Dan, Lucy’s husband, is a thwarted novelist whose lack of success has made him jealous, greedy and spiteful. “I honestly don’t think your work is going to win any prizes, do you?” he says to his wife. When the book begins, Lucy has just finished her latest novel, in which she has given Eliza an “incapacitating” injury that appears to involve a disfiguring injury to her neck. Eliza is not pleased at the prospect of being written out of Lucy’s books; neither is Lucy’s editor.

Surprise! Dan celebrates by secretly using his wife’s money to buy a fancy house in her least favorite neighborhood, near the woods where she and her baby brother wandered one night years earlier, only for her to return without him. It was a horrible scandal and is still an unsolved mystery, and Lucy, who claimed she doesn’t know what happened, has changed her name and tried to put it behind her.

Things get really complicated when Dan goes missing, in what looks to be a “Gone Girl”-style twist, and Lucy’s past becomes public. What else is she hiding? It turns out that Dan has possibly been sleeping with their hot new neighbor while conspiring to gaslight his wife. Maybe Lucy killed her brother all those years ago. Maybe Eliza made her do it. Alarmingly, Dan has neglected to mention that he put the new house in his own name.

Subplots blossom and sometimes wither, and Macmillan merrily leads us down many wrong paths, all the while examining the gap between fact and fiction and the relationship between author and subject. We cheerfully follow. The ending runs away with itself a bit, but we happy to keep up.

Imagine your dismay if, after embarking on a scheme to embezzle millions of dollars from a small Midwestern municipality, you are faced with the news that its accounts are migrating from paper to computer. How will you, the town’s meticulous comptroller and keeper of the paper receipts, hide your crimes when email comes to town? “Why did everything have to get harder, all the time?” gripes Becky Farwell, the heroine of Emily Gray Tedrowe’s new novel, THE TALENTED MISS FARWELL (Morrow, 352 pp., $26.99), who faces this very problem.

By this time, Becky has fully embraced a double life, just as Tom Ripley does in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” to which this book is a stylish homage. To the clueless citizens of Pierson, Ill., she is a dedicated public servant, a municipal booster, a nothingburger known for her intimate understanding of the town’s finances and her humdrum existence as the unmarried daughter of a man who ran a farm-supply business.

But outside of town, she is Reba, a glamorous, mysterious and disciplined buyer and seller of art, a sophisticated patron of artists with connections in Chicago, New York and abroad. Unbeknown to all, she uses money from the first life to finance her second. Tedrowe lays all this out — the quick shifts from one persona to another, the financial shenanigans, the increasing danger of the high-wire act Becky has set for herself, her growing ruthlessness — in granular detail, so that we see how she falls deeper and deeper into her life of deception.

The story was inspired by the bizarre case of Rita Crundwell, comptroller of Dixon, Ill., who in 2013 was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison for embezzling more than $53 million in town funds in possibly the greatest municipal fraud in American history. (She used the money to help finance and operate her champion quarter horse-breeding operation.) Crundwell seemed to show no remorse; the fictional Becky is playing a more morally complex game. But will she get caught?

The cruelties the three Drumm brothers inflict on one another in the Irish writer Liz Nugent’s LITTLE CRUELTIES (Scout Press/Gallery, 352 pp., $28) include lying, bullying, stealing, seducing one another’s girlfriends and, finally, murder. (Don’t get me started on the sins of their mother, the ghastly Melissa.) One of the delights, if that is the right word, of this book is how thoroughly the author delves into the details of the family’s world-class dysfunction.

The book starts with the three brothers at a funeral — two in the pews, one in a coffin — but we won’t know until later who has died, and who did it. There’s William, a sadistic and amoral film producer; Brian, who was fired under murky circumstances from his job as a teacher in France; and Luke, a rock star whose fame and success haven’t liberated him from his childhood demons or from his status as the family’s designated victim.

Each brother narrates the book in turn, so that scenes partly described by one are rounded out by second and third perspectives later. It’s a fascinating reminder that no story is complete unless you hear it from everyone involved. Adding to this fictional mosaic is Nugent’s clever device of having each brother’s section jump around chronologically — a vignette from the present followed by one from childhood followed by one in the middle — so that we can see the inevitability in how the events play out.

It sounds complicated, and it does require some careful attention on the reader’s part to pick up the nuances amid the shenanigans. (Tip: Pay attention to Daisy, William’s daughter.) “Little Cruelties” shows how thoroughly families can mess one another up, and how sometimes the greatest mysteries are found within the psyche.

Once you get over your disappointment that Nicci French’s HOUSE OF CORRECTION (Morrow, 487 pp., $27.99) isn’t set in a racy sex club, you can move on and enjoy it for what it is. A youngish Englishwoman named Tabitha Hardy has been accused of fatally stabbing the skeevy teacher who lured her into a sexual relationship when she was in high school, and whose body has just been found in the shed behind her house. As the novel begins, she is behind bars, awaiting trial.

Is she the murderer? Absolutely not, she says, but she can’t really remember all the details, and the evidence points to her. When her court-appointed lawyer advises her to plead guilty, Tabitha makes the foolish decision to mount her own defense. That requires her to serve not only as amateur detective, identifying and sorting through evidence from her prison cell, but also as amateur lawyer, arguing her case in court even though she has no clue what she’s doing.

The result is part Nancy Drew, part “Twelve Angry Men,” full of unexpected turns and surprisingly taut courtroom scenes. It’s immensely satisfying to watch Tabitha learn on the job, aided by a feisty fellow prisoner, Michaela. Tabitha is difficult and often unlikable — depressive, combative, rude, self-destructive, anti-authoritarian, a woman wrecked by past abuse — but it’s impossible not to cheer her on as she matches wits with a skeptical judge, several arrogant lawyers and a number of hostile witnesses whose self-assurance withers under her blunt sense of personal justice. Maybe she did it. (Maybe she didn’t.) But she’s not going down without a fight.

Andrea, the 30-ish heroine of Victoria Gosling’s moody BEFORE THE RUINS (Holt, 288 pp., $26.99), is another woman with a murky past composed of elusive details. She has an immediate problem: Her oldest friend, Peter, has disappeared. He won’t answer his phone; he’s not at home. Maybe there’s something weird going on at the office, but he’s recently switched jobs and she can’t remember where he works.

As Andy hunts for Peter, she is also searching for the truth about her own past. When they were in their late teens, the two and several others — Em, Andy’s loyal friend; Marcus, Andy’s attentive boyfriend; and David, a posh bad boy both Andy and Peter fancied — spent much of one summer on the grounds of a grand abandoned manor, playing an elaborate hide-and-seek game. All sorts of tragedies — not even Andy realizes how many — were set in motion back then.

