Kevin Powers, the author of the landmark Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds, returns with Children of the Wild, a deeply felt tale of two men — one wealthy, one penniless, both in love with the same woman — and the endurance of their unlikely friendship as they journey from the valleys of southwest Virginia to the killing fields of France during the first World War and back home to a rapidly changing world.

Over four decades, Richard Bausch has come to be regarded as one of literature’s foremost practitioners of the short story. Few have limned the struggles of the human heart in a forlorn world with comparable skill. Bausch’s people are — there’s no better way of saying it — us. His new collection, The Fate of Others, is a luminous addition to his formidable legacy.

James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a powerful tale of early 20th-century Jewish and African American communities bonding together to protect a disabled orphan. McBride will deliver the Nashville Public Library Foundation Literary Award lecture at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Nashville on November 9.

In Tell Me Everything, Strout unites her most famous and beloved characters — Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, and Bob Burgess — in a haunting but nevertheless optimistic examination of the way we depend on stories to survive. Strout will appear at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on September 12.