Susan Coll was already an established novelist when she started working at Politics and Prose in 2011, and she promised the store’s owners that she wouldn’t write some kind of comic behind-the-scenes account of the beloved Connecticut Avenue shop. Oops. “I assured them that was not my intention,” says Coll, who ran the store’s programming and author events. “It truly was not! It just happened.”

Coll’s high-spirited brand of comedy is back, this time trained on a week in the life of 26-year-old Clemi.

Highlights among the year’s novels, short-story collections and works in translation, as selected by the staff of The Washington Post’s Book World.