Lauren Christensen

Reading her audiobook memoir, “How to Say Babylon,” the poet gives voice to her Jamaican roots, her early ambition and the Rastafari father who would have quashed it.

“Same Bed Different Dreams,” Ed Park’s second novel, is a heady mix of true history and high-flying fiction.

A vibrant cast narrates “North Woods,” Daniel Mason’s lyrical saga about the various inhabitants of a single home in Massachusetts, from the founding of this country to the present day.

The writer and public intellectual reads “Doppelganger,” a searching exploration of uncanny doubles both personal and political.

In “Drawn Testimony,” the portraitist Jane Rosenberg takes you inside high-profile federal trials across four decades.

Lauren Elkin’s first novel, “Scaffolding,” traces the multiple infidelities of two Parisian couples a generation apart.

Betsy Lerner’s assured first novel, “Shred Sisters,” maps the effects of a daughter’s volatility on her parents and younger sister.

In Yasmin Zaher’s “The Coin,” a rich, chic Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City grapples with displacement and American consumerism.

Voices, cadence, pacing: These 8 sublime audiobooks do everything right.

What started as a scholarly study becomes, in Will Rees’s hands, a freewheeling journey into our brains and souls.

The opening of the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne archives in the New York Public Library reveals unseen aspects of their family life, and approach to writing.

In Franziska Gänsler’s novel, “Eternal Summer,” a tenuous bond forms between strangers stranded in a hotel as the world burns.

In “Sad Tiger,” the French author Neige Sinno analyzes her memories of being abused as a child, alongside literature about incest and pedophilia.

In Charlotte Wood’s novel “Stone Yard Devotional,” an atheist burrows into herself while staying in a convent, and contemplates how to live without causing harm.

Abandoned by both her mother and a really bad ex, the 25-year-old narrator of “Gingko Season” avoids her own traumas by focusing on grand historical ones.

Devotion is the overwhelming concern of this book about two friends making their way in the art scene in 1990s New York City.

In the novel “Theft,” by the recent Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, three characters navigate messy relationships in 1980s Tanzania.

“A Truce That Is Not Peace,” the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews’s first nonfiction book since 2001, is a discursive reflection on her father’s and sister’s suicides, 10 years apart.

Lily King’s new novel, “Heart the Lover,” is a profoundly affecting story of romantic entanglement by a master of the genre.

A patron saint of exquisite verbosity, James made a career examining the clash of American innocence with European cunning. Here are his best works.