The whole place was like a doll’s house that had been turned upside down and stepped on.“ This is Margaret Atwood’s startling description of our world after the eponymous disaster that sets the stage for “The Year of the Flood.“ It’s the same bleak stage on which her novel “Oryx and Crake” took place: a world in which excessive corporate growth and genetic engineering have brought about a society that’s part Orwellian (with robot bees that spy on citizens), part Wellesian (with genetically modified pigs and plants), and part-Sinclairian (with hamburger joints that may well recycle human body parts into their meat.

Philip Roth’s novels have become downright austere in recent years, with none of the past four cracking 300 pages. They’re chamber works, small-scale explorations of an idea or two. For Roth, that normally means sex and death. These days, he’s whittling it down to death alone. That’s not to say that his new novel, “The Humbling,“ is sex-free. But the balance of power has definitely shifted to the Grim Reaper.

It’s the long Labor Day weekend in Holton Mills, N.H., in the mid-1980s, and 13-year-old Henry and his mother, Adele, have nothing special planned. That’s not unusual. Adele doesn’t like to leave the house, though Henry wishes they’d get out more. She works at home, selling vitamins over the phone, and hasn’t really dated since Henry’s dad divorced her. But Henry, who is about to enter the seventh grade, needs a new pair of pants. So Adele decides to go shopping at their local Pricemart.

Sibling rivalry is usually enough to give an edge to most family get-togethers. Throw in a will that insists that the siblings spend the entire summer together before they inherit, and the result, as Haywood Smith describes in “Ladies of the Lake,“ is an engaging tale of sisters reluctantly shedding the past and embracing the present.

In the long history of novels, love triangles have rarely ended well. The one that drives Paul Auster’s fascinating new novel, “Invisible,“ certainly doesn’t. But it began so casually that now, 40 years later, Auster’s protagonist has trouble recalling the details of that first fateful meeting. Adam Walker had been a Columbia University student and an aspiring poet when he met Rudolf Born, a French political scientist serving a one-year professorship at the university. They chatted about various hot-button issues—the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination—while Born’s black-clad companion, Margot, stared “into space as if her central mission in life was to look bored.“

FICTION
David Baldacci has a knack for writing best-selling thriller series. Most recently, he has devoted attention to his Camel Club series, as well as adding an installment to his long-running series featuring former Secret Service agents Michelle Maxwell and Sean King. Now, with “True Blue,“ the Richmond native has introduced a new character who shows promise for starring in her own series.

The past has a way of clinging to troubled and haunted souls, and Gil Castle, the scarred protagonist of Philip Caputo’s smart new thriller, “Crossers,“ wears it, Caputo writes, “like a second skin.“ It disturbs him that others don’t. He lost his wife in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an event that commentaries claimed had changed the world forever. But it hasn’t.

It’s not easy to put in a good word for the other woman. She is the wicked witch of marital bliss, the one who threatens destruction and heartbreak. And she certainly deserves no defense, but as cardiologist and novelist Martha Moody so perceptively describes in “Sometimes Mine,“ circumstances occasionally upend conventional wisdom.

Gone fishin’. They might be two of the most beautiful words in the language, conjuring an image of relaxation, solitude (or companionship, if chosen), the joys of nature and the absence of the 24/7 cycle of tweets and bulletins and phone calls. That’s where Virgil Flowers, an ace investigative agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension finds himself as “Rough Country,“ the third entry in John Sandford’s spin-off series, begins—musky fishing in Minnesota’s North Woods. But his boss, Lucas Davenport, manages to contact him with a puzzling, and perhaps politically charged, case.

In February 1983, alluring songstress and part-time heroin addict Zoe Kruller is found murdered in her home in the dying Rust Belt town of Sparta, N.Y. When the police hunt for suspects, they come up with her mechanic husband Delray and her lover, construction worker Eddy Diehl. Neither is charged with the crime, but small-town suspicion is enough to ruin Eddy’s life, and Delray never quite recovers, either. The tragedy ripples outward to envelop Eddy’s vulnerable daughter Krista and Delray’s son Aaron. Krista and Aaron each believe the other’s father is to blame, but a budding sexual energy between them complicates their emotions.

In a 2003 piece for The New York Times, Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt questioned the merit of the Harry Potter series. Her basic argument: Young-adult novels like these are safe, comfortable, and lacking in what she refers to as “a compensating seriousness . . . a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests.“

Judging by the unending flow of books, movies and television series, World War II is still being fought. But, as Dan Fesperman shows in his absorbing new espionage novel, “The Arms Maker of Berlin,“ there continue to be war stories worth telling. Like John Le Carre, Fesperman is a writer who emphasizes motive and character rather than firepower, though there is a high-enough body count to satisfy action addicts. Grounded in research and careful documentation, his novels offer fictionalized accounts of actual events. This time around, he links the German resistance group, the White Rose, with Kurt Bauer, an aging arms maker whose family provided Hitler with weapons and after the war became a major appliance as well as arms manufacturer.

MYSTERIES
One finishes an outstanding trilogy with regret, but also, in the case of Rennie Airth’s three novels featuring John Madden, with abundant admiration. Airth introduced Madden in 1999’s “River of Darkness” set in 1921, continued with 2004’s “The Blood-Dimmed Tide” set in 1932 and now brings the series to a conclusion with the remarkable The Dead of Winter (416 pages, Viking, $25.95).

FICTION
Reviewing Dan Brown’s new thriller several days after its publication is a little like standing in the middle of the Indy 500 racetrack and announcing that the race has started. But here goes: Dan Brown has written a sequel to his bestselling thriller, “The Da Vinci Code.“ It’s called “The Lost Symbol,“ and you really should consider buying one of the 5 million copies its publisher printed for its first run.

FICTION Sequels often seem the literary equivalent of dessert—worth the wait as well as the reward for eating your veggies first. So fans will enjoy Dorothea Frank’s “Return to Sullivans Island,“ which catches up with the next generation of Hamiltons and Hayeses as they share old heartaches and face new challenges. Frank’s novels celebrate life in South Carolina’s Low Country—the beguiling beaches, close family ties and a more leisurely way of life.