NYT Book Reviews

“Man in the Mirror,” by Anand Giridharadas, is a searching investigation into the 2023 death of Jordan Neely and the trial of the man who held him in a chokehold.

In Rebecca Perry’s “May We Feed the King,” a curator falls down a rabbit hole imagining life in a palace court.

An engaging new book shows the master of American Gothic to be a deeply disturbed man who embraced the darkness most of us flee.

“Dodge City,” by Patrick deWitt, follows a young man on a road trip to Canada to avoid conscription in Vietnam.

In “Mestra,” Madeline Miller follows the daughter of the king of Thessaly on her endless, self-destructive quest to satisfy her insatiable father.

A new book by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz recounts how violent resistance by a group of armed Black men fueled the fight over slavery.

Lois Lowry pioneered dystopian fiction for young readers. “Building 903” adds to her legacy.

In his new book, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that without feelings, true intelligence cannot exist.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and former Columbia graduate student, offers an account of his ordeal and explains why his work continues.

“Swan Song,” Charles Spencer’s memoir of Lady Diana, is full of love and vengeance.

In a new book, the prizewinning biographer Benjamin Moser charts a tradition of Jewish opposition to Zionism and recounts his belated conversion to that view.

In “The Age of Cures,” the journalist Barry Werth shows how American drug manufacturers got big and then came under attack.

Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s “Said the Dead” is a fusion of biography, memoir and poetry drawn from century-old casebooks.

In “Shadow Before the Flame,” Catherine Grace Katz puts us back on the famously doomed airship.

In “Crossing the Red Line,” Akbar Shahid Ahmed goes behind the scenes in the Biden White House in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.

Fights, feuds and insults are all in a day’s work for Ari Emanuel, who offers an unvarnished look at his rapacious career in a new memoir.

In John Green’s “Hollywood, Ending,” two young actors navigate the highs and lows of Hollywood.

In “Ausländer,” Michael Moritz, the managing partner of a venture capital firm, examines his inheritance.

“The Rouse,” by China Miéville, is a decade-spanning epic about a secret military unit trying to raise and weaponize the dead.

In “When America Roared,” Jonathan Kaufman draws together a bushel of figures who thrived in one fateful decade.

In “True North,” the veteran travel writer Paul Theroux crisscrosses the country of his forebears for insights about how it differs from his own.

In “Live Laugh Love,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez examines how Christian women absorbed the idea that material abundance was evidence of divine favor.

“Our Noble Selves” takes place amid the 1951 Festival of Britain, when a traumatized ex-war reporter and P.O.W. goes from government cog to murder suspect.

In “End Times Fascism,” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that apocalyptic ideology has taken hold over American elites.

In Sarah Anderson’s satirical novel, “Fallow,” a debt-laden woman becomes a professional surrogate for a corporate behemoth.

Sebastian Barry’s new novel tours a post-Civil War America where cruelty is ever-present but love endures.

Two career-spanning essay collections, from Nik Cohn and Jerry Stahl, revel in life’s margins and recapture auras past.

In “Profiles in Cowardice,” Jacob Weisberg offers a grim twist on John F. Kennedy’s collection of heroic biographies.

In “Exit Party,” by Emily St. John Mandel, two versions of America’s future crash into each other.

In “Redwood,” Ben Macintyre tells the story of a Russian spy in Iran who betrayed his country in exchange for an unusual request.

In “A Shadow Over the World,” William I. Hitchcock shows how the early struggle against totalitarianism was rife with contradictions.

A new book takes kids whose phones can beat grandmasters back to a 1997 nail-biter.

In a new book, the fashion historian Kate Strasdin looks at the makers who designed the monarch’s sartorial persona.

The new and selected poems in Jill Bialosky’s “Mock Heart” show her steadily circling desire and domesticity.

In a new book, Susan Neiman argues that by defining evil in terms of individual monstrousness we fail to perceive its widespread hold on our culture.

Steven Hyden considers the cultural shifts of the past 25 years in a new book about the band.

In “Money to Burn,” William D. Cohan charts the rise and fall of the Wall Street billionaire Leon Black.

In a new novel, the author Ariel Lawhon revives a 16th-century sea captain previously pushed to the margins.

“Taipei Story,” R.F. Kuang’s seventh book in eight years, is about an American student in Taiwan.

In “Living With Freddie,” Anna Heyward recalls the pet who taught her “to be human.”

In an impressive change of pace, Emma Cline’s new novel gets inside the head of a stoic businessman with dementia.

In “Tower Hill,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Alan Taylor pulls apart the twisted logic of a Virginia slave owner and his descendants.

