SUGAR RUN, by Mesha Maren. (Algonquin, $26.95.) An ex-convict returns to her Appalachian roots in this debut novel that harks back to hard-boiled fiction and film noir even as it updates those venerable genres. “Though the powerful pulls of land and home and sense of place persist,” Charles Frazier writes in his review, “one of the primary questions ‘Sugar Run’ asks is what these concepts even mean now in this country. Maren is masterly at describing America’s modern wastelands, the blasted towns not yet and maybe never-to-be the beneficiaries of rehabilitation and reoccupation.”

ANNE FRANK’S DIARY: The Graphic Adaptation, adapted by Ari Folman. Illustrated by David Polonsky. (Pantheon, $24.95.) By turning the famous diary of a girl hiding from the Nazis into a graphic novel, Folman and Polonsky bring out its wit and humor in whimsical illustrations capturing Anne’s rich imaginative life. “The comedy of the ‘Diary’ — one of the book’s most charming and often overlooked aspects — shines in this form,” our reviewer, Ruth Franklin, writes. “Another consistent standout is the way the graphic novel conveys Anne’s fantasies and emotions. … This graphic adaptation is so engaging and effective that it’s easy to imagine it replacing the ‘Diary’ in classrooms and among younger readers.”

REVOLUTION SUNDAY, by Wendy Guerra. Translated by Achy Obejas. (Melville House, paper, $16.99.) This Cuban novel, about a poet named Cleo facing political and personal questions amid the loosening grip of socialism, plays with expectations; as often as Guerra gives a concrete description of Havana, she gives one that dances and evades. “More than in its plot — a Cold War conspiracy of sorts — the movement of ‘Revolution Sunday’ is in the coming and going from the island, the beacon that will find Cleo in Paris, Barcelona and New York,” Jaime Lalinde writes in his review. “What emerges in ‘Revolution Sunday’ is primarily a novel of the self, of an artist contending with her own vanishing. The paradox of isolation without privacy. The isle in the word exile.”

GHOST WALL, by Sarah Moss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) This compact, riveting novel, about a 17-year-old working-class girl forced by her parents to join a re-enactment of Iron Age Britain, asks us to question our complicity in violence, particularly against women. According to Alyson Hagy’s review, Moss “salts the novel with women who practice ancient skills with modesty, who honor historical experience without slavishly imitating it. … If most of the women in ‘Ghost Wall’ find solidarity through collaboration, the men become transfixed by their desire ‘to kill things and talk about fighting.’”

THE BREAKTHROUGH: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, by Charles Graeber. (Twelve, $28.) Training the body’s immune system to fight disease now offers the most promising developments in the effort to battle cancer. Graeber recounts the treatment’s 19th-century origins and provides a panoramic view of the work being done today to make it effective. The book, Mimi Swartz writes in her review, “relates an unfolding and very frustrating mystery. Researchers have come tantalizingly close to beating the disease — even creating miraculous cures in mice and the occasional human — only to come up against another harrowing complexity in the body they hadn’t imagined or anticipated. Over the years, these scientists became like a platoon that could get itself behind enemy lines, only to find itself without weapons. Returning with weapons, they would find they had no bullets. Returning with bullets, they would discover they had the wrong kind, and so on. ‘The Breakthrough’ is the story of this desperate war waged on a cellular level.”