WEATHER by Jenny Offill (Knopf). Reminding us yet again that we're living in a bountiful period of American literary fiction. Year after year, and in some stretches week after week, I find myself confronting one and often more than one really distinguished book that's both clearly in the great main stream of American literature and yet distinctively of our time. In touch with the way we live (and laugh, and complain, love, work, suffer, and even read) right now. Offill gets a bunch of the same adjectives (inadequate, again) that I've recently sprinkled on books by Gish Jen, Charles Yu, Lily Tuck, Meng Jin—diamond-brilliant but warmer than that suggests, witty, appalling—but then that turns out to be exhilarating, even elevating (I may not have employed that one recently). It's very contemporary, but our grandchildren, when they've grown, will read it, too. And when they ask each other: What were they thinking? the answer might come to them: Oh! Maybe this—the best of them, anyway.

MERCY HOUSE by Alena Dillon (Morrow). Not so literary, but smart, enjoyable and emotionally charged novel of a women's refuge in Brooklyn run by a sweetly silver-haired nun, Heaven-sent, maybe, but hellacious—in defense and support of her refugees. She's no joke, though, and she isn't the only character—not by a long shot—that you'll long remember from this novel.

OLYMPIC PRIDE, AMERICAN PREJUDICE by Deborah Riley Draper and Travis Thrasher (Atria). This is, as its subtitle announces, “The untold story of 18 African Americans who defied Jim Crow and Adolph Hitler to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.” Part of it, of course, is one of the great American stories, that of the legendary Jesse Owens, and it's here. But there was more, and if anything even more inspiring. Enormously accomplished, dedicated athletes, great but not immortal, faced fierce public scrutiny at home even before they confronted the monstrously racist Nazis (one of them was Mack Robinson, whose younger brother Jackie was to become yet another immortal).

SALT RIVER by Randy Wayne White (Putnam). This new one would be a very good place to get to know, if you haven't, the Florida Gulf coast fishing-boat captain/private eye/keeper of found things and not-quite-snowy-white knight, Doc Ford. He's one of the great characters in crime fiction, a good guy a little inclined to favor his own rules over the law's at times. It's no surprise that his pal Tomlinson's colorful past is a triggering factor, here—but plenty of surprises follow. Of course there can be no single best of this superlative series, but if we were discussing that, this one would come up.