Joumana Khatib

FORCE OF NATURE, by Jane Harper. (Flatiron, $16.99.) In this thriller from the hugely popular Australian crime novelist, five colleagues set out for a hike in the bush, but only four return. Aaron Falk, a federal agent, investigates the missing hiker — a woman who was widely disliked and secretly looking into her firm’s dodgy finances. He turns up a web of betrayals and secrets, and acts as the book’s moral compass.

FEEL FREE: Essays, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin, $18.) A joyful current guides these selections, which touch on everything from a philosophical consideration of Justin Bieber’s appeal to the thrill of public parks in Italy. As Times reviewer Amanda Fortini put it, “It is exquisitely pleasurable to observe Smith thinking on the page, not least because we have no idea where she’s headed.”

ANATOMY OF A MIRACLE, by Jonathan Miles. (Hogarth, $16.) When an Army veteran who has been paralyzed from the waist down suddenly can walk again, his recovery raises a number of questions: Was it divine intervention? A medical breakthrough? And, above all, why him? Miles’ novel mimics a New Journalism narrative style, and Times reviewer Christopher R. Beha called the book “a highly entertaining literary performance.”

DAUGHTERS OF THE WINTER QUEEN: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Nancy Goldstone. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Goldstone is known for her histories of royals, and this one charts the stormy life of Elizabeth Stuart. The daughter of Charles I and known as “the most charming princess of Europe,” she schemed for her children in 17th-century England. The book doubles as a useful introduction to a time when Britain’s relations with Europe were strained.

THE ESSEX SERPENT, by Sarah Perry. (Custom House/William Morrow, $16.99.) In this romance-meets-ghost-story, it’s 1893, and Cora, recently widowed, heads to the coast of England with her son. There, she finds a town racked with worry that a fearsome monster has returned. As Cora investigates the phenomenon, she is drawn to a local pastor, and their dialogues about faith and science help create a richly satisfying relationship.

THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER, by Francisco Cantú. (Riverhead, $17.) To better understand immigration in the United States, Cantú joined the Border Patrol. He writes of his time with the agency, where he witnessed casual cruelty toward migrants. A later section, which tells the story of a friend who was deported, makes a meaningful contribution to literature of the border.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="9936b6fb-ab8f-319c-a7f1-e904c40bb581">The New York Times</a>.

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

NOTEWORTHY PAPERBACKS

AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE, by Tayari Jones. (Algonquin, $16.95.) The lives of a young black couple in Atlanta are thrown into chaos after the husband, Roy, is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. As the couple grapple with their grief, they must also confront the failed hopes of a marriage and romantic love. The grave miscarriage of justice forms the core of Jones’s deeply compassionate and heartbreaking novel.

HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. (Broadway, $15.) Think beyond the coups d'état: The backslide from democracy into autocracy can be brought about by elected officials who upend the processes that empowered them. The authors, political scientists at Harvard, describe four criteria to identify authoritarian leaders. Donald Trump has met all of them.

GRIST MILL ROAD, by Christopher J. Yates. (Picador, $18.) A gruesome act of violence connects three teenagers, who stay linked to one another for the rest of their lives. As more is revealed about the crime, this thriller raises questions of guilt, culpability and forgiveness. As New York Times reviewer Sarah Lyall put it, “You have to work hard to follow the winding road Yates sends us down, and the drive is full of pleasantly unpleasant surprises.”

NO TIME TO SPARE: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin. (Mariner, $14.99.) Long revered as a master of fantasy writing, Le Guin turned to blogging late in life, writing about everything from feminism to aging to breakfast. This collection brings together some of her best blog posts. There’s a lot that will delight fans of Le Guin, who died last year: “The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them,” Times reviewer Melissa Febos wrote.

TEXT ME WHEN YOU GET HOME: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship, by Kayleen Schaefer. (Dutton, $16.) For generations, the importance of these relationships has been played down, taking a back seat to romantic partnerships and family bonds. Drawing on the evolution of female friendships in popular culture and her own experiences, Schaefer puts camaraderie among women on a pedestal.

THE GHOST NOTEBOOKS, by Ben Dolnick. (Vintage, $16.) Facing career burnout and a stalled relationship, a young couple leave New York City for Hibernia, a tiny town upstate. As they settle into their new home, a historic house with a secret dark past, their romance becomes a ghost story: The relationship soon begins to unravel, and it’s not clear whether psychosis or malevolent spiritual forces are to blame.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="4babfcc0-75b6-3fa0-ae75-9e1a9333c553">The New York Times</a>.

THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Jamison, adding to a large group of addiction memoirs, maps her own recovery while considering the relationship between creativity and substance abuse. The emotional firepower of the book comes in its second half, after she has embraced sobriety; Times critic Dwight Garner called this section “close to magnificent, and genuinely moving.”

LOVE AND RUIN, by Paula McLain. (Ballantine, $17.) McLain’s latest novel, about the marriage between journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, takes up the question that vexed (and probably doomed) their relationship: Why must a woman choose between her career and what her husband wants her to be? McLain drew on primary sources to develop her fiery protagonist.

A WORLD WITHOUT ‘WHOM’: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, by Emmy J. Favilla. (Bloomsbury, $18.) The BuzzFeed copy chief discusses her plan to codify language in a digital era, balancing a need for logic with flexibility to account for how people actually talk. Along with a look at the rules she devised, the book offers a guide to the quandaries we face as the way we communicate online reshapes language itself.

MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT, by Ned Beauman. (Vintage, $17.) Emboldened by “fungal clairvoyance” after inhaling mold in an old temple, a CIA agent tells the story of a fateful meeting in the Honduran jungle in 1938. The novel’s twists and turns touch on everything from colonialism to conspiracy theories. Times reviewer Helene Stapinski called the story “a kitchen-sink sendup of spy novels, 1930s Hollywood and screwball newspaper comedies, with a pinch of Pynchon thrown in for fun.”

ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker. (Penguin, $18.) Pinker sets out to persuade pessimists — people disturbed by today’s threats like climate change and the rise of authoritarian populism across the globe — of one thing: that life has never been better, both in the West and in developing countries. The Harvard psychologist marshals an impressive array of data to back up his claim.

ETERNAL LIFE, by Dara Horn. (Norton, $15.95.) When readers meet Rachel, she’s a suburban great-grandmother in the 21st century. But that life is only the latest in a string of reincarnations, the consequences of a promise she made in Roman-occupied Jerusalem some 2,000 years earlier. Horn’s elegant novel explores how Rachel’s immortality impedes her ability to be fully, truly alive.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="74ad7690-3a98-3c01-ab92-d52946275330">The New York Times</a>.

