Temple is a teen girl who has never known a time before zombies. She is alone in her fight to survive and rejoin the isolated pockets of humanity still left in the American south. This is a brilliantly written allegorical story of self-discovery and the personal spiritual journey. It is nonetheless a very graphic zombie novel that is not for those with a weak stomach.

These are like Twitter short stories. They are all 25 words or less. There are some high profile writers included, like Joyce Carol Oates, Ha Jin, and J.A. Konrath, but there are also many talented emerging writers contributing as well.

I don't think this book could "fall through the stacks", or at least if it did, it would leave a serious dent. The Instructions is the biggest book I have ever seen on our fiction shelves at 1030 pages. More astonishing is that the story only covers a time period of four days.

This is Toby Ball's debut novel, and I can't wait for his second. The Vaults is a suspenseful tale of three men who get in over their heads while they try to unravel the secrets of a crooked mayor. It's an alternate history set in the 1930's in a nameless city that feels very real. Ball starts his story with Arthur Puskis who is the city's police archivist. For nearly 20 years Puskis has only left the vaults to go home and occasionally stop at the corner store. One day, he discovers a duplicate file. To his exacting mind, this is unthinkable. When he discovers a second forged file, he is compelled to leave his safety zone and investigate. Meanwhile, reporter, Frank Frings, is investigating the suspect mayor and his cronies. A bomb destroys the home of one of the mayor's underlings, and the local union is blamed. More bombings are on the way. One of the union's supporters happens to be a private investigator and he gets involved too. All three men spiral around each other as they piece together the complex mystery and reveal the truth behind the bombings.