In “All the Presidents’ Wars,” the journalist Peter Bergen traces the many missteps of U.S. military action in the Middle East.

In “The Living Realm,” an expat in Germany is visited by phantoms.

In “The Ghost of the Mountains,” Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi proves there is no substitute for old-fashioned field study.

Meg Howrey’s novel “Body Language” doesn’t skimp on the kind of absurd humor that thrives in a crucible.

In “Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings,” Jared Diamond considers the impact leaders might have had on the course of their civilizations.

“The Everest Mystery” takes on the enduring puzzle of two climbers’ fates — and pays tribute to the often-overlooked Sandy Irvine.

“American Scoundrel” traces the career of Roy Cohn, whose smash-mouth politics continue to shape our own.

In “53 Days,” the historian Timothy W. Ryback shows how the Nazis used democratic means to destroy German democracy.

The journalist Jon Ronson finds metaphor and meaning in the story of one man’s baronial fantasia and others like him who are living unmoored from reality.

Marlon James’s story of gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica is a maximalist’s banquet — and the Booker Prize winner’s finest book yet.

Robert Harris’s new novel, “Agrippa,” follows a statesman who witnesses the transformation of a republic into an empire.

“The eloquence and depth of his prose remain for me the gold standard,” John Adams writes of Michael Steinberg, who excelled at his craft in the 1960s and ’70s.

In “Under Story,” a grieving woman makes a discovery that could help her recover what she thought she had lost forever.

As Shaun Tan reminds us with his stand-alone follow-up to “The Arrival,” some truths are so enormous, so beautiful, they can be told only through myth.

A new book of essays by the celebrated classicist captures her excitement for her subject matter and the surprising range of her references.

In an evocative new memoir, the journalist Wilbert L. Cooper explores the history, and paradoxes, of race and policing in Cleveland, his hometown.

In “The Time Tax,” the Atlantic journalist Annie Lowrey takes aim at bureaucratic red tape.

In Jennifer Hillier’s new book, a woman must confront her traumatic past after a body washes up on the shores of her seaside town.

In “Up on Cove Mountain” Earl Swift confronts a place — and a tragedy — that haunts him.

“The Anniversary,” a novel by the Italian novelist Andrea Bajani, examines a marriage ravaged by abuse and malice.

In “The Great Wherever,” generations of spirits watch as their descendants debate whether or not to sell their ancestral home.

Though full of details that echo the life and career of Natalie Portman, “Life of M” remains chilly and abstract.

In Kurt Andersen’s new novel, “The Breakup,” a family navigates a nation ruptured by civil war.

In a new book, Jill Lepore examines what happens when we abandon liberal democracy for rule by automation and machines.

In “Range,” by the Danish writer Dorthe Nors, a misfit astrophysicist lives alone in the wilderness, struggling to connect.

In “The Book of Chuck,” clairvoyance is a terrible inheritance.

In Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, “Dèy,” a Haitian American mother in Miami experiences the numbing aftershocks of a random act of violence.

Are the 30-somethings in Katy Simpson Smith’s “The Maltese Version” in love? That depends on how you define it.

In “Days of Miracle and Wonder,” Ashley Kahn revisits the “trials and triumphs” of Paul Simon’s “Graceland.”

An ungainly new biography by the German philosopher Thomas Meyer purports to situate Arendt in the context of her own era.

In Richard Russo’s new novel, “Under the Falls,” a singer reckons with his troubled past and the community he left behind.

In his new book, Chang-rae Lee follows a 10-year-old into the social powder kegs of schoolyards and summer camps.

In “Sunrise,” Téa Obreht mashes up Western gothic, murder mystery and survival saga.

In his new book, Joby Warrick traces the rise and fall of Carlos the Jackal, the notorious terrorist-for-hire.

Julie Kliegman’s thorough biography of the transgender tennis player is fascinatingly complicated by her changed stance on gender and sports.

“A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving,” by Virginia Eubanks, is a memoir of what happened after her partner survived a brutal attack — and her own will to endure.

In “The Responsible Party,” a novel by Claire Carusillo, a woman named Claire Carusillo vapes her way through her wild family history.

Kimon de Greef’s “The Ego Trip” is an enthralling, galling journey into the deeply weird underbelly of the psychedelic renaissance.

Claudia Rankine’s latest autobiographical work, “Triage,” asks how best to effect change in the world.

In “Don’t Be Evil,” Claire Stapleton, a former Google spin doctor, tries to make sense of her time in the industry.

The Italian best seller “All That Is Left of Life” is a cinematic family drama set in the summer of 1980.

