First-time novelist Ted Thompson delves into his native suburban Connecticut for The Land of Steady Habits (Little, Brown), the saga of Anders Hill.

After two novels chronicling familial and political upheaval in her native Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie goes abroad for her new book, Americanah (Knopf). The author's fiercely clever stand-in, Ifemelu, follows the racial indignities she encounters as a college-educated African immigrant in the US with an uneasy return to Nigeria.

Writer Stephanie Lacava always had fantastical yearnings, but her collection of essays An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris is an untidy fairytale of self-sabotaged romance.

Thirty-one-year-old author Joshua Cohen writes jumpy, post-everything babble, the kind where one story’s down-and-out drug dealer ponders the future of campaign finance reform.