11 New Books We Recommend This Week

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/books/review/11-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

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New fiction can take you almost anywhere you want to go this week, from 1980s Athens to 19th-century Edinburgh to the Italy of the scheming Borgias and even more scheming Machiavelli. Jami Attenberg, author of “The Middlesteins,” returns with a beguiling portrait of a woman on the verge of 40 for whom being “All Grown Up” doesn’t mean checking the boxes of marriage and motherhood. In nonfiction, “Sapiens” author Yuval Noah Harari explores the future of humanity in “Homo Deus,” while Elena Passarello illuminates the lives of animals in a provocative book of essays with a title borrowed from a Prince song. Speaking of lyrics, a debut collection of poems by Molly McCully Brown might just stop you in your tracks.

Radhika JonesEditorial Director, Books

THE VIRGINIA STATE COLONY FOR EPILEPTICS AND FEEBLEMINDED: Poems, by Molly McCully Brown. (Persea Books. $15.95.) Brown’s first collection of poems is inspired by a real-life government-run residential hospital that opened in 1910 and was, for many of its residents in the first half of the century, a house of horrors. Our critic Dwight Garner called the book “part history lesson, part séance, part ode to dread. It arrives as if clutching a spray of dead flowers. It is beautiful and devastating.”

THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, by Michael Finkel. (Knopf. $25.95.) Christopher Thomas Knight spent 27 years living alone in the Maine woods. In this book, Finkel tells the full story (as much as we can know it) of this self-imposed exile from civilization. Our critic Jennifer Senior said the book is “campfire-friendly and thermos-ready, easily drained in one warm, rummy slug. It also raises a variety of profound questions — about the role of solitude, about the value of suffering, about the diversity of human needs.”

TO BE A MACHINE: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, by Mark O’Connell. (Doubleday, $26.95.) This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters, including Aubrey de Grey, who runs a foundation dedicated to finding a way for people to live a thousand years, and Max More, whose cryopreservation facility in Phoenix puts a new spin on rising from the ashes.

MADAME PRESIDENT: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, by Helene Cooper. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) In this biography, rich with local detail, a Liberian-born Times reporter surveys the improbable career of Liberia’s Nobel-winning two-term president. The book sheds light on the country’s history, describing civil war, the Ebola epidemic and the ordinary women who enabled Sirleaf’s victories.

WAKING LIONS, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Translated by Sondra Silverston. (Little, Brown, $26.) An Israeli doctor in the Negev accidentally hits an Eritrean immigrant, then drives off. The consequences are explored with insight and a thriller’s twists and turns in Gundar-Goshen’s darkly ambitious novel.

HOMO DEUS: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari. (Harper/HarperCollins, $35.) Harari, the author of “Sapiens,” envisions a future in which humans are outpaced and made irrelevant by the intelligence of our creations. His provocative, at times chilling, book is essential reading for those who think about the future.

ANIMALS STRIKE CURIOUS POSES: Essays, by Elena Passarello. (Sarabande, $19.95.) Passarello, a master of the essay form, presents biographies of famous animals from an ancient mummified mammoth to Mr. Ed and Cecil the Lion. Helen Macdonald, the author of “H Is for Hawk,” writes in her review, “I’ve spent decades reading books on the roles animals play in human cultures, but none have ever made me think, and feel, as much as this one.”

RUNNING, by Cara Hoffman. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) In brief chapters that skip around in time, Hoffman’s novel tells the story of young outsiders living recklessly in Athens in the 1980s. Their hustle is working as “runners,” riding the trains and convincing gullible tourists to check in at a seedy hotel. Hoffman’s characters are tough and resourceful, scarred, feral and sexy — less cast out than looking to get lost.

THE WAGES OF SIN, by Kaite Welsh. (Pegasus Crime, $25.95.) What better setting for a Gothic murder mystery than 19th-century Edinburgh? A woman studying for a medical degree is the heroine of Welsh’s pungent debut. Sarah Gilchrist is brave, but not so stoic that she doesn’t blanche to see a familiar figure show up as a corpse on her dissection table.

ALL GROWN UP, by Jami Attenberg. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25.) Attenberg’s protagonist, a 39-year-old single woman, seems stuck in her life as others move forward in theirs. It’s no easy task to build a novel around a character who doesn’t evolve. But Andrea is funny, perceptive and all too human, and Attenberg’s dry sense of humor makes her story both entertaining and moving.

IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY, by Sarah Dunant. (Random House, $28.) In her capacious if conventional historical novel, Dunant returns to the machinations of the Borgia clan, whom she wrote about in “Blood and Beauty,” introducing a new character, Niccolò Machiavelli. She is most successful in her portrayal of the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, whose reputation Dunant does much to restore.