Pollan, best-known for “The Omnivore’s Dilemma, starts off this new work of non-fiction with a simple question: Why, in an era in which most people go out of their way to avoid cooking, has the chef become a celebrity and the cooking show a guilty pleasure?

To answer that question, Pollan turns his journalist’s sensibility and straightforward, thoughtful powers of analysis to examining just why cooking should matter, speaking to those who still perform traditional cooking tasks and attempting to learn them himself.

The book is organized around the four elements: fire, water, air, and earth, which correspond to four basic ways to transform raw materials into nutritious, tasty things to eat. Fire is linked to grilling and barbecuing, water to cooking with liquid and braising, air to baking bread, and earth to fermenting, cheese making, and brewing. Among other culinary adventures, Pollan joins barbecue pit masters at the spit in North Carolina and New York, kneads with bread makers at Tartine in San Francisco, learns to put up sauerkraut with fermenter extraordinaire Sandor Katz, and observes the “Cheese Nun” (and micro-biologist) Mother Noëlla Marcellino as she creates a raw-milk cheese using techniques practiced since the 17th century.

The results of his researches into the secrets of cooking are fascinating, but the magic of “Cooked” lies not in its ability to unlock the secrets of slow-roasting a whole hog or brewing beer. Instead, he manages to illuminate the wealth of connections that stem from our time spent in the kitchen. As he writes, “Cooking — of whatever kind, everyday or extreme — situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other.”

Here are 10 debut novels that the publishing world is buzzing about for spring 2013.  You can read more about each novel on Publishers Weekly's site. 

Above All Things by Tanis Rideout

The Andalucian Friend by Alexander Söderberg

Autobiography of Us by Aria Beth Sloss

The Blood of Heaven by Kent Wascom

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

You Are One of Them by Elliot Hold

 Beautiful Boy is a memoir about meth addition told from the point of view of the addict's father. As any parent could imagine, watching one's talented, athletic, and smart child fall into a horrible addiction is heart-wrenching. David Sheff is a parent who many of us strive to be—loving, engaging, and well-educated--but this does not prevent his son from becoming an addict.

This book is painful to read, but it is also hopeful. While this is an addiction story of one family, it is more than that. Sharing the knowledge of many medical experts with whom Sheff consulted, he is able to shed light on all drug addictions, looking at the brain chemistry of addicts as well as societal influences. I highly recommend this book to anyone who knows an addict or who has a child.

David Sheff’s new 2013 book Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America's Greatest Tragedy is also recommended.

To be only nineteen and exiled on a remote Chilean island, on the run from drug dealers and the police, is a life that Maya Vidal could not have imagined for herself. Growing up in Berkeley, California under the care of her eccentric Chilean grandmother, Nini, and loving astronomer Grandfather, Popo, Maya was happy despite being abandoned by her Danish flight-attendant mother. However, when her beloved Popo dies of Cancer and her Nini slips into an all-consuming depression, she begins a dangerous downward spiral, experimenting with drugs and committing crimes just to numb the pain she is feeling. When her Nini finally emerges from her fog and notices the trouble that Maya has gotten into, she sends her to a rehabilitation center for teens in Oregon. After only a short time, Maya escapes, hitching a ride with a trucker, who first sexually abuses her and then dumps her in Las Vegas with ten dollars. Emotionally and physically bruised, Maya takes up with the first man who shows an interest in her, Brandon Leeman, a drug-dealing junkie who offers her a job and a chance to be in his inner circle.

Even though she has all the drugs and money she could want at her disposal for the first time, in the back of her mind, Maya still longs to get clean and go back to her Nini in California. After there is violent betrayal among Brandon Leeman’s ranks, Maya loses the only protection she has, ending up on the streets of Las Vegas, on the run from the FBI and rival drug dealers.

Eventually her Nini comes to the rescue and Maya agrees to her radical plan of seeking refuge with her old friend, Manuel Arias, an academic recluse in his seventies who was once a political prisoner. She spends a year in Chiloe, disconnected from the outside world, immersing herself in the rich history of the island, its mythology and the villagers who she begins to care about like family. Even though a far cry from the man that her Popo was, Manuel, with secrets of his own, fills a part of the space within Maya that the death of her grandfather left behind. But she can’t hide there forever. Maya must still come to terms with her past after the men who are hunting her finally arrive at the doors of her remote sanctuary. Juxtaposing two pasts, Maya and the island of Chiloe, Isabel Allende has written a book in her trademark lyrical style but with a fast paced intensity not usually found in her other novels.