Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

This was the cover in our nonfiction section that—sorry—turned the most heads during the holidays, but the book inside is more than just a macabre history. A head separated from its body carries a deeply unsettling power, and Larson, writing about her grisly subject with a style that's even-keeled almost to a fault, makes clear that Western societies have hardly been immune to its "barbaric" attraction. (For centuries England had a "Keeper of the Heads" in charge of arranging the spiked skulls of the executed near London Bridge.) The "messy, and magical, business" of decapitation has spurred terror and reverence, science and sainthood, and after her tour through its history you won't look at your own noggin the same way again.