Some Luck by Jane Smiley ($26.95, Knopf) From the author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres comes a multigenerational novel once again set in an Iowan farming community, spanning three transformative decades in America, from 1920 through the early 1950s. A lush yet grounded novel of children and parents, hope and disappointment, this book augers well for the next books to come in the trilogy.

Falling from Horses by Molly Gloss ($25, Houghton Mifflin) In the late '30s, a young cowboy escapes a family tragedy in Oregon and travels to Hollywood to become a stunt rider. On the long bus ride south, Bud strikes up a friendship with a young woman hoping to make it in Hollywood as a screen writer, a friendship that carries them through their tumultuous days in Hollywood -- and continues through the end of their lives. Portland author Gloss is the author of several previous books, including most recently The Hearts of Horses.

  Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014  by Alice Munro ($30, Knopf) Nobody rocks a short story like Alice Munro, winner of last year's Nobel Prize in literature. Family Furnishings brings us twenty-four of Munro's most accomplished stories, many of them set in the territory she has so brilliantly made her own: the small towns and flatlands of southwestern Ontario. These stories illuminate the quotidian yet extraordinary particularity in the lives of men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, suffer defeat, set off into the unknown, or find a way to be in the world.

 Lila by Marilynne Robinson ($26, Farrar Straus Giroux) Lila is the third of Robinson's three novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa, following Gilead and Home. The new book tells the story of Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside. She steps inside a small-town church, the only available shelter from the rain, and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life as she becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newly found security. 

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell ($30, Random House). Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life. The author of Cloud Atlas and four other novels, Mitchell has produced a cautionary genre-bending, time-leaping, world-traveling metaphysical thriller.

For the reader of post-apocalyptic fiction on your gift list, we've got a couple of books to suggest, the first a debut novel by a Portland author and the second a finalist for the National Book Award. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot ($26, Little, Brown), by David Shafer, is a suspenseful, global thriller in the spirit of William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk. Three young adults grapple with the usual problems of thirty-somethings, while also dealing with a cabal intent on privatizing all information. The book has been described by reviewers as wickedly hilarious, chilling, fast-paced, and outlandishly cleverly -- "literary entertainment of the highest order." If you hurry in, you might score a signed copy! Station Eleven ($24.95, Knopf), by Emily St. John Mandel, was a finalist for this year's National Book Award. Vividly depicting life before and after a devastating flu pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel explores the themes of art and fame, human relationships, and those things we would miss and all those we would still have. Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus, says "Once in a very long while a book becomes a brand new old friend, a story you never knew you always wanted. Station Eleven is that rare find that feels familiar and extraordinary at the same time, expertly weaving together future and present and past, death and life and Shakespeare. This is truly something special." We agree.

Here by Richard McGuire ($35, Knopf) If you're looking for fiction that completely steps outside of the box, take a look at this new book from McGuire, one of the great comic innovators. Using comic panels that resemble Edward Hopper's clean paintings, McGuire presents a corner of a single room and the events that have happened in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years in a sort of hopscotch illustrated narrative. Each two-page spread features a fixed view of the room in a certain year, with pop-up windows giving glimpses of what might have been visible in exactly that spot at various moments in the past and future, from the tail of a passing dinosaur to a 1960s children's birthday party to a quiet late-21st-century fireside chat.