Tan’s ambitious debut is a gripping historical novel set on an exotic island in Southeast Asia during a 60-year span that encompasses the island’s primitive condition as a British colony, the WWII Japanese invasion, and its postwar transformation. Thanks to a deep natural harbor, fine climate, and convenient position between India and China, the island becomes “the shiny opal in the empire’s Far Eastern crown.” But since the heroine has the gift—or curse—of seeing the dead, this is also a gothic tale with scenes of grisly supernatural horror, its atmosphere full of dark omens and a sense of the macabre. Narrator Ling, who later changes her name to Cassandra, is born in early 1920s China. As an adolescent, she goes with her father and twin brother to the aptly named Black Island, where she lives through one harrowing event after another as she’s forced to summon spectral apparitions in order to placate the men who rule her life: her feckless father, the Japanese officer who makes her his mistress, and the ruthlessly ambitious Oxford-educated politician in whose bed she finds herself next. Tan’s imagination seems boundless as she involves her protagonist in events that force her to evade moral scruples in order to stay alive. Conveying an atmosphere of corruption, violence and betrayal, Tan anchors the narrative with authoritative details of time and place, and social and ethnic rituals. Her descriptions of the supercilious British and the arrogant, depraved Japanese are brutally candid. Her stark, knife-sharp images of horror-inducing events—a woman in sexual congress with an octopus, a schoolgirl’s body dangling from a ceiling fan, forced sex in public as entertainment for Japanese army officers, occult rites in a cemetery, prisoners forced to harvest fleas from bodies to make pathogens, sharks bursting out of an aquarium tank and devouring children, a huge gathering of ghastly corpses—are not for fainthearted readers, but the tale as a whole maintains its mesmerizing power throughout. Agent: Barbara Braun. (Aug.7)

The opening of Hall’s outstanding third mystery featuring PI Vish Puri (after 2010’s The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing) sets the tone nicely as Puri tinkers with the bathroom scale to prevent his wife, who refers to him as Chubby, from learning that he’s gained weight. Soon after, a representative of the Moustache Organization of Punjab (MOP) asks him to find the fiend who cut off half of the record-setting long whiskers of one of its members. This case fades as he looks into a more serious matter—the poisoning of a guest at a dinner following a high-stakes cricket match. A resourceful and dogged investigator, Puri follows a twisting trail that connects with corruption in the sport and illegal gambling. Well-drawn colorful characters bolster a whodunit sure to appeal to those who enjoy a dash of humor with their crime. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher & Co. (July)

Flint’s third mystery featuring Inspector Singh of the Singapore Police (after 2011’s A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul) works better as a portrayal of a world largely unknown to Western audiences than a whodunit. As Singh and his wife prepare for a visit from an eligible bachelor relative of hers, Jagdesh Singh, from India, the policeman’s called away on a high-profile murder case. Mark Thompson, a senior partner at the very firm that employs Jagdesh, has been bludgeoned to death in his office. The many suspects at the firm have a variety of secrets that they each seek to keep hidden, ranging from substance abuse to sexual identity. Any one of them could’ve killed Thompson to preserve his or her secret. Singh’s politically sensitive boss limits his ability to follow the evidence. The police procedure proceeds along routine lines until the less than surprising revelation of the killer’s identity. (July)

MWA Grand Master Burke continues to raise the bar for himself, and the reader, as shown by his lyrical, insightful 19th Dave Robicheaux novel (after 2010’s The Glass Rainbow). While the New Iberia, La., deputy sheriff is recovering in a New Orleans hospital from a bullet wound, he receives a visit from Cajun singer Tee Jolie Melton, who leaves him an iPod loaded with music, including the blues song “My Creole Belle.” Only thing is, Tee Jolie supposedly disappeared months earlier, and her teenage sister, Blue Melton, has just turned up frozen in a block of ice. Meanwhile, Clete Purcel, Robicheaux’s hard-drinking best friend, has problems of his own: some local wise guys are trying to blackmail him, and he fears his lost daughter, Gretchen, may be a notorious assassin. As Robicheaux and Purcel suit up again to take on an array of foes, including corrupt politicians, oil men, and a wealthy old man they suspect is a Nazi war criminal, they feel the weight of their own history, and begin to hear the ghostly whisper of mortality. This is another stunner from a modern master. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency. (July)

