Four middle-aged siblings meet in their grandparents’ home in the English town of Kington for a three-week holiday. They have convened to discuss whether or not to sell the house, but family tensions dominate conversations. The brother has brought his Argentinian third wife, whom the three sisters haven’t met. One sister brings an ex-boyfriend’s teenage son; another laments her unsatisfying love life. THE PAST is a quiet exploration of suppressed desire and internal struggles.

In a departure from his usual satires of Washington politics, Christopher Buckley turns to politics of a more medieval nature. In 1517, a former Swiss mercenary named Dismas sells holy relics to powerful clients who then use their purchases to sell indulgences to people hoping to shorten their stay in Purgatory. The sudden loss of his life savings forces Dismas to sell a forgery of Christ’s burial shroud --- a scheme that goes harrowingly wrong.

It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought 11 years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching 40s, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to calm his unquiet soul in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.

Colum McCann’s latest consists of a novella and three short stories. In the title piece, mystery surrounds the death of a retired 82-year-old New York Supreme Court justice. The other stories involve a writer struggling to compose a story for a New Year’s edition of a magazine, a mother in Galway whose 13-year-old adopted son has disappeared, and an elderly nun who discovers that the man who kidnapped her 37 years earlier is now a diplomat.

Oliver Otway Orme --- a man equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating --- is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who has never been caught…until now. Unfortunately, the purloined possession in question is the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend. Fearing the consequences, Ollie has fled --- not only from his mistress, his home and his wife, but from the very impulse to paint, and from his own demons. He sequesters himself in the house where he was born and sets about trying to uncover the answer to how and why things have turned out as they did.

PEDIGREE is a memoir, written in 2005 and now translated from the French, by Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. The book focuses on Modiano’s first 21 years, from 1945 to 1966, and includes ruminations on events he has explored in his fiction --- from his father’s shady business dealings during and after World War II to the years Modiano spent in boarding schools, and the books and films that shaped him as writer.

In Kulumani, a village in present-day Mozambique, lions are killing local women, including three of the four daughters of the Mpepe family. Only 32-year-old Mariamar is left. Village elders recruit Archangel Bullseye, a hunter from Maputo who saved Mariamar from danger 16 years earlier, to end the attacks. Now, as she wonders whether or not she wants to see the hunter she once loved, Mariamar suspects that spiritual forces may be the cause of the village’s troubles.

Joshua Cohen’s long, rambunctious novel is the story of a Google-like Internet search firm, its mysterious leader, and the mid-level novelist hired to write the leader’s memoir. In the grand tradition of postmodern novels, the mid-level writer’s name is Joshua Cohen. That’s also the name of the company leader, better known as the Principal. Like David Foster Wallace’s works, BOOK OF NUMBERS contains dense passages of encyclopedic detail --- in this case --- details about computer technology.

Ken Kalfus’ latest collection of short fiction is a mix of experimental works and stories that borrow from recent news items. The piece that likely will receive the most attention is the title novella, in which a figure based on Dominique Strauss-Kahn has a sexual encounter with a housekeeper from Guinea at New York’s Sofitel hotel. Other stories in this provocative book touch upon topics like the Iraq War, the Large Hadron Collider, and execution by lethal injection.

THE TURNER HOUSE is a domestic drama of African-American parents and the 13 children they brought up in Detroit. Angela Flournoy’s debut novel focuses on three of the adult children: Cha-Cha, the oldest, who has been plagued by visions of haints (apparitions); Lelah, the youngest, who has a gambling problem; and Troy, a cop who resorts to underhanded tactics to try to sell the family home, which is worth far less than its mortgage.