Standing as a primitive log structure atop a small rise, the round house was built as a sacred place for special Ojibwe ceremonies and Native American gatherings. But in 1988, when Geraldine Coutts emerged from the abandoned building beaten, raped, and doused with gasoline, it became known as the scene of a crime that would forever alter Geraldine, her husband, Bazil, and their thirteen-year-old son, Joe.

Told from the viewpoint of an older Joe reflecting back on the spring of his mother’s attack and reading as a combined crime drama/coming-of-age tale sprinkled with Ojibwe customs and stories, The Round House by Louise Erdrich is a novel loaded with complexities, depth, injustice and the frustrations of being a Native American in contemporary America.

The story centers around the Coutts family, who live on a Ojibwe reservation near Hoopdance, North Dakota. One Sunday afternoon, Joe’s mom, Geraldine, leaves to run a quick work errand and doesn’t return. Concerned, Joe and his father begin to search. When they find her, she is covered in vomit and gasoline and has been brutally violated.

In Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson, Christine Lucas wakes every morning to a fresh, new day, literally. She suffers from amnesia and every night all of her memories, long and short term, reset and in the morning she wakes up as a blank slate, not knowing anything about her self.

Every morning Christine wakes up with her husband, Ben, who has to reassure her that she is in her home and that he belongs there, too. Nothing looks familiar to Christine, not the furniture, the momentos, the photos, not even her clothes spark recognition as being hers.

Ben goes through their morning routine (as he assures her) making a bit of breakfast, telling her what to expect from the day, and then he heads off to work. Left alone, Christine is unsure how to proceed until a phone call decides for her.

The man on the other end of the line identifies himself as her doctor, Dr. Nash. He says they have been working together on rebuilding and restoring her memory. He asks to meet and Christine, led by a desire to discover more and an innate sense of trust in Dr. Nash, agrees.

He hands her a package: a brown, leather journal. Dr. Nash explains that over the past few weeks Christine has been keeping a record of who she is and has been using the journal as a tool to build from each day.

In The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty, Louise Brooks is a young free spirit who doesn’t care what society thinks of her. Cora Carlisle, on the other hand, is a middle-aged married woman with unflinching morals. In 1922, Louise makes an important trip to New York with Cora as her traveling companion. It is a journey that will profoundly change both women forever.

In the late 1920s, everyone knew Louise Brooks as a world-famous silent film star. She was beautiful. She was troubled, and she was the woman who made the “bob” haircut a cultural phenomenon.

But in 1922, Louise was a 15-year-old girl who hated living in Wichita, KS, because it was old-fashioned, restrictive, and one big dead end. It was a feeling that Cora Carlisle didn’t share. She mostly found Wichita comforting with its small-town attitude and sense of community.

That summer, with Cora as her chaperone, Louise escapes to New York to attend classes at the Denishawn School of Dance. Louise's ambition is to become a member of the Denishawn Dance Company so that she does not have to return to Wichita.

Cora's purpose, however, and real reason for coming to New York is to find the identity of her birth parents. As a small child, Cora had been dumped at the Home For Friendless Girls in New York, residing there until she was eventually put on an orphan train and shipped off to Kansas for adoption.

For women, it’s not about the stuff, it’s about the love. All-consuming love is just too intoxicating to ignore and after years growing up in the afterglow of the ERA and that “woman-man-fish-bicycle” mantra, we’re finding new targets for our passions. Hence, some women’s compulsive devotion to cats, firefighting, and shopping. Our personal obsessions make us who we are and you have to love us for them. Check out some of the books about what some women love and why.

Susan Allen Toth’s passion is so big she needs another country to hold it. In My Love Affair with England, Toth adoringly describes a night of badger watching in Dartmoor, her secret obsession with royal family life gossip rags and a staunch preference for English breakfasts (hold the kippers). So great is Toth’s ardor for the mother country. she took her then-boyfriend James to England to see if he could love England the way she did. He could and they married.

Written by the great-great-great granddaughter of literary genius Herman Melville, Tigers In Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann is a mystery drama that follows a prominent East Coast family through three decades of dysfunctional relationships, unearthed secrets, stinging betrayal, and eventually acceptance.

The novel takes its name from a line in the poem, Disillusionment at 10:00 by Wallace Stevens and opens at the end of WWII. Nick and Helena are cousins spending the summer together at Tiger House, the family home on Martha’s Vineyard. Nick is preparing to leave for Florida to rejoin her husband, Hughes, a serviceman returning from the war. Helena is also soon leaving, setting off for Hollywood to marry a promising producer.

As the years pass, each cousin has a child and the family expands. Nick and Hughes’ daughter, Daisy, grows into a stubborn, independent and free-spirited young woman. Helena’s son Ed, however, is quite different. He is a loner with a dark mind and a twisted heart.

Each year, the family members return to Tiger House for the summer season. While there, the painful frailties, flaws and fears of individual characters come to light, including those of Nick and Helena. Neither cousin finds life or marriage as promising or fulfilling as they expected, and the women must secretly find ways to cope with their bitter disappointment.

I love stories about things that go bump in the night. There is just nothing better than entering into another world full of unknowable dangers and getting lost there.

There is a primal urge, the rush of adrenaline you feel, when the noise—the bump—happens. Maybe the sound is almost just beyond the perception of hearing and your senses, nurtured by millennia of species’ survival, perks up your ears; or maybe it’s the loud crash that startles you and then settles into the silence of the evening, making you question if you ever heard it in the first place. The unknown is a terrifying topic, unless it is neatly contained within the covers of a book.

Something Red by Douglas Nicholas is perhaps the quintessential story of things that go bump in the night. Set in the Dark Ages, a time of superstition, it is darkly atmospheric. The story opens with a young boy, fifteen, named Hob. He is part of a travelling party of four who is led by Maeve, a wise woman proficient with healing herbs and who is perhaps more than slightly magical.

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit as a children’s book. It provides a much less grand vision than The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but that doesn't mean it lacks seriousness or that it fails to raise some serious questions.