This is the third book for Teicher, who is poetry editor and director of digital operations at PW. In this volume—at the perilously young age of 32—Teicher (Cradle Book) stages a showdown with his demons, even mentor-demons and lover-demons. The book risks most everything poetry can risk: family, reputation, legacy, privacy. The spirits of dead parents mix with a spouse and children and colleagues, and then, there’s Robert Lowell, who presides over this entire volume in a ghostly fashion that should get Harold Bloom’s attention. Lowell’s Life Studies, in fact, provides the title to the first of two “books” in this volume, and Lowell is directly the subject of the third and fourth poems. Lowell’s circle—Berryman, Bishop, Niedecker, et al.—is the subject of the poem “Middle Generation.” Teicher grapples with that mid-century’s confessional and yet highly formal work by fighting same with same. “All words stand for pain,” he writes, in one of the many brilliant sonnets. You feel Teicher’s pain in a word, “Cal,” the name of his young son whose “need for care” is referenced and who, one might assume, is named after Lowell, who was known by that name to friends. Such is the way of words and what they issue. Marriage and fatherhood wreak agony from Teicher, as does the pain of having lost his own mother early, the young poet-to-be cast into the world groping for language—“Her death was like waking up to fried/ food cooking on another family’s stove/ in another life where no one cried.” In the “blurry” regions of the title, he conflates his helpless mother in late-stage illness with a helpless infant and sees in his own relation to women the helpless boy wanting to be mothered—“the world is overripe with surrogate moms,/ it turns out, and I’m a willing son.” Ultimately, Teicher looks to Lowell, a poetic father, to give him the backbone to “make himself look good” even if “his art was saying I’ve been bad.” Although the persona in these poems toys with annihilation and (twice) with “dull blades,” it survives, and does so through aesthetic will: tight sonnets, a perfect villanelle, a moving prose memoir. “True self-haters,” writes the poet in “Confession,” “perform to empty houses, late.” That won’t be Teicher’s fate. (Sept.)

Bang has done for Dante’s most famous poem something akin to what Baz Luhrmann did for Shakespeare in his 1996 film of Romeo and Juliet: updated the presentation of a classic for a contemporary sensibility without sacrificing its timelessness. Bang (The Bride of E) has preserved the feel and tempo of the original—and the many English translations that readers will be familiar with: ”Stopped mid-motion in the middle/ Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—/ Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost,” she begins. She has, however, modernized the metaphors; where Dante looked to the politics and culture of his contemporary Italy for allusions to illustrate his sense of faith and morality, Bang mines American pop and high culture. Yes, traditionalists and scholars may shriek upon seeing Eric Cartman (of South Park fame), sculptures by Rodin, John Wayne Gacy, and many others make anachronistic cameos in Bang’s version of Hell, but this is still very much Dante’s underworld, updated so it pops on today’s page. The result is an epic both fresh and historical, scholarly and irreverent: “ ‘Pope Satan, Pope Satan, Alley Oop!’ ” begins Canto VII with a line in which Bang mines various previous translations of Dante and the roots of the phrase “Alley Oop” in French gymnastics and a newspaper comic about “a Stone Age traveling salesman from the kingdom of Moo who rode a dinosaur named Dinny,” according to Bang’s comprehensive notes. This will be the Dante for the next generation. Includes illustrations by artist Henrik Drescher. (Aug.)

