The Red House
By Mary Morris (Doubleday)

When Laura is a child in New Jersey, her mother goes missing, a moment that becomes the fault line in her life. Nothing is the same again. Decades later, Laura, the novel’s narrator, heads to her mother’s native Italy in search of clues. A cinematic story with many twists and a jagged timeline, Mary Morris’s writing is visually rich with scenes of Italian city streets and coastlines. Laura, who stages others’ homes for a living, finds the titular red house her mother would often paint, along the way encountering dark historical truths—and many personal truths as well.

The Baker of Lost Memories
By Shirley Russak Wachtel (Little A)

In this historical novel, a young woman in 1960s Brooklyn achieves her dream of becoming a baker, as her mother had been before the war, even as she faces silence about her parents’ Holocaust experiences. Author Shirley Russak Wachtel, herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, braids a story about the reverberations of loss across generations and the power of inherited memory.

A Precise Chaos: Poems
By Jo-Ann Mort (Arrowsmith)

Jo-Ann Mort’s debut collection of poems involves memory, love and the passage of time in closely observed moments, like a Jewish woman in deep prayer on the New York City subway. Mort sets many poems in Israel and in locales taken from her wide travels and work as an advocate for peace. These are glimpses of a life still being well-lived and thoughtfully considered, and the “precise chaos, that we, the living/ must endure.”

My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy
By Edward Hirsch (Knopf)

Award-winning poet and author Edward Hirsch tries a new form, relating the story of his coming-of-age in the 1950s and 1960s in short pieces of prose, some only a sentence or two, in which he sharply describes his family’s Skokie, Ill., milieu and their mix of Old World Yiddishkeit and Midwestern pragmatism. The humor can be dark, but there’s also affection as he writes about a grandmother who plays poker every Saturday night and a grandfather who copies poems into the backs of books, along with Jewish gangsters, scrap metal salesmen, refugees from Europe and night club dancers.

Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
By Rachel Cockerell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

This is history and memoir told in a thoroughly inventive style, as Rachel Cockerell unfolds the true story of a largely forgotten plan to bring Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe to Texas, where they were to create a Jewish homeland in an effort known as the Galveston Movement. She uses letters, articles, diaries and interviews to build a narrative of immediacy. Cockerell has a family connection to the events, as her great-grandfather was responsible for persuading a shipload of Russian Jews to travel to Texas—launching the movement.

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Sandee Brawarsky is a longtime columnist in the Jewish book world as well as an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.