Violence and its impact on writers anchor three of our recommended books this week: Michael Korda offers a group biography of the soldier-poets of World War I, while Kristine Ervin writes about her mother’s murder and Salman Rushdie relives the knife attack that almost took his life two years ago.
We also recommend a history of immigration detention in America and, in fiction, new novels by Leigh Bardugo, Terese Svoboda, Caoilinn Hughes and Julia Alvarez. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
In his candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir, Rushdie recalls the attempted assassination he survived in 2022 during a presentation about keeping the world’s writers safe from harm. His attacker had piranhic energy. He also had a knife. Rushdie lost an eye, but he has slowly recovered thanks to the attentive care of doctors and the wife he celebrates here.
A lowly servant girl in 16th-century Spain has a secret: There’s magic in her fingertips, perhaps the kind that anxious kings and other assorted schemers would kill for. The best-selling fantasist Bardugo (“Shadow and Bone”) infuses her new standalone novel with both rich historical detail and a heady sense of place and romance.
Flatiron | $29.99
The titular sisters in Svoboda’s new novel are modern-day harpies, of mythological renown: half-woman, half-bird, fearsome creatures. They’re also social workers, and their very long life’s work is the consideration of children who have been abandoned, neglected or worse.
West Virginia University Press | Paperback, $21.99
The American government has a long record of detaining migrants in places that are, legally speaking, black sites. Minian traces immigration detention from the late 1800s through the present via the stories of four figures, showing how absurd and arbitrary the system can be.
This novel features four 30-something Irish sisters, all with Ph.D.s and all lonely or a little bit lost in some way. When the oldest of them goes (voluntarily) missing and her younger sisters team up to investigate, Hughes has the catalyst for a witty, bittersweet and often stylistically bold exploration of blood ties and chosen family.
Riverhead | $28
Returning to her Dominican homeland after decades in America, a weary novelist decides to build a literal graveyard for all her failed and unrealized tales in the lively latest from Alvarez (“In the Time of the Butterflies”), who continues to fuse magical realism with warm humanism.
When Ervin was 8 years old, her mother was abducted from a mall parking lot; her body was found several days later. This gruesome reality is just the beginning of Ervin’s riveting tale, which resists society’s insistence on conflating both her own and her mothers’ identity with victimhood, even as it marks every facet of her life. A lacerating, bracing read that reminds us not just of the actual people behind the true crime genre, but of our own complicity in its consumption.
Counterpoint | $27
In this erudite and often funny group biography of the Allied soldiers who turned their battlefield experiences into verse during the Great War, Korda tracks the whole arc of public opinion as the conflict progressed, from romantic enthusiasm to incandescent rage.