In Fiona Mozley’s novel “Awake Awake,” a London writer returns to her hometown to unearth hazy memories of past friendships and traumas.

Food books by chefs and celebrities arrive by the landslide. “Voices From the Kitchen” highlights workers who get far less attention.

Dave Zirin traces the radical career of Howard Zinn, whose “A People’s History of the United States” has sold millions of copies.

Paul Yoon’s deeply moving novel “Etna” explores the aftermath of war with an unconventional narrator.

In “The Story of Your Life,” Kathryn Jezer-Morton explores, without castigating, the wish to present a curated version of experience via social media.

“Plant Lady,” by the Korean novelist Minyoung Kang, imagines an urban haven for women who need an escape from dangerous men.

In Riley Sager’s “The Unknown,” actresses on a research trip stumble into a paranormal mystery.

In “The Savage Landscape,” the nature writer Cal Flyn argues that wilderness is just one more man-made invention.

A new book by the historian Micki McElya considers how the politics of beauty both shaped and divided the women’s movement.

“All That’s Unseen,” by Emilee Hackney, an eighth-generation Appalachian, offers a portrait both loving and cleareyed of the region that formed her.

In a sobering new book, Annie Jacobsen considers the potentially civilization-ending impacts of biological war.

The first serious biography of Albert Sabin recounts the pivotal role he played in the development of a polio vaccine.

Sarai Walker’s “Furious Violet” is a psychological thriller about the kind of woman the genre — and the world — typically overlooks.

In “The Renoir Girls,” the English historian Catherine Ostler tells the beguiling, troubling and ultimately heartbreaking story of the Cahen d’Anvers family.

A pair of new books look back at the fear, anxiety and optimism that shaped the founding of the United States.

In a new book, the historian Kim Phillips-Fein chronicles a “shadow tradition” of anti-egalitarians who fought against America’s founding ideals.

Matthew Quick’s memoir takes the form of a letter to his father as dementia slowly dismantles the man who once terrified him.

In “The Mortons,” a young hit woman — a prodigy at killing — is tested by inherited secrets and her own morality.

In “The Frenchmen,” Emily Eakin traces the rise and fall of postmodernist philosophy, and the surprising ways its influence lingers.

A new compendium of Roberta Gregory’s comics does away with delicacy in the name of feminism.

Blending autobiography with meditations on craft, “Unsayable” feels destined for the graduation gift bag.

The final installment of his Harlem crime trilogy is full of heists, cultural shifts and nostalgia for 1980s New York.

In “The Lost Founder,” the journalist Jesse Wegman looks back at a largely forgotten and singular voice that helped make the United States what it is today.

In Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel “Yellow Pine,” a single woman having an existential crisis decides now is the time to have a child.

Jem Calder’s novel, “I Want You to Be Happy,” follows the flailing situationship between two aspiring writers with a 12-year age gap.

In “Journey to Nowhere,” Shiva Naipaul reports on the aftermath of a cult’s disastrous turn away from idealism.

A new book by the journalist Lauren Collins chronicles the ongoing effects of the violent takeover of Wilmington, N.C., on those living in its aftermath.

In “Air,” by the Swiss writer Christian Kracht, a decorator’s unusual commission leads abruptly into another universe.

“Cloudthief,” by Nathaniel Rich, follows a dispirited writer into a scheme to get rich and find romance along the way.

Julie Buntin’s novel “Famous Men” complicates an old story with questions of ambition and consent.

A new book by Michael Blanding chronicles the history of Hobby Lobby and its billionaire founder’s campaign to promote conservative Christian values.

From assisted living to elder activism and her own experience as a caregiver, Lucy Schiller investigates aging’s myriad challenges in her first book.

Her first collection of short fiction, “It Will Come Back to You,” is threaded with erudition but never pretentious.

In “Catch the Devil,” Pamela Colloff vividly tells the true story of the con man who traded on other prisoners’ “confessions” for clemency.

In “Every Inch a Lady,” Audrey Smaltz shares her incredible story — if not her inimitable voice.

Han Ong’s barbed, irreverent portrait of identity, class envy and flimflam deception in turn-of-the-21st-century Manhattan still resonates.

A group of artists gathered at a hotel on the Côte d’Azur in 1937. A new book by Anna Thomasson captures the art and escapades the holiday inspired.

William T. Vollmann’s fascinating, wildly ambitious text interweaves a family saga with a history of the American war machine since Vietnam.

Rachel Aviv’s essay collection, “You Won’t Get Free of It,” shows the breadth and complexity of matrilineal relationships.

A new book by the historian Mason B. Williams chronicles the dubious effects of school, housing and police reforms by local politicians on the right.

