Moonface / Angela Balcita

Thousands of feet up in the air, smack dab in the middle of the most violent turbulence I have yet to experience, I realized how bad it had gotten only when the elderly woman next to me actually yelped out loud in fear. Though a nervous flyer, I had been too engrossed in Moonface (Harper Perennial, $13.99) to notice. That’s how visceral the plight of the young couple who star in this beautiful, lyrical memoir is—your own real life woes will seem silly by comparison, perilous ice storms and supernatural wind gusts included.

This is not to suggest that this is one of those woe-is-me self-indulgence feasts that so often characterize the contemporary memoir. Though the narrative covers the writer’s battle with kidney disease (she goes through three kidney transplants in 220 pages), there is never a doubt from the first page to the last that this is, at its heart, a love story (pun intended). The author’s husband, Charlie, gives her his kidney early in their courtship, and while this is a true knight-in-shining move, the couple’s playful banter, fierce loyalty, and a shared sense of adventure that takes them across the country prove even more remarkable in the end.

Yes, this is a memoir about living with an illness and overcoming obstacles, but it’s also a stunning portrait of true, fairytale-esque love in the twenty-first century, complete with all the quirks, pitfalls, and empowering trends that define our twenty-something generation.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Harper Perennial

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks / Rebecca Skloot

In December, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown, $26.00) made almost every best-of-the-year list I looked at, and has maintained a healthy presence on the New York Times bestseller list for months and months. It’s unavoidable—despite its aggressively psychedelic jacket and somewhat depressing story, this book has legs.

I first saw the book in bound galley form. In an attempt to drum up internal publicity for Henrietta, a stack had been placed in our office kitchen, free for the taking. I was intrigued. I grabbed one. It stayed on my list well after its publication, beckoning but as yet unread, until I finally gave it to my sister for a flight home. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get another.”

I did, and am I ever glad. Skloot’s account isn’t perfect—her writing feels a little too loose at times, and the reader is in for a couple of upsetting surprises at the book’s close—but I couldn’t put it down. Often extremely moving, Henrietta is a story of injustice whose greatest payoff comes in small moments of generosity to the Lacks family. Doctors who explain, in simplified and accessible terms, what a gene is; an archivist moved nearly to tears by the family's plight: these are the people who deal with the Lackses on human terms. In scenes like this, Skloot almost restores our faith in the kindness of strangers.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Crown

Around My French Table / Dorie Greenspan

A good cookbook is more than just interesting recipes and pretty pictures; it seduces you into the mindset of a great culinary magician at work. Dorie Greenspan's charming, gorgeously crafted book Around My French Table (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40.00) manages to do just that: she lures you into her kitchen, into her perspective on French cuisine, and you immediately find your mouth watering.

After getting the French fundamentals right—gougères and crème brûlée make requisite appearances—Greenspan explores the French flavor pantheon, incorporating African, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Middle Eastern influences. She describes each recipe as if it were gastronomically predestined: on a mozzarella, tomato, and strawberry salad, "As ripe and sweet as they should be, the fruits should retain some of their characteristic acidity. If they're ripe and right, then you won't need even a micro splash of vinegar on the salad." She respects her ingredients, but she’s also got a healthy dose of whimsy--any chef who serves smoked salmon blini on tiny waffles gets extra points from me.

Even if this is French, this isn't the France of Julia Child: Greenspan doesn’t overdo it on the butter and cream. Nevertheless, the food always feels indulgent; after her mustard tart, chicken tagine with sweet potatoes and prunes, endives with apples and grapes, and her “pumpkin stuffed with everything good” (everything good = bread, Gruyère, garlic, bacon, and scallions), you’re not even a little bit deprived. When it comes from Dorie Greenspan, every dish turns out to be a glorious mouthful.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self / Danielle Evans

Short story collections get a bad rap. Notoriously bad sellers, even critically acclaimed collections often sit on book stores’ shelves gathering dust. My heart always does a small, happy leap when I see a collection break this curse, because the publishing world would be a sad place without them—I’m a firm believer that the aha moment in perfectly executed short story can blow a reader’s hair back with more gusto than the most epic of literary novels, its quiet efficiency and precision making the emotional payoff all the more remarkable.

