Melissa Fay Greene | author | Lori Lansens | Eric Blehm

There Is No Me without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children (Bloomsbury, $26): It’s quite possible that of all the narrative nonfiction writers working today, no one is better than Melissa Fay Greene — of Praying for Sheetrock fame — at turning big, sprawling topics into accessible, great reads that put a human face on the otherwise too-big-to-grasp issues. In her latest, Greene carefully immerses readers in the story of Haregewoin Teferra, an Ethiopian woman who, one by one, is saving the lives of children orphaned by AIDS.

The Girls: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company, $24): From the first sentence of her elegantly written novel, author Lori Lansens makes it easy for readers to fall for the girls, 29-year-old conjoined twins, in The Girls. And, luckily for readers, Lansens didn’t just spend time developing her two main (and wonderful) characters, Ruby and Rose; she also gave her full attention to drawing a clear picture of the world around them, which is definitely a fine by-product of the author’s work as a screenwriter.

The Last Season (HarperCollins, $25): If outdoors mags are your regular reads, there’s a good chance you’ve already come across this title. But it deserves a much broader audience. Author Eric Blehm collected a mountain’s worth of information during his quest to find out what happened to Randy Morgenson, a backcountry ranger in the Sierra Nevada Mountains who seemingly just disappeared. The writing pulls you along, and along the way, Blehm gives readers an intriguing introduction to the world of backcountry rangers.