Edmund de Waal 
FSG

This rueful family memoir is also a vividly episodic history of 19th- and 20th-century Europe, and a plangent consideration of the pleasures and fleetingness of aesthetic and familial happiness.

Letters to Monica 
Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite 
Faber and Faber

Even as this book chronicles an almost passionless and far from conventionally happy relationship, it yields moments of exquisite tenderness and acuity, while obliquely showing the civilizing effect that even the most trying woman can exert on even the most impossible man.

The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan 
Richard Nickel and Aaron Siskind, with John Vinci and Ward Miller
Richard Nickel Committee

This publishing feat illuminates some of the most beautiful and influential art that America has produced. With painstaking clarity, it reveals the ways Adler and Sullivan balanced the severe, massive elegance of their façades with the rhythmic grace of their exuberant, often whimsical ornament.

Saints and Sinners: Stories 
Edna O’Brien 
Back Bay

In prose as rich as loam, O’Brien discerns the various drives that coexist amid the welter of human behavior. The world she summons is a piercingly beautiful combination of yearning and disappointment, violence and endurance.

Emily, Alone 
Stewart O’Nan 
Viking

With this quietly devastating, precisely observed novel that traces the course of three-quarters of a year near the end—but decidedly not at the end—of a widow’s long life, O’Nan, too long overlooked, has firmly established his place as one of our finest and most humane novelists.