In The Crowd Sounds Happy, Nicholas Dawidoff — a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Fly Swatter — offers a coming of age story about growing up in a devastated New Haven community with a single mother and an absent father. One of the things that got him through – his beloved Boston Red Sox. Also in nonfiction is All Hands Down, in which authors Kenneth Sewell and Jerome Preisler detail the May 1968 attack on the USS Scorpion.

In fiction, Donna Leon returns with another Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery, The Girl of His Dreams. In this one, the Venice detective investigates a Catholic priest, but then gets involved with a murder investigation a gypsy girl’s body is found in a canal. And Andrew Sean Greer, much praised for The Confessions of Max Tivoli, has released The Story of a Marriage, which follows the tale of a young San Franciscan married in 1953 to her childhood sweetheart. The pair have an adopted on, but things get complicated when the husband’s former boss and lover returns and a romantic triangle forms.