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Teenager Nikki Maxwell chronicles her "not-so-fabulous life" as the new girl at a fancy school in Rachel Renee Russell's Dork Diaries series. Read along with NPR's book club for young readers, and send along your questions for the author.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is a debut novel about a sharp and assured young man living among young, aspiring literary types in Brooklyn. Book critic Maureen Corrigan says never before has a novel made her feel so grateful to be middle-aged.

Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone is a sleuthing novel that was ahead of its time.

Najla Said's father, Edward Said, was an outspoken professor and prominent voice for Palestinian independence. Yet Najla's life felt less grounded. Growing up as a Palestinian-Lebanese-American in New York City, she balanced competing cultures and multiple lives, searching for a place to fit in.

Maggie Shipstead mocks the pretensions of New England WASPs, while Jessica Lott executes unexpected riffs on the student-professor relationship plot. Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two stellar fiction newcomers.

When she was 24, Piper Kerman dated a woman who was part of a drug smuggling ring. Years later, after being named as part of that ring, Kerman served time in a federal prison and at one point shared a cell with her former girlfriend. Her memoir of that experience inspired the Netflix series.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez' new novel, The Sound of Things Falling, is a sophisticated vision of the way the Colombian drug trade unravels lives. Reviewer Marcela Valdes says Vasquez shies away from stock drug war imagery in favor of a quieter, more sophisticated approach.

Colonel Mustard, in the ballroom, with the ... Gouda? You may not expect a wheel of cheese to be at the center of a devious plot, but Michael Paterniti's The Telling Room manages to do just that.

Charlie Huston's new thriller is a fast-paced and action-packed tale of a retired assassin who rejoins the game to protect a roboticist as she tracks a computer virus. But reviewer Alan Cheuse says "the action comes bracketed with a load of rhetoric," which ultimately put him to sleep.

An autobiographical exploration of fatherhood and faith, Jeffrey Brown's A Matter of Life is his most personal work to date — which says a lot, given the confessional cartoonist's revealing past works. Reviewer Jody Arlington finds this new book both wise and hilarious.