FAMILY IN SIX TONES by Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Cao (Viking). An extraordinary, inspiring joint memoir. A couple of smart, strong, and strong-minded people, here. The mother a Vietnamese American refugee who actually manages, with great difficulty, dissociative identity disorder—what used to be called “multiple personalities”; she's now widowed, and a law professor, and a novelist; her gifted daughter, just now out of high school and fatherless, and who has had a mother who has been, sometimes vividly, more than one person. Their stories of their relationship as she grew through her childhood emerge gradually, developing the narrative strength of a novel even though it must be episodic in the telling. Experiencing with each of them their learning to live with each other's differences—and samenesses—is not harrowing, exactly, but often powerfully moving (and struck me, at least, as especially American).

THE EXILES by Christina Baker Kline (HarperCollins). A big historical novel, clearly deeply researched but vivid, engrossing, of the settling of Australia by, among others, people under sentence for various “crimes” including debt. Often willful, even if not always willing, people, then, and they make a great cast of characters for an epic drama. It's a little like America (as it still is, now, of course), with an aboriginal population to be swept aside—but there are fully realized aboriginal characters in this book, too—and wild animals and romances and children, and. . . . Really, Christina Baker Kline (an American, by the way) is the real deal, where this sort of thing is concerned.

GROUNDED by Jon Tester (HarperCollins ). Another memoir, but this one calming, even encouraging. Tester is Senator Tester of Montana, a Democrat from the reddest of red states, so a centrist, but intelligent and strong and more than a little brave. So, not boring but cheering, not because he sings pleasant songs but because he makes good sense. There are legislators in our glorious capitol who enjoy accomplishing things. By, yes, legislating. Who remembers that?

MONEY by Jacob Goldstein (Hachette). Entertaining introduction to thinking of money conceptually—coming to realize that its value is a fantasy that we all manage to sustain a belief in, steadfastly ignoring the occasional impulse to question it for an inward moment. (Such a moment may occur in the reading of this book. “Wait—gold, somewhere? Could I get hold of any, if, the government ever—you know, they might—.”) But never mind, no need to trouble yourself about that, heh, heh. . . . Really, it's clarifying in a way that's soon enough reassuring, leaving us with a more orderly mind to work with and deeper reasons to trust, and even admire, the whole ingenious system.