In the last novel in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, modern-day Amazon Lisbeth Salander lies immobile-but-still-texting in a locked hospital room. Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist — aided by some of his fellow journalists, rogue hackers and skeptical police detectives — scurries around unearthing a monstrous Cold War-era scandal within the Swedish government. Stieg Larsson's soaring architectural ambition fully reveals itself, as he fixates on violence against women, and the men who enable it.
Arthur Phillips' fifth book, The Tragedy of Arthur, is his wildest and funniest yet, at once homage to Nabokov's Pale Fire, satire of literary hagiography in general and Shakespeare scholarship in particular. His concept is clever: A long-lost Shakespeare tragedy is reluctantly ushered into print by Arthur Phillips, the skeptical son of a convicted forger. Full of jousting and jesting, The Tragedy of Arthur is deliciously stimulating.
The Illumination is an unnerving spiritual fantasy about how we humans would (or would not) respond if we could see each other's wounds — physical and emotional — glowing through our bodies. It's structured as a series of linked stories, in which characters hand off to each other a dead woman's deeply affecting collection of love letters. The Illumination glows with the awareness of its characters' sufferings and the bright light of inspiration.
It's the first day of 2100, and you stumble into the bathroom to wash your face and brush your teeth. Tiny microchips in your toothbrush and your toilet instantly analyze your health. You wrap a few wires around your head and mentally cue up soothing music and fried eggs for breakfast. When you're ready, you issue another mental command to your magnetic car, which cruises to your door. Sound crazy? According to physicist Michio Kaku, these technologies are not only possible, they're in development.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why is the universe governed by one particular set of laws and not others? In The Grand Design, cosmologist Stephen Hawking applies cutting-edge quantum physics to these enduring questions. "Spontaneous creation," he writes, "is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to ... set the Universe going."
Charlotte Abbott edits "New in Paperback." A contributing editor for Publishers Weekly, she also leads a weekly chat on books and reading in the digital age every Friday from 4-5 p.m. ET on Twitter. Follow her at @charabbott or check out the #followreader hashtag.