“The Simp,” by Roshan Sethi, is a satire of the unending demands, learned helplessness and stubborn racism of Hollywood elites.

“The Coast of Everything,” by Guillermo Stitch, is structured like a nesting doll, with one story hidden within another.

Irvine Welsh brings back his beloved Edinburgh ensemble for his new novel, “Men in Love.”

In Daniel Mason’s charming “Country People,” a stuck father and his happier family are tempted, and changed, during a stint on a bucolic campus.

In “American Trickster,” Ru Marshall takes on the epic story of Carlos Castaneda.

A new book by Samuel Moyn argues that the country has become an “oldigarchy,” in which wealth and power are hoarded by the elderly.

“The Midnight Special” offers an unconventional cultural history with profiles of five artists influenced by the carceral system.

In Paul Tremblay’s new A.I. dystopia, “Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep,” an experimental technology gives its heroine control over somebody else’s body.

In her biography of the novelist George Sand, Fiona Sampson urges us to see Sand chiefly as a writer, an inventor of stories and also of the self.

A new book examines the desperate lives of Nigeria’s romance scam artists — and their victims.

Janet Fash’s memoir is both a sunny coming-of-age story and an exposé of corruption, understaffing and unnecessary deaths at Rockaway Beach.

Monica Datta’s “Nebraska” is a maximalist, continent-spanning story of a mother killing her youngest child, as relayed by a highly idiosyncratic psychoanalyst.

In “The Housewives Underground,” the Atlantic writer Kaitlyn Tiffany salutes a loose network of skeptics who questioned the findings of the Warren Report.

“The Emergency Playbook” is a disaster preparation guide that emphasizes community rather than lone-hero fantasies.

In “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,” the renowned tech critic Cory Doctorow tries to find a good way to coexist with artificial intelligence.

In “Regime Change,” two New York Times journalists offer a riveting chronicle of the weird fusion of reality and show business in the White House.

Fascinating if overstuffed, Amitav Ghosh’s “Ghost-Eye” connects the mystifying case of a girl in Calcutta to the global climate crisis.

In “Presence,” the historian Erin Maglaque pieces together the fragments of early modern womanhood.

The stories in her new collection deal in jagged emergencies and in wounds both physical and psychic.

In “The Nord Stream Conspiracy,” the investigative journalist Bojan Pancevski tells a high-stakes international war story in blockbuster prose.

In “Empire of Ink,” Alex Wright describes how newfangled technologies and disruptive personalities have regularly unsettled the American media.

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor’s new book, “Something We Said,” is at once a memoir and a history of a racial slur.

In “They All Fall in Love at the End,” a young Black woman navigates taboo attractions and a contentious political environment while working toward a creative writing degree.

In “Drayton and Mackenzie,” two young grads navigating the 2008 financial crisis enact a plan they hope will change their fate.

Kate Milford’s cozy mystery is set at an abandoned amusement park, while Erin Entrada Kelly and Eliot Schrefer’s horror satire unfolds at a malevolent sleepaway camp.

In this surreal book, two spiraling men swap lives.

In “The American School of Spies,” Stephan Talty tells the story of the desperate struggle to preserve antiquities during World War II.

In her lyrical new biography, “This Dark Night,” Deborah Lutz shines light on the most enigmatic of the literary, secluded Brontë sisters.

In her new history, “Cocked and Boozy,” Brooke Barbier illuminates the pervasive role that alcohol played throughout the colonial era.

Set in 1962 Los Angeles, “Red Sheet” follows the murder and mayhem behind a “mini Red Scare.”

In Ben Fountain’s new novel, Washington insiders scheme to replace the president with a religious professional wrestler.

In his memoir, Simon Paré-Poupart recounts the highs and lows of hauling trash for more than 20 years.

In this satisfyingly old-school novel, an artist tries to find his place, and hold onto his spark, in a world that values fads and flash.

Deb Olin Unferth’s new novel is part cosmic comedy and part dirge for our dying world.

Following his “Less” books with “Villa Coco,” Andrew Sean Greer drops an aimless postgraduate into a glamorous, romantic and secret-laden setting.

In “The Man Who Stole the Gods,” Matthew Campbell recounts a shocking, decades-long crime and the search for its perpetrator.

The story at the heart of “Checkmate” is a good one, but Ben Mezrich has hustled it into print too quickly.

As presented in Andrea Wulf’s new biography, “The Traveler,” George Forster was an impressively curious, open-minded 17-year-old naturalist and polymath.

In “The Wreck of the Mentor,” the maritime historian Eric Jay Dolin brings to life a dramatic episode from the golden age of whaling.

