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Howard Berkes is an NPR correspondent based in Salt Lake City.

In real life, people have to make choices. But the fictional Ursula Todd gets to live out several realities, all set in 20th century Europe. Reviewer Meg Wolitzer says Kate Atkinson's playfully experimental novel ends up capturing what life is really like.

Steve Inskeep talks to Zanny Minton Beddoes, of The Economist, about the long-term impact of the Cyprus crisis on European economies. Beddoes offers the view from Germany. That country is now turning its attention to its own general elections in September.

Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for her last novel, Olive Kitteridge. Her follow-up, The Burgess Boys, is a sure-handed meditation on a family fractured by tragedy. Reviewer Lizzie Skurnick says Skurnick's "deft touch" comes through in the subtle betrayals of her characters.

During a beach outing with her family when she's 5, a little girl is swept away by a wave and drowns. In another version of that trip, though, an amateur painter swims out and saves her. Ursula's many lives grow in and out of each other in Kate Atkinson's new novel.

Set in 1930s Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles, The Teleportation Accident is a sci-fi-noir-comedy mashup overstuffed with astute social observations, high-brow literary allusions and vivid prose. Critic Jennifer Reese finds this freewheeling farce both brilliant and exasperating.

The U.S. military called its Oak Ridge, Tenn., facility "Site X." During World War II, thousands of workers there enriched uranium for the first atom bomb — even if they didn't know it at the time. Author Denise Kiernan's new book, The Girls of Atomic City, follows some of the women who worked there.

Editor's note: NPR's Corey Dade recently traveled to New York to interview the Rev. Al Sharpton about the unusual arc of his checkered career, from pugnacious street fighter for racial justice to savvy insider with ties to CEOs, a successful television show and the the ear of a soon-to-be second-term president. Click on the slideshow above to see a day in the life of Sharpton and hear more about how he juggles it all while running a civil rights organization with 40 chapters across the nation, hosting his own radio show, and appearing on PoliticsNation -- all on the same day.

Tarantino's Christmas Present To Film Lovers

Hank Welzel has served in two wars, under two different flags. At 16, he was drafted into the German army during World War II. Captured by the Americans, he spent the rest of the war at a POW camp in the U.S. -- the country of his birth. Five years later, he was sent to the front lines of Korea by the U.S. Army.