A life of service, sacrifice, and spirituality is what Mary Johnson had in mind when, at age 17, she joined Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity order at the end of the 1970s.

What she hadn’t counted on was the pettiness, rigidity, even cruelty that she encountered.

Now in her book “An Unquenchable Thirst,” Mary Johnson offers what Anne Rice has called “a candid, generous, and profound spiritual memoir.”

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Elinor Lipman is a longtime favorite novelist who is also, it turns outl, a brilliant essayist. Her tenth novel, “The View From Penthouse B.” was published at the same time as her first essay collection “I Can’t Complain.”

Bringing the same warmth and easy companionship of her fiction to her essays, Lipman writes about everything from her favorite soap opera to unexpected widowhood and caring for elderly parents.

Then she eases you effortlessly from the final essay .. into her novel, which centers on two sisters brought together again by circumstance to live together in a New York penthouse — and how they come to rely on each other, an odd roommate, and even an ex-husband.

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What, exactly, happens to the food we eat, after we’ve eaten it?

As any school child can tell you, it goes into our stomach where it gets digested.

But, how, exactly, does that happen? And what if something goes wrong? And why doesn’t your stomach digest itsefl? And why don’t we like to eat the same things animals eat? And …….

Well, clearly, once you get started, there are a thousand questions.

And now, with a thousand answers, Mary Roach, whose new book “Gulp” is an adventure down the alimentary canal.

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Money makes the world go ’round, as the saying goes. But what is money? Does there have to be just one kind of currency?

Now, in a new book called “Rethinking Money” journalist Jacqui Dunne and banker and consultant Bernard Lietaer explore the origins of our current monetary system, which is built on bank debt and scarcity, and compare it to new kinds of money that communities all over the world are exploring and adopting.

They contend that the current centuries-old money system is actually causing many of the world’s problems. And new currencies, new ways of defining money, can solve those problems.

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There is very little peace for a man with a body buried in his backyard.

But it could always be worse. . . .

And as mild-mannered Jason Getty finds out, in Jamie Mason‘s darkly comic thriller “Three Graves Full,” it can indeed get much worse.

After Jason kills a man in an uncharacteristic moment of lethal rage, he buries the body literally in his backyard. Now a year has passed, and Jason finally is learning to live with the undeniable truth of what he’s done.

And that’s when police dig up two bodies on his property – neither of which is the one Jason buried.

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It’s a new, upside down American Dream that Dale Hammer is struggling with, in William Hazelgrove‘s novel “Rocket Man.”

Dale has moved his family out to the suburbs — big house, big lawn, big car, and big anxiety and big panic…

But Dale is determined to find meaning in the landscape of suburbia, looking for the moment he once had with his own father when they blasted off a rocket one wintry evening, so many years ago.

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The American Civil Liberties Union is a frequent target of Christian critics, who say the organization seems bent on removing God from any public space.

Now in a new book called “Bad Samaritans,” Jerome Corsi writes that liberty in America has always depended upon a citizenry who believes in God.

And he is convinced that the ACLU is dead set on undermining that belief, that faith, and banishing God from the public square.

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John Wood was a Microsoft executive for nine years, but his real passion for the past several years is building libraries all over the world and sharing the love of books

In his acclaimed first book, “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World,” Wood explained his vision.

In his new book, “Creating Room to Read,” he continues the story and proudly shows off how the “Room to Read” organization has shaped the lives and futures of thousands of children in some of the poorest and most underserved parts of the world.

And along the way Wood has learned a lot about what it takes to run a successsful organization, keeping it true to its roots while also retaining the flexibility to scale up.

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It’s the adventure of a lifetime for a brother and sister from a grimy Ohio town in the ’50s, in Sharon Short‘s novel “My One Square Inch of Alaska.”

High-school senior Donna Lane wants to be a designer. She’s eager to leave home, but stays to care for her troubled father and her younger brother, Will, who’s in fragile health.

Will is also obsessed with a TV adventure show about Alaska — and, one thing leading to another, he and Donna are soon in a yellow convertible, along with a Siberian Husky, en route to Alaska.

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From depleted retirement accounts to underwater homes, it’s been awfullly gloomy news for the past few years.

But the picture gets brighter for those who take advantage of the laws and reforms enacted in the wake of the banking, real estate, and economic meltdown.

Now certified real estate attorney and mediator Shari Olefson brings those tools to the foreground in a book she calls “Financial Fresh Start.”

Olefson makes sense of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Making Home Affordable Program, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

And, along the way, brings fresh hope to those needing a financial fresh start.

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