FIRE AND FURY: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff. (Picador, $18.) Remember the book that had everyone talking this time last year? In Wolff’s telling, President Donald Trump is a barely literate chief executive who heads up a chaotic, aberrant White House. The anecdotes are entertaining, if deeply unrewarding (and at their worst, thinly sourced). A media reporter, Wolff is strongest on his subject’s insecurities and psychological hang-ups.

THE POWER, by Naomi Alderman. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) One of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017, this novel imagines the sudden emergence of an “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the world. Through the lives of several female characters, the story explores a grim idea: that no one is immune to power’s corruptive effects.

OFF THE CHARTS: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies, by Ann Hulbert. (Vintage, $16.95.) Why do many exceptional children fail to sustain their success into adulthood? Hulbert offers an empathetic view of some child geniuses, including Shirley Temple and Bobby Fischer. She aims to “listen hard for the prodigies’ side of the story,” as she puts it. At the same time, she avoids preachy parenting advice.

THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN: Stories, by Denis Johnson. (Random House, $17.) This posthumous collection takes up many of Johnson’s central themes, including his preoccupation with mortality. Johnson died in 2017, and his impending death is felt on the margins of these last stories, without straying into morbidity. As Times reviewer Rick Moody wrote, Johnson draws on his “singular skill” for revelation to “brighten the interiors of tragedy and help us wave off the vultures hovering above.”

HIPPIE FOOD: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, by Jonathan Kauffman. ( Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Kauffman, a food reporter, outlines how the counterculture of the 1960s continues to shape American tastes and diets today. Times reviewer Michael Pollan said this entertaining history shows that the hippie ideal “has lost none of its power, and continues to feed a movement.”

THREE DAUGHTERS OF EVE, by Elif Shafak. (Bloomsbury, $18.) At an upscale dinner party in present-day Istanbul, Peri recalls her college days at Oxford, where she and two friends came to be known as the Sinner, the Confused and the Believer. Shafak, one of Turkey’s best-known authors, explores the relationship between faith and doubt in a time of political upheaval.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="03154324-63d9-3fce-ad55-990ad30efaf8">The New York Times</a>.

KING ZENO, by Nathaniel Rich. (Picador, $19.) In 1918 New Orleans, a new style of music takes hold as the Spanish flu, the mafia and a serial killer ravage the city. Rich’s sprawling, unruly novel focuses on three characters — a Creole jazz musician, a detective recovering from World War I and the matriarch of an organized-crime family — whose lives are tossed into chaos by an ax-wielding killer on the loose.

THE MONK OF MOKHA, by Dave Eggers. (Knopf, $16.95.) Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the Yemeni-American at the center of Eggers’ book, became captivated by the history of coffee in his family’s country and set out to encourage farmers there to revive the trade. Eggers tells his story, though the book is built less on a historyof Yemenor coffee than on a more familiar theme: the American dream.

THE AFTERLIVES, by Thomas Pierce. (Riverhead, $16.) At the opening of this debut novel, Jim Byrd is waking up after a heart attack, which left him dead for several minutes. But the world he finds after his revival seems strange and impossible (free-range holograms, disease-detecting condoms). As he encounters more and more supernatural elements, the sense that life is off-kilter nags at him, and at us.

FUTUREFACE: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging, by Alex Wagner. (One World, $18.) The only child of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Wagner grew up hearing stories of “escapes, settlement, assimilation.” She set out to understand her heritage, traveling across the world and turning to DNA tests. Our reviewer, Maud Newton, praised the book, writing, “It’s the concreteness of Wagner’s own search, in all its messy detail and lingering uncertainties, that underscores our interconnectedness.”

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A Biography, by Mary V. Dearborn. (Vintage, $18.) The first female biographer of Hemingway, Dearborn writes that she is immune to her subject’s hypermasculine mythology and legacy, and turns to what formed the writer. Her account is particularly strong on Hemingway’s tortured relationship with his mother, his fractious marriages and what could be seen as his fluid understanding of gender.

SPOONBENDERS, by Daryl Gregory. (Vintage, $16.95.) The Telemachus family, blessed with telekinesis, mind-reading and other psychic powers, was once a television sensation. But when a death derails the act, the remaining members confront the burdens of their gifts and struggle to lead offstage lives. As our reviewer, Manuel Gonzales, put it, “What Gregory accomplishes in his seventh novel is both magic and magic trick.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="b2b0c1b5-aaf9-3120-a03d-070315faa911">The New York Times</a>.

THE AGE OF RESPONSIBILITY: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State, by Yascha Mounk. (Harvard, $14.95.) A political theorist traces the shift from “responsibility-as-duty” to “responsibility-as-accountability” — in other words, when responsibility was no longer about looking after those in need and instead about rewarding the good and punishing the bad. Mounk argues that holding individuals responsible for their circumstances is a flawed view.

THE FAMILY TABOR, by Cherise Wolas. (Flatiron, $18.99.) When readers meet Harry Tabor, the central character of this novel, he seems to be at the pinnacle of his life: He is about to receive the Man of the Decade award for his philanthropic work. But as the story progresses, secrets about him are revealed, and the novel shifts to tell the tale of a flawed and conflicted man reckoning with his past misdeeds.

INTO THE HANDS OF THE SOLDIERS: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East, by David D. Kirkpatrick. (Penguin, $18.) Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times from the beginning of 2011 through the end of 2015, re-examines pivotal moments in Egypt’s uprisings during the Arab Spring that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, the efforts to foster a more democratic government and the coup that gave power to Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

A DOUBLE LIFE, by Flynn Berry. (Penguin, $16.) The heroine of this thriller, a London doctor living under an assumed name, confronts her family’s troubled, bloody past: the lingering question of whether her father murdered her mother. She’s been haunted by the question her entire life, lingering on true-crime message boards, and has been tormented by the possibility that her father is innocent. Times reviewer Karen Valby praised the book, saying that “the writing is rich and moody, without any unnecessary fuss.”

CONCEIVABILITY: What I Learned Exploring the Frontiers of Fertility, by Elizabeth Katkin. (Simon &amp; Schuster, $17.) What Katkin experienced in her years trying to have children is harrowing: eight fresh in vitro fertilization cycles, two frozen IVF attempts, seven miscarriages. Her memoir, a candid, practical guide for what other women may face, amounts to an indictment of many traditional infertility treatments.

