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In Radiant Daughter, award-winning novelist Patricia Grossman follows a Czech-American family for twenty-seven years, beginning in suburban Chicago in 1969 and ending in Brooklyn, in seaside “Little Odessa,” in 1996. Though the novel begins as a traditional assimilation story—immigrant parents, “native” children, and the conflicts one might expect—it evolves into a highly particular and harrowing tale surrounding the descent of Elise Blazek, the family’s brightest star. Radiant Daughter is also a story of translation—between generations, from the Czech of Irena and Stepan, to the “American” of the children, and finally to the Russian that is Elise’s academic specialty.

 Radiant Daughter explores all that is human, from the most self-destructive behavior to the highest forms of commitment and self-sacrifice. Even at her lowest moments, Irena never loses her fierce love for the daughter who has traveled so utterly beyond her reach. For Elise, the future will always be complicated: a precarious balance between periods of insight, bursts of accomplishment, and the abyss of her illness.

Reminiscent, on the one hand, of the meticulously constructed mother-daughter dynamic in Carol Shields’s Unless and, on the other, of the anarchic real-life experience of Big and Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens, Grossman’s moving narrative breaks new ground in exploring a dangerous turn in the complex bond between a mother and her adult child.

Three generations of the Demas family face the ups and downs of the twentieth century after their fathers leave the coal mines that drew them from Greece to America, become wool growers and small businessmen, and Americanize their Demopoulos name. As the years pass, the family accumulates untidy lives and tragedies. Parents seek to keep their children tightly bound by old-country customs, to arrange marriages, and to foist their views of women’s inferiority on their daughters. Lia Papastamos in particular, child of a forced marriage between her Greek father and Amerikanidha mother, pulls away from the stifling burden of family tradition and interference, but she and her husband must contend with the decline that time, synthetics, and changing tastes bring to a once-thriving sheep business.

RayAnne’s next adventure takes our intrepid heroine, haunted by her beloved grandmother’s death, to New Zealand to film a new season of her all-women fishing talk show

What stage of grief is it when your grandmother’s ghost keeps popping up on your electronic devices? Denial? For RayAnne that seems to be the stage for launching the second season of Fishing!—in New Zealand. Ready or not, she is taking public television’s first all-women fishing talk show on the road, putting the cold Minnesota winter in the rearview mirror—which, it turns out, Gran is haunting, too.

After a challenging first season, and RayAnne’s serendipitous ascension to host, there’s a lot at stake. With camera-wielding twins Rongo and Rangi along as crew and tour guides, RayAnne and her indefatigable producer Cassi set out across New Zealand in search of noteworthy women who fish: a skipjack boat captain navigating sexist harbors; a writer of historical suffragette fiction, which is, apparently, a thing; a reclusive Māori octogenarian who ties fishing flies for dignitaries. Their stories, and a good dose of the country’s history, are almost enough to take the edge off RayAnne’s homesickness and grief, to say nothing of jetlag—and it doesn’t hurt to discover a bird dog who fishes, an anti-fashionista, a pair of sisters fishing their way through recovery, and . . . a Hobbit? Meanwhile, the romantic and family entanglements she left behind at home haven’t exactly come untangled in her absence.

Those who met RayAnne in Fishing!, Sarah Stonich’s first outing with the intrepid, accidental talk-show host, will encounter familiar and unexpected pleasures in her latest antics—and a story whose lighthearted surface and surprising depths will charm readers who now find her for the first time.

When he’s approached by a recruiter at a boxing tournament, troubled teenager Charlie Dale sees an opportunity. By enlisting in the United States Marine Corps, he can leave his unhappy childhood behind, transform himself wholesale, and finally find a place to belong. Stationed at a remote base in the Mojave Desert, he soon finds hard training and vicious hazing, brotherhood and a future. But when a single mistake means his unit deploys to Afghanistan without him, Charlie is cast adrift. How will he rebuild his life in the shadow of a war?

Drawing on the author’s experience as a Marine Corps infantry officer, Remedial Action interrogates the myths we tell ourselves about military service through the lens of one young man’s coming of age. Most war stories focus on how servicemembers change; Remedial Action instead asks what parts of them endure.

When restaurateur Liliane “Lili” Chabrier and her cook, Ricky, discover a crashed plane while hiking in the mountains near Lake Tahoe, they stumble into a criminal enterprise that reaches far beyond the kitchen of Lili’s upscale Reno-area restaurant, the Bistro Bellevue.

Unaware that Ricky has taken a fortune in cartel money from the wreckage, Lili returns to the restaurant and the demanding rhythms of fine dining. But someone is watching her. As suspicion, violence, and betrayal close in, Lili must navigate a dangerous world of money laundering and organized crime while trying to protect the restaurant and the people she loves. Her growing relationship with Mac, a veteran of the Middle East wars, offers an unexpected source of strength as the danger escalates.

Fast-paced and atmospheric, Run, Chef, Run offers an insider’s view of the high-pressure world of fine dining, from the controlled chaos of a professional kitchen to the intricate codes of behavior that restaurant guests rarely see. Rich descriptions of food and the daily lives of restaurant workers give the novel a vivid sense of place, while Lili’s sharp observations and resilience drive a story of crime, loyalty, and survival.