The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

The pathos exhibited in Gin Phillips acclaimed debut novel, 2008's The Well and the Mine, is again on display in this sensitive story of a 36-year-old archeologist, Ren, whose life was altered by the death of her brother. Even long after his passing, Ren's brother appears to her, sometimes to sing to her at night. Now, in the midst of an important dig, two ghosts from an ancient culture emerge to teach Ren about life, loss, and love.

In his hilarious and moving tale The Common Reader, Alan Bennett deliciously imagined England's monarch as a woman whose mind is set free by a surprising turn to reading. Now, in this pair of novellas, the writer turns his unmatched pen onto the lives of  two women caught up in decidedly less literary concerns. Wicked -- and insightful -- fun.

Pity the poor stage mother, living out her dreams through her put-upon offspring. In his first work of fiction, poet and memoirist Alan Shapiro brings us an archetypal doozy: Growing up, Miriam Bluestein imagined her glamorous future on the stage. Those ambitions faded with the arrival of her family, but they are revived when her son, Ethan, shows talent as a performer. Miriam's single-minded drive on her disinterested son's behalf tears her family apart: readers get front-row seats for this arresting drama.

Who doesn't love a novel in which a doppelganger plays a central role? Filmmaker and novelist Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) here introduces two boys growing up on the opposite side of the proverbial tracks in 1960s Dublin. One of them, not insignificantly, lives next door to the former home of Dracula scribe Bram Stoker. This masterfully structured tale is both a gothic thriller and an intimate musing on childhood and loss. It's also, it turns out, much more.

In this extraordinary debut, Carter Sickels mines the beautiful, damaged landscape of West Virginia for fictional treasure. Sickels' characters are often trapped by greed and addiction, but for Cole Freeman, a drug-dealing nursing-home aide whose family land is being threatened by a big mining concern, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

The pieces of Bosnia-Herzegovinia-born author's dazzling, dynamic debut combine to create a multilayered picture of the Bosnian War, as seen through the eyes of two Muslim teens with dramatically different fates. The novel's truths are slippery and shifting, keeping readers on their toes, but Prcic's grip on the deeper truths of war and survival is unshakeable.

On the run from history and the modern world, Solomon Kugel flees with his family to rural New York -- but history follows, in the form of an unlikely figure in the attic. Shalom Auslander follows his blazingly funny and bracingly honest memoir, The Foreskin’s Lament, with an irreverent and unforgettable novel.

This sensuous Italian historical novel, set in the early and mid-1800s, follows headstrong Agata Padellani, whose family falls on hard times after the death of her father. Agata is compelled to join a convent, dashing her hopes for marriage. There, she passes the time reading novels sent to her by an English sea captain for whom she eventually discovers she has feelings that threaten to unsettle her life inside the convent. Readers will be seduced by Simonetta Agnelo Hornby's lush romance.

In this sensitive, subtle and unsettling trio of novellas, the acclaimed Anita Desai tells stories of people striving to move beyond the stagnant circumstances of their lives.  These are heartbreakingly honest explorations of how dreams can be thwarted -- and how hope endures. Delicate and deeply affecting.

Marie Lu's debut young-adult novel is a gripping, gritty, dystopian story of two teenagers, wealthy prodigy June and wanted criminal Day. The author's sharp eye for detail makes the militaristic "Republic" (once the western U.S.) they live in seem all too real, and with fearless command of plot and pace she delivers a smashing opener of a new series. Perfect for readers who have devoured Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games.

One of Europe’s most celebrated writers of fiction for young readers, Gianni Rodari (1920-1980) presents a fable for all ages about privilege, terror, magic, and mortality. In the quest for eternal life, billionaire Baron Lamberto hires servants to chant his name day and night. But when criminals lay seige to his island villa, hilarity ensues in a story that retains the wonder and delight of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince.

This debut novel by Norwegian writer Kjersti A. Skomsvold tells the Kafkaesque tale of an elderly woman who finds herself upon the point of disappearing due to the mundanity of her old age, and who decides to attempt to rescue herself through whimsy and spontaneity. Alternately bleak and shining, the tale ponders if it's ever too late to make a fresh start. A B&N Discover Great New Writers selection.

Nancy Jensen's heartrending saga of two siblings, Mabel and Bertie, who go their separate ways in 1927 following a suicide and a bitter betrayal, astutely and affectingly explores the way family secrets can reverberate through generations. This is a provocative debut novel from a talented writer inspired by her own family history.

A romantic tale of intrigue as stylish as a bespoke gown. The epic story of Sira Quiroga, a young seamstress who reinvents herself, first as a couturier and then as a spy, is woven against the vivid backdrops of Madrid and Morocco during World War II. This captivating first novel by Spanish writer and professor Maria Dueñas is already a runaway bestseller in Europe.

