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Weekend picks for book lovers, including Anne Tyler's 'Clock Dance'

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY’s picks for book lovers include the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anne Tyler and two new fiction titles for teens.

"Clock Dance" by Anne Tyler; Knopf, 292 pp.; fiction

Family is the way some of us understand the world. Not the self, not society – but the little malleable confederation that lies between the two.

Anne Tyler, one of this country’s great artists, has spent 50 years and more than 20 novels on the subject, her beautiful, understated, humane tales so similar in shape and voice that taken together they have come to seem like a subtle and sublime mania, the author explaining the same idea to herself over and over again, marveling anew each time at its mysteries.

“Clock Dance,” her latest, concerns Willa, a typical Tyler protagonist, which is to say decent, wry, middle class, and basically bewildered.

Willa is living in Arizona when she hears that her son’s ex-girlfriend in Baltimore has been shot in the leg. Can Willa come and take care of the woman’s daughter? Nobody else is around. The answer should of course be "no," and of course Willa, full of indistinct yearning, says "yes."

In the shabby-respectable neighborhood where her son’s ex lives, she immediately finds a surprising sense of community.

USA TODAY says ★★★½ out of four. “A powerful, stirring work. Tyler has lost none of the inspired grace of her prose, nor her sad, frank humor, nor her limitless sympathy for women who ask for little and get less.”

"The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik" by David Arnold; Viking, 432 pp.; fiction

After being hypnotized by an oddball neighborhood kid at a party, 16-year-old Noah Oakman finds that he has stepped into an alternate universe with little details of his life changed.

USA TODAY says ★★★½. “Clever, poignant…an artfully crafted tale about a boy finding his groove amid the cacophony of adolescence.”

"Furyborn" by Claire Legrand; Sourcebooks Fire, 512 pp.; fiction

The start of a time-bending, intertwining fantasy trilogy features not one but two powerful young women in the imaginary world of Atrias.

USA TODAY says ★★★½. “Impressive… the heroines jump off the page.”

"Number One Chinese Restaurant" by Lillian Li; Henry Holt, 304 pp.; fiction

At the Beijing Duck House in Maryland, the specials include intricately carved duck, Mob-connected investors and a brotherly rivalry that has been simmering for years.

USA TODAY says ★★★. “Action-packed… rewards readers with a compelling family story about love, work and what it means to serve.”

"Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous" by Christopher Bonanos; Henry Holt, 319 pp.; nonfiction

Biography offers a portrait of New York photographer Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, whose 1930s and ‘40s black-and-white shots of the city (slain gangsters, raging fires, car crashes and crowds at Coney Island) became iconic.

USA TODAY says ★★★. “Stirs up so many feelings: curiosity, fascination, revulsion, pathos, empathy and not a few moral questions.”

Contributing reviewers: Charles Finch, Emily Gray Tedrowe, Brian Truitt, James Endrst