In a quietly devastating new book, two journalists chart the protest movements fighting for change inside the country.

Josh Weil’s new novel follows an autistic trapper on an odyssey during the California gold rush.

Set in the decades after the Great Hunger, “Land” is a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s long struggle against British rule.

“The Fire Agent,” by David Baerwald, is a historical novel that spans two continents and world wars.

In “Whistler,” a surprise encounter at the Met changes the course of their lives.

A collection of Harold Bloom’s letters details the working life of one of America’s most influential intellects.

In “1873,” the historian and financier Liaquat Ahamed traces the political consequences of booming markets that left a lot of people behind.

In “Rabbit, Fox, Tar,” a white neighborhood’s local election is complicated when a mysterious, dark-skinned woman suddenly appears in town.

In Sonia Feldman’s novel, “Girl’s Girl,” the delicate balance of a Gen Z friend group is unsettled over one Ohio summer.

In her book “Sublimation,” Isabel J. Kim reimagines the dilemmas of immigration through a science fiction story about scheming clones.

Beyond a few pointed digs at her husband’s successor, “View From the East Wing” largely sticks to the head-spinning details of first lady-hood.

Meg Wolitzer and Charlie Panek’s “Found Sound” and Aida Salazar’s “Stream” send their protagonists on a listening (and healing) tour of real life.

A new book by Antonia Senior chronicles the careers of five men who betrayed their country — with devastating results.

Matt Haig returns with another life-affirming novel, this one about a man on a magical train that helps him revisit key moments of his life.

In “Freedom Round the Globe,” Sarah M.S. Pearsall tracks the stirrings of liberty beyond the British colonies that became the United States.

Tom Lin’s new novel, “Babylon, South Dakota,” reimagines the western with surreal elements.

The stoic narrator of “The Vivisectors” befriends a student embroiled in a cultural politics debate.

A new biography of Garry Trudeau tracks the rise of a comic strip that brought counterculture and political opinions to the funny pages.

In “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie Glaude Jr. looks back at the country’s past anniversaries with skepticism and pain.

In “The Danger to Be Sane,” the journalist Rosa Montero delves into the connections between psychic turbulence and creative work — including her own.

In David Sedaris’s wry new collection, being alive is as weird, atrocious, contradictory, unfair and funny as ever.

In “Dekonstructing the Kardashians,” MJ Corey takes America’s most famous TV clan seriously.

In her ingenious “Dog Days,” Emily LaBarge writes about a terrifying event without resorting to “the trauma plot.”

Ali Smith’s new novel, “Glyph,” dispenses with subtleties and takes on an age of war and the ghosts left behind.

A stirring memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ada Ferrer chronicles her family’s life in the aftermath of traumatic rupture.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s parents were leaders of the Weather Underground. His new book traces how their revolutionary ideals collided with their family life.

For her latest book, the popular British scholar Mary Beard gets personal about how she fell for ancient Greece and Rome.

In “An Inconvenient Widow,” Lois Romano defends the most reviled first lady from her detractors past and present.

In his first book, Theo Baker chronicles an outrageously eventful year navigating an enigmatic center of power.

The two-time National Book Award winner collects essays, profiles and appreciations in a new book, “On Witness and Respair.”

In “The Theater,” the journalist James Verini recounts the bombing of a performing arts space turned refugee shelter in the middle of war-torn Mariupol.

In “The Wonderful World That Almost Was,” Andrew Durbin reconstructs the coterie that surrounded the artist-lovers Peter Hujar and Paul Thek.

Steven Rowley’s new novel, “Take Me With You,” asks who we are without our partners.

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s novel follows a commitment-averse liar who is plagued by visions of violence.

The popular astrophysicist can be witty and informative when making science accessible. You wouldn’t know it from his new book, “Take Me to Your Leader.”

In Veronica Roth’s “Seek the Traitor’s Son,” a soldier in a pandemic-ravaged world is forced to become the hope of her people.

“Nerve Damage,” by Annakeara Stinson, is a jittery psychological thriller about a woman whose creepy ex simply won’t leave her alone.

In “AI for Good,” Josh Tyrangiel travels to the classrooms, hospitals and research labs where people are using artificial intelligence that might benefit society.

“Men Like Ours,” a novel by Bindu Bansinath, follows an immigrant family through a community crisis.

Suzanne Simard’s new book urges Western science to take a lesson from the more holistic Indigenous approach to forest preservation.

In John Lanchester’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” a widow is unnerved when a hit TV series airs details from her marriage a little too closely.

In “Selling Opportunity,” Mary Lisa Gavenas tells the not-always-rosy story of Mary Kay, the brand — and its founder.

