Short List: New & Noteworthy

Traversa, average joe Fran Sandham's memoir of leaving his bookstore job in London and walking 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) overland from Namibia's Skeleton Coast to Zanzibar, on the Indian Ocean.

Vienna Blood, a thriller by Frank Tallis that follows the search for a serial killer in 1902 Vienna, a city buzzing with the works of Freud, Klimt, and Mahler but also dealing with the rise of Nazism.

The Temple of the Wild Geese/Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, a pair of atmospheric novellas from bestselling Japanese author Tsutomu Mizukami (1919-2004), the former set in a Kyoto temple, the latter in a poor village in Fukui Prefecture.