Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers. Through the book, Jacobs also embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally.

The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal, and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes. Jacobs's extraordinary undertaking yields unexpected epiphanies and challenges. This book charmed readers both secular and religious. The Year of Living Biblically is part CliffsNotes to the Bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable.

Often compared to To Kill a Mockingbird, Hillary Jordan's debut novel Mudbound is told in riveting personal narratives by the individual members of the McAllan and Jackson families. As they strive for love and honor in a brutal time and place, they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale and find redemption where they least expect it. This is storytelling at its most indelible - fierce, unflinching and deeply human. Mudbound won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded biannually to a first literary novel that addresses issues of social justice.

Hillary Jordan grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She lives in Tivoli, New York.

Jon J Muth's highly acclaimed picture books are beloved around the world and have been translated into more than ten languages. He was born and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. He drew and drew and drew and drew, and painted. His mother was an art teacher and she took him to museums all over the US. He had his first one-man exhibit of paintings and drawings at the invitation of Wilmington College when he was eighteen. "My work in children's books really grew out of a desire to explore what I was feeling as a new father," states Muth. "I was working in comics and that is a natural forum for expressions of angst and questioning one's place in the universe. When the children came it became important to say other things about the world. With the birth of my children, there was a kind of seismic shift in where my work seemed appropriate. In 1995 I created the comic strip IMAGINARY MAGNITUDE for a Japanese magazine and that was where my work began to express the very real delight I find in being a parent." Muth lives in upstate New York with his wife and four children, where he spends time "chasing the clouds from his brushes."

Cecilia Galante grew up in a religious commune in upstate New York until the age of 15. The leader died when she was 10 and she believes that if he hadn't passed away, she and her family would still be living there. While leaving such an isolated environment was a mental and cultural shock for her, books helped her understand and acclimate to the new world she was encountering. She is currently a high school English teacher, and lives with her husband and three children in Kingston, PA.

Patron Saint of Butterflies is both a unique and a recognizable story; the setting is uncommon, but its truths are familiar. While the novel is set on a commune and zealotry plays a role, at its heart is the universality of assessing, accepting, and embracing your own belief system, regardless of what people around you are doing and saying; and it's the story of conviction and self reliance. Having been born into a similar environment, Cecilia adds a layer of understanding and authenticity to Agnes and Honey's feelings and experiences. While this novel is not autobiographical, Cecilia does see a little of herself in both young women and wrote The Patron Saint of Butterflies as a way of reimagining her own teenage years as she wished they'd played out.

The Bronx is the only New York City Borough on the mainland of North America. Which doesn't stop it from being a country all its own. As any Bronxite will tell you, being from Da Bronx is a permanent condition, no matter where you end up, and Bronx geography is played from Alaska to Florida, from Paris to Trinidad. Originally a huge farm estate belonging to one Jacob Bronck ("Yonkers? Where's that?" "Just north of the Broncks'." Get it?), the borough has as many diverse social ecosystems as the Amazon has biological ones.

For a time in the '70s and '80s the name was synonymous (to non-Bronxites) with a vast urban maelstrom of lawlessness and decay. But the place was always more complicated than that. There's the Bronx Zoo, and the Botanical Garden; there are universities and Yankee Stadium, grand estates and squalid housing projects, the sinking Concourse and nautical City Island.

This is not to say crime isn't, potentially, everywhere. Just that the Bronx has more everywheres than most people imagine. The writers represented in Bronx Noir know the borough so well that, reading the book, you'll smell it, feel it, see it, hear it. The sights and scents will be multitudinous and as distinct as the neighborhoods. And every one of them, in all their glorious mutual contradiction, is the Bronx.

S.J. Rozan was born and raised in the Bronx and is a life-long New Yorker. She's the author of eight novels in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, and the standalones Absent Friends and In This Rain. Her book Winter and Night won the Edgar, Nero, and Macavity Awards for Best Novel, and was nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards. Two of her previous books have won the Shamus for Best Novel and another won the Anthony for Best Novel. Her short story "Double-crossing Delancey" won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. She's at work on another series novel, Shanghai Moon.

Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin
Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala
Fancy Nancy, Jane O'Connor & Robin Preiss Glasser (illus)
Rebel Angels, Libba Bray
1776, David McCullough
Zen Shorts, Jon Muth
Big Russ and Me, Tim Russert
Gregor the Overlander, Suzanne Collins
Samaritan, Richard Price
Rural Life, Verlyn Klikenborg
Full Hand, Thomas Yezerski
A Corner of the Universe, Ann M. Martin
October Suite, Maxine Clair
Jefferson's Pillow, Roger Wilkins
You Can't Take a Balloon Into the Museum of Fine Arts
      Jacqueline P. Weitzman