In “One Leg on Earth,” a young college grad’s idealistic move to Lagos turns into a nightmare.

In “Screen People,” Megan Garber looks at how we all became famous for 15 minutes.

Two new biographies of the Supreme Court justice show how his career was propelled by a legal movement that coalesced to take down Roe v. Wade.

Fonda Lee’s “cyberpunk samurai in space” novel follows a sword-wielding warrior trying to finish one last job.

In a new book, the journalist Suzy Hansen plumbs an Istanbul community for insights into Turkey’s hard-right turn.

“The Family Man,” by the novelist and poet James Lasdun, brings a literary voice and elaborate detail to a case that gripped the nation.

Partly inspired by her life, Harriet Clark’s “The Hill” portrays a young girl navigating between her beloved mother’s jail cell and the world outside.

“Riverwork,” by Lisa Robertson, considers the lost history of the Bièvre and the lives of working women once linked to it.

In a new novel told in interlinked stories, Dylan Landis revisits a dauntless family she has written about since 2009.

Séamas O’Reilly’s new novel is a boisterous sendup of “prestige” media and its distortion of Northern Ireland’s complex past.

In the powerful and surprising “John of John,” Douglas Stuart sends a young art student back home to a family he thought he’d left behind.

“The Things We Never Say” leaves behind Crosby, Maine, for Massachusetts, where a middle-aged history teacher discovers a long-buried family secret.

In a new book, Siri Hustvedt recalls her life with the writer Paul Auster and the story of his illness.

Kathryn Stockett’s prodigious second novel, “The Calamity Club,” brings together an unlikely group of spinsters, sex workers and orphans in Depression-era Mississippi.

Her new memoir, “True Crime,” traces how she survived a Southern Gothic upbringing to emerge as one of the world’s most famous thriller writers.

In her memoir “Backtalker,” Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw shows how personal trauma spurred her influential and controversial ideas about race and gender.

In “The Successor,” the exiled journalist Mikhail Fishman tells the story of a charming Russian politician who might have made his country into a liberal democracy.

Eleven-year-old Genya plays the pretending game as she crams for an art school entrance exam in Chernobyl’s wake.

Benjamin Hale’s book “Cave Mountain” connects the brief disappearance of his cousin in 2001 to a grisly true-crime story in 1978.

In “Prophecy,” Carissa Véliz explores how generative A.I. relies on prediction, enriching Big Tech while making the rest of us less safe.

In “Japanese Gothic,” a 21st-century college student and a 19th-century samurai find themselves occupying the same house.

The worldly men of the cloth in Héctor Abad’s new novel find divinity both inside and outside the church.

In “Project Maven,” Katrina Manson shows us how close we are to artificial intelligence picking targets and dropping bombs without human input.

The German writer Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar trilogy crackles with life and unsparing details of a broken society.

The music journalist Bob Spitz, a keeper of numerous rock ’n’ roll flames, has turned out a colorful and authoritative new take on a much-documented band.

A new book by Jayne Anne Phillips, a Pulitzer-winning novelist, recalling her childhood is a bittersweet triumph.

A middle-aged novelist sifts through memories of growing up in New Jersey in Tom Perrotta’s frustratingly formulaic book.

In her engaging, sympathetic book “Like, Follow, Subscribe,” the journalist Fortesa Latifi digs into growing up in the spotlight.

In her engaging, lyrical “Homesick for a World Unknown,” Miriam Horn tells the story of the famed naturalist George Schaller.

The translator Daniel Hahn makes the case that Shakespeare can be appreciated “even if we don’t hear a single one of his words.”

In “The Radiant Dark,” life is upended after humanity receives a signal from a distant planet. But extraterrestrial contact takes a back seat to more earthly problems.

In his chatty, compulsively readable first book for adults, Mac Barnett champions his career choice and urges our culture to hold kids in higher esteem.

In “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” Omer Bartov charts how a nation founded in the wake of trauma abandoned the emancipatory impulse of its origins.

In Sophie Mackintosh’s novel “Permanence,” cheating couples find themselves in an alternate world free of complication — and missing the mess.

“How It Feels to Be Alive,” by Megan O’Grady, blends criticism with personal history to explore how and why art affects us.

In “The Palm House,” Gwendoline Riley offers understated yet cleareyed observations of human behavior — this time about middle-aged Londoners struggling to stay relevant.

A new biography of Jan Morris shows why the journalist, world traveler, historian and essayist was far more than a trailblazer.

