Once dubbed a “sadistic moralist” by Newsweek, Michael Tolkin has been spinning tales about the ethically challenged in film (Deep Impact, The New Age, and The Rapture) and on the page (Among the Dead and Under Radar) for the past twenty years. But it was his memorable debut novel, The Player (1988), which he adapted for the screen with Robert Altman in 1992, that put him on the literary map. The eponymous player is Griffin Mill, a soon-to-be-fired studio executive who turns to murder after a frustrated, unproduced screenwriter starts sending him anonymous, threatening postcards. In a writerly manipulation worthy

The bloody era of sectarian violence between nationalists and Unionists known as the Troubles that marked Northern Ireland from 1969 until the late ’90s comes boldly to life in Louise Dean’s astonishing second novel, This Human Season. From her scrupulously fashioned prose emerges a sprawling saga, structured in alternating chapters, of two Belfast families—the Catholic Morans and the Protestant Dunns—torn from without by their warring loyalties and from within by their own demons during the two months leading up to Christmas 1979.