Matthew Polly.  American Shaolin:  Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks,

and the Legend of Iron Crotch

Conn Iggulden.  Genghis:  Birth of an Empire

Iggulden, the acclaimed author of the Emperor novels, which chronicle the life of Julius Caesar, now offers an account of the life of Genghis Khan.

Aryn Kyle.  The God of Animals

Sixth grader Alice Winston is having a rough year. Her older sister elopes. Her depressed mother won't get out of bed. Her father struggles to save their faltering horse ranch. And Alice's school pal drowns. Caught in a dizzying adult world, Alice soon faces challenges that threaten to shatter her dreams and her family.

Ishmael Beah.  A Long Way Gone:  Memoirs of a  Boy Soldier

This is how wars are fought now by children, hopped up on drugs, and wielding AK-47s. In the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived.

Lloyd Jones.  Mister Pip

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with almost everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations.  While artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape.

Patrick Rothfuss.  The Name of the Wind

This powerful debut novel follows the story of Kvothe, the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen.

Thomas Maltman.  The Night Birds

A mysterious aunt named Hazel, confined for years in an asylum, arrives bearing with her secrets about the now banished Dakota Indians whom everyone else wants to forget. Their family's relationship with these onetime neighbors and friends has shaped her life, and theirs. Her arrival will propel the story into the past, as far back as the Senger family's initial settlement in and later flight from slave-holding Missouri, a place of superstition and folklore. Interweaving Grimms' Tales, the abolitionist movement, country healers and water-witches, as well as Dakota ethnography and heritage, she tells the story of their epic journey.

Lisa Lutz.  The Spellman Files

Meet Izzy Spellman, a 28-year-old private eye working for her familys investigative business--a family that puts the fun in dysfunctional--in this irresistible, laugh-out-loud debut novel.