After his parents fall “on hard times,” young Edward Lear (1812-1888), the 20th child in a big family, is sent to live with his older siblings. Amid this nurturing environment, he explores his creativity while dealing with his “Demon”—chronic epilepsy. By age 20, he’s in high demand throughout England as a talented natural history artist, but he feels like an outsider due to his humble origins and his Demon. His work documenting the Earl of Derby’s private collection of animals and his interactions with the earl’s young visitors inspire some of his most famous written works for children. After traveling the world, yearning for companionship, he settles down with his beloved feline; both would die months apart, embodied in a stunning spread with Lear slowly transforming into the titular bird from “The Owl and the Pussycat” as he flies to his grave. Though playful, Hill’s lengthy text may find a more receptive audience among adults interested in the history of children’s literature. While young readers will find Lear a sympathetic figure, they may not entirely understand his frustration with marriage and relationships (“Such odd couplings could only happen in the world of nonsense”) or his feelings of alienation in restrictive Victorian society. Still, Hill’s writing complements Carlin’s ethereal illustrations, creating a fanciful world full of wonder and nonsensical imagery.

Narrator Molly Gray may now be head of special events at the five-star Regency Grand Hotel, but she and her fiancé, Juan Manuel, the pastry chef, are as cash-strapped as ever; the wedding they are planning is to be a budget affair. Meanwhile, the Regency Grand (its geographical location remains unspecified) is hosting an event with the Antiques Roadshow–like reality TV series Hidden Treasures, of which Molly and Juan are loyal viewers. After the hotel manager invites the Regency Grand staff to present any collectibles they may have to the show’s hosts before the shoot, Molly learns that what she thought was a valueless ornamental egg is a Fabergé prototype worth a bundle. But just as Molly’s egg has been auctioned off at the hotel for $10 million, it vanishes from its display case. The novel’s present-day chapters alternate with diary entries addressed to Molly by her now-dead grandmother, who gradually tells the story of the egg’s provenance. To arrive at the truth, readers have to wade through an awful lot of Gran’s personal history, not all of it interesting or surprising and much of which would be more at home in a romance novel than a crime caper. Prose is hoping that fans of the series will inhale Molly’s family history even if it means being served a less fully fleshed present-day mystery, and that gamble may well pay off, as the book has the series’ customary charms: a stouthearted protagonist who has trouble reading social cues and an elegant, anachronistically wholesome setting in which platitudes are considered worthy of not snark but serious reflection.

It’s 2025, and Hannah, a frustrated young fusion scientist vacationing in Scotland’s Western Isles, is visited by a disfigured young man who was born in a colony on Mars and has come back from the future to help her perfect fusion technology in time to save Earth from runaway climate change and civilizational collapse. Now it’s the 2070s and Hannah’s son, Andrew, has become one of Scotland’s leading political figures by fighting against billionaire futurists and arguing that society has “the means to save ourselves… if we work together.” Yet his daughter, Kenzie, is building on her dead grandmother’s unfinished research to construct a fusion reactor for the Tevat Corporation, which has given up on the planet and intends to evacuate its Shareholders (wealthy investors, corrupt politicians, and useful scientists like Kenzie) to Mars. Now it’s 2103 and Kenzie’s son, Roban, who lives with the painful physical disabilities experienced by the first generation of humans born in the Corporation’s frighteningly totalitarian Colony, is learning to function with the assistance of a mechanical exoskeleton—and to gradually distrust the Corporation’s vision for a better future. Can Kenzie build the reactor her grandmother first theorized? Can Andrew convince his daughter to labor toward a better future on Earth rather than off it? Can Andrew’s political career survive Kenzie’s plans to abandon Earth and its people? Can Roban find a way to communicate his mother’s fusion discoveries to his long-dead grandmother before it’s too late? Is “the alteration of the past by the future” even possible? Dancing between decades, characters, and planets, Reed’s latest may lack some of the lyrical beauty that marked his previous two books, but it succeeds in brilliantly dramatizing some of the great questions of our time. Can we technologize our way out of the climate crisis or should we instead focus our energies on collaboratively solving the problem with the tools we have? Is Earth our only viable planetary home or can we adequately replicate its richness elsewhere? If the latter, who will get to go? And what fate awaits those left behind? And is the future worth living for those who manage to leave?

Jessamine Bricker has a history of succeeding even in the worst of circumstances. When her teen mother opted out of raising her, Jess’ Nana Blanche “clipped coupons like a fiend” to pay her tuition at Wren Hill Day School for Young Ladies, where blue-collar Jess rubbed elbows with Nashville’s old-money princesses. Jess went on to nurture her upper-class connections at tony Harrow University, parlaying them into a three-year stint working for one of the city’s “most feared wedding planners.” Realizing that spoiled young women with more money than sense might crave more than a single day of indulgence, she opens Bricker Consultants, helping wealthy young men create over-the-top proposals to delight their prospective brides. Working with grooms-to-be when the real clients are, of course, the brides is a tricky business that Jess handles with exceptional finesse. Still, Trenton Tillard IV provides a special challenge. Trenton’s already proposed to Diana Helston, but without the spectacle the social media influencer feels her Helston LuxeGram brand deserves. So Diana calls in Jess to guide Trenton into a more appropriate “Will you…?” Diana spirits Jess away to Golden Ash spa for a week of yoga, facials, and proposal planning. Unfortunately, the getaway also includes weird lights in the woods, corpses, and a police investigation. The silver lining is Golden Ash chef Dean Osbourne and his wonderfully quirky family, who offer Jess a tantalizing glimpse of life outside the perils of princess-pleasing.

Emma Moskowitz has a lot going for her—she’s a licensed marriage and family therapist who’s just turned in the first draft of a book on maintaining healthy relationships; she has a successful YouTube channel; she lives in a very nice Los Angeles apartment; and she’s happily planning her wedding to Ryan, a man she loves. And yet, after a conversation that’s over in “less time than it took to watch a network sitcom,” she’s suddenly very single and focused on all the other traits that make her who she is: She’s someone who’s always getting dumped; she has generalized anxiety disorder, sensory sensitivity issues, and a lack of innate knowledge about social expectations; she hates vegetables and sharing food. What she decides to do next is unexpected: Rather than canceling the wedding, she initiates Operation: Save My Date. She determines that she will, despite all the initial arguments from her loved ones and online fans, find a replacement groom and prove that Western ideals of dating and marriage are not the only ways to establish a loving, worthwhile relationship. Her following explodes and she winds up partnering on a podcast that does extremely well, which lands her on a very well-known talk show. And along the way, she experiences failures, embarrassment, and successes in her quest.