Memory is incomplete; the book jumps back and forth between past and present. It’s hard at times to know which details are important. The legacy of violence and craziness left by Andy’s mentally ill mother; Andy’s inchoate fear of Joe, the man who was briefly her sort-of stepfather; her mixed feelings about Marcus; what happened to Em; the repercussions of the tangled attractions and betrayals that summer — all these strands are teased out, sometimes too subtly. By the time we realize we are dealing with a murder mystery, we are a long way into the book.

But Gosling is a stylish, sophisticated writer, and we realize that we are following Andy on what amounts to a grand scavenger hunt for the truth. Rain falls relentlessly, and the ensuing floods form an ominous backdrop to a story that becomes darker as it goes along. Some secrets are better left buried.

It’s hard to do justice to the clever, amusing, complicated works of Sophie Hannah, which rest as much on the tortured internal logic of their bonkers characters as on any normal standards of plot and motivation. Her latest book, THE KILLINGS AT KINGFISHER HILL (Morrow, 288 pp., $27.99), is on the surface a conventional whodunit — a homage to Agatha Christie starring Hercule Poirot himself, the fourth in Hannah’s Poirot series — a psychological thriller with a characteristically intricate and humorous puzzle of a plot.

It begins, as often happens in Hannah’s novels, with a seemingly crazy person making a crazy claim. This is Joan Blythe, who, just as she is about to board a luxury bus bound from London, declares that she has been warned by a strange man not to sit in a particular seat, lest she be murdered. She also seems unnaturally terrified of the words “Midnight Gathering,” the title of a book belonging to a woman on the bus.

Luckily for us, the great detective Hercule Poirot is on that very bus with his sidekick and narrator, the Scotland Yard inspector Edward Catchpool (a new character invented by the author). Catchpool’s purpose is to plod along cluelessly, asking the wrong questions and making stupid guesses, so that Poirot can flex his little gray cells and prove his deductive superiority over and over again.

The two are bound for a place called Kingfisher Hill, where they have been called to solve a vexing puzzle. A young man, Frank Devonport, has been murdered, and his fiancée, Helen Acton, has confessed to the crime. But, according to Frank’s brother, Richard, who loves Helen and now appears to be engaged to her himself, she is “entirely innocent.” Poirot and Catchpool have been asked to prove it.

That is the simplest element of the multidimensional chess game the author is playing. Other elements include a fortune derived from the invention of a tedious board game called Peepers, a kind of rival to Monopoly; another woman who claims that she, in fact, is the one who murdered Frank Devonport; a second dead body whom no one claims to have killed; and a lot of discussion about the convoluted reasons all the characters did the bizarre things they did, and how the distressed woman on the bus fits in to the whole thing. “The wish to kill is simply a part of human nature,” one character announces. Discuss.

Sometimes what you need most is an insanely plotted book about identical twins and white-hot jealousy and an ill-fated sailing expedition and identity theft and untrammeled greed and a huge fortune and competitive pregnancies and a long con in which the ultimate victim isn’t unveiled until the very end. THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR (Morrow, 304 pp., $27.99), by Rose Carlyle, is just that book.

Its main characters are the hot blond twins Summer and Iris Carmichael. They are mirror images of each other, meaning that Summer’s internal organs are where they are meant to be, but Iris’s are on the wrong side of her body. “When I lay still and watched my bare chest,” Iris says, “it was the right-hand side that rose and fell in a rhythmic flutter, proof that my heart was misplaced.”

Summer, who has a hunky husband and a tiny stepson, apparently loves Iris unconditionally, but Iris — less successful, less nice, less lucky in marriage — has mixed feelings. “I can barely stand to be in the same room as my sister and her husband,” she admits. Nonetheless, she drops everything and flies to Thailand to help them out of a strange predicament — and then finds herself alone with Summeron the family yacht, Bathsheba. It’s just the two of them and the open sea. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s impossible to do justice to the twists and turns that ensue, but they include a missing, presumed dead person; a fake pregnancy; a second, fake-for-different-reasons pregnancy; scheming older relatives; unexpectedly raunchy sex; a family will with one of the more ridiculous preconditions for inheritance you’re ever likely to come across; several quixotic schemes to bag the loot; some man-eating crocodiles; a brother who knows too much; and a family motto whose relevance becomes increasingly apparent as the story goes on: “Nice is dumb.”

Why should it make any sense? It’s rare to find a book both this preposterous and this riveting.

Sarah Lyall is a writer at large at The Times.

This deadly, as-yet-unsolvable, real-life obstacle in the path of the Anglo-American filmmaker’s rapid trajectory as a master of brainy blockbusters gives THE NOLAN VARIATIONS: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan (Knopf, 381 pp., $40) an interesting unplanned edge. The book, by the British-born writer and film critic Tom Shone, is every bit as intricately jiggered as one of Nolan’s projects — a kind of ongoing, genially competitive, intellectually footnote-y conversation between the author (who has written previous books, one in praise of Martin Scorsese, another in praise of blockbuster movies) and the subject. The two first met in Los Angeles in 2001, following the success of Nolan’s second film, “Memento,” at the Sundance Film Festival, and the dynamic was set in motion. “As he picked up his menu, I couldn’t help but notice that he leafed through it backward. He was left-handed, he said, and always leafed through magazines and such from back to front. I wondered if this had anything to do with the structure of his film, which plays its scenes in reverse order. He told me I may have hit on something, explaining that he had long been fascinated by notions of symmetry, mirroring and inversion.”

Shone’s close reading continued nearly two decades later, through conversations held over a period of three years. And the associative leaps are impressive; the short stories of the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges and the music of the English composer Edward Elgar, whose haunting 1899 musical puzzle “The Enigma Variations” provided Shone with an organizational principle, are mentioned in heavy rotation. The thematic headings, attached chapter by chapter to Nolan’s résumé of 11 commercial films, include “Structure,” “Perception,” “Chaos,” “Dreams” and “Knowledge.” The physical book is a handsome thing in itself, luxuriously illustrated with eye-pleasers, including movie stills from “Blade Runner” and “Chariots of Fire,” archival photos of Nolan’s English boarding school, a reproduction of C. S. Lewis’s map of Narnia and a page from Elgar’s “Enigma” score.

