in one story, the narrator is a folding chair in a men's barber shop and it shares its impressions of its fellow chairs and the people who sit on them; in another story, the narrator is the piano from Casablanca who dishes about the actors' on-set drama and its life as a film prop. Displaying Gass' usual blend of the profound and the profane, Eyes shows he still has one of the best imaginations in the business. — Kenneth Loosli