This extraordinary volume of letters offers an intimate portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein, not as the granite logician of legend, but as a man unguarded, needy, joyful, and often undone by love. Written between 1946 and his death in 1951, the correspondence with Ben Richards, a medical student 35 years his junior, documents what Wittgenstein called “man’s greatest happiness.” The letters are disarmingly plain; they were edited by Citron, assistant professor of religion at Princeton University, and Schmidt, assistant director-general of the Austrian National Library. The letters track weather, train times, tooth extractions, flowers coming into bloom. Dried leaves are enclosed; cartoons are sketched; music is recommended with missionary zeal. Yet threaded through this domestic hubbub is an emotional intensity that can feel unbearable at times. “I want to tell you how much I love you & how much I need you,” Wittgenstein writes, again and again. Richards’ letters strain to meet this need without being consumed by it. That imbalance is the book’s quiet drama. Wittgenstein knows he is dependent; worse, he knows his dependence can wound. A dispute over Richards growing a beard becomes a startling meditation on love, possession, and the sacredness of the beloved’s face. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein’s self-abnegation (“there is really nothing in me that is lovable”) borders on emotional blackmail. The historical context matters. Sex between men was illegal in Britain; the language available was that of “romantic friendship,” intense yet circumscribed. What survives, improbably, is joy. In his final letter, Wittgenstein thanks Richards for having made his life “different altogether.” These are love letters, and show how thinking, for Wittgenstein, was inseparable from feeling; and how love could both steady him and push him perilously close to the edge.

Toshi Hunter and the ragtag crew of the spaceship Pandora already have a lot on their plates by the time they first encounter a dead ship full of metamorphic monstrosities tumbling through space. Players of the classic 2008 Dead Space video game will no doubt instantly recognize the kind of gruesome scene Toshi and company find. It would be a galaxy-class understatement to say that it’s the last thing the beleaguered crew needs at this point. They’re tired of being on the run, because the Imperium has branded them, as members of the Free the Galaxy organization, as terrorists. Years of tossing intergalactic monkey wrenches into the Imperium’s never-ending plans to terraform the universe have taken a serious toll on them all, and Toshi himself is pondering retirement. The Imperium’s version of Manifest Destiny, however, is just as mean and genocidal as the 19th-century variety, because it, too, is lethal to indigenous communities, and despite the trials and sacrifices, the Pandora’s crew remains determined to fight it: “Every planet the humans had colonized had been terraformed, its ecosystem destroyed and brought to Earth standards,” notes the third-person narration. “Humanity was like a plague, burning through the galaxy.” It’s true that the politics of Gurgu’s novel couldn’t be more overt. That said, the galloping, guns-blazing nature of the power-packed prose makes this space opera seem more pulpy than political. The text has a tendency toward gruesomeness in places: “Its upper body looked human, but its legs were insectlike and its head was shredded, as though something with huge mandibles had chewed on it.” Overall, the author has a keen knack for mixing and melding SF and the supernatural in all kinds of intriguing ways. Clear allusions to vampirism would be too obvious; Gurgu opts instead for more obscure archetypes: When was the last time one read about a wendigo in outer space?

Surrounded by the serene waves of the Aegean Sea and home to Paradisos II, an exclusive boutique resort, the island of Phaedros rests on a bedrock of family, faith, and rigid roles that are not to be tested. Emilio Politis, “on the verge of becoming Greece’s most celebrated hotelier,” has recently opened Paradisos II, fulfilling his mother’s promise of “a life in paradise.” Descended from refugees but now living a posh life filled with drink and women, Emilio has grown cold, calloused, and selfish. Meanwhile, in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, young pharmacist Maryam plans an escape with her husband and daughter—they take a boat to Greece, planning to pass through to Germany and then make their way to Canada. When the boat capsizes during a freak storm off the shore of Phaedros, Emilio is the one to pull Maryam to safety; with this act of heroism, paradise will never be the same. With the arrival of Maryam and another Syrian refugee who survived the sinking boat, the people of Phaedros are forced to reckon with their own biases, intolerance, and previously unchallenged views of the world, and when a murder shocks the island, tensions rise to a boiling point—Emilio must fight to preserve his family and his paradise from total collapse. This tale of paradise found spans hundreds of years, tracing the arcs of refugee and immigrant families from 1817 through 2015 to illustrate that the line dividing refugees fighting for their lives and a rich hotelier is shockingly thin—paradise can be taken away just as quickly as it was achieved. Though the plot and character development may have benefitted from more focus on Maryam and Emilio’s relationship, the fascinating histories of both of their families compellingly bring themes of religious intolerance, racism, and societal norms to light. The characters and their stories are both unique and universal, and Kokkaris’ depiction of their everyday lives broadens the reader’s understanding of the world.

At Camp Refuge, a Christian summer camp run by her family’s church, Clarity (who’s Black) grows closer to fellow camp counselor and classmate Hannah (who’s cued white), discovering a part of herself that just feels right. But when they’re caught kissing by other counselors, Clarity experiences the sting of her peers’ disapproval of her sexuality—something she still doesn’t have totally figured out. One thing she knows is that she’s not ready to come out to her Baptist parents, so she avoids Hannah for the last week of camp. Clarity’s senior year becomes a series of obstacles, testing her ability to keep her secret: Her best friend, Kristen, tries to set her up with a boy; the camp director, Mrs. Patricia, who knows about what happened with Hannah, wants Clarity to be her Sunday school assistant; and Clarity is forced to be around Hannah because they’re co-presidents of their school’s festival committee. While aspiring to embody her name, Clarity also yearns to figure things out at her own pace, offering a refreshingly honest reminder that developing self-knowledge is a complex and nuanced journey. Her anxiety over being outed, her struggle with faith, and the impact of hiding her true self from the most important people in her life unequivocally tugs at the heart.

In this story “of love in a time of violence,” the narrator never reveals his name; he’s an octogenarian who reasonably expects that “terrible, powerful, soulless people are coming to kill me.” Yet his own soul is at peace. He loves the “hum of Brooklyn roads, the muffled roar of the BQE, and the sound of air whistling through the steel weave of the bridges…” Brooklyn is “embraced by the ocean, the harbor, the East River,” and its deep blue sky is a rhapsody that calms the heart. Yet with rhapsody comes tragedy. The narrator recalls with melancholy his wife, Clare, their son, Charles, and the joy they all once brought to each other. But Charles died fighting in Iraq and Clare’s own violent passing nearly strips the narrator’s life of meaning. The couple—he once a rich investment banker, she a lawyer—enjoyed long walks from Brooklyn into Manhattan until one day a crazed man wielding a machete began butchering people. The narrator, then a 70-something Vietnam veteran, killed the attacker, but at a heavy and permanent cost. The ensuing events are nothing he could have anticipated, which is much to the readers’ benefit. A few years later, he saves a friend from the clutches of a drug gang, and he knows the gang is now coming for him. But he feels he’s lived his life and isn’t about to skip town to escape his likely death: “Emily Dickinson stuck like a limpet to Amherst,” he says. “Brooklyn is good enough for me.” The narrator reflects deeply on the family and possessions he once had, on his love of his family and his city, and on the ghosts to whom he owes allegiance. Had he known what was going to happen, would he have interrupted the machete attack? He and Clare could have kept walking, but they didn’t, and he is forever haunted by the consequences.