Shone presents Nolan as a cool puzzle with “the matte mystique of the magician played by Hugh Jackman in Nolan’s 2006 film ‘The Prestige,’ who takes his applause below the stage, having just disappeared through it.” In work, the filmmaker likes precision, discipline, punctuality and efficiency. In life, he eschews the email account and the cellphone, and he is partly colorblind. His longtime artistic and producing collaborator is his wife, Emma Thomas. Other close collaborators include his screenwriter-brother, Jonathan Nolan, and the composer Hans Zimmer, whom the director astutely describes as “a minimalist composer with maximalist production values.” It is Zimmer’s stunning score for “Dunkirk” that turns the Elgar variation called “Nimrod” into the movie’s spectacular aural heartbeat.

Martin Scorsese.Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

“The Nolan Variations” keeps the manly volley going through the making of “Tenet.” But between then and today, as we know now, a global virus would wreck the movie’s game plan — and perhaps some of Shone’s mojo, too. Glenn Kenny got luckier working on MADE MEN: The Story of “Goodfellas” (Hanover Square, 397 pp., $29.99). The movie-and-music-mad longtime New York critic, who contributes frequently to The New York Times, squeezed in a final interview-in-a-hurry with the director Martin Scorsese on March 9 of this year, just days before New York City went into pandemic retreat. Kenny transcribes that nicely nerdy session of fast-talked remembrances at the conclusion of his impassioned homage to Scorsese’s grand, bloody 1990 tour de force of a mob movie, now celebrating 30 years of Joe Pesci scaring the crap out of audiences with the quiet line, “I’m funny how — I mean funny like I’m a clown? I amuse you?”

“Made Men” is obsessive, free-associative and exuberantly geeky. I mean that in a good way; it’s everything a hard-core fan might want, with Kenny’s signature bebop digressions that cover the pages with first-person asides. The book’s structure is somewhere between frame by frame and minute by minute — a quick-fire commentary track on paper. And the author takes maximum advantage of interviews, particularly with Barbara De Fina, an ex-wife of Scorsese who continued to work with him professionally and who, listed as executive producer of “Goodfellas,” still smarts from the greater credit she feels she was denied by the producer Irwin Winkler. Then again, Kenny also salutes Winkler’s interview accessibility. (“Go figure,” he adds in the acknowledgments.)

As a cool-down lap after the fever of his “Goodfellas” chronicle, Kenny barrels through 30 years of Scorsese’s ensuing projects in one chapter, from “Cape Fear,” “The Age of Innocence” and “Casino,” up through “Gangs of New York,” “The Aviator,” “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Irishman,” which first aired on Netflix in 2019. Along the way he takes some jabs at the former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein (now serving prison time as a convicted rapist). He settles some scores with fellow movie critics. And he wiseguys his way around even in the footnotes. Confirming the detail that, in condemning the violence in “Cape Fear,” the conservative commentator George Will, speaking on television, pronounced the director’s name as “Scor-seeze,” Kenny writes, “You’re going to have to trust my word and my memory on this one, kids.”

The prolific British movie critic and historian David Thomson always trusts his own words, and always states those words with outsize confidence in his opinions and delight in his own prose. Sez who? Sez him. That’s what makes his more than 20 books so intriguing — or aggravating depending on the reader’s (i.e., my) mood. In recent years, Thomson, like many other movie-purist critics who previously didn’t have time for television, has thrown himself into the medium, weighing in with “Breaking Bad: The Official Book” in 2015 and “Television: A Biography” in 2016. MURDER AND THE MOVIES (Yale University, 232 pp., $26) arrives a year after “Sleeping With Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire,” and the author does indeed riff on how movies allow the viewer to “watch so many murders with the distance of a connoisseur or a general on a hilltop far away.” But he can’t help beginning with a set piece on the critic-approved Netflix crime series “Ozark,” in which Jason Bateman and Laura Linney play an upscale Chicago couple relocated to the Missouri Ozarks, whose descent into crime involves an operatic deluge of deaths.

Then Thomson is on to Jim Jones’s exhortation to mass suicide by his followers in 1978, and then on to “The Shining” and “Deliverance,” and “Psycho” (of course) and “Full Metal Jacket.” Sometimes he asks, “In 1939, as a magical sniper, would you have shot Hitler?” Sometimes he wonders whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin. His analysis of death in Hitchcock movies is gorgeous. His restlessness is palpable. There is an anxiety in this brief, hurried book that suits these political and medical times so well, I had to check when it was written: 2018. No pandemic yet, just White House instability and mass shootings in high schools. No wonder Thomson has been switching channels a lot.

This may be a good place to lighten up for a minute, and turn to SHIT, ACTUALLY (Hachette, 243 pp., $27). The statement might well apply to all of 2020, but in this case it is half the legal title of a collection of snarky movie reviews by the delightfully brassy comic essayist Lindy West, who made a splash in 2016 with “Shrill.” The other half is “The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema.” Of course, nothing in this collection, inspired by a series of movie essays West began at the feminist website Jezebel.com, is either definite or objective, beginning with the title — one great punchline — applied to the 2003 romantic comedy roundelay “Love Actually.” I don’t happen to agree with West about the sentimental sins of what has become annual, anesthetizing Christmas viewing for many. But I do love her vocabulary. And I cheer the author’s unique, loud voice. So if watching West chew on modern cinema morsels as gummable as “Titanic,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Forrest Gump” (which she calls “Dude, You Gotta Stop Listening to Your Mom”) sounds like fun, then check it out, actually.

Alfred Hitchcock at a news conference for “Psycho” in 1960.STF/Agence France-Presse & Getty Images

Or you might prefer a pair of books that look at old Hollywood from contemporary angles. With THE CAMERA LIES: Acting for Hitchcock (Oxford University, 251 pp., $34.95), Dan Callahan takes Alfred Hitchcock’s often-retold quip that “all actors should be treated like cattle,” and shapes the one-liner into a cohesive thesis about the kind of performance that best suited that old master’s aims — one by an actor who could do “nothing” well. Callahan, the author of two previous volumes on “The Art of American Screen Acting,” writes, “He wanted his audience to act and supply emotions to the large heads of the stars on the screen, and so he didn’t want the actors to do too much emoting.”

By way of explication, the author goes through every title in Hitchcock’s filmography, identifying what made some players great (Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant), and some less so (Joan Fontaine, John Gielgud). His observations are bright, often wry. He is also keenly — nay, insistently — interested in the sexuality of the players, both expressed and hidden, beginning with that of Hitchcock himself, but especially when a queer-centric observation is possible. Of Esme Percy in “Murder!” (1930), he writes, “Percy’s real-life sexuality is unknown at this date, though there are several fetchingly girlish photos of him as a young juvenile actor to place him on the gay side of the spectrum.” Analyzing a scene in “Rear Window” with Raymond Burr, he comments, “Burr was gay, but that’s not something you would likely guess from his heavy, staring screen look and presence.”