COME WEST AND SEE: Stories, by Maxim Loskutoff. (Norton, $15.95.) In this debut collection of 12 stories, by a former student of David Foster Wallace’s, the myths of the American West are turned on their head, with bizarre twists in stories about isolated trappers and militia members. One centers on a lonely homesteader fighting a physical attraction to a female bear.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="620c84ff-1868-3b8c-ac96-f7b8185f997a">The New York Times</a>.

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan. (Penguin, $18.) Yes, this is the book in which Pollan drops acid. Here, the author, known for his searching examinations of the ethics of eating, investigates how psychedelics can provide relief. His book was one of the Book Review’s 10 best of 2018.

SEVERANCE, by Ling Ma. (Picador, $17.) Candace, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is the anchor of this dystopian novel as she falls into an unsatisfying and trance-like routine in New York City. As Times reviewer Antonia Hitchens put it, the book “offers blatant commentary on ‘dizzying abundance’ and unrelenting consumption, evolving into a semisurreal sendup of a workplace and its utopia of rules.”

THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder. (Tim Duggan, $17.) Snyder considers what causes democracy to fracture, with a focus on recent political instability in the West. In his view, Russia and Vladimir Putin are to blame. Times reviewer Margaret MacMillan wrote that Snyder “argues forcefully and eloquently” that we are living in dangerous times, calling his book a “good wake-up call.”

THE GLITCH, by Elisabeth Cohen. (Anchor, $16.) Shelley is the chief executive of a tech company, and she’s ruthlessly efficient: She schedules sex with her husband, carves out “me time” at 3:30 a.m. and even takes a men’s multivitamin. When she encounters a woman who claims to be a younger Shelley, her life begins to unravel, raising broader questions about work and selfhood. “What is the ‘glitch,’ really, for the rest of us?” Times reviewer Stephanie Danler asked. “It’s a question of work and what it costs women to do it.”

STEALING THE SHOW: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, by Joy Press. (Atria, $18.) Press, a former critic for The Village Voice, traces the ways in which women like Shonda Rhimes, Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling have transformed television. While the book focuses mainly on contemporary shows, including “Gilmore Girls” and “Broad City,” it gives a nod to their forebears, like “I Love Lucy” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

TRANSCRIPTION, by Kate Atkinson. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) In her new novel, the author of “Life After Life” explores a teenage girl’s unlikely involvement with MI5 in 1940. Juliet was a secretary before her recruitment and was assigned to monitor British fascist sympathizers. Ten years later, while she was working for the BBC, her past comes back to her in unsettling ways.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="e33e7d51-3d31-37f2-a4ae-787a3bc2a63e">The New York Times</a>.

THE TRUTH ABOUT ANIMALS: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales From the Wild Side of Wildlife, by Lucy Cooke. (Basic Books, $16.99.) From the marvelous to the utterly bizarre, there’s an astonishing diversity of life on display in this book. Cooke, a noted zoologist and documentarian, devotes each of her chapters to a misunderstood creature, upending our assumptions and beliefs about animals.

THERE THERE, by Tommy Orange. (Vintage, $16.) This polyphonic debut novel is centered on a group of Native Americans as they travel to a powwow in Oakland, California. Structured as a series of short chapters featuring different characters, the book raises questions of identity, belonging and history’s relationship to the present. “There There” was named one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018.

IN THE ENEMY’S HOUSE: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies, by Howard Blum. (Harper Perennial, $17.99.) Blum looks at the two men who helped track down Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and whose work uncovered a secret Soviet spy network. The book reads like a detective thriller as it describes their efforts and offers a fresh consideration of Cold War-era history.

LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. (Penguin, $17.) An Ohio town is rattled when the house of a wealthy white family is set ablaze. As Ng delves into the past to help solve the mystery, the town is further cast into turmoil by the disappearance of two newcomers, a mother and teenage daughter, and a custody battle springing from an interracial adoption. Times reviewer Eleanor Henderson praised the book’s “vast and complex network of moral affiliations — and the nuanced omniscient voice that Ng employs to navigate it.”

TIGER WOODS, by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian. (Simon &amp; Schuster, $18.) There’s no shortage of biographies of Woods, but this one stands out for the new details it uncovers about the athlete’s rise to become a champion — and his eventual fall from grace. As Times critic Dwight Garner wrote of the book, “It has torque and velocity, even when all of Woods’ shots, on the course and off it, begin heading for the weeds.”

MOTHERHOOD, by Sheila Heti. (Picador, $18.) The narrator of Heti’s latest book, a female writer in her late 30s, wrestles with her ambivalence about having a child before time runs out. As the woman untangles her feelings — “I resent the spectacle of all this breeding, which I see as a turning away from the living,” she says — the novel becomes a broader exploration of creativity, art and selfhood.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="3084dfad-600d-3ca6-abf2-d5ceeea8fec9">The New York Times</a>.

PROPERTY: Stories Between Two Novellas, by Lionel Shriver. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) Greed, and the many ways it can lead people astray, anchors this wry collection of short fiction, with stories that leap across the globe. Times reviewer Stephen McCauley praised the book, writing that Shriver’s “confident grasp of the material and her natural gifts as a storyteller will keep you in her spell and leave you, at the end, slightly altered.”

TWO SISTERS: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad, by Asne Seierstad. Translated by Sean Kinsella. (Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, $16.) What compels Europeans to join ISIS? Seierstad examines the question through the story of Ayan and Leila, who left behind their family in Norway to head to Syria in 2013. The book is an absorbing attempt to understand their radicalization.

THE DISTANCE HOME, by Paula Saunders. (Random House, $17.) For Leon and René, siblings growing up in South Dakota and the principal characters of this debut novel, ballet offers an escape from their grim home life. Leon is spurned by their father, who sees his soft-spoken, stuttering son as inferior to René. Saunders follows the pair as they struggle to find their place in the world and Leon tries to overcome his personal trauma.

BENEATH A RUTHLESS SUN: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found, by Gilbert King. (Riverhead, $17.) King, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, looks into a notable miscarriage of justice in Jim Crow-era Florida. A white woman accuses a black man of rape, but the sheriff goes after a white teenager with a developmental disability, committing him to a hospital to avoid a trial. “King tells this complex story with grace and sensitivity, and his narrative never flags,” Times reviewer Jeffrey Toobin wrote.

LOST EMPRESS: (A Protest), by Sergio de la Pava. (Vintage, $17.) In his polyphonic novel, de la Pava touches on the NFL and the criminal justice system. Nina has been jilted — her father gave control of the Dallas Cowboys to her brother, leaving her an inconsequential team in New Jersey instead. The narrative then expands to Rikers Island and beyond, and even includes a stolen Dalí painting.