Propelled by her successful fiction debut, A Discovery of Witches, historian Harkness concocts an energetic if chaotic sequel filled with witches, daemons, vampires, wearhs, weavers, and warm-bloods (aka humans) racing to retrieve a lost manuscript that details the origins of supernatural species, which, in the wrong hands, could hasten their extinction. The first novel culminated in the mixed marriage of vampire/scientist Matthew de Clermont to historian/untrained witch Diana Bishop. This novel opens with the newlyweds time-traveling to Elizabethan England so Diana can study witchcraft; never mind they’re burning witches in Scotland or that in London an educated American woman doesn’t exactly blend in. There, they hope to retrieve magical manuscript Ashmole 782, last seen in Oxford’s 21st-century Bodleian library. Diana gets in touch with her inner firedrake, Matthew with his father, but they can’t find a tutor for ages, and they can’t rescue the manuscript without a trip to Prague. Supporting Diana and Matthew in their quest is a secret society that includes dashing Walter Raleigh and dangerous daemon Christopher Marlowe. Harkness delights in lining up the living dead and modern academic history, as in her explanation of how a forger named Shakespeare, with supernatural prompting, takes up playwriting. This tale of a feminist Yankee in Queen Elizabeth’s court charms amid the tumult, as the gifted heroine and her groom fight for generations and another sequel to come in order to protect the magical world that’s all around us. Agent: Sam Stoloff. (July 10)

Bakopoulos debuts with a family drama and revolutionary romance set during the Greek military junta of 1967–1974. On the April night that the army stages its coup, 21-year-old Sophie is dancing at her leftist boyfriend Nick’s Athens apartment when soldiers barge in and arrest suspected student dissidents. Refusing to break contact with Nick and his fellow activists or abandon the liberal political convictions inherited from her family, Sophie sinks dangerously deeper into antijunta resistance. Meanwhile, her widowed mother, Eleni, faces possible trouble at the hospital where she works when the junta forbids treating torture victims. Eleni’s brother, a famous leftist poet who’s fought oppression before, has to gauge his response more carefully, since his family is at risk and an opportunity arises to reconnect with his estranged wife. Meanwhile, Sophie’s observant younger sister tries to understand the purpose of the struggle. Warm, engaging characters and a richly authentic Greek setting make for an engaging read with commercial appeal. And while some narrative threads are less taut than others, Bakopoulos’s juxtaposition of a historic conflict with the joys and trials of motherhood, the heedlessness of youth, and the durability of family ties is poignant and effective. Agent: Amy Williams, McCormick & Williams. (June)

A provocative “what-if” premise propels Nobel laureate Wiesel’s (Night) latest novel. In 1975, an Orthodox Jewish man, Shaltiel Feigenberg, is kidnapped from a Brooklyn street and held hostage by two terrorists, an Arab and an Italian, who demand the release of Palestinians and threaten death if their demands aren’t met. Shaltiel, a kindly storyteller, ruminates on the blessings of Judaism and recalls the words of Jewish prophets, philosophers, and mystics with nostalgia. He also remembers the moral ambiguity of being hidden in his native Galicia by a Nazi officer while his family labored in Auschwitz. Wiesel deplores ideologies that mislead and betray, including the communism that lured Shaltiel’s brother in the 1930s. As Shaltiel’s Arab captor spews hatred and his Italian captor speaks for international terrorism, Shaltiel claims that the excesses of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians are unavoidable safety measures. While the clock ticks closer to the deadline, Wiesel’s narrative skills fail to create tension, and Shaltiel’s rescue is perfunctory. Instead of a literary thriller, we get a didactic defense of the Jewish state and its timeless vulnerability. Agent: Georges Borchardt. (Aug. 24)

The struggle for survival is relayed with elegance and humility in Ratner’s autobiographical debut novel set in Khmer Rouge–era Cambodia. Raami is seven when civil war erupts, and she and her family are forced to leave Phnom Penh for the countryside. As minor royalty, they’re in danger; the Khmer Rouge is systematically cleansing the country of wealthy and educated people. Escaping their Phnom Penh home aboard a rusty military vehicle, a gold necklace is traded for rice, and literacy can mean death; “They say anyone with glasses reads too much... the sign of an intellectual.” Amid hunger, the loss of much of her family, and labor camp toil, Raami clings to the beauty that her father has shown her in traditional mythology and his own poetry. Raami’s story closely follows that of Ratner’s own: a child when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, she endured years under their rule until she and her mother escaped to the United States in 1981. This stunning memorial expresses not just the terrors of the Khmer Rouge but also the beauty of what was lost. A hauntingly powerful novel imbued with the richness of old Cambodian lore, the devastation of monumental loss, and the spirit of survival. Agent: Emma Sweeney. (Aug.)