This week, an animal uprising, an argument over cheese, and cryptocurrency.

Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge (Knopf) - In 1828, Franz Schubert gathered his circle of friends to perform Winterreise (Winter Journey), his latest song cycle, for them; they found the music gloomy and mournful, but Schubert—who died that year at age 31—said that he liked these songs more than all the others he had composed, and that his listeners would come to like them as well. Schubert’s 24-song cycle, originally written to be recited by a male vocalist and piano for 70 minutes, without interruption, in intimate settings, is now performed in large concert halls around the world. English tenor Bostridge, who has sung these pieces frequently, offers his take on the meaning and enduring power of Winterreise. Bostridge’s illuminating reflections will guide readers as they listen again, or for the first time, to the nuances of Schubert’s great work.

I Was Here by Gayle Forman (Viking) - As she did in If I Stay, Forman offers an introspective examination of the line between life and death, and the courage it takes to persist. College freshman Meg’s suicide shocks no one more than her best friend Cody. To make Meg’s death even more unsettling, the last six months of her emails are missing from her computer. Certain that an outsider—a correspondent of Meg’s—pushed her to take her own life, Cody embarks on a quest to identify the culprit. Her journey proves both enlightening and dangerous as she traces the steps Meg took during her last weeks of life. As the pieces of a disturbing puzzle start to fit together, Cody takes an enormous risk to come to terms with Meg’s final decision and her own guilt. Beyond exploring Cody’s grief, this psychologically incisive book delves into her complex relationships with Tricia, her single mother; Meg’s more conventional family; and, most profoundly, the boy who stole and wounded Meg’s heart shortly before her death.

The Honest Truth by Dan Gemeinhart (Scholastic) - Gemeinhart debuts with an emotionally hard-hitting survival story about 12-year-old Mark who, facing another bout of the cancer he’s been fighting throughout his childhood, runs away with his loyal dog, Beau, to fulfill his dream of climbing Mount Rainer. Armed with cash, camera, notebook, and a pen for jotting down the haikus that come constantly to mind, Mark soon encounters distressing setbacks, culminating in the onset of a dangerous storm. His harrowing adventures are interspersed with brief third-person half-chapters focusing on his best friend Jessie, who knows where he is and the danger he is in, and struggles whether to keep his secret. Jessie’s internal battle between her loyalty to Mark and her empathy for his frightened parents is nearly as intense as Mark’s trip to the mountain and his attempt to climb it.

Breaking Creed by Alex Kava (Putnam) - Bestseller Kava introduces Ryder Creed, who has started his own search-dog business after serving in a K9 unit in the Marines, in this superior introduction to a new thriller series. In the Gulf of Mexico, off Pensacola, Fla., Creed and his team inspect a commercial fishing vessel, which the authorities suspect is being used to smuggle drugs. Unexpectedly, one of Creed’s dogs uncovers human cargo hidden in the hold—five filthy children who appear to be Americans. Meanwhile, FBI agent Maggie O’Dell, the star of the author’s other series (Stranded, etc.), tries to identify a floater found in the Potomac with marks of torture. O’Dell and Creed later unite in Alabama to search the property of another murder victim, who may have been tied to stakes in the ground atop a mound of fire ants.

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Grau) - This absorbing first book from journalist Leovy traces the investigation and prosecution of a 2007 murder in South Los Angeles, registering along the way a powerful argument about race and our criminal justice system. Eighteen-year-old Bryant Tennelle was “just another black man down.” His shooting death inspired neither press attention nor vigorous police action—until, that is, his case was handed to Police Detective John Skaggs, the central figure in Leovy’s narrative. By following the relentless Skaggs, fleshing out all his quirks, and rendering the perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses of the murder vividly, Leovy spins a good yarn and illustrates how, by her lights, black-on-black homicide should be dealt with (but too seldom is). The state fails “to catch and punish even a bare majority of murderers” in urban black enclaves, and the result is “street justice”—informal legal systems, replete with their own laws and codes and punishments. Gang violence, in Leovy’s account, is thus not a cause of lawlessness; rather, it is “a whole system of interactions determined by the absence of law.” Like most ghettoside cases, the Tennelle case was eminently solvable—merely awaiting a determined investigator to whom the lives of black men were valuable, their murders something to be answered for. Readers may come for Leovy’s detective story; they will stay for her lucid social critique.