AND NOW WE HAVE EVERYTHING: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready, by Meaghan O’Connell. (Back Bay, $16.99.) O’Connell’s is the rare book about parenthood that contains little advice. Instead, she reflects on her decision to have a child, desire for an Instagram-worthy pregnancy and fears about failing as a mother. This bitingly funny memoir will appeal not only to parents but to nonparents, too.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="5582cce6-58fa-394d-ab0a-9e9cf51b5dc3">The New York Times</a>.

WARLIGHT, by Michael Ondaatje. (Vintage, $16.95.) In this novel, set in post-World War II London, a couple leave their two teenagers in the care of a band of misfits, claiming to head overseas to work in Singapore. But when their mother returns alone, without their father, the children begin to question what they’ve been told. Later, the son discovers his mother was actually doing top-secret intelligence work, with lasting consequences for the family.

AIR TRAFFIC: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America, by Gregory Pardlo. (Vintage, $16.95.) Pardlo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, was one of the thousands of air traffic controllers fired in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan. The author examines the ramifications of the episode on his family’s legacy, then expands to consider questions of race, addiction and fatherhood.

TIN MAN, by Sarah Winman. (Putnam, $14.) In this slim, deeply affecting novel, a reprint of one of van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers paintings proves to be an emotional salve after the fracturing of a childhood friendship. As New York Times reviewer Gayle Forman wrote, “The slow build of emotion and the cascade of quiet, well-earned tears are testament to how rich this meditation on love, art, loss and redemption truly is.”

ON GRAND STRATEGY, by John Lewis Gaddis. (Penguin, $18.) Gaddis, a leading historian of the Cold War, draws on examples from the seminar he teaches at Yale, taking up the subject of wars — and how not to lose them. Times reviewer Victor Davis Hanson called the book “a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.”

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY, by Rachel Lyon. (Scribner, $17.) It’s 1990s Brooklyn, and Lu, an aspiring photographer, is at work on a series of hundreds of self-portraits. In the 400th, she unintentionally captures the image of her 9-year-old neighbor falling to his death in the background. The manner in which Lu, convinced that the photograph is her masterpiece, appropriates his death haunts her throughout the novel.

THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA: Love and Marriage in Mumbai, by Elizabeth Flock. (Harper Perennial, $17.99.) After moving to India, Flock, a U.S. journalist, was struck by many Indians’ approach to romance, what she saw as “a showy, imaginative kind of love.” Her book focuses on three couples, using their travails as a way to understand modern, middle-class Indian life.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="9d87ecfd-08bc-399b-aa1c-54ff3e37c4c8">The New York Times</a>.

I AM, I AM, I AM: Seventeen Brushes With Death, by Maggie O’Farrell. (Vintage, $16.) A mugging, a near drowning, a nightmarish childbirth: The Northern Irish novelist shares her near-death experiences and what it means to know her life could have turned out very differently. The memoir is particularly strong on how her relationship to risk-taking evolved after becoming a mother, and her fears about not doing enough to protect her children.

THE OVERSTORY, by Richard Powers. (Norton, $18.95.) In this series of interconnected stories, the human characters are just the underbrush; the true protagonists are the trees that they encounter. Powers combines botany and storytelling in this majestic novel. Times reviewer Barbara Kingsolver praised the book, calling it “delightfully choreographed, ultimately breathtaking.”

ATOM LAND: A Guided Tour Through the Strange (and Impossibly Small) World of Particle Physics, by Jon Butterworth. (The Experiment, $14.95.) The author, a leading physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is an entertaining guide, and his book helps answer the question that has intrigued scientists for generations: “What is the universe made of, really, when you get right down to it?”

SPEAK NO EVIL, by Uzodinma Iweala. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) The second book by Iweala, the author of “Beasts of No Nation,” follows a teenager in Washington, D.C., as he reconciles his coming-of-age with the expectations of his Nigerian parents and their church. Niru, the Harvard-bound protagonist, was raised in a loving home, but after his father discovers he is gay, their relationship becomes strained. The book skillfully deals with generational conflict and what it means to be a young black man in America.

PATRIOT NUMBER ONE: A Chinese Rebel Comes to America, by Lauren Hilgers. (Broadway, $16.) Hilgers profiles Chinese dissident Zhuang Liehong and his wife, Little Yan, who came to the United States in 2014 to avoid a government crackdown. Hilgers, a journalist who spent years living in China, follows the couple as they forge a new life in Queens and navigate the U.S. immigration system.

COUNTRY DARK, by Chris Offutt. (Grove, $16.) In Offutt’s long-awaited novel, a Korean War veteran comes back to Kentucky, tangles with bootleggers and grapples with difficulties at home. But there is an undercurrent of fierce love: As Times reviewer Smith Henderson put it, “winsome twinkles shine through the blackness throughout, thanks in no small part to Offutt’s keen ear and eye.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="f2b40440-9c15-3f97-af58-cb825b46d7c7">The New York Times</a>.

Reaching Nablus, in the West Bank, from Jordan, takes planning, and patience.

There is the circuitous drive to the closest border checkpoint. There are the notoriously long lines and waits to make the crossing. But if you’re fortunate, as was the British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad, you may have as your guide a “force of nature” grandmother, who comes prepared with a detailed itinerary and a game plan.

When Hammad, 27, first visited Palestine six years ago, it was, in some ways, the culmination of a childhood in which memories and family stories about the region — especially coming from her grandmother — were always present. During that trip, she spent months in the Middle East conducting research and collecting oral histories. Now she has channeled those stories into her debut novel, “The Parisian.”

The book, a sweeping historical novel that opens in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, comes out Tuesday from Grove Press. It follows a Palestinian from Nablus, Midhat Kamal, from roughly 1914 to the mid-1930s, as the region is poised to change hands from Ottoman to British control. To avoid being forced to fight in World War I, Midhat goes to Montpellier to study medicine, moves to Paris and finally returns to Palestine after a few years. The character is based on Hammad’s great-grandfather, whose nickname in Nablus, “al-Barisi,” means “the Parisian” in Arabic.

”The Parisian” has attracted a good deal of advance praise. Novelist Zadie Smith, who taught Hammad in the MFA program at New York University, called it “uncommonly poised and truly beautiful.” Writer Nathan Englander, in a blurb, called it a “beautifully written, expansive powerhouse.”

Hammad joins a group of contemporary Palestinian authors, virtually all of them female, who write in English, including Hala Alyan, Etaf Rum, Randa Jarrar, Susan Albuhawa and Selma Dabbagh. Their books share common themes: Many of the stories unfold both in the Middle East and the West, and explore how displacement, nostalgia and loss are refracted across generations of families.