In “This Vast Enterprise,” Craig Fehrman refreshes a familiar story with a rich chorus of voices.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s precise and devastating memoir chronicles the 328 days her son was held hostage in Gaza, and what came after.

In “How to Be a Dissident,” Gal Beckerman offers an inspiring tour of famous renegades with lessons for the rabble-rousers of today.

Both authors share uncanny similarities of upbringing. But their culinary paths diverged sharply.

Julia Langbein’s novel considers the legions of women whose lives have been forever marred by compromising early relationships.

Through accounts of relatives and direct witnesses, Adriana E. Ramírez examines a pivotal, and brutal, period of history.

In a new book, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue that Elon Musk’s disruptive approach to business is transforming both politics and the economy.

In “Rasputin,” the biographer Antony Beevor delves into the mysterious life of the last czarina’s mystic adviser.

Nicholas Enrich’s tell-all memoir, “Into the Wood Chipper,” has advice for others caught between their conscience and their government.

Jim Windolf’s new book, “Where the Music Had to Go,” traces the influence of Dylan on the Beatles and the Beatles on Dylan.

Solvej Balle’s cult hit series about a woman trapped in a time loop continues with a fourth volume.

In “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise,” a New York Post reporter paints an intimate portrait of the Kennedy scion and cabinet member.

A new history by Jonathan Cheng argues that an influx of missionaries in the late 19th century profoundly shaped the ruling Kim family dynasty.

“Go Gentle” throws together art heists, sexual assault and a coven of middle-aged divorcées on the Upper West Side.

Jay McInerney has written about the literary party boy Russell Calloway once a decade since the 1990s. He returns in the Covid novel “See You on the Other Side.”

Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon both lost loved ones to the conflict in the Middle East. In “The Future Is Peace,” they look for hope and understanding.

In 10 minutes or less, this mom-and-pop London institution produced stylish snapshots for some of the world’s biggest stars.

“Lázár,” by Nelio Biedermann, is a multigenerational novel that spans the collapse of a monarchy, two world wars and a revolution.

A new book by the historian Melvin Patrick Ely draws on court records to highlight the complex relationships between enslavers and the enslaved.

In “Empire of Skulls,” Paul Stob explores how a mania took over America.

After devoting her first novel to her wild mother, Violaine Huisman focuses her second on her father, a man who amassed wealth, love affairs and stories.

Tae Keller’s new novel, “When Tomorrow Burns,” offers reassuring answers to the question, “What do you do when your biggest fear comes true?”

In his excellent “The Oracle’s Daughter,” Harrison Hill looks at the people and the questions beyond the headlines.

A new book by Patrick Radden Keefe retraces the secret life of a 19-year-old Londoner who fell in with a gangster underworld.

In this novel, a group of authors race to finish a mystery manuscript, only to find themselves part of a lethal plot.

In Emma Straub’s latest novel, “American Fantasy,” a pop group’s midlife return provides fodder for both comedy and redemption on the high seas.

“Corto Maltese,” Hugo Pratt’s influential 1967 graphic novel, returns, with just as much to say about childhood during wartime.

The Polish best seller “Hexes of the Deadwood Forest” is like a post-porn fever dream of Eastern European magic realism crossed with a plant-based “Joy of Sex.”

The well-born protagonist of Nancy Lemann’s novel “The Oyster Diaries” returns home and immediately feels like an outsider.

In “Here Where We Live Is Our Country,” Molly Crabapple tells the story of a Jewish labor movement that fought antisemitism and nationalism with equal fervor.

In Caro Claire Burke’s novel, “Yesteryear,” a homesteading momfluencer can no longer hide the scandal swirling just below the surface.

The lexicographer Kory Stamper’s “True Color” is a sneakily insightful philosophical treatise on what it means to define anything at all.

Matt Phelan’s bear cub named Bartleby and Scott Rothman’s judgy bunny aren’t wicked or misbehaved. Like our reviewer, they simply prefer not to.

In anticipation of the nation’s 250th anniversary, a Pulitzer winner visited 300 sites to see how history is displayed and, sometimes, erased.

The sloppy, solipsistic narrator of Kirsten King’s novel, “A Good Person,” casts a witchy spell on a guy who dumped her. Hours later, he’s been stabbed to death.

Yann Martel’s “Son of Nobody” joins many recent books that reimagine the classics, but offers a Nabokovian twist.

Samuel Pepys’s journals are an invaluable record of British history. A new book reconsiders his infamous sexual exploits.

Part horror, part fable, the latest novel by Marie NDiaye to be translated into English is an exacting portrait of domestic entrapment and psychological turmoil.

In “Transcription,” Ben Lerner considers a famous father, a loyal protégé and a distant son, bound by devotion and separated by miscommunication.

