10 New Books We Recommend This Week

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/books/review/10-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

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Looking for an escape into the jungle? A revisit with Huck Finn? A deep dive into the origins of ISIS or a rousing defense of the Obama administration? Then this is your week, reader. Some seriously great storytelling below.

Pamela Paul Editor of The New York Times Book Review

TRANSIT, by Rachel Cusk. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In the second novel of a planned trilogy, Cusk continues the story of Faye, a writer and teacher who is recently divorced and semi-broke. Our critic Dwight Garner wrote that the books are “already a serious achievement: dense, aphoristic, philosophically acute novels that read like Iris Murdoch thrice distilled.”

TRUE SOUTH: Henry Hampton and ‘Eyes on the Prize,’ the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement, by Jon Else. (Viking, $30.) This history of “Eyes on the Prize” is written by a producer and cinematographer on the project. Our critic Dwight Garner called it a “warm and intelligent” book that is several things at once: a biography of the filmmaker Henry Hampton; a lucid recap of the civil rights movement; and a book about how a long and complicated documentary was made.

AUDACITY: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail, by Jonathan Chait. (Custom House, $27.99.) According to this book, yes, he did — a very good job of it, too. Jonathan Chait, a veteran political columnist now at New York magazine, cogently argues that Obama has been a transformational figure who changed America for the better.

THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD: A True Story, by Douglas Preston. (Grand Central, $28.) The novelist joins a rugged expedition in search of pre-Columbian ruins in the Honduran rain forest. There’s a surprise twist in here that rivets the reader and takes the book to a whole new level. I won’t spoil it here.

HUCK OUT WEST, by Robert Coover. (Norton, $26.95.) Who doesn’t wonder whatever happened to Huck Finn? This sardonic novel imagines an innocent Huck and a murderous Tom Sawyer as adults in a savage post-Civil War West.

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED AMERICA: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation, by Randall Fuller. (Viking, $27.) This lively and informative history looks at how Americans responded to the publication of Darwin’s great work in 1859. It starts off with a New Year’s Day dinner party that included Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott’s father, and takes the story from there.

THE AFTERLIFE OF STARS, by Joseph Kertes. (Little, Brown, $26.) A Jewish family flees Hungary’s 1956 revolution in Kertes’s inspired and deeply affecting novel. Our reviewer called it “devastating yet unnervingly funny.” Count us in.

THE WAY OF THE STRANGERS: Encounters With the Islamic State, by Graeme Wood. (Random House, $28.) Graeme Wood’s cover story for The Atlantic, “What ISIS Really Wants,” attracted an extensive readership when it appeared in March 2015. This book expands on that piece, with Wood’s interviews of ISIS supporters in an effort to understand the roots of their beliefs a major part of his research.

HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD, by Ottessa Moshfegh. (Penguin Press, $26.) Watch for this name: Ottessa Moshfegh, author of the novel “Eileen” and one of the literary world’s rising stars. The insightful stories in her dark debut collection, winning rave reviews everywhere, are about “loneliness, desire, hope and self-awareness.”

ENIGMA VARIATIONS, by André Aciman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) According to our reviewer, Aciman writes “with the ferocity of a writer who’s finally getting his vision down.” The result, “a magnificent living thing,” is a sensitive and sensuous novel about love, desire and betrayal.