Cary Grant, left, and Randolph Scott outside their home in California.Hulton Archive/Getty Images

With so much written for so long about “the male gaze” in culture as applied to women both by creators and critics, there can be freedom, honesty and even revelation in the many newer gazes through which to interpret art. Reading sexual overtones and undercurrents into Hitchcock’s relationship to his actors and the performances he drew from them is as viable an approach as any. Scott Eyman doesn’t refer to sexuality in the subtitle of his thorough new Hollywood biography, CARY GRANT: A Brilliant Disguise (Simon & Schuster, 556 pp., $35) — or does he? On the one hand, Eyman (whose previous thoroughly studied Hollywood subjects include Mary Pickford, Cecil B. DeMille and John Wayne) declares that he is most interested in the contrast between Grant’s powerful “Cary Grant-ness” onscreen and the private man. “This philosophical awareness of an essential duality took Grant decades to assimilate, and it was accomplished only after sacrificing four marriages, enduring years of therapy, and over 100 LSD sessions — an experience he came to regard as life-altering,” Eyman writes.

Cool, tell me more! On the other hand, the biographer returns again and again to poke at the long and happy domestic life Grant shared for many years with his fellow actor Randolph Scott, who once signed a souvenir menu, “to my spouse, Cary. Randy.” Looking for … what? “There is plausible evidence to place him in any sexual box you want — straight, bi, gay, or any combination that might be expected from a solitary street kid with a street kid’s sense of expedience,” Eyman finally hedges. Oh, for the momentary contemporary bluntness of the British actor Tom Hardy, when once asked (years ago, please note, when he was less famous and less guarded) whether he ever had any sexual relations with men: “Of course I have. I’m an actor. ... I’ve played with everything and everyone.”

Cicely Tyson in 1971.Dennis Oulds/Central Press, via Getty Images

Moving right along. It is a fine and bracing thing to finish this roundup with JUST AS I AM (HarperCollins, 416 pp., $28.99), a memoir completed recently enough to include references to Covid-19 and Breonna Taylor. (It will be published in January.) The stories are those of the esteemed actor, activist and former model Cicely Tyson, who, just two years ago, became the first African-American woman to receive an honorary Academy Award, and who has received multiple Emmy nominations for her ongoing work on “How to Get Away With Murder.” Of course, what with Tyson turning 96 years old this year, no illusions are spoiled in explaining that the firm, warm, proud, reflective voice on the page, in full keeping with the star’s onscreen image, is the creation of Michelle Burford, a gifted “collaborator and story architect,” as she calls herself, whose previous celebrity collaborations include books with Alicia Keys, Toni Braxton and Simone Biles.

I linger on this “with” credit, because I like to think that Tyson herself must admire the enterprise with which Burford has turned her specialized skills into such success. The Harlem-born Tyson was “a deep chestnut brown in a nation that considers the darker sister the less attractive one.” Her parents were immigrants from Nevis in the West Indies; her father’s womanizing resulted in her mother leaving, taking little Cicely, her older brother and younger sister. Tyson’s mother could be harsh, belittling. Pregnant as a senior in high school, young Cicely married the baby’s father, but the marriage was brief; the daughter she sent away (to boarding school, to the care of others) for such long stretches while she hustled to establish her own life appears over and over in these pages, an old mother’s regret for what she felt she could not give her baby girl.

Certain stories serve as narrative anchors: Tyson’s artistic education through the tutelage of the lauded director Lloyd Richards; the revolutionary gesture of cutting her hair short and natural in 1962; and, especially, her long, complicated romantic relationship with the damaged, drug-ravaged, genius jazz musician Miles Davis, a connection of great glamour and great strain. This she reflects on at length, with a cleareyed attention to painful details that, no matter how great the writing assistance, begins with the integrity of the woman ready to do the telling.

A throng of admirers has been eager to hear whatever she wants to tell. Burford, a sensitive listener, has organized 96 years’ worth of stories with grace. Right about now, the autobiography of Miss Cicely Tyson is a balm for the afflicted.

Lisa Schwarzbaum is a freelance writer and former critic at Entertainment Weekly.

Lenny Kravitz spends much of LET LOVE RULE (Holt, 260 pp., $29.99), his new memoir written with David Ritz, focused on his single-minded pursuit of making it big in music. On his way, he sleeps in a Pinto, smokes weed, finds God and Lisa Bonet. He tells of his experience as a lost soul suffering through coming-of-age battles and writes candidly about his acrimonious relationship with his father, a white Jewish man who was a bit of a wet blanket and, we learn later, a philanderer. In his teens, guided by youthful recklessness, Kravitz befriends a sex worker whom he whisks away from a club in the middle of the night to his parents’ house. She sleeps under his bed, and when she tells him she knows his father, he thinks little of it, choosing ignorance over heartache. Revealing scenes like these are bright spots in a book that sometimes veers toward mythmaking, a well-worn trope of the rock ’n’ roll autobiography. A good number of pages are dedicated to the artist mulling the depths of his talents and the lengths he’s gone to to keep his music pure. He recounts his decision to turn down a major-label record deal after painstaking labor from him and his band, not because he was a diva, he explains, but because it was the right thing to do for the music. As a practical matter, of course, such bravado tends to be backed up by an enormous amount of privilege.

Lenny Kravitz in the Bahamas.Dana Scruggs for The New York Times

Leonard Albert Kravitz went to high school in Beverly Hills with Nic Cage and Slash. He was always surrounded by loving Black women, including a selection of illustrious godmothers like Cicely Tyson and Diahann Carroll. His mother was the beloved actress Roxie Roker, of “The Jeffersons,” who would take her bicoastal son to the Carlyle Hotel and Lincoln Center when he was growing up. It will come as a surprise to no one that Bonet helped Kravitz make one of the best decisions of his career when she encouraged him to ditch his stage name (Romeo Blue. Yikes!) for something simple, like Lenny. Reading Kravitz on his fabulous life — at one point, he recalls meeting Andy Warhol at a book party for Bret Easton Ellis and then grouses about not being featured in Warhol’s Interview magazine — can grate. But the book shines when it is honest about just how fleeting and fickle success can be, even for someone with a “golden childhood” growing up in New York, Los Angeles and the Bahamas. In one memorable chapter, Kravitz describes getting caught stealing a handful of Kiss cassettes from Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. A store manager lets him go, but I couldn’t help thinking of what would have happened to the future star if he had become another Black teenager in California with a criminal record before graduating from high school. The book ends long ago, before Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin became household names.

