NPR People: Lizzie Skurnick

Michelle Huneven's new novel — featuring a repeat-offender drunk driver who kills a mother and daughter — raises questions about self determination and fate.

In Joyce Maynard's Labor Day, a mysterious stranger enters the life of a single mother and her son for a holiday weekend. Apart from being a successful thriller, the book is a fascinating portrait of what causes a family to founder, and how much it can cost to put it back on the right path.

In Rhino Ranch, Larry McMurtry returns to his lighter side and his recurring protagonist, Duane Moore. The gentle comedy tracks the once-powerful oilman as he adjusts to his own retirement and to the changes a new nature preserve brings to his small Texas town.

Forget the Steven Spielberg fish tale. Author Lizzie Skurnick says she'll take Peter Benchley's salty novel — and its swearing sailors — over its cinematic adaptation any day.

Danzy Senna's poet mother was a Boston Brahmin, her father the son of a black piano player and a Mexican boxer. Her memoir, in which she examines her family history, is part detective story, part the story of a nation.

When the stock market crashed, writer Lizzie Skurnick turned to her childhood bookcase, where she found a bunch of girls who learned to survive life's downsizing. Here are three heroines whose belt-tightening serves as great advice.

It's hard to look at the perpetually dissatisfied sophisticates in Caitlin Macy's Spoiled and not see a nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her stories demonstrate not only Fitzgerald's wit and insight, but deep empathy for her subjects.

This clever, poignant spoof tells the story of a relationship gone wrong in the form of a precisely annotated auction catalog that puts the detritus of a love affair — notes, photos, keepsakes — up for sale.

Eula Biss' dazzling leaps and odd juxtapositions have the knack of seeming brilliant and obvious at the same time. Notes from No Man's Land collects forceful, beautiful essays that examine race through a frame of reference both personal and wide-ranging.

Not always nice, the characters in The Piano Teacher are always interesting. The novel tells a romantic tale of smoky mysteries, near misses, two-faced villains and secretive lovers.

In this smart and funny follow-up to his previous story collections, The Book of Ralph (2004) and America's Report Card (2006), John McNally revels in a gallery of Midwestern misfits and their stories of hard-luck love.

If previous years' bookshelves were crowded with woeful tales of single living, 2008 marked the year of marriage; even Anna Karenina, the ne plus ultra of domestic dissatisfaction, got back into the act, returning as a resident of Rego Park in Irina Reyn's What Happened to Anna K.

After a flirtation with literary fiction, King returns with Just After Sunset, a collection of lurid, gore-spattered tales that can be both horrifying and heartbreaking.

In the author's third Jackson Brodie mystery, a train crash connects a tangle of characters and crimes. The novel explores the line between protectiveness and violent possessiveness.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson returns to the town of Gilead, scene of her last novel. Home has a less meditative tone that suits its younger characters, especially Jack, the wayward son who returns in search of redemption.