"The Best Of Friends: Two Women, Two Continents, and One Enduring Friendship," by Sara James and Ginger Mauney. (Harper, $14.95.) The subjects of this lively dual memoir speak in alternating chapters, describing a closeness that began during their Virginia childhoods and going on to discuss work, love and family. In The New York Times Book Review, Heather Byer found the women's adventures fascinating, but noted that the "drive to explore and succeed shaped these women" and wished that the topic of ambition had been addressed more directly.

"Run," by Ann Patchett. (Harper Perennial, $14.95.) Patchett's prize-winning novel "Bel Canto" explored the interactions among a group of hostages and captors during an incident in South America. Here the disparate characters all belong to one family -- that of a former mayor of Boston, who adopted two black babies (now university students), and their birth mother and her young daughter -- whose lives reconnect in the midst of a snowstorm. Interracial adoption, family allegiances and political ambition are among the novel's themes.

"Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia," by Lesley Chamberlain. (Picador, $18.) In September 1922, a ship full of writers and intellectuals left Petrograd, taking away an independent worldview the new Soviet regime would not tolerate. Chamberlain describes the "paper civil war" in which the Bolsheviks closed independent journals and purged universities, and "brings these forgotten figures back to life with great skill and sympathy," William Grimes wrote in The New York Times; the voyage was an indication of what was to come.

"The Exception," by Christian Jungersen. Translated by Anna Paterson. (Anchor, $15.95.) The central characters in Jungersen's novel work together at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide, researching atrocities around the world. When two of them receive anonymous death threats, suspicion falls on their colleagues, and the office becomes "a crucible in which the reader is offered no less than a profound and unsettling examination of evil," The New York Times' reviewer, Marcel Theroux, said. He praised the "hugely empathetic imagination behind this novel" and its "rich and contradictory accounts of what evil is."

"James Madison: And the Struggle for the Bill of Rights," by Richard Labunski. (Oxford, $15.95.) This well-researched history focuses on the years from 1787 to 1789, during which Madison played a major role in shepherding the Constitution into existence. Labunski's account of Madison's involvement in the creation of the Bill of Rights is fascinating; "No other person in the nation's history did so much for which he is appreciated so little," he writes.

"A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign," by Edward J. Larson. (Free Press, $15.) The first contested presidential election, in 1800, was marked by serious policy differences and personal rivalries -- and by many dirty tactics that modern voters will recognize. The participants "could write like angels and scheme like demons," Larson declares in this dramatic narrative.

"The Sabotage Cafe," by Joshua Furst. (Vintage Contemporaries, $14.95.) A young woman flees her suburban home for the seedy Minneapolis neighborhood where her mother lost her way in the 1980s, in a novel that The New York Times' reviewer, Field Maloney, called an "urban blight pastoral." He said it "suggests that each generation is condemned to live out its parents' unresolved stories."

"Leonard Woolf: A Biography," by Victoria Glendinning. (Counterpoint, $16.95.) Woolf's "life, character and career have been hardly considered except in relation to his wife's," Glendinning writes in this readable biography. She redresses the balance, exploring Woolf's accomplishments as a writer, publisher, journal editor and political figure (he was a Labour Party activist).

"To the Castle and Back," by Vaclav Havel. Translated by Paul Wilson. (Vintage, $15.95.) "I was unable, nor did I wish, to write a full-blown memoir," Havel explains in the preface to the English edition of his "strange little book." But feeling that "I owed people an account of some kind," he "decided to fashion a special kind of collage." This collection of brief anecdotes and commentaries moves between past and present, illuminating his personality and beliefs. (Interestingly, he thought Hillary Clinton would make a "wonderful president.")

"The Bestiary," by Nicholas Christopher. (Dial, $14.) In prose that often has the feel of incantation, Christopher (a poet as well as a novelist) describes a quixotic quest for a renegade medieval religious encyclopedia dedicated to the beasts that were barred from Noah's ark. The novel is "erudite, lyrical and breathlessly paced," Ligaya Mishan wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "Everything is ... a little larger than life, and all the more interesting for it."

"The Narcissist's Daughter," by Craig Holden. (Simon & Schuster, $14.) A cynical, ambitious young medical student trying to transcend his working-class roots seduces first his boss's wife and then the boss's daughter in this tautly plotted thriller.