Also of interest...in portraits of small-town America

Benediction

by Kent Haruf (Knopf, $26)

“The writing fits the landscape” in the final book of Kent Haruf’s trilogy about fictional Holt, Colo., said John Reimringer in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. As he chronicles the last days of a 77-year-old shop owner, the author’s spare, precise sentences “have the elegance of Hemingway’s early work.” The characters’ reticence prevents us from fully understanding the events that shaped their lives, but Haruf’s “determined realism” on that score proves to be deeply satisfying.

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The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones (Touchstone, $25)

The first pages of Holly Goddard Jones’s debut novel “evoke memories of Stephen King’s Carrie,” said Michelle Moriarity Witt in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer. Here, though, the bullying of a teenage girl leads not to a paranormal revenge story but to a complex portrait of a southern Kentucky town. The community’s hunt for a missing resident is the tie that binds several narrative threads, and all reveal the author’s “intimate understanding of the back roads of Southern culture.”

News from Heaven

by Jennifer Haigh (Harper, $26)

The decline of Bakerton, Pa., may have been inevitable, but Jennifer Haigh’s “fine, enveloping” stories about various fictional residents of the former coal town “are not ordinary or predictable at all,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Current inhabitants find unlikely paths to happiness while the prodigals—a Houston oilman among them—face old ghosts. “It’s Haigh’s great gift to make all these people come alive and to make readers really care about how their destinies unfold.”

American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit, $14)

Wink, N.M., is no ordinary place, said Jeff VanderMeer in the Los Angeles Times. Even in the world created by fantasy novelist Robert Jackson Bennett, Wink doesn’t appear on any map, and newcomer Mona is taken aback by its eerie residents and the pink moon that appears nightly. Readers may find themselves a step ahead of Bennett’s strong, flawed heroine as she unravels the town’s secrets, but she’s such a convincing character that her story “manages to surprise, terrify, and move” us.