Perhaps most famous for her debut novel, The Sunne in Splendour, about Richard III, Penman now turns her attentions further back to that king's namesake, Richard I, the Lionheart. Dividing her plot between affairs of state and heart in England and Richard's daring battlefield exploits in the Holy Land, Penman conjures up a tangible world both alien and familiar, where cultures clashed and larger-than-life personalities turned the wheel of history.

Set in the working-class outskirts of Oslo, circa 1961, Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen's subtle, captivating coming-of-age novel tells the story of a young boy, Finn, whose life changes dramatically when a previously unknown half-sister comes to live with him and his mother in their cramped apartment. Soon they're joined by a lodger who further upends Finn's world. A poignant, painstaking exploration of the mysteries of the heart.

An overdose delivers the 13-year-old narrator of Chuck Palahniuk's new novel straight to perdition, where she finds a veritable Breakfast Club of cohorts (cheerleader, jock, nerd, punk rocker) to cavort with in the maze of eternity. By turns hilarious and disturbing, the author's twisted vision of Hell isn't filled with flames and brimstone so much as dandruff and toenail clippings in a hilarious, impious reinterpretation of Dantean tropes. 

Chef Donia Bijan, whose family fled from Iran during the Islamic revolution and settled in San Francisco in 1978, mixes memoir and recipes in perfect proportion as she tells her family's history, from her parents' struggle to acclimate to their new country to her own culinary awakening and accomplishments. Sweet, warm, and full of flavor.

Best known for his mysteries featuring Louisiana P.I. Dave Robicheaux, James Lee Burke has also written an electrifying series of thrillers about taciturn West Texas lawman Hackberry Holland. Feast Day of Fools puts the sheriff on the trail of a brutal desert killing. But the path is beset with danger and ethical dilemmas -- not to mention the psychopath with the machine gun.

Helen Oyeyemi's vulpine tale finds frustrated novelist St. John Fox entertaining his supernatural Muse in the form of an all too flesh-and-blood woman named Mary, whose attempts to instruct and enlighten her protégé engender marital discord with Daphne, Fox's mortal wife. Thorne Smith and Jasper Fforde might look approvingly on this intrusion of literature and goddesses into life.

British novelist Esther Freud (Hideous Kinky) turns her unflinching (but not uncaring) gaze on the life of the young actor -- with all its vanity and passion, lofty dreams and crushing blows. The author's talent is such that you'll care more about her three main characters, who meet as drama students and find varying levels of success, than you ever thought possible.

When his father's ancestry is called into question during China's Cultural Revolution, a boy must leave his home on the shore and live among the boat people. Su Tong (Raise the Red Lantern) won the 2009 Asian Man Literary Award for this poignant coming-of-age tale in which a young man learns to navigate innocence and experience, land and sea, shame and pride.

French author Alice Zeniter is no late bloomer, publishing her first novel at age 16. Now 22, she brings us the story of Alice and Mad, two childhood friends of different backgrounds (she is white and French; he is neither) preparing to marry in order to prevent one of them from being deported. A revealing take on race and youthful rebellion, loyalty and personal growth from a lively new voice in contemporary French fiction.

Martha Southgate's fluidly composed novel follows Josie, an African-American marine biologist who, despite her successes, cannot break free from the ties that tether her to her family, struggling with generations of addiction. This powerful narrative earns its oceanic themes, as it washes over the reader with tidal force.

As a gifted piano student, Konstantin struggles to hold on to beauty and bravado among the bleakness and brutality of late-Cold War Bulgaria, where his talents are rigidly cultivated even as his independence is stifled. Nikolai Grozni tells the semi-autobiographical story of a place and time that, like childhood or a moving passage of music, exists now only in memory.

Reissued now in paperback after her prizewinning novel Lord of Misrule brought the author well-deserved notice, this 1999 novel by Jaimy Gordon is the solemnly hilarious, off-kilter tale of Ursula Koderer, lover of "girlgoyles" and rebellious sanitarium patient. Ursula's distinctive voice draws readers in to wonderfully wild three-ring circus of psychiatry and lust.

A young woman raised in the foster care system makes her first shaky foray into adulthood and struggles to learn the language of the heart. Standing out among the season’s new offerings, Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s debut novel is a gorgeously written, absolutely absorbing, and deeply affecting story -- as enticing (and thorny) as a freshly plucked bouquet.

At the time of her death in 2010, beloved author Beryl Bainbridge was working on this rollicking tale of a young Englishwoman who, in 1968, joins a man on a cross-country road trip through a turbulent America. Bainbridge's long-time friend and editor, Brendan King, picked up where the author left off, based on her manuscript and notes. This farewell offers us just what readers of novels like The Bottle Factory Outing have longed for: Bainbridge's sparkling wit, nuanced characters, and an engrossing story.

The unsettling ambiance that still surrounds the death of Princess Diana is distilled down into the person of one imagined spectator in this tenth novel from French author Laurence Cossé, who posits the existence of an enigmatic female witness to the infamous crash. How one woman's life is upended by this chance happening forms the basis of this suspenseful and surprising page-turner that evokes the works of David Cronenberg and J. G. Ballard.