Title: Secret Son
Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Description: Moroccan-born Lalami offers a novel set in her native land. The protagonist is a young man of very meager circumstances living with his widowed mother in Casablanca while he attends college as an English major. The city’s ancient streets teem with political unrest, but Youssef seems disconnected. His thoughts are haunted by the loss of his father in a freak accident when Youssef was an infant. Youssef determines to find his real father, who turns out to be a successful local businessman. A story brimming with insight into the complexities of life in contemporary Morocco. --Mark Knoblauch

Title: The World Without Us
Author: Alan Weisman
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Description: Starred Review. If a virulent virus—or even the Rapture—depopulated Earth overnight, how long before all trace of humankind vanished? That's the provocative, and occasionally puckish, question posed by Weisman (An Echo in My Blood) in this imaginative hybrid of solid science reporting and morbid speculation. Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan's subways dry would fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start to crumble. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics manufactured since the mid-20th century. (July)
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Title: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Description: Bestselling Harvard psychology professor Pinker (The Blank Slate) investigates what the words we use tell us about the way we think. Language, he concludes, reflects our brain structure, which itself is innate. Similarly, the way we talk about things is rooted in, but not identical to, physical reality: human beings take the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them and package their experience into objects and events. Examining how we do this, the author summarizes and rejects such linguistic theories as extreme nativism and radical pragmatism as he tosses around terms like content-locative and semantic reconstrual that may seem daunting to general readers. (Sept.)
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