The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger

Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer
by Warren St. John

• The love story of Henry and Claire whose lives are punctuated by Henry's disappearance to different points in time--sometimes even back to visit Claire as a young woman. When Henry meets Claire, he is twenty-eight, and she is twenty. A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of a passionate love affair that endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap.

• St. John's account of following the University of Alabama's football team as a part of the team's fanatical legion of tailgaters is just as much fun as the book's title (words to a school chant). As St. John, an Alabama native who writes for the New York Times, tries to join Bama RV nation, he ... comes into contact with a slew of good ol' boys, well-to-do entrepreneurs and the most hated man in Alabama.

• The title refers to the "Panda" entry in a poorly punctuated wildlife manual that, if believed, indicates the panda is truly to be feared, especially after eating. We all know the basics of punctuation--or do we? In "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," Truss dares to say, in her delightfully witty way, that it is time to institute a zero tolerance approach to punctuation.

The Rottweiler
by Ruth Rendell

The Metro Girl
by Janet Evanovich

Shem Creek
by Dorothea Benton Frank

• To make ends meet, widowed Inez Ferry takes in tenants above her antique store. But the unpredictable and obsessive acts of a serial murderer begin to disturb the lives of the lodgers, especially when suspicion grows that one of them might be the killer dubbed "The Rottweiler."

• From the word go, Evanovich delivers her usual goods, albeit in a different vehicle. After 10 Stephanie Plum novels, each more successful than the last, Evanovich introduces Alexandra Barnaby, aka Barney. Barney hails from Baltimore rather than New Jersey, but she's from the same slice of working-class life as Stephanie.

• Frank (Isle of Palms) delivers another novel rich in the charms of small town South Carolina, the fourth in her bestselling Lowcountry series. Linda Breland, a single mother tired of living hand-to-mouth in New Jersey, decides to move herself and her two teenage daughters to her distant hometown of Mount Pleasant, S.C., where her sister, Mimi, still lives.

The Jane Austen Book Club
by Karen Joy Fowler

Light on Snow
by Anita Shreve

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke

• Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her finely sighted eye for the frailties of human behavior and her finely tuned ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing.

• After retreating from a family tragedy to a house tucked away in the New Hampshire woods, 12-year-old Nicky and her father are thrust back into the world when one wintry afternoon they discover an abandoned newborn outdoors.

• Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that it leaves readers longing for more.

• Evanovich is at her best in her 10th Stephanie Plum adventure (after 2003's To the Nines), which reads like the screenplay for a 1930s screwball comedy: fast, funny and furious. The Trenton, N.J., bond enforcement agent (bounty hunter), accompanied by her trigger-happy friend Lula, an errant file clerk, is after a quirky collection of bail-jumpers.

• A shady marine scientist suspects that his wife knows that he has been doctoring water samples so that a ruthless tycoon can continue polluting the Everglades, so he pushes her overboard from a cruise liner. But she's saved by former cop Mick Stranahan--and that's when the real adventure begins.

• Set at the turn of the century, this heartfelt story of the limits and power of love chronicles the remarkable lives of the Castellucas, an Italian-American family, over the course of three generations. Trapped in a small Pennsylvania town not unlike the small Sicilian village her family left behind, middle-daughter Nella dreams big-and falls for a disarmingly charming poet who just as disarmingly disappears.

• Investigating what appears to have been the natural death of the husband of an old friend, LAPD detective Harry Bosch decides to dig deeper, given the man's ties to the hunt for the infamous serial killer, The Poet. What Harry discovers leads him into the most terrifying situation he has ever encountered.