It鈥檚 the spring of 1924, and English playboy Lord Percival Bromley has disappeared in the Himalayas. The climbing world assumes he鈥檚 perished in an avalanche. Lady Bromley, his mother, believing otherwise, summons three mountaineers to her estate. 鈥淚f my Percy is alive,鈥 she says, 鈥淚 want you to bring him home to me.鈥 So begins prolific sci-fi master Dan Simmons鈥檚 brick-thick adventure thriller (Little, Brown, $28). Bromley鈥檚 an invented character, as are the three sent after him: decorated World War I veteran Richard Deacon, crafty Chamonix guide Jean-Claude Clairoux, and young Harvard grad Jake Perry. Soon enough the trio is battling Nazis disguised as yetis, but the surprise here is how well Simmons knows his climbing history. The team鈥檚 gear is supplied by George Finch, the inventor of the down jacket and oxygen kit. And Deacon鈥檚 Great War scars (body and soul) were all too common. The Abominable keeps the action roaring through the team鈥檚 grueling ascent and Nazi showdown while paying out enough crampon-and-ax accuracy to keep skeptical climbing geeks satisfied.
After two bestselling memoirs ( and ), Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a sweeping tale of fortune, adventure, and the quinine trade. (Viking, $29) follows 19th-century scientist Alma Whittaker, whose extraordinary life unspools like a Jane Austen novel as she struggles to be taken seriously as a botanist and find a partner worthy of her love. Gilbert鈥檚 blockbuster memoir success has overshadowed her mastery of fiction (). But here she claims her rightful spot as one of the 21st century鈥檚 best American writers.