Bitingly funny, full of wit and pathos, Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow (Knopf, $26.95) is a trenchant portrait of young lives being carried away on a sea of change. The year is 1970, and the youth of Europe are in the chaotic, ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. Though blindly dedicated to the cause, its nubile foot soldiers have yet to realize this disturbing truth: that between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of terrifying purgatory—or, as Alexander Herzen put it, a pregnant widow. Keith Nearing is stuck in an exquisite limbo. Twenty years old and on vacation from college, Keith and an assortment of his peers are spending the long, hot summer in a castle in Italy. The tragicomedy of manners that ensues will have an indelible effect on all its participants, and we witness, too, how it shapes Keith’s subsequent love life for decades to come. 6pm

Brother Duke (Booksurge, $14.99) is the first novel from Adam Scholer, a high school English teacher and Miami native. The main character finds himself hitch-hiking on a bet and when he meets a deranged taxidermist who preserves a cursed dog, mayhem ensues. Brother Duke is for all types of readers ages sixteen to one hundred and six. 8pm