But “The Parisian” is among the first to be set in the era before the founding of Israel: before the 1967 war that led to occupation and the displacement of scores of families, before the uprisings known as the intifadas, before the Palestinian-Israeli conflict became a political flash point.

While the timeline of Midhat’s life offered a natural framing for the book, Hammad was also interested in exploring a point of view that showed “the complexity of Palestinian life” and avoided reductive characterizations of Palestinians as either militants or victims.

“Any time you write about Palestine, it’s going to be political,” Hammad said over lunch last month. “But I wasn’t interested in looking at debate that pertained to the current time.” The book “is painting a specific picture of what happened from the Palestinian perspective,” she said, “but I didn’t want to write something that felt like, ‘This is the definitive history.’”

Born to a British-Irish mother and a Palestinian father, Hammad first had the idea to write about Midhat when she was a teenager.

Hammad’s father, Saad, said it was important to foster in his children a curiosity about their heritage, particularly because they were not able to visit the region as children. “That’s what makes you whole, as a person,” he said, “to look at all the dimensions of yourself.”

Hammad’s grandmother is a “fixture” in the Palestinian community in London, and Hammad recalls growing up exposed to its culture and history. As a child she once attended a lecture by Palestinian academic and critic Edward Said with her father — “I’m certain I slept through most of it, but I felt very cool to have been there,” she said, laughing — and read her father’s copy of Said’s pioneering work, “Orientalism.”

Literature offered an alternative way to understand history. “We didn’t learn about empire in school — I came to understand the British Empire through books,” she said, citing Said as an influence along with Chinua Achebe, Virginia Woolf, the Black Mountain poets and Scottish myth.

She graduated with a literature degree from Oxford in 2012, then spent months in the Middle East doing research, interviewing Palestinians, historians, architects and geographers.

“I basically said to anyone, If you have a grandparent with a good memory, I’d like to talk with them,” Hammad said. She spent time with extended family members and others — her grandmother came prepared with a Filofax of names — including people with “very, very vivid memories” who remembered her great-grandfather, which helped stoke her imagination and evoke the mood of the city at that time. Back in Britain, Hammad supplanted those accounts with archival research and documents from British soldiers in the Middle East, including a guidebook “about Jews and Palestinians, their inclinations, their temperament, their history,” she said.

She came to the United States to attend Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar, then enrolled in the MFA program at NYU to focus on the book. By the time she sat down to start writing, in 2013, the research and stories “had become part of my own brain.”

“The Parisian” calls to mind a 19th-century novel. Midhat enjoys taking walks around Paris and returns to Palestine with a dapper wardrobe that includes a cane. There is a purloined letter and a halted romance. And despite the tumult going on around him, Midhat is more preoccupied by his inner life than the surrounding political activity.

His personal turmoil stems from conflicting identities (“He was two men,” Hammad writes), and from believing he belongs equally in Palestine and Europe yet feeling like an outsider in both places.

Midhat isn’t the only one unsure of his place in Nablus. Some characters are skeptical of his affinity for Europe, particularly in the context of the region’s fight for self-determination. As one person observes: “To be a Parisian in Nablus was to be out of step with the times, locked in an old colonial formula where subjects imitated masters as if in the seams of their old garments they hoped to find some dust of power left trapped.”

The book “has the feeling of a classic,” said Elisabeth Schmitz, Hammad’s editor at Grove. They worked on it simultaneously with Michal Shavit, an editor with Hammad’s British publisher, Jonathan Cape. (The novel will be published in Britain this month, and Hammad has also sold the Arabic rights to the book.) “It’s the most exciting debut we’ve had in a very long time,” Schmitz said, and hopefully a story that will help readers “understand how we reached the brink of this intractable place.”

Hammad is at work on her second novel — a more contemporary story, she said — and while she plans to stay in New York for now, she hopes to visit Palestine again in the future. She prefers having a foot in both worlds, she said. “I like being between places.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/books/isabella-hammad-the-parisian.html" id="6247b3a2-4fa6-316b-a93a-2fe18811f924">The New York Times</a>.

A Debut Novelist Explores Her Family's History, and Palestine's

(Profile)

HOMEY DON’T PLAY THAT!: The Story of “In Living Color” and the Black Comedy Revolution, by David Peisner. (37 Ink/Atria, $17.) Peisner explores the influential sketch comedy show, which helped jump-start the careers of Jamie Foxx, Jim Carrey and others, and what made it a cultural force in the 1990s. The book includes interviews with the cast and writers, and outlines how the show helped shape national conversations about race.

AWAYLAND: Stories, by Ramona Ausubel. (Riverhead, $16.) The pieces in this collection touch on everything from leaving home to mortality, all with a zany undertow. One story includes a cyclops with a dating profile. As New York Times reviewer Rebecca Lee put it, the stories foreground “families so cracked and mythologically weird that they are more like interesting old ruins.”

HITLER IN LOS ANGELES: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, by Steven J. Ross. (Bloomsbury, $18.) Hitler and Joseph Goebbels set their sights on Los Angeles, planning terrorist attacks and attempts to kill leading Hollywood stars, but a World War I veteran created a spy ring to foil their efforts. Ross’ engaging history turns up some surprising facts, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.

KUDOS, by Rachel Cusk. (Picador, $17.) The final volume in Cusk’s critically acclaimed trilogy, this book finds Faye, a writer and the series’s narrator, newly married and on the literary festival circuit. As with the other novels, the story resists typical plot summary, and highlights the rich monologues Faye elicits from the people she encounters. As Times critic Dwight Garner wrote, Cusk “has that ability, unique to the great performers in every art form, to hold one rapt from the moment she appears.”

THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY: Our Destiny in the Universe, by Michio Kaku. (Anchor, $16.) Kaku, a scientist whose previous books considered the future of physics and the future of the mind, goes long in his new book, imagining everything from settling Mars to how humans might alter themselves to come close to achieving immortality. Kaku gives readers a sense of the science and research being done right now, and where it might lead.

WASHINGTON BLACK, by Esi Edugyan. (Vintage, $16.95.) Edugyan’s terrific novel opens in Barbados in the last days of slavery, and follows a slave who develops a close relationship with his master’s brother. He escapes by hot air balloon, and the pair head to Canada as the story takes on the elements of an adventure narrative. This book was one of the Book Review’s 10 best of 2018.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="9c6a8476-76b8-3482-a0b5-3c801253a842">The New York Times</a>.

