Your Shelf Life: 5 Books to Read in March

The short stories in Will Mackin’s Bring Out the Dog are based on his deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL. Three were first published in the New Yorker, garnering comparisons to great the chroniclers of modern warfare.

In Jesse Ball’s Census, a retired doctor learns he will die soon, so he takes a job as a census worker and travels across an unnamed country with his disabled son, witnessing the breadth of human experience.

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The Parking Lot Attendant is the debut novel from Nafkote Tamirat, about a sarcastic but tenderhearted Ethiopian teenager who lives with her father and comes under the sway of a scheming older man.

San Diego author Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone is the first installment in a West African fantasy series. It follows a girl’s odyssey to bring magic back to her village, which has been overtaken by a ruthless new monarchy.

James Conaway’s decades-long reporting on Napa continues with Napa at First Light, a look at the troubling reality of historic family wineries lost to multinational corporations.

Your Shelf Life: 5 Books to Read in March