In Lisa Robinson’s NOBODY EVER ASKED ME ABOUT THE GIRLS: Women, Music, and Fame (Holt, 242 pp., $27.99), Kravitz-style confidence is in short supply. Robinson, a veteran rock columnist, reporter and editor, draws from her enviable interview notebook — filled with decades of meetings with the likes of Tina Turner, Stevie Nicks, Patti Smith, Beyoncé and Rihanna — to shape a sort of oral history on the maddening sexism that has animated the music business since, well, forever. Joni Mitchell tells of a jam session in Laurel Canyon where all the men, including Neil Young, passed around the guitar, but never to her. “I had to ask,” she says. The pressure to look “performance ready” and to meet unreasonable beauty standards is ever-present. Rihanna describes her disbelief after being criticized for wearing the wrong color lipstick at an award ceremony. Janis Joplin, Robinson reminds us, was “compared to a dog” and called “the world’s ugliest man.” Gene Simmons of Kiss, on the other hand, kept numbered Polaroids of the girls he slept with on tour. (“I once told him that these numbered pix reminded me of the numbers tattooed on the arms of his Holocaust survivor parents.”) The double standard persists today.

Maggie Bell in 1970.McCarthy/Daily Express, via Getty Images

Acerbic and authoritative, Robinson can also be cutting about the women she feels have perpetuated the culture of misogyny in music. Mariah Carey and Madonna are “delusional” about their “age-inappropriate dressing,” she needles. Gwen Stefani and Jennifer Lopez swear they haven’t had work done to their faces, which Robinson finds hard to believe in a business where even the most talented stars are forbidden to age gracefully. “These days, with social media and all that butt-baring and body shaming going on, it’s a miracle that any female has the guts to make a record, put herself out there or get on a stage,” she writes. The book is best read as a cautionary tale for women tempted by show business. For every Taylor Swift — whose relentless ambition Robinson clearly detests, describing a young Swift as “something out of ‘The Exorcist’” — there is a Maggie Bell. This forgotten Scottish blues singer from the 1970s with curly red hair and curves defied categorization, Robinson argues. She had the talent, but never became a huge star, because having talent isn’t always good enough.

Jimi Hendrix seemed to have it all, including an origin story fit for a Greek tragedy, one skillfully narrated by the prolific Philip Norman in WILD THING: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix (Liveright, 391 pp., $28.95). Hendrix was born dirt poor in Seattle to a mother who died of complications from hepatitis at 32. His younger brother was in and out of state care while his father, a gardener, disparaged Hendrix’s musical aspirations, pressuring him to get the dreaded “honest” job. Hendrix would instead go on to become a guitar legend, laying the groundwork for genres like heavy metal and punk rock.

September 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of his untimely death at 27, and much has already been written about his tragic life. But in Norman’s hands, that life becomes even more astounding thanks to an abundance of rich details. When Hendrix was in the 101st Airborne, he was so preoccupied with playing his guitar that he was unable to perform his duties; his bandmates called him “Marbles” because he practiced so much they thought he was losing them; on his way to legend he played guitar for not only Little Richard, but also Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Bobby Womack, Solomon Burke and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.

Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival, 1970.Evening Standard, via Getty Images

Norman is strong when writing about race. Hendrix, who started out performing on the Chitlin’ Circuit, the loose constellation of venues that regularly booked Black artists throughout the early and mid-20th century, would sometimes flout Jim Crow rules. “This produced an ugly incident when he arrived for a show with a blond personage known only as ‘Poopsie’ clinging to his arm,” Norman says. A policeman in the security cordon yelled that Hendrix had “‘no right to have his hands on that girl’ and drew his gun.”

Norman, best known as the author of the Beatles book “Shout!,” credits young white British musicians with helping to break down some of those racial barriers through their trans-Atlantic devotion to African-American music. But he acknowledges that Britain had its share of bigotry. Keith Richards, for example, once called Hendrix “a Black junkie,” according to Norman. After the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, he notes, Hendrix donated $5,000 to King’s memorial fund. Rock ’n’ roll stardom doesn’t always attract good people, but the good ones are worth remembering.

Lauretta Charlton is an editor for The Times in South Korea.

After cooking through this season’s new titles, I must advise you to order some stat. Get some curry leaves, black mustard seeds and gochujang chile paste while you’re at it. Because the cuisines in the new books reach far into the world. It’s all the travel we’re going to get for a while, and, thankfully, it’s an incredible journey. It’s hard to imagine that book publishing — that slow-moving, too-white industry, in which it takes at least two years to get from book deal to bookshelf — has managed to meet the moment so well, but it is a great pleasure to say that they have brought an inspiring diversity of voices and cuisines to the kitchen. It’s almost enough to make Ottolenghi look basic!

Yotam Ottolenghi is here, of course, with his biannual fall tome. And he’s stepped up his game, working with his co-chef Ixta Belfrage and his longtime co-author Tara Wigley to incorporate new ingredients into the four main techniques (charring, browning, infusing and aging) they unleash in OTTOLENGHI FLAVOR (Clarkson Potter, 320 pp., $35). The Israeli-Italian-Londonite chef admits to having experienced a bit of vegetable ennui — “How many more ways are there to fry an eggplant…?” But he overcame it; the three authors have created nothing short of flavor bombs for vegetables.

These aren’t dishes you can make without a good shop, but the payoff in layered, electrified flavors is worth it. An end-of-summer meal included green beans that were charred, simmered in stock, then tossed with a brightening mix of herbs and preserved lemon. The dish was a jolt to both palate and spirit. Pappa al pomodoro, the Italian way of using up that glut of tomatoes and stale bread (sourdough!), gets an Ottolenghi twist with an oil made from charred red chiles, black mustard seeds and curry leaves, as well as reinforcements of lime and basil. My (distanced) guests and I felt renewed.

Like Ottolenghi, Meera Sodha has a cooking column in The Guardian. (Vegan, in her case.) With EAST: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes From Bangalore to Beijing (Flatiron, 304 pp., $35), she offers dishes that are bright and clever, not to mention weeknight-achievable. Employing the Asian larder, she deftly deploys such ingredients as miso and kimchi to reduce time and effort. (She began her column weeks after giving birth.) Her delightful ideas for salads, noodles, rice, curries, tofu dishes and more are sure to yield more than one go-to recipe. In my case, it’s the candy-sweet tomato and coconut milk curry and the fragrant beet and yogurt rice inspired by a dish in Kerala, India. (Sodha’s salted miso brownies have the potential to go viral. Trust.) The food in “East” is vibrant and joyful, making meatless cooking that much more sneakily appealing.

