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Bridget Jones hasn't aged well. At 51, she's the "geriatric mum" of two small children, and finds herself yearning to plunge back into dating. Critic Maureen Corrigan says if you're looking for jolly feminist cultural commentary, you'd be better off reading a witty "encyclopedia of lady things" from the creators of the website Jezebel.

Former IT consultant Graeme Simsion's debut novel, The Rosie Project, is a scientific romp about a probably-Asperger's-affected genetics professor who falls in love with a free-spirited woman during a search for her biological father. Reviewer Heller McAlpin says it's an "utterly winning screwball comedy."

When writer Lynn Darling found herself at a turning point in her life, she sought solitude and enlightenment in the woods of Vermont. Her new memoir, Out of the Woods, describes that midlife experience. Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan calls it "a compelling story of internal exploration, as well as outward-bound adventure."

Sarah Waters' spellbinding novel — about two women in 1920s London — is no simple period piece. Waters is a superb storyteller with a gift for capturing the layered nuances of character and mood.

Aimee Bender's new story collection, The Color Master, is full of fractured fairy tales that flavor everyday lives and neuroses with a liberal dash of magic. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says Bender's work is "akin to the best of Italo Calvino in its matter-of-fact treatment of the fantastic."

Religious scholar Reza Aslan found that he was much more interested in studying Jesus as a human being than as the figure he learned about in church. His new book, Zealot, chronicles Jesus' life and times and explains how the historical context shaped Jesus and the perception of him.

Alan Rabinowitz grew up with a terrible stutter, but he felt comforted by the big cats at the zoo. Now an accomplished jaguar expert, Rabinowitz tells his touching boyhood story in a book for kids.

T. Geronimo Johnson's latest follows four Berkeley students who take an American history class that leads to disaster. It's an ambitious book about race that wants to say something big about America.

In Natalie Babbitt's celebrated classic, a young girl stumbles upon a secret spring and the family the spring has given eternal life to. Babbitt says she wrote the book to help kids understand death.

A dazzling range of new music, from five women setting their own terms.