NO TURNING BACK: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria, by Rania Abouzeid. (Norton, $17.95.) Abouzeid has spent years on the ground in Syria covering the civil war, and she combines extraordinary reporting with a historical and political overview of the origins of the conflict. In her book she focuses on a small group of characters, and their stories offer an intimate look at the impact of violence and tragedy.

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW, by Amor Towles. (Penguin, $17.) In Towles’ hugely popular novel, an aristocrat under arrest watches from a posh hotel as the Russian Revolution unfolds. New York Times reviewer Craig Taylor wrote, “What saves the book is the gorgeous sleight of hand that draws it to a satisfying end, and the way he chooses themes that run deeper than mere sociopolitical commentary.”

LOOK ALIVE OUT THERE: Essays, by Sloane Crosley. (Picador/MCD, $17.) Fans of Crosley, the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake” and “How Did You Get This Number,” will be pleased to see her signature wit on full display in this new collection. The pieces draw on everything from her volcano-scaling escapades to the death of her solitary downstairs neighbor. Her observations, even the most sobering, are shot through with hope.

THE BALCONY, by Jane Delury. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) This debut novel leaps back and forth to tell the stories of a property’s inhabitants, starting in the 19th century through the recent past. The state of the house, from dilapidation to haphazard renovation, mirrors the shifting relationships among its residents, including a Jewish family in hiding, a former courtesan and more. Times reviewer Jan Stuart praised the novel, writing, “The vivid intimacy of Delury’s canvas is enhanced by descriptive prose at once concise and lush.”

TAILSPIN: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse It, by Steven Brill. (Vintage, $16.95.) In this lament, Brill places a special focus on the laws and public decisions that have ushered in the current political and legal stalemates. It’s not all depressing reading, however, as Brill is careful to highlight people and groups he believes are working to address our problems.

SMALL COUNTRY, by Gaël Faye. Translated by Sarah Ardizzone. (Hogarth, $15.) A best-seller in France, this novel borrows some elements from the author’s life to tell the story of a young boy, Gabriel, who is uprooted from his happy childhood in Burundi after civil war between the Hutus and Tutsis breaks out in the 1990s. The book charts Gabriel’s loss of innocence in the face of violence.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="11cc2a6e-a050-3e82-a985-26cf44423565">The New York Times</a>.

HEAVY: AN AMERICAN MEMOIR, by Kiese Laymon. (Scribner, $16.) Laymon’s profound memoir reflects on his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, and shows how his pursuit of excellence was a means to survive. Touching on everything from the racism he encountered to the physical and sexual abuse he endured, Laymon compares his childhood memories with how he feels in middle age, and offers a complex, nuanced portrayal of his mother.

CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX, by Jordy Rosenberg. (One World, $17.) Rosenberg’s novel is a heady romp through an 18th-century England awash in sex, crime and revolutionary ideas. When Dr. Voth, the principal narrator, finds a mysterious manuscript at a book sale, the novel expands to tell the story of Jack Sheppard and Bess Khan, notorious thieves and jailbreakers in London, and their high jinks.

FLY GIRLS: HOW FIVE DARING WOMEN DEFIED ALL ODDS AND MADE AVIATION HISTORY, by Keith O’Brien. (Mariner, $15.99.) Amelia Earhart wasn’t the only female pilot to take to the skies in the 1920s, this lively new account shows, but many have been overlooked. In addition to Earhart, the book focuses on Ruth Nichols, Louise Thaden, Ruth Elder and Florence Klingensmith. As O’Brien puts it, “Each of the women went missing in her own way.”

DO THIS FOR ME, by Eliza Kennedy. (Broadway, $16.) Raney Moore thought she had the perfect life. A lawyer at a top-flight Manhattan law firm, she is the mother of charming teenagers and happily married. But when she discovers her husband is having an affair, she torches their life together — canceling his credit cards, deleting his email account and shipping his belongings to his mother’s house — and must determine the future she wants for herself. It’s an exhilarating, if over-the-top, novel of divorce.

THE MARSHALL PLAN: DAWN OF THE COLD WAR, by Benn Steil. (Simon &amp; Schuster, $20.) Steil, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, untangles the complicated politics that led to America’s intervention in Europe, and focuses on the debate over the continent’s economic future. Our reviewer, Timothy Naftali, praised the book’s handling of “a large cast of statesmen, spies and economists that perhaps only Dickens could have corralled with ease.”

A PLACE FOR US, by Fatima Farheen Mirza. (SJP for Hogarth, $17.) In this debut novel, an Indian Muslim family gathers for the eldest daughter’s wedding, and sets up a long-awaited reunion with an estranged sibling. Mirza’s book follows generations of the family as they navigate their lives in India and the United States, weathering racism, betrayals and crises of faith.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="f5f9e04c-810e-3146-acbd-de40c02a8c69">The New York Times</a>.

SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary, by Lorrie Moore. (Vintage, $17.) Moore is perhaps better known as a novelist and short story writer than a critic, but readers of her fiction will recognize her engaging and approachable voice. Her first nonfiction collection brings together pieces touching on everything from Marilyn Monroe to the O.J. Simpson trial, along with book reviews and political pieces.

THE GUNNERS, by Rebecca Kauffman. (Counterpoint, $16.95.) A group of childhood friends reunites for a funeral and tries to imagine what drove their classmate to kill herself. Times reviewer Xhenet Aliu praised the novel, writing, “There’s so much generosity and spirit and humor shared by whatever characters are on the page at any given time that I was always happy to accompany them.”

THE PLANT MESSIAH: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species, by Carlos Magdalena. (Anchor, $16.) Magdalena, a senior botanical horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, takes readers from the Amazon to the Australian outback on his quest to preserve some of the most vulnerable plants on the globe. Back at his lab, he designs ways to save these species, encouraging them to thrive and breed.

NO ECHO: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel, by Anne Holt and Berit Reiss-Andersen. Translated by Anne Bruce. (Scribner, $17.) When the body of a celebrity chef in Oslo is discovered on the steps of the police headquarters, the department scrambles to investigate the killing. Hanne, the heroine of these popular Norwegian crime novels, joins the case after six months in mourning for her partner. As she looks into the murder, it becomes clear that, for all his fame, the chef was a mystery, even to those closest to him.

TO END A PRESIDENCY: The Power of Impeachment, by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. (Basic, $17.99.) The authors are constitutional law experts and outline the history of impeachment while taking care to explain the critical questions that arise at each step of the process. Both Tribe and Matz are close observers of the Trump presidency, and they make a case for when impeachment ought to be used in the 21st century.

