Could Sept. 11, 2001, really be a quarter of a century in the past? Although the world has changed dramatically in the years since, the events of that day retain a kind of shocking immediacy. If we’re old enough, we remember where we were when we learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an inflection point in U.S. history—and in our personal lives.

It didn’t take long for 9/11 to show up in fiction, in novels as diverse as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), and Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). It still figures in contemporary fiction, such as Jodi Picoult’s new novel, Hollow Bones (Ballantine, Sept. 15), in which Molly reflects on growing up as “The Girl Who’d Lost Her Mom on 9/11”; she was less than 3 months old when her mom went to a doctor’s appointment in the South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, and never returned. Molly has been shaped by an event of which she has no actual memory.

At a media luncheon in New York this spring, I heard Picoult talk about the inspiration for the novel. A friend, she said, had told her about an anonymous handwritten postcard sent to the art project PostSecret: “Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I’m dead.” That message got the wheels of her plot turning. (Coincidentally, that same message turns up in Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party [Knopf, Sept. 15], where the characters are speculating about the unexplained disappearance of a friend who had sometimes referred to it.) For more about Hollow Bones, don’t miss our recent profile of Picoult.

Other new books continue to grapple with the legacy of 9/11. Here are a few we’ve reviewed at Kirkus in recent issues:

150,000 Trees: Growing a Memorial for 9/11’s Flight 93 by Rebecca E. Hirsch; illustrated by Jacqueline Tam (Tilbury House, June 9): This informational picture book introduces young readers to the 200-acre Pennsylvania forest planted by volunteers over the course of 10 years in remembrance of the passengers who were on the flight brought down near Shanksville to thwart its use as a weapon of terror. Our review calls it a “sensitive treatment that honors sorrowful memories while showing that healing is possible.”

Forgiveness at Ground Zero: A Journey of Service, Loss, and Redemption After 9/11 by Lyndon Fitzgerald Harris (Bloomsbury Academic, July 23): St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan survived the collapse of the World Trade Center and emerged as a makeshift sanctuary for volunteer workers at Ground Zero. The author, a former Episcopal priest, writes about that recovery effort as well as his subsequent loss of faith and challenging journey to healing. Our starred review calls it an “affecting memoir about moving beyond blame.”

All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror by Peter Bergen (Norton, Sept. 8):  A national security expert examines the U.S. response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the realm of foreign policy—namely the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost roughly $6 trillion and 7,000 American lives. Our review calls it a “profoundly insightful account of why we’re mired in forever wars, and likely will be long into the future.”

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.