(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Human Stain Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin) Professor Coleman Silk is accused of racism and forced to resign in Philip Roth's latest novel. What his accusers don't know: Silk is a black man who has passed in white society for years. Roth humorously skewers the moralizing, cultural arrogance, and hypocrisy that can plague a politically correct college campus.

The Circus Fire Stewart O'Nan (Doubleday) In 1944 fire engulfed the Ringling Bros. big top in Hartford, claiming 167 lives. Questions remain: Why had the tent been coated in a paraffin/gasoline mixture? How did lions and tigers and Flying Wallendas escape? And what of the mysterious identity of the littlest unclaimed victim? Paging James Cameron...

Taken for a Ride: How Daimler-Benz Drove Off With Chrysler Bill Vlasic and Bradley A. Stertz (William Morrow) Detroit may never get its Barbarians at the Gate, but this comes close. The drama is seeing Daimler's Jurgen Schrempp outmaneuver Chrysler's Robert Eaton, who becomes so unnerved that on occasion he bursts into tears. This was no merger of equals.

In Her Defense Stephen Horn (HarperCollins) A down-on-his-heels attorney looks up from his troubles to find he has a glamorous new client--she's accused of murder, and she doesn't deny the crime. We've been here before, but who cares? With his first novel, lawyer Horn has written the thriller of the summer, with enough salty wit to keep a cold beer company.

Driving Mr. Albert Michael Paterniti (Dial Press) When Albert Einstein died, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy kept the brain. More than 40 years later he and wonder boy Paterniti head cross-country to return the brain--in a Tupperware bowl--to Einstein's granddaughter. Truth is stranger than fiction, and slightly less fulfilling. Still, what a weird, wild ride.

The Year of Jubilo Howard Bahr (Henry Holt) Though subtitled A Novel of the Civil War, Jubilo is about the war's aftermath--Reconstruction on a personal scale. Bahr has pulled off a neat trick, writing lyrically and suspensefully about a Confederate soldier who returns home to Mississippi to do battle with both his own ghosts and a vigilante ranger.

The Confirmation Thomas Powers (Alfred A. Knopf) Frank Cabot's on deck to be the next CIA director, but his confirmation implodes because he's been keeping secrets about Vietnam MIAs, the Soviet gulag, and a U.S. government that didn't care. Cabot must defend himself against a Washington-style betrayal: politicians, journalists, even his own family.

In a Sunburned Country Bill Bryson (Broadway Books) Master raconteur Bryson leads a droll, rambling tour of Australia, a country that may still escape our notice but not his keen eye. He chronicles the odd accidents that shaped the nation, concluding that its people, apart from the tendency of Aussie men "to wear knee-high socks with shorts, are just like you and me."

Stern Men Elizabeth Gilbert (Houghton Mifflin) Don't be put off by the cliched plot (Romeo and Juliet spend the 1970s on feuding Maine islands). The payoff is in Gilbert's textured, eccentric characters and landscapes--she makes these sleepy lobster burgs pop. Check it out before it becomes a sanitized movie starring the kids from Dawson's Creek.

The Marines of Autumn James Brady (St. Martin's Press) The Korean war gets the novel it has long deserved with Brady's powerful tale of MacArthur's Chosin Reservoir campaign. His smooth, clean style only highlights the fact that the war had a lot in common with the weather: One was coldly brutal, the other brutally cold. You'll never look at M*A*S*H the same way again.