THE ITALIAN TEACHER, by Tom Rachman. (Penguin, $16.) Pinch, the title character, grew up under the specter of his father, a larger-than-life artist whose affections were always out of reach. “Rachman appears in perfect control of his material,” Times reviewer Olga Grushin wrote. “This is not an aesthetic treatise but, first and foremost, a morality tale about fame and family.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="7f76f2ee-3b90-3553-ab87-5dbfee1eb1ea">The New York Times</a>.

WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? Essays, by Marilynne Robinson. (Picador, $18.) In a collection of lectures and other writing, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and critic dwells on the current political and cultural climate and defends the importance of the public university. Above all, Robinson returns to prominent themes across her work: the moral dimension of intellectual development and the relationship between faith and reason.

THE LOST GIRLS OF CAMP FOREVERMORE, by Kim Fu. (Mariner, $14.99.) An overnight kayaking trip becomes tragic one summer at a camp in the Pacific Northwest and reverberates throughout the lives of the campers for years to come. Times reviewer Lisa Ko praised the novel, writing that Fu is “a propulsive storyteller, using clear and cutting prose to move seamlessly through time.”

ASK ME ABOUT MY UTERUS: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain, by Abby Norman. (Bold Type, $16.99.) Norman is one of millions of women across the world with endometriosis and uses her experience as a jumping-off point to argue that women’s discomfort is routinely dismissed by doctors. Along the way, she interweaves revealing anecdotes — spanning everything from Freud to recent scientific debates.

DOWN THE RIVER UNTO THE SEA, by Walter Mosley. (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Joe King Oliver was once one of the NYPD’s top investigators until he was framed for sexual assault and imprisoned. Years later, he’s trying to recover from the horrors he faced in jail and running a private detective agency with his teenage daughter when he hears from the woman who accused him: She found religion and wants to clear her conscience. King then begins the tricky process of looking into who wanted him off the police force — and why.

THE NINE OF US: Growing Up Kennedy, by Jean Kennedy Smith. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) The eighth of nine children, Jean is the last surviving Kennedy sibling and writes fondly about her experiences with the clan. Some notable episodes are absent from this slim memoir, but her recollections — especially those of a young child witnessing her father’s politicking — are a sweet tribute and give a more personal dimension to a highly public family.

THE HOUSE OF BROKEN ANGELS, by Luis Alberto Urrea. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) This bighearted book tells the story of La Cruzes, an exuberant Mexican-American family in San Diego, who gather as the patriarch is dying of cancer. “The novel disrespects borders,” Times reviewer Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote, calling it “a Mexican-American novel that is also an American novel.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="44de50a8-aac0-3f79-a75d-fe060db26544">The New York Times</a>.

GOD SAVE TEXAS: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. (Vintage, $16.95.) Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and longtime resident of the state, explores Texas’ foibles, ironies and contradictions with affection. Given the state’s booming population and economic growth, Wright’s book seems to say, America’s future runs through Texas — whether the rest of the country likes it or not.

HOW IT HAPPENED, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) In this murder mystery, Rob Barrett, an interrogation specialist with the FBI, is sent to investigate a double homicide that’s rattled the town of Port Hope, Maine. He believes the confession by a young addict, who directs him to where she says the bodies can be found. But when the details don’t seem to pan out, he’s kicked off the case.

UNEASY PEACE: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, by Patrick Sharkey. (Norton, $16.95.) What’s the downside to falling crime rates nationwide? In Sharkey’s analysis, what was done to make those rates plunge included increased incarceration rates and violent policing tactics. This book admirably connects the story of how the country became safer with why many communities are wary of the police.

A LONG WAY FROM HOME, by Peter Carey. (Vintage, $16.95.) A married couple and their bachelor neighbor set out on a 10,000-mile endurance contest around Australia in the hopes of eventually opening their own auto dealership. Times reviewer Craig Taylor praised this shape-shifting, propulsive novel, writing: “With all its inventive momentum, all its pleasurable beats, the fast pace of the race, the scenery unfurling, the novel ends up far from where it started, in a place of historical reckoning and colonial guilt.”

THE MAKING OF A DREAM: How a Group of Young Undocumented Immigrants Helped Change What It Means to Be American, by Laura Wides-Muñoz. (Harper, $17.99.) Wides-Muñoz chronicles the battle for immigration reform through the stories of young activists. A centerpiece of the story is the arrival in 2012 of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and how it grew out of close to two decades of grass-roots efforts and political activity.

CALL ME ZEBRA, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. (Mariner, $14.99.) In this crackling novel, a bookish Iranian in exile retraces the journey she took with her father and finds love along the way. As Times reviewer Liesl Schillinger wrote, the author “relays Zebra’s brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="05f7de4a-8a02-3db9-a13a-4aac9a41e60b">The New York Times</a>.

With the Oscars coming up on Sunday, you may be revisiting films that are up for awards this year. Some, like “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Black Panther,” were adapted from books, while others, like “Roma” and “Capernaum,” may encourage you to learn more about their subject and time period. We’ve rounded up a reading list inspired by some of 2018’s biggest films.

Spike Lee’s movie — about a black police officer, Ron Stallworth, who infiltrates his local Ku Klux Klan chapter in the 1970s — is adapted from Stallworth’s memoir. “Black Klansman” (Flatiron) details the detective’s investigation and efforts to derail the organization,even managing to befriend David Duke.

Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition” (Norton) is a sobering account of the group’s history and role in society. The KKK exercised huge influence over local politics and everyday life, to a jaw-dropping degree; our reviewer said the book “should be required reading.”

For a novel that deals with many of the movie’s central themes, check out Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut, “We Cast a Shadow” (One World). Set in the future, in a deeply racist American South, the story’s narrator is a black lawyer who goes to extraordinary lengths to protect his biracial son from experiencing racism. Our reviewer said the book “asks some of the most important questions fiction can ask, and it does so with energetic and acrobatic prose, hilarious wordplay and great heart.”

If you’d like to spend more time in Wakanda, the universe of “Black Panther,” check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reprisal of the comic, illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze. In their first volume, “A Nation Under Our Feet” (Marvel), a superhuman terrorist group is rattling the nation, and the leader T’Challa must lead the country through the uprising and help determine its future.

For another fantastical, sprawling story set in Africa, look to Marlon James’ new novel, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” (Riverhead),the first of an expected trilogy that’s been compared to “Game of Thrones.”

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s epic novel, “Kintu” (Transit Books) is set in present-day Uganda, and follows one family’s efforts to evade a curse that’s followed them for generations.

Nadine Labaki’s movie, the latest Lebanese film to be nominated for an Oscar, follows a young refugee, Zain, and the horrors he faces, from cutthroat traffickers to the realities of being stateless.

