With the holiday shopping season imminent, publishers are bringing out the big guns in coming weeks. Recommended Reads offers a sampling of some of today’s new releases, great for personal pleasure or holiday gifts.

Ian McEwan can turn any setting into a simmering pot of dread, but his best works tend to be set in war-torn 20th century Europe (The Innocent, Atonement). His new novel, Sweet Tooth, concerns Cold War intrigue and romance. Featuring a female protagonist, McEwan puts his young student to work undercover for MI-5. She finds herself engaged in cultural and emotional warfare.

The Inexplicables, the fifth installment of Cherie Priest‘s Clockwork Century series, finds Rector “Wreck ’em” Sherman about to be discharged from the orphanage. Feeling guilt over his friend’s death, Sherman plunges into a dystopia of drugs and the undead.

Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium Trilogy gets the graphic novel treatment, with each book in the series set to be re-imagined in two-part, hardcover illustration. Makes sense: Lisbeth Salander is a comic book wet dream, and the majestic vistas of Sweden should look amazing in ink. Today, Book One of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hits shelves. Illustrator Denise Mina has previously inked Hellblazer, A Sickness in the Family and other works of noir fiction.

Cue the Singularity: the enigmatic inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil returns with How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. Here, the author explores reverse-engineering the human brain, which could be applied to creating more intelligent machines for the bio-mech future.