One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History by Peter Manseau (Little, Brown) - The last few decades have produced several magisterial tomes on American religious history, from such authors as Sydney Ahlstrom and Edwin Gaustad. None, however, matches the subversive and much-needed revisionism of Manseau's tour de force. Arguing that "we have learned history from the middle rather than the margins... from which so much of our culture has been formed," Manseau undertakes a thorough reimagining of our nation's religions. Christopher Columbus, in this telling, is not nearly so interesting as contemporaneous Moorish and Jewish conquistadores, who were already accustomed to cultural pluralism; Mormon founder Joseph Smith was influenced not so much by the revivalist Protestantism of western New York as by the legacy of the Iroquois spiritual leader Handsome Lake; and the Salem witch trials are evidence of Puritans' inability to stamp out persistent folk beliefs and practices from the Old World. Indeed, Manseau suggests, "a spectrum of beliefs has shaped our common history since well before the first president." Engagingly written, with a historian's eye for detail and a novelist's sense of character and timing, this history from another perspective reexamines familiar tales and introduces fascinating counternarratives.

Mort(e) by Robert Repino (Soho) - With sly references to Orwell’s Animal Farm, debut novelist Repino puts a nicely modern postapocalyptic overlay on the fable of animals taking over the world. Enraged by the anthropocentrism of humans, ant queen Hymenoptera develops a race of super ants while simultaneously releasing a pheromone causing all animals to become humanlike. Former house cat Sebastian, now over six feet tall and capable of handling firearms, adopts the name Mort(e) and becomes a ruthless soldier for the revolution. Steering clear of allegorical artifices, Repino effectively harnesses animal emotions within the anthropomorphic context, using Mort(e)’s quest to rescue a canine playmate from his former life to introduce the all-too-human messiah complex that will doom Hymenoptera’s vision of a posthuman world. This is an affecting, intriguing shift from the traditional “power corrupts” destruction of utopia, allowing an empathetic melancholy to rise along with Mort(e)’s disillusionment as supposedly free animals begin to commit suicide. Even horrific Hymenoptera, ferociously single-minded in the face of endless unpredictability, reveals an aching loneliness in her absolutism.

Happy Are the Happy by Yasmina Reza, trans. from the French by John Cullen (Other Press) - Playwright and author Reza’s newest book is a fragmented novella of vignettes, all of which function as independent short stories. Reza follows more than a dozen characters struggling with marriage and loneliness—opening with “Robert Toscano,” a hilarious study of patience and insistence revolving around a married couple in France, the Toscanos, who get into an escalating argument over cheese (he doesn’t buy the kind she likes). Reza’s askew humor pervades the book—four chapters later, we find out that the seemingly perfect Hunter family (bitterly envied by the Toscanos) has a secret: the son is not interning abroad, he is in a mental institution because he believes he is Celine Dion. Reza’s vignettes are also dark (a man’s incestuous relationship with his brother later turns him into a sexual masochist) and sardonic (a man accuses his wife of wanting to be buried together for social reasons: “My wife is counting on the grave to outfox spiteful gossips, she wants to remain a petit bourgeois even in death”). Reza’s stories build and build, creating a complicated, multifaceted world—a world that is unmistakably Reza’s.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna and Michael Casey (St. Martin's) - While many readers understandably have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of non-government-backed currency, journalists Casey (Che’s Afterlife) and Vigna, who blog about cryptocurrency at the Wall Street Journal’s MoneyBeat blog, here use their considerable expertise to make the Bitcoin phenomenon accessible. They take a thorough, multidisciplinary approach to the topic, including a fascinating examination of the origin of money. The authors are appropriately cautious, warning that despite increased public awareness of Bitcoin, it remains a niche product, and the jury is still out on how far and how quickly it and other digital currency will spread. However, newcomers will gain a better understanding of the revolutionary potential of digital currency, especially for the “roughly 2.5 billion people from Afghanistan to Africa to even America who have been shut out of the modern finance system.”

I'm Glad I Did by Cynthia Weil (Soho Teen) - Grammy-winning songwriter Weil makes an impressive YA debut with this period novel set against the rapidly changing music industry of the early 1960s. Sixteen-year-old JJ Green dreams of being a songwriter, and opportunity knocks when a music publisher in New York City’s Brill Building offers her a three-month gig as an assistant. Unfortunately, her successful parents want her to follow in their footsteps and study law. They allow JJ to accept the position on one condition: if one of her songs isn’t recorded within three months, she “has to give up this crazy songwriting thing and never mention it again.” JJ embraces the challenge but is sidetracked by charismatic figures she meets at her job: a mysterious, green-eyed boy; her estranged Uncle Bernie, whose shady music business dealings have made him the black sheep of the family; and a once-famous blues singer, whose violent death leads to startling discoveries.