What do we know to be true—and why do we believe it? In a teasing, hypnotic inquiry into memory and imagination, über-talented Julavits gives us Mary Veal, a 16-year-old schoolgirl who was abducted and ravished—or was she? When the shrink hired to chip away at Mary's supposed amnesia writes an infamous book proposing that she concocted the whole shebang, the girl's chilly mother approves his thesis, preferring her daughter to be a liar rather than a rape victim. Then, in adulthood, Mary returns home for her mother's funeral and catapults into an unsettling reinvestigation of her past. Told in three alternating realities—Mary's, her shrink's, and a "what might have happened" section—Julavits's dreamy and disturbing novel reveals itself like a Chinese puzzle box of mysterious jolts and delights.

Forget a year in Provence or life in a Tuscan village. As this poetic, funny memoir shows, you don't have to be a well-heeled expatriate to change your life and find your true self. Divorcée Catherine Goldhammer has a thinning bank account and a 12-year-old daughter. She moves from their suburban enclave to a rustic house by the sea and, to engage her daughter, buys a passel of chicks. Both fall madly in love with the birds; as they care for them, their lives begin to take flight among the coops and home renovations. In the pecking order of memoirs, this honest and hopeful book, full of chicken lore (chickens can fly!) and warm ruminations on the nature of home and happiness, truly rules the roost.

Set in Montreal's seedy red-light district, this fierce, humorous shocker illuminates the story of a childhood gone heart-wrenchingly wrong and the guts, grace, and luck it takes to survive it. Precocious narrator Baby is on the cusp of 13, tending her drugged-out, volatile dad when he's home, then bouncing from foster homes to juvenile detention to life on the city's meaner streets. O'Neill shows how a smart, sensitive dreamer like Baby can still find glamour among the outcasts, and how her little criminal acts can be both payback for the wrongs done to her and part of a dazzling new persona. Writing in a mind-bendingly original voice, the author uncovers the yearning heart beneath her character's gritty bravado, even as Baby aches for the comforts of the childhood she never got to have.