“The Keeper,” the final book in her Cal Hooper trilogy, returns readers to an insular village in rural western Ireland.

Philip Stead’s “A Potion, a Powder, a Little Bit of Magic” gleefully ignores all the storytelling rules.

In a new book, the historian Mark Peterson argues that our founding document is rooted in ideals of expansion and conquest ill suited to the nation we’ve become.

A new history by Trevor Jackson argues that the economic system that transformed global living standards depends on endless growth impossible to sustain.

In “How Flowers Made Our World,” David George Haskell makes a case for their soft power.

Just in time for Opening Day, Robert Coover’s prescient 1968 baseball novel is back in print.

“American Men,” by Jordan Ritter Conn, and “Who Needs Friends,” by Andrew McCarthy, report from the front lines of the epidemic of male loneliness.

In a new book, the Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber suggests how Americans targeted during the Red Scare used literature to confound their interrogators.

“Open Space,” by David Ariosto, suggests there are few limits on human ingenuity that could prevent us from colonizing the cosmos.

A new book by Rhae Lynn Barnes examines how minstrelsy once occupied the center of the nation’s cultural life.

In Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s novel “Almost Life,” a passionate love affair between two college women gives way to a lifetime of what-ifs.

In “Playmakers,” Michael Kimmel traces, and celebrates, the immigrant roots of the American toy industry. (Batteries not included.)

In “The Feather Wars,” James H. McCommons pays tribute to the nation’s first conservationists.

As his new memoir demonstrates, he himself would achieve fame as a visual artist, filmmaker, TV host and formative tastemaker.

“Paradiso 17,” by Hannah Lillith Assadi, considers the toll of displacement through the tale of a Palestinian émigré.

A new book by the historian Christopher Clark chronicles a nearly 200-year-old scandal with echoes of the present day.

Joshua Bennett’s two new collections, “We” and “The People Can Fly,” take different paths to the same destination.

In “Chain of Ideas,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that a modern form of xenophobia has come to dominate conservative movements across the world.

In a new book, Caroline Tracey explores the mysteries and beauty of salt lakes.

Mieko Kawakami’s novel “Sisters in Yellow” follows a group of dreaming and scheming young women through society’s margins.

In “Stay Alive,” Ian Buruma paints a picture of the city dwellers who survived in Germany under the Nazis.

A new history by Luke Barr chronicles the innovations, excesses and chauvinism of the French chefs who spawned a revolution in cooking.

Charlotte Wood’s “The Natural Way of Things” conjures a not-so-implausible world in which girls and young women are thrown into prison for their sexual shames.

From 1940 to 1973, Ursula Nordstrom transformed kids’ books into real art and big business. A new middle grade biography attempts to capture her magic.

Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel, “Night Night Fawn,” approaches a closed-minded matriarch with compassion, even at her child’s expense.

In an affecting new memoir, Tom Junod, a prizewinning magazine writer, grapples with unsettling discoveries about his larger-than-life dad.

From his perch in Hawaii, the hero of Patricia Finn’s first novel, “The Golden Boy,” revisits his dark past in rural Ontario.

“Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” is a familiar reminder that growing up in showbiz can lead to awards and adulation, but also to heartache.

Karan Mahajan’s new novel, “The Complex,” tracks the fortunes of a political family in a rapidly changing India.

In Andrew Martin’s keenly observed new novel, a group of friends navigate a society reshaped by the pandemic.

“Nonesuch,” the new novel by Francis Spufford, conjures a plot laced with magic to change the course of history.

In “Whidbey,” three women reckon with the aftermath of sexual assault.

“Gunk,” a novel by Saba Sams, follows a woman through the trials and tenuous jobs of young adulthood.

A newly released collection of the Australian master’s short fiction shows her sympathy, her virtuosity and her ear.

In “Chosen Land,” Matthew Avery Sutton argues that, despite the intentions of certain founders, the First Amendment guaranteed that the United States would be a godly country.

In “Days of Love and Rage,” Anand Gopal creates an indelible portrait of revolution and civil war in Syria.

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s new novel, “Lake Effect,” is the latest in a specific contemporary subgenre: “Four Adult Siblings Reconvene to Rehash Their Privileged but Fraught Adolescence.”

In “Reproductive Wrongs,” the classicist Sarah Ruden traces efforts to exert political control over family planning back 2,000 years.

A new book by the journalist Beth Gardiner argues that oil companies are upping production of the material as a safeguard against falling revenue.

Ivana Sajko’s novel “Every Time We Say Goodbye” explores personal and political crises in lengthy, lyrical sentences.