THE REINDEER PEOPLE by Piers Vitebsky (Houghton Mifflin, hardcover), is the amazing story of a British anthropologist's 25+ years visiting and documenting the life of some of the last indigenous Siberian people to herd domestic reindeer.  We meet many keenly individual men women and children, from the university-trained to the 

descendants of shamans.  I was reminded of the Mongul family in the documenary movie "The Weeping Camel," and of Amundson's antarctic expeditions, which used native skills while Scott died using modern mechanical aids.    We learn what it was like to live under Soviet rule (when labor camps drove the meat markets); we watch Perestroika as it affects both animals and people, and we witness the region's disastrous ecological and economic decline under Putin's Russia. 

BRANWELL by Douglas A. Martin (Soft Skull Press, paperback), an historical novel which tells the story of the Bronte family from the perspective of the black sheep brother.  Like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (about the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre), Branwell enhances any reading of the sister's novels.

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEAR: 1599 by James Shapiro (HarperCollins, paperback).  The year that Shakespeare made the transition from history plays (Henry V) to tragedies (Hamlet) was a year of tremendous upheaval and political change in Elizabethan England.  This book will forever change your reading of the line:

"The play's the thing in which to catch the conscience of the King."

THE STORY OF GENERAL DANN AND MARA'S DAUGHTER by Doris Lessing (HarperCollins, hardcover).  Think of Cassandra writing an Ursula LeGuin fantasy.  Lessing is didactic but powerful -- and not in the least politically correct -- when she portrays men and women yearning for utopia.  She honors the hope, but no one could be more pessimistic about at what cost those efforts eventually (and always, at least in this book) fail.

THE SARI SHOP by Rupa Bajwa (new Norton paperback), a sad, haunting story of a clerk in a small shop in India.  The hero reminds me of the lower caste lovers in the movie Monsoon Wedding, and Leonard Bates in Howard's End).

MAPS FOR LOST LOVERS by Nadeem Aslam (March, Knopf hardcover).  An extraordinary novel about long-time British residents, a family caught between devout, traditional, misogynist Pakistani culture (which the mother enforces) and the marxist, integrationist -- yet still observant -- attitude of the liberal father.  I read this book a little before the London bombings, and it gave me instant awareness of what kind of rage and hopelessness simmers beneath the surface, just waiting to be high jacked by extremists.  The father is an extremely sympathetic figure who has deliberately remained in the run-down, immigrant neighborhood to help improve conditions for the working class.  Yet several of his ethical decisions have disastrous consequences for himself and his children, as does the mother's insistence on wanting her sons and daughter to be so faithful they will return to Pakistan to marry.

OUR FATHER'S WAR by Tom Matthews (Broadway, new hardcover and see his NPR interview recently).  This new book is the story of how so many American sons and fathers learned NOT to talk about war, especially not to each other, and how Matthews decided to try to find a way to understand his father's combat experience in World War II.  Inspired in part by the movie "Saving Private Ryan," it echoes the father-son sagas in Flags of Our Fathers, Final Rounds, and the self-effacing war stories in The Greatest Generation, but this book intimately grounded in one writer's eloquent portrait of what it means to be men who have killed in war, and then who return to a civilian life where no one can imagine how they feel, even after the "Good" war.

OUR MOTHER'S WAR by Emily Yellin (March, S&S  paperback).  First of all, Yellin's mother's first husband was the author of the book, play, movie Mr. Roberts.  It is therefore completely understandable that she was always curious about her mother's Red Cross war experience, but it wasn't until she read her mother's Saipan Diary and letters home (unfortunately, not until after her mother died), that she realized how little she had really understood about life during World War II.  Although "Rosie the Riveter" and the total six million women who went to work for the war effort had gotten some attention finally for what they had done in civilian jobs, she couldn't find a lot to read about women who joined the Army, the Air Corps and the Navy.

This book makes up for that lacuna in spades.  It's well written and extremely well-researched, with a fascinating bibliography of contemporary original sources.  And she covers everything from Julia Child in the OSS to women pilots ferrying B-29s over the Pacific, life in the Japanese-American internment camps, and Hattie McDaniels' efforts to get the African-American war effort recognized by Hollywood.

WILL IN THE WORLD by Stephen Greenblatt (Norton, hardcover).  You may have heard about this bestselling biography of Shakespeare, but it's better than you can possibly imagine.   I defy anyone to read this and not want to run out and see a play or reread the Bard.  It is readable, fun, and original, without any academic or intellectual pretensions.  I know a 17th Century scholar who loved it, and an artist who loves theater but is very skeptical of literary criticism, who raved about it.