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Young-ha Kim's latest thriller, Your Republic Is Calling You, is about a North Korean spy living covertly in Seoul for two decades — when he's suddenly called to return to Pyongyang. Critic John Powers says the suspenseful novel offers a gripping look inside modern Korean culture.

As summer ends, it's time for brainy reads you may have missed in hardcover. Wolf Hall, set in the court of Henry VIII, won the 2009 Booker Prize. Former nun Karen Armstrong takes on the atheists in The Case for God. Barbara Ehrenreich pops the bubble of American optimism with her usual wit — and more.

In 1975, the Lutz family moved into their dream home on Long Island — and barely lasted a year. Jay Anson chronicles their paranormal experiences in a 1977 pulp horror classic. Josh Kilmer-Purcell says Amityville's hyperbole and hackneyed plotlines keep his mind off of his own anxieties.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's elegant style is out of date — but not out of touch. In The Woman with the Bouquet, the French writer's sparse, anachronistic explorations of love create a passionate, timeless collection that will make readers wonder "what if ...?"

There's been plenty of buzz about Jonathan Franzen's much-anticipated fourth novel ever since President Obama accepted an advance readers copy for his vacation in Martha's Vineyard. Critic Heller McAlpin says inflated expectations aside, she found Freedom to be a surprisingly moving and hopeful epic.

The Bard is rolling in his grave — and according to novelist Anne Fortier, that's a good thing. Her retelling of Romeo and Juliet is a contemporary fairy tale mixing medieval and modern mystery — a time-shifting maze that unravels the unknown story of the feuding families in fair Verona.

Abigail Adams said that "simple truth" was George Washington's "greatest eulogy," and Ron Chernow proves it in his captivating new biography. Chernow keeps his distance from the founding father's mythology, and instead examines his foibles and triumphs.

Mark Feldstein's gripping new account of the long-running rivalry between Richard Nixon and columnist Jack Anderson examines what is likely the all-time low point in American journalist-politician relations. His analysis of their relationship is even-handed, and hard to put down.

In her new book, Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins, and Other Nasties, Lesley M.M. Blume creates a world in which trolls use bones for money and dwarfs dig rubies out of the Lincoln Tunnel.

Mark Schatzker, a lifelong steak lover, was disappointed in the steaks he was eating. So Schatzker set off on a quest to find the very best piece of beef in the world — a quest that took him from feedlots in Texas, to French cave paintings of prehistoric cattle, to the Argentine pampas.