McSweeney's, $18. With its political intrigue, fraught romances and life-threatening adventures, Sayles's vast historical novel recalls both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Pynchon. The book opens in 1897, during the Klondike gold rush, and closes in 1903, the year after the Philippine-American War ended. In between, Sayles takes the measure of America from the perspectives of Western ramblers, war profiteers, black soldiers and Filipino insurgents. A WIDOW'S STORY: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco/HarperCollins, $14.99. Oates ruminates on the death of her husband, Raymond Smith, in 2008, and on her struggle to fathom a life without the bond that sustained her for 47 years. Our reviewer, Ann Hulbert, called this book "more painfully self-revelatory than anything Oates . . . has ever dared to produce." Harper ­Perennial, $13.99. In Schulman's unsettling morality tale, the Bergamots, a once-thriving family of four from a college town, have moved to Manhattan. But their frenetic new life comes undone when their 15-year-old forwards a sexually explicit video made for him by a 13-year-old girl. LIBERTY'S EXILES: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, by Maya Jasanoff. Vintage, $17.95. An estimated 60,000 people chose to leave the colonies rather than become citizens of the new republic. Jasanoff, a Harvard historian, recreates the "bittersweet" experiences of those who emigrated - rich and poor, white, black and Indian. THE FORGOTTEN FOUNDING FATHER: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture (Berkley, $16), by Joshua Kendall , is an insightful biography of the activist and lexicographer (1758-1843) whose journalism, "American Spelling Book" and "American Dictionary of the English Language" argued strongly for the nation's political and cultural independence. Rendell's morbidly witty suspense novel subjects the self-absorbed residents of an apartment house in Kenilworth ("as dreary as only a London outer suburb can be") to intense psychological scrutiny before picking one of them for murder. A Theory. A Flood, by James Gleick. Vintage, $15.95. Information, Gleick argues in this amalgam of logic, philosophy, linguistics and anecdotal wisdom, is more than just the contents of our libraries and Web servers. It is "the blood and the fuel, the vital principle" of the world. His sweeping survey covers the five millenniums of humanity's engagement with information, beginning with the invention of writing in Sumer. AN EVIL EYE, by Jason Goodwin. Picador/Sarah Crichton, $15. In the fourth book in Goodwin's mystery series set in 19th-century Istanbul, the death of Sultan Mahmut II and Russian designs on the Ottoman Empire loom over the eunuch Yashim's latest investigation (a body has been found in a monastery cistern). LEE KRASNER: A Biography, by Gail Levin. Morrow, $16.99. In Levin's perceptive telling, Lee Krasner (1908-84) emerges as a significant modernist painter whose marriage to Jackson Pollock, while no less a central fact of her life, did not define her.