Last Ottolenghi reference — promise. It was his success in introducing Middle Eastern flavors that opened the culinary lens in the last decade. After exploring Israeli food, you may have found yourself cooking from Palestinian and Persian books more recently. If so, you are primed for the profound delights of Durkhanai and Farida Ayubi’s PARWANA: Recipes and Stories From an Afghan Kitchen (Interlink, 255 pp., $35). The gorgeously colorful book not only tells the story of a family that fled the war-torn country in 1987, eventually opening a restaurant in Adelaide, Australia, it also delves deeply into the country’s long, complex history. The grim images of Afghanistan that have been shown for decades have depicted little of the culture — certainly not the beautiful food and ingrained hospitality. (If a stranger arrives at your home, you not only lay out a spread, you invite the guest to stay over.) With “Parwana,” the Ayubi family welcomes us in for an enriching night of feasting and knowledge.

Just as what became known as Afghanistan was built from the cross-pollination of many cultures, the food, too, is a fascinating bricolage of flavors and techniques that are a delicious history lesson. Little dumplings called mantu were brought from territories in the Mongol Empire, spreading to Turkey (manti), China (mantou) and Korea (mandoo) alike. They are often served with chana dal, familiar to Indians. The recipes for flatbreads (such as an addictive, herb-stuffed bolani), spiced kebabs, fruit-studded rice palaws and curries deepened with the spice blend chaar masalah may have familiar cousins, but they come together in enticingly different ways. This is a book for winter nights around the table, finding joy in simplicity. It is also an important reminder of resilience in the face of seemingly endless struggle.

Ma Gahennet, a Bibi from Eritrea at her home in Yonkers, N.Y.Khadija M. Farah & Jennifer May

IN BIBI’S KITCHEN: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers From the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean (Ten Speed Press, 288 pp., $35), by Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen, also brings us recipes from corners of the globe that Westerners have long associated with strife. Hassan, a Somali chef and entrepreneur who went from a U.N. refugee camp with her family to living alone with a family in Seattle as a teenager, sets out to explore and preserve cultures through the recipes of bibis (grandmothers). “Food is … just like language,” Ma Khanyisa, a grandmother in Cape Town, told Hassan via Skype. “For me, stopping traditions would almost be like throwing my culture away.”

The languages spoken by their food are diverse, from the warm spices of Somali chicken stew with yogurt and coconut — enjoyed with bites of banana, per tradition (it works) — to the satisfyingly filling black-eyed peas and tomatoes in peanut sauce from Kenya. There are surprising lessons, as in the kitchen of Ma Vicky, who moved from Tanzania to Mount Vernon, N.Y.: There, one is as likely to taste matoke, a green plantain stew, as her famous lasagna, a dish brought to East Africa by Italian colonists. (Her secret? Adobo seasoning.) This is not a book about assimilation. It’s about keeping traditions alive, and proving — with beautifully told stories — that food is not only culture, but love.

Marcus Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia and adopted by a Swedish couple, and he made his name as a four-star chef in New York City. For the past decade, he has run the Red Rooster, a community hub near his Harlem home. THE RISE: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food (Voracious, 336 pp., $38), written with Osayi Endolyn, is not about his recipes, however. His ambition was to write a cookbook about “race, class and the equity of the American food landscape.” As Samuelsson explains, “Black food is American food, and it’s long past time that the artistry and ingenuity of Black cooks were properly recognized.”

The ingenuity of these cooks, restaurateurs and writers ranges from the cutting edge to Southern staples. There is the chef David Zilber, the former director of fermentation at Noma in Copenhagen, whose sweet potatoes go deep with a garlic-fermented shrimp butter. Some recipes are modern mash-ups, such as the food scholar Adrian Miller’s andouille and callaloo hand pies with red pepper sambal, while others are inspired by the migration from the South, like the Harlem chef Melba Wilson’s fried chicken and waffles with piri-piri glaze. “The Rise” is not just a recipe collection; it is a tool for change. The chefs’ stories open an important dialogue about representation in American foodways, and the back of the book includes sources for learning more about Black food, from books to podcasts to organizations for social change. As Samuelsson says, “Let’s cook, let’s eat, let’s Rise.”

The first time Lara Lee ate the food from her father’s childhood home in Kupang, Timor, was when her grandmother came to live with them, and began visiting Indonesia only as an adult. Once she decided to cook professionally, she was driven to learn about her family’s history through the food of the archipelago’s many islands, gathering recipes from home cooks, street vendors and food historians from Sumatra to Timor. Her first book, COCONUT & SAMBAL: Recipes From My Indonesian Kitchen (Bloomsbury, 287 pp., $35), is an absolute delight — the kind of book that inspires meals with every reading. That’s because once you’ve brought the flavors and simple techniques behind these rice and noodle dishes, curries, stir-fries and snacky fried things to the table, you’ll want to make every recipe in this book.

That was certainly the case when I tackled her recipe for beef rendang, fragrant cubes of meat that magically caramelize once the coconut milk they’ve been bathed in has been absorbed. The next day, I put leftovers on a tortilla with spicy tomato sambal, one of the many variations of a fiery chili sauce that is to the Indonesian table what salt and pepper are to the West. That sambal also served as both marinade and topping for Lee’s zippy roast eggplant. I bought a jar of prepared lemongrass to save me trips to the store, so I’m ready to get through winter with fried shallot and coconut rice, smashed fried chicken with sambal and sticky short ribs with chile. If I ever find pandan leaves, I’ll make the gorgeous green pandan and coconut cake with mascarpone frosting. Lee’s recipes are worth temporarily suspending my online-ordering ban.

Marianna Leivaditaki left her home in Crete for England when she was 17, thinking she’d experienced enough of the island where her father was a fisherman and her mother ran a seaside restaurant. But becoming a chef (she now heads the kitchen at Morito in London) unlocked the island’s treasures for her. AEGEAN: Recipes From the Mountains to the Sea (Interlink, 224 pp., $35) is an exquisite homage, both for its imagery and design — sun-bleached and stark, like the island — and for its singular food. Leivaditaki is a confident, deeply personal cook. There is nothing fussy (or even that photogenic) about her food. It’s elemental and profoundly good. Tiny fried anchovies are piled up next to boiled potatoes tossed in herby oil, to be swabbed through a genius mayonnaise brightened with boiled-lemon purée. Lamb breast is marinated in a paste of feta, mint and chiles that later becomes the sauce. And crisp shards of phyllo stand in for flour in a yogurt cake soaked in spiced orange syrup. As if we didn’t already want to be at a table in Greece right now, “Aegean” truly transports you with its rustic grace.

