Mona Miller is a people-pleaser by nature. Her reputation as a team player has served her well so far, even though she feels like she’s been running in place at the travel magazine where she works. When she’s called into her boss’s office, her first instinct is to expect a pink slip, but instead she’s offered the opportunity of a lifetime—a trip to Iceland to write the cover story for an upcoming issue. It’s not only a fun change of pace from the local gigs she’s been landing; it’s also an assignment that could set her up for a promotion. The only catch is that the photographer assigned to accompany her is an absolutely unwelcome blast from her past. Benjamin Carter is a rising star behind the lens, but he was also Mona’s childhood best friend, the person with whom she once shared all her secrets and a whole lot of firsts before he inexplicably broke her heart 14 years ago. Mona doesn’t want to rock the boat, though, so she decides to grin and bear it for the sake of professionalism. The next 10 days could make or break this opportunity for Mona, but the more time they spend together, the more likely it is that Ben could also break her heart all over again. Oliver’s debut is a stunning achievement, full of unresolved emotion and angst that results in feelings simmering to the surface, as well as proof that the embers of true love can never fully die down. Mona’s frequent reflection on her history with Ben is seamlessly interwoven with the present-day timeline, for which the Icelandic setting serves as the perfect backdrop, with vivid, descriptive imagery and intense, open-air experiences that push Mona beyond her physical limits while likely inspiring more than a little wanderlust in the reader.

A world where humans are descended from a variety of mammals endures its own equivalent of the U.S. Civil War—the northern, industrialized Parity arming against the southern, rural, and slave-owning Echelon. When a marauding Parity gang’s rampage in a frontier Echelon town kills otter-descended schoolteacher Martha Good, her lover, dog-descended fellow teacher Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, joins a group of Echelon guerrilla fighters, seeking a violent revenge that the gentle Miss Martha never would have wanted and earning her the moniker “Dog-Bitch Bess.” Assisting her in these brutal endeavors is Wakeful Slim, a multifunctional AI gun that’s a piece of ancient Precursor technology. In the distant past, a Pandominion strike team pursues rebels seeking a return to the old government’s policy of conquest over parallel Earths; the chase strands the rebels on an Earth whose inhabitants are unwitting participants in a terrible experiment. These two storylines converge after Bess, who’s on the run from Parity forces, picks up a new companion with a mysterious mission. In addition to the iconic tragedy of the gunslinger, whose bloody path can only have one ending, Carey adds the tragedies of the sentient gun and armed drone; this is probably the first time you will sympathize with actual weapons. Perhaps the messaging around the racism directed toward the novel’s Black and Native American analogues is a bit obvious, but it does two very important things: It highlights both how artificial the categories are that we put people into, and how the thoughtless acceptance of those categories leads to more brutal consequences.

Humans going back to ancient civilizations have tried to interpret and find meaning in our dreams. Dreams have been thought of as divine signals, warnings, and simply things that happen to us. But what if we could seize control of them? In her exploration, sleep expert and neuroscientist Carr deftly guides the reader through the science of sleep, dreams, and how the darkest of our mind inventions can traumatize us in waking hours. Carr has spent hundreds of nights awake and working in the sleep lab during her career, watching others sleep, electrodes placed on their scalps, later working to pull apart their dreams and disturbances. At the heart of her work in the sleep lab lie three questions: Why do we dream? Why do dreams go bad? How can we harness the science of dreaming to improve our health? In her unpacking of these questions, the author carries us through a raft of complicated brain science and sleep studies in compelling, clear writing. At times, the narrative is overly dense with study details that risk losing the nonscientist reader. While most of us have been taught to believe we have no agency over our dreams, Carr argues otherwise. She presents a strong case that we have the power to harness dreams and to guide our brains away from images and stories that might harm us while awake. What unfolds is a detailed manual for the notion of “dream engineering.” Though it may seem far-fetched to some, to those who experience chronic nightmares and lucid dreaming, the concept could introduce a revolutionary practice for healing.

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are two of the most widely read 20th-century British writers. For both men, the ideals of British-ness centered on the communal life of the village, the heroism of everyday people in great times, and the attempt to bring together a fecund imagination with a faith in a Christian god. Many things shaped their writings, not the least being their scholarship in the medieval English language. Beowulf, Chaucer, and romance adventure gave them a vocabulary for fantasy and faith. Both men looked back, too, to their experiences as soldiers in World War I for the vividness of conflict. And, as they lived through World War II on the home front, their memories came back to them, invigorating imagined places with the gore and grit of the trenches. At the heart of their work is a theme, writes historian and filmmaker Loconte: “the necessity of individual courage to combat evil.” That individual courage had to be found in the ordinary man, the Hobbit, the person like us, who was “not made for perilous quests.” Such men were like the men with whom they fought. And in the 1930s and ’40s, when Tolkien, Lewis, and their contemporaries came together in conversation and scholarship at Oxford, they bonded in the shared need to “cordon” off the fears of combat. The pub, the library, and the college common room made “space for relationships that were meaningful, for conversations rich in wit and wisdom, and for creative work that could inspire and enchant. For Tolkien and Lewis, male friendship fulfilled all of these needs like nothing else.” At their most fantastic, both writers were at their most real and personal.

Journalist and author Cohen, author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, strikes gold with a story from Victorian Britain that comes with a scholar’s favorite documentation: court transcripts. In 1883 a wealthy Australian bought a used yacht in Britain and hired a crew to deliver it: an experienced captain, two crewmen, and a cabin boy. After six weeks sailing south in the Atlantic, a storm sank it. With only minutes to save themselves, the crew fled to its dinghy with time to grab two cans of turnips and a few instruments but no water. After nearly three weeks, with all nearly moribund from thirst and starvation, the captain cut the boy’s throat, and all consumed his blood and organs “with quite as much relish as ordinary food.” Four days later, a ship appeared. The survivors did not conceal their actions, and their rescuers were not scandalized because all knew similar stories. Cohen describes half a dozen documented occasions and summarizes the history of human cannibalism before moving on to what followed after the men landed in England. Newspapers covered the story mostly favorably. No sailor in history had been prosecuted for cannibalism, so the men were shocked to be arrested and charged with murder. The decision came from the government where senior officials rejected the ancient tradition that allowed sailors in danger of starving to eat someone. More than half the book recounts the trials, which concluded for the first time in history that the men had committed homicide. Almost no one wanted them hanged, so they served six months in prison. Readers will likely agree with current legal opinion that denies that murder is justified when it can be presented as the lesser of two evils.