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They say if you love something, you should set it free. Not so in Stephanie Powell Watts's powerful debut novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us (Ecco). “Love means never letting anything go, never seeing it stride on long confident legs away from you.” A modem recasting of The Great Gatsby in the American South, this timely novel sheds its green light on economic and emotional heartbreak and the spaces where the living meet the dead. Peter Heller's latest, Celine (Knopf), also keeps its eyes on the prize, this time via the suspenseful story of a bourgeois Brooklyn P.I., on the hunt for a missing man and thrust into the raw scenery of Yellowstone National Park—wildly gripping in every sense. While we’re out there, Hannah Tinti takes us to Alaska and back in The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley (Dial). In this literary thriller about a father’s attempts to shield his daughter from his past, Tinti proves she is the rare writer equally adept at describing cheesecake texture and gunshot wounds.

Send out the ravens: Epistolary artillery is deployed in An American on the Western Front (History Press), edited by Patrick Gregory and Elizabeth Nurser. A letter-writing habit turns hairy in Carol Weston's Speed of Life (Sourcebooks). Nadeem Aslam's The Golden Legend (Knopf) glimmers under the pressure cooker of radical Islam. And Colum McCann offers Letters to a Young Writer (Random House). “Be ready to get ripped to pieces: it happens.”