Pretty in Pink Rose Milk from “I Cook in Color.”Evan Sung

Asha Gomez moved to the United States from Kerala, India, when she was a teenager. Today, the author and food advocacy and policy worker is comfortable roaming the world in her Atlanta kitchen, where one dinner might feature Chinese-style dry-fried pork with green beans, another a school-night chicken pho or Keralan fish head stew. As the title of her new cookbook — I COOK IN COLOR: Bright Flavors From My Kitchen and Around the World (Running Press, 224 pp., $32.50) — explains, what unites her dishes, besides curiosity, is her love of a bold palette. Gomez’s food is as fragrant as it is colorful, and a bit health-minded at times (try her all-day herb water perhaps after you’ve jammed three sticks of butter into her mango cardamom Bundt cake). With chapter titles touting “luscious soups,” “vivid vegetables” and “splendid seafood,” this might seem like the book you get your mom — and you should.

Nom Wah Tea Parlor has been part of New York’s Chinatown for almost a century. The immigrant Wally Tang worked his way from dishwasher to owner of this dim sum restaurant and mahjong parlor, before passing it down to Wilson Tang, who left a career in finance to ensure that the business had a future. While he didn’t touch the cinematic 1930s décor, Tang and a chef who’d worked with Wally got their hands on the menu to make sure the dim sum stood out, both perfecting the classics and tossing in newer ideas, such as collaborating on an “everything” bao with their friends at Russ & Daughters and Katz’s Delicatessen. For those who miss those stacks of steaming baskets piled high on the table, Tang and Joshua David Stein help you bring home the experience with THE NOM WAH COOKBOOK: Recipes and Stories From 100 Years at New York City’s Iconic Dim Sum Restaurant (Ecco, 272 pp., $34.99). Making dumplings is easy — really! Besides, how else are you going to enjoy pan-fried pork dumplings, sweet potato kale won tons and puckery shrimp siu mai? Thanks to recipes for rice and noodle dishes, large-format feasts like Peking duck and desserts like almond cookies, at least transplanted New Yorkers’ Christmas and New Year’s Day plans won’t taste that different this year.

What have we been doing with ourselves besides baking, really? Luckily, new books bring new recipes, from one-bowl (and one-pan) to multiday. The pastry chef Melissa Weller worked her way up through the ranks of restaurants in New York City, from composing desserts at early-days Babbo to working with bread at Sullivan Street Bakery and Per Se, and getting us hooked on babka at Sadelle’s. Her debut, A GOOD BAKE: The Art and Science of Making Perfect Pastries, Cakes, Cookies, Pies and Breads at Home (Knopf, 496 pp., $40), written with Carolynn Carreño, reflects the patience and perfectionism required of such a career — as well as of her previous life as a chemical engineer. This highly creative dough engineer is worth following through each exacting step. Her pie crust is flawless — better still when layered with custardy apples and a sour cream topping that is frozen for three hours before being Cuisinarted to bits. Weller ranges from New York classics like rugelach and challah to all-American cookies and pies to laminated French pastries, with lots of personal modernizations — say, using that challah dough to make date tahini knots. Success with a few of these recipes might just give you the courage to tackle her croissants. If you’re willing to lean in and nerd out, “A Good Bake” will definitely make you (or your loved ones) a good baker. Think of this as a gift that could yield delicious benefits.

A treat from “One Tin Bakes.”Edd Kimber

Edd Kimber, who won the first season of “The Great British Baking Show,” that last bastion of human decency, is spreading the love with ONE TIN BAKES: Sweet and Simple Traybakes, Pies, Bars and Buns (Kyle Books, 176 pp., $22.99). Everything in this sunny book can be made in a 9-by-13-inch brownie pan, be it bonkers s’mores cookie bars, milk chocolate caramel sheet cake, a giant Portuguese custard tart or a slab scone. Kimber can’t help his jazz hands: His creative dial is set to 11, as if the cameras were still on. Still, for those days you want Instagram to like you back, all you need to do is dedicate yourself to making a tray of zhuzhy raspberry and rose cheesecake buns. Or just hashtag his peanut butter brookie, a catchy mash-up of a brownie and a peanut butter cookie.

On the simpler — but no less revelatory — side, the baker Yossy Arefi’s SNACKING CAKES: Simple Treats for Anytime Cravings (Clarkson Potter, 190 pp., $24) could not be better timed. For the most part, Arefi’s clever, work-every-time creations require just one bowl, and she offers adaptations for pans and ingredients that save us from leaving the house. So if you’re craving that super-snacky banana and almond butter cake but only have peanut butter and a loaf pan, don’t cry; just bake it longer. She also offers flavor variations for each recipe — because sometimes that simple sesame cake wants to be a peach and raspberry sesame cake — and dress-up options, taking that powdered doughnut cake from the sweatpants zone to the Zoom shirt place with some maple coffee glaze. If books could hug, “Snacking Cakes” would mask up and grab you tight.Want even more inspiration? Here are a few more recommendations.

ALWAYS ADD LEMON: Recipes You Want to Cook — Food You Want to Eat (Hardie Grant, 256 pp., $35), by Danielle Alvarez. Bright, enticing food from a young Sydney chef by way of California’s Chez Panisse.

CHASING FLAVOR: Techniques and Recipes to Cook Fearlessly (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pp., $35), by Dan Kluger. The celebrated chef of New York’s Loring Place shows how to build restaurant-level flavor at home.

DESSERT PERSON: Recipes and Guidance for Baking With Confidence (Clarkson Potter, 368 pp., $35), by Claire Saffitz. The fearless video star knows how to break down a recipe — and build an incredibly delicious baked good.

HOW TO EAT YOUR CHRISTMAS TREE: Delicious, Innovative Recipes for Cooking With Trees (Hardie Grant, 144 pp., $16), by Julia Georgallis. The perfect book to find under the tree this year…

IL BUCO: Stories and Recipes (HarperDesign, 320 pp., $60), by Donna Lennard with Joshua David Stein. The owner of the beloved New York restaurant travels to Italy to tell her story (the pasta and wine don’t hurt).