The refugee crisis in Lebanon dates back decades, the result of longtime instability in the region. For an overview of the Middle East’s political and cultural upheavals, consider “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Anthony Shadid, a former Middle East correspondent for The Times. Shadid, who died in 2012 on assignment, was of Lebanese descent. His book examines the long-lasting effects of the region’s convulsions.

Wendy Pearlman’s “We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices From Syria” (Custom House) brings together accounts from refugees scattered across the Middle East and Europe, showing the extraordinary heroism of ordinary people.

In her highly personal graphic novel “Baddawi” (Just World Books), Leila Abdelrazaq explores the childhood of her father, who grew up in a Lebanese refugee camp in the 1970s.

This film isn’t particularly kind to Queen Anne, the feckless monarch at its core, but history hasn’t been, either. In “Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion” (Knopf), historian Anne Somerset tries to defend the monarch.

Ophelia Field’s biography, “Sarah Churchill: Duchess of Marlborough: The Queen’s Favourite” (St. Martin’s),delves into the life and times of the queen’s longtime companion, a politically savvy, controlling woman who, in a moment of desperation, sought to blackmail the queen and out her as a lesbian.

Skipping ahead to the Victorian era, Sarah Waters’ lush novel “Tipping the Velvet” (Riverhead) explores an illicit romance between two women with sensitivity and verve.

Barry Jenkins’ film is based on James Baldwin’s 1974 novel of the same name, and follows a young couple in 1970s New York whose lives are thrown into chaos when the man is wrongly imprisoned.

If you’d like to explore more by Baldwin, consider his debut novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” the loosely autobiographical story of a man growing up in Harlem in the 1930s.

For a more contemporary story, there’s “An American Marriage” (Algonquin) by Tayari Jones, which follows a young African-American couple “on the come-up” whose lives are upended after the husband is convicted of a rape he didn’t commit.

To understand the devastating effects of the mass incarceration of black men, look to James Forman Jr.'s “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux). His book shows the role of black mayors, judges and police chiefs, taking office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction, in putting in place measures that would prove devastating for poor black neighborhoods.

In their novel “The Nanny Diaries” (St. Martin’s Griffin), Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus — both former nannies themselves — include plenty of hilarious details in their story of child care among wealthy Manhattanites.

Don’t let the title of Leila Slimani’s novel deceive you: “The Perfect Nanny” (Penguin) is a chilling psychological thriller ripped right from the headlines, with a family’s caretaker who snaps and kills the children. The book was named one of The Times’ 10 Best Books of 2018.

The author P. L. Travers wrote six Mary Poppins books, but was an intensely private woman. Valerie Lawson was determined to tell the author’s story in “Mary Poppins She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers” (Simon &amp; Schuster), which serves as an intrepid guide to a surprisingly difficult topic: Travers fascinating, though confusing, personal life.

In “Roma,” Alfonso Cuáron sets out to capture the Mexico City of his childhood, following a family and their beloved nanny during a turbulent political moment.

For a thorough account of the city’s — and Mexico’s — history, look to “La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City” (Random House) by Jonathan Kandell, a veteran journalist in Latin America.

No guide to books set in Mexico City should overlook Roberto Bolaño’s novels. One of his best-loved works, “The Savage Detectives” (Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux),unfolds largely in the 1970s, following a young poet and a group of literary guerrillas.

In Mexico and elsewhere, there’s a growing movement for authors to write in indigenous languages — including Zapotec, which Cleo, the film’s central character, and the family’s maid speak. For an introduction, look to Natalia Toledo’s poetry collection “The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems” (Phoneme Media).

Adam McKay’s movie foregrounds Dick Cheney’s role in U.S. military campaigns during President George W. Bush’s tenure. For a deeper look, check out James Mann’s “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet” (Viking),which focuses on Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and others, with an eye to how the Vietnam War shaped their strategies and interventions.

Bush wrote a campaign memoir, “A Charge to Keep” (William Morrow) before he was elected, that offered hints about what his presidency might look like.

Thomas Mallon’s latest book, “Landfall” (Pantheon),is a blackly comic novel set during Bush’s administration, and shows off a side of the president that no one knows.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/books/oscars-reading-guide.html" id="0ee63cb6-cc5a-3d72-abf8-381d11e3d81d">The New York Times</a>.

(Further Reading)

A Literary Guide to the Oscars

THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, by Antonio Damasio. (Vintage, $17.) Damasio, a well-known neuroscientist, makes a case for the centrality of feelings and emotions in human history. Unlike other accounts that focus on cognition and are largely unconcerned with the role of affect, his book reframes the history of humans and the natural world, putting feelings at its core.

THE PISCES, by Melissa Broder. (Hogarth, $16.) In this darkly funny novel, a depressed and stalled graduate student finally meets her dream date — who turns out to be half fish. As New York Times reviewer Cathleen Schine put it, Broder “approaches the great existential subjects — emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, death and boyfriends — as if they were a collection of bad habits.”

SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean. (Grove, $17.) In breezy biographical chapters on 10 writers, including Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Pauline Kael, Dean explores their successes and failures and their relationship to feminism. Above all, she considers the double-edged nature of the word “sharp”: It’s a compliment with an undertow of terror, she writes. “Sharpness, after all, cuts.”

THE IMMORTALISTS, by Chloe Benjamin. (Putnam, $16.) In late 1960s New York, the Gold children visit afortuneteller known for predicting the dates when people will die. The four siblings grapple with the prophesies over the next 50 years: One heads West for San Francisco, and another becomes a scientist, researching the possibility of living forever. For each, the knowledge turns out to be both a blessing and curse, and all must try to balance their desires and choices with their predetermined destinies.

NO ASHES IN THE FIRE: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, by Darnell L. Moore. (Bold Type, $16.99.) Growing up gay and black in Camden, New Jersey, Moore had a brutal, violent childhood. In his book, he sets out to make visible the “forces that rendered my blackness criminal, my black manhood vile, my black queerness sinful,” he writes, but despite the cruelty he faced, he suffuses his memoir with humanity.

THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, by Alan Hollinghurst. (Vintage, $16.95.) Hollinghurst’s emotionally resonant novel charts nearly a century of queer life and desires in Britain. When readers meet the title character, he’s an object of intense desire among a group of male friends at Oxford. Years later, a sex scandal torpedoes his political career, leaving his gay son to claim the possibilities his father never had.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/books/review/new-paperbacks.html" id="80c550f6-fa2f-3977-a610-82661d75f3d7">The New York Times</a>.

Joumana Khatib

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