The Middlesteins
by Jami Attenberg (Grand Central)
The Middlesteins opens on Edie, a 5-year-old girl topping 60 pounds who has early on learned to equate food with love. The rest of the novel deals with her growing up, her family, her estranged husband, surly daughter and clueless son, all of whom are forced to watch her eat her way to an early grave. This gem of a book is swift, moving and brutally honest, but it has as family-centric moral at its heart: Without family, we are nothing.
Lost at Sea
The Jon Ronson Mysteries
by Jon Ronson (Riverhead)
The weird-but-true master Ronson — author of “The Men who Stare at Goats” and last year’s “The Psychopath Test” — is back with a collection of colorful essays covering the bizarre and off-beat. In it, you’ll find profiles of the Insane Clown Posse, the North Pole and the “sociopath mind guru” Richard Bandler. Always unnerving and never boring, Ronson’s work makes for fun, true-life reading.
Astray
by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown and Company)
Her last book, 2010’s bestselling phenomenon “Room,” centered around a 5-year-old boy who was held captive in a garden shed. But her new collection, a historical-fiction-style travelogue, concerns wanderers. The 14 stories are broken up into three sections: Departures, In Transit, and Arrivals and Aftermaths, which follow a wife fleeing the Irish famine, a slave escaping from abusive owners in the Civil War, and a child sent to a New York orphanage in the 1800s.
Bitter Brew
The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer
by William Knoedelseder (Harper Business)
There are few things more American than an ice-cold Bud — yet Anheuser-Busch, once based in St. Louis, is now owned by a Belgian company. This fact is one of the many tragic elements in the Busch family’s 150-year history. At once the crowning example of the American dream and the perfect encapsulation of the corruption of power, the story of the beer dynasty is frothy and salacious, filled to the brim with great insider, tell-all details.
Wine Grapes
A Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, Including Their Origins and Flavours
by Janice Robinson, Julia Harding and Jose Vouillamoz (Allen Lane)
If you don’t know the difference between a Burgundy and a Beaujolais, then this book isn’t for you. Billed as the “wine bible” — and clocking in at more than 1,000 pages — this guide is for the wine snobbiest of them all. Using “cutting-edge DNA analysis,” the book details 1,400 distinct grape varieties in an attempt to identify what makes certain wines taste great. Think of it as a genome map of wine grapes.