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This weekend, the NPR Books Time Machine is rewinding Scott Lynch's swashbuckling Gentleman Bastard series, a combination fantasy of manners, heist caper and heartfelt buddy comedy. With pirates.

Ken Liu's debut is an epic saga of gods, kings and rebels, set in an invented world with echoes of pan-Asian myth. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls it "beautiful, nuanced, fierce, original and diverse."

The Peruvian Nobel Prize-winning writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, has a new novel out, and he's not resting on his laurels. It's an ambitious and weighty novel that's worth the effort.

Lev AC Rosen's dystopian thriller, set in an underwater New York City, is an expert mix of the sci-fi and hardboiled genres. Reviewer Jason Heller calls it a nervy crime caper with hidden depths.

Sarah Vowell's charming not-quite-a-history gives us a young, glory-hungry Marquis de Lafayette, and the Founding Fathers not as marble statues, but as real men who bicker, bumble and snore.

Juan Felipe Herrera is the child of Mexican migrant farmworkers. He says, "I had a mother [who] sang and told stories and loved poetry, even though she only went to third grade."

Bob Proehl's sprawling novel follows actor Valerie and her son Alex on an epic road trip, punctuated by stops at comic conventions. It's a charming but messy debut that crams in too many ideas.

David Weigel is primarily a political reporter, but in The Show that Never Ends he spins his love of prog rock into a detailed, affectionate history of a genre that's never completely gone away.

Can Xue's book is hard to describe, much less explain — there's a town, and a mountain, and a poplar grove, and a host of people just trying to connect in a world of absent-minded strangeness.

British authorities have arrested 24 suspects in their investigation into an alleged plan to blow up as many as 10 aircraft bound from London to the United States, using liquid chemicals carried in hand luggage. Many, if not all, of the suspects are believed to be British citizens of Pakistani origin.