And how perfectly executed are the eight tales in Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead, $25.95). A graduate from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Evans has already garnered some serious review attention (the book was featured in New York Magazine's Fall preview with the claim that it “threatens to become the season’s hot young MFA discovery”). Even before this debut her remarkable talent earned notable accolades for so young a writer—her fiction debuted in The Paris Review when she was only twenty-three and another story in the collection appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008.

Evans more than lives up to these honors. Her prose is elegant but straightforward and fluid and the points she makes are wise and profound but derived from believably ordinary events. Ostensibly things haven’t changed much during many of these stories’ climaxes, but we can feel the difference in the aftermath as readily as if a tornado had just blown through. Every sigh, every silence, every eye role or snarky comment speaks volumes. Each of the stories has a black or biracial protagonist, and while the non white experience in America is certainly explored here with wit and candor, factors universal to every person’s growing up and finding his or her way in the world prove equally relevant to the stories’ outcomes. There’s as much to learn and experience here as there is to relate to.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Riverhead

The Cookbook Collector / Allegra Goodman

I spent most of Labor Day weekend on a dock on Lake George, leisurely making my way through Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector (Dial Press, $26.00). This novel is packed with rich detail and has something for everyone—well, for everyone who has an interest in the dot-com boom, rare books, environmentalism, Berkeley, or cooking, to name a few of the many topics that Goodman touches on here.

A few moments—an inevitable but somewhat inappropriate love affair, personal disaster on 9/11, or Goodman's insistence on the beauty and delicacy of her protagonists, sisters named Jess and Emily—might make readers squeamish, but the book’s many pleasures are likely to leave a greater impression. If there’s one thing that Goodman clearly understands, it’s the relationship between passion and material objects. Appreciation for the finer things in life (an elegant house furnished in glowing wood, a perfectly ripe peach, the eponymous cookbook collection and its mysteries) is present throughout, as are the current events and trends of the 90’s and 00’s. These two foci, in fact, parallel the interests of Jess and Emily—the former a graduate student in philosophy, the latter a Silicon Valley CEO.

If you’ve been longing to escape into a beautifully realized material world or the distinctly more harrowing realm of technology and financial growth over the last twenty years, The Cookbook Collector is precisely the novel for you.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Dial Press

The Possessed / Elif Batuman

Smart and very, very funny, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.00 paperback original) is well worth a read. Batuman has an ear for dialogue—and the luck to have found herself, repeatedly, in unexpectedly zany situations. While academia doesn’t lack for characters, Batuman seems to have stumbled upon some of the most excessively strange of these.

The best chapters in the book are the introduction and Batuman’s essays “Babel in California” and “Who Killed Tolstoy?” The introduction sees Batuman teaching English and judging leg contests (read it) in Hungary after her freshman year in college. In the first essay, the Stanford Slavic department finds itself suddenly bound up in the tensions and eccentricities of Isaak Babel’s surviving family; in the latter, Batuman attends a conference at Leo Tolstoy’s estate, weaving through the whole chapter her cast-aside theory that Tolstoy was poisoned and her attempt to regain her lost luggage:

“Oh, it’s you,” sighed the clerk. “Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?”

Batuman’s humor, often good-natured, can also be biting at times—it’s then that she seems to prey on the weak—and the final chapter is an unworthy, unfocused conclusion to an otherwise fine book. But these are both small quibbles. The Possessed will make you laugh and read aloud, and when Batuman talks about the literature itself, she does so beautifully.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Little Bee / Chris Cleave

Talk about coming late to the party: Chris Cleave's Little Bee (Simon & Schuster, $14.00 paperback) made its resounding critical splash in 2009. When a book is much-hyped my instinct is to avoid it, for reasons I can't always fathom. But I've been watching Little Bee pick up a second wind in paperback this year, and when a copy fell into my hand I decided the gods were sending me a message.

I have not cried this much while reading a book for a very long time. It took me two nights to read Little Bee, during which I entered the early hours of the morning clutching a fistful of tear-sodden tissues. Everything about it -- the cover, the blurb on the back, the glowing praise from People and O Magazine -- suggests a story that will ultimately resolve itself through an affirmation of humanity's innate goodness. But instead of presenting a cleanly wrapped emotional package of love triumphing over sorrow and despair, Chris Cleave ruthlessly, albeit beautifully, skewers your heart.

This is a powerful, genuine novel that more than earns its considerable critical accolades. If you haven't yet considered it seriously, I urge you to pony up for the paperback, but prepare yourself; it is only for the strong of soul, and while quick to read it is difficult to forget.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Simon & Schuster