When dark clouds roll in, do you stay and weather the storm, or do you run toward blue skies?

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.”

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.