MILK BAR: KIDS ONLY (Clarkson Potter, 240 pp., $22.99), by Christina Tosi. Milk Bar’s desserts have always been pulled from childhood fantasy; now actual kids can get in on the game.

MODERN COMFORT FOOD: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 256 pp., $35), by Ina Garten. Ina-style comfort when we need it most.

MY MEXICO: A Culinary Odyssey With Recipes (University of Texas Press, 472 pp., $45), by Diana Kennedy. A redesigned edition of the 1998 book from the legendary food writer, featuring over 300 authentic regional recipes.

PIE FOR EVERYONE: Recipes and Stories From Petee’s Pie, New York’s Best Pie Shop (Abrams, 240 pp., $29.99), by Petra Paradez. Pie it forward with a focus on seasonal ingredients.

RED SANDS: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland (Quadrille, 288 pp., $37), by Caroline Eden. The author of the award-winning “Black Sea” continues her gripping culinary travels by exploring “the last blank on the map.”

THE GOOD BOOK OF SOUTHERN BAKING: A Revival of Biscuits, Cakes, and Cornbread (Lorena Jones Books, 336 pp. $35), by Kelly Fields with Kate Heddings. The baker behind New Orleans’s Willa Jean serves Southern classics with expertise.

KID IN THE KITCHEN: 100 Recipes and Tips for Young Home Cooks (Clarkson Potter, 288 pp., $24), by Melissa Clark. The New York Times food columnist brings you a book packed with dishes to make with your child.

THE MEXICAN HOME KITCHEN: Traditional Home-Style Recipes That Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico (Rock Point, 192 pp., $28), by Mely Martinez. Soulful, straightforward recipes from the Tampico-born home cook.

THE NEW RULES OF CHEESE: A Freewheeling and Informative Guide (Ten Speed Press, 160 pp., $14.99), by Anne Saxelby. An approachable guide from a star cheesemonger.

THE PASTRY CHEF’S GUIDE: The Secret to Successful Baking Every Time (Pavilion, 192 pp., $24.95), by Ravneet Gill. A young British baker’s foolproof tour through the classics.

THE SOURDOUGH SCHOOL: Sweet Baking: Nourishing the Gut & the Mind (Kyle Books, 192 pp., $29.99), by Vanessa Kimbell. An emphatically pro-probiotic book that delves deeply into the physical and emotional benefits of sourdough.

THE ULTIMATE COLLEGE COOKBOOK: Easy, Flavor-Forward Recipes for Your Campus (or Off-Campus) Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, 160 pp., paper, $19.99), by Victoria Granof. Because cooking is not optional for today’s college student.

TIME TO EAT: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives (Clarkson Potter, 256 pp., $29.99), by Nadiya Hussain. The “Great British Baking Show” winner offers inventive, comforting recipes that bring a smile to the table.

XI’AN FAMOUS FOODS: The Cuisine of Western China From New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop (Abrams, 304 pp., $35), by Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou. Thanks to this book, hand-pulled noodles could be the new sourdough.

Christine Muhlke is the former food editor of The Times Magazine. Her most recent books are “Wine Simple” and “Signature Dishes That Matter.”

More cookbooks than you can shake a $35 Williams-Sonoma spatula at! Get yourself over to nytimes.com/books to read more.

I’m talking about books, yes. But I’m also talking about Instagram, that other wellspring of wanderlust. I have spent a shameful amount of time this year staring at my phone, scrolling through oversaturated images of beautiful places and daydreaming. And then there are the feeds that feel like one long daydream. Wally Koval and his wife, Amanda, started the @accidentallywesanderson account in 2017 to collect photos that captured the film director Wes Anderson’s trademark aesthetic. Over the ensuing years, they amassed over a million followers and showcased a steady stream of submissions from all over the world. Now — as testament to the power of the social media app — we have ACCIDENTALLY WES ANDERSON (Voracious, 368 pp., $35), a big and beautiful book that combines the sugary-sweet palette of Anderson’s cinematography with the snackable summaries of a guidebook.

With a foreword by the director (“I now understand what it means to be accidentally myself,” he writes) and separated into chapters by region, the book showcases landmarks, buildings and street scenes washed in bright and varied colors. The subject of each photo is, almost invariably, centered in the frame. Lighthouses abound, as do theaters, auditoriums and public swimming pools. Occasionally, the descriptions are engaging enough to keep your attention — a deep dive into the history of the font found in Toronto’s subway stations, for example — but often, as with lengthy Instagram captions, you’ll find yourself wanting to flip to the next photo before you’re through. While every continent is represented in the book, it is sadly not an even spread: A bulk of the book is devoted to places in Europe and North America while there are a mere 14 photos from Africa and the Middle East. Granted, grand hotels and cutesy forest lodges — both in abundance in the Western Hemisphere — are Anderson’s bread and butter.

The National Art Museum of Ukraine, in Kyiv.Dasha Lukyanova

Like attempting a Wes Anderson movie marathon, digesting the book at once can be tedious. But it’s not meant to be consumed that way. When opened sporadically, it’s like bathing in serotonin. A museum lobby in Ukraine, a wooden pancake stand in Croatia, a ghost town in Namibia: They are images bound by an aesthetic, but demonstrative of such different ways we interpret beauty. And they all will make you want to travel again.

Wally Koval is one kind of travel Instagram influencer, a curator more than an online personality. Dean Nicholson, of @1bike1world, is another. His internet fame (856,000 followers and counting) comes not from how he’s traveling (on a bicycle) or where he is traveling (mostly Europe, so far), but whom he is traveling with. She’s small, nimble and has eyes the color of kiwifruit flesh. She is, most notably, a cat. In NALA’S WORLD: One Man, His Rescue Cat and a Bike Ride Around the Globe (Grand Central, 261 pp., $27), Nicholson tells the story of how a kitten found on the side of a mountain road changed the course of his life forever.

In 2018, Nicholson, “a scruffy layabout from Scotland” (his words), left his hometown, Dunbar, to cycle around the world. Besides a potentially ruptured A.C.L. and a similarly strained friendship (Nicholson and the friend he had planned to cycle with parted ways a few months in), the trip seemed to be going well — by Nicholson’s estimation, at least. Then, on a lonely stretch of road in Bosnia, close to the border with Montenegro, he heard an incessant mewing. A tiny, sand-colored kitten was following him.

Looking around and seeing no sign of civilization, Nicholson decided to carry the cat to the nearest town and leave it with a vet or shelter. That plan didn’t last long, with the kitten crawling out of his bike’s handlebar bag and onto his shoulder. “We were an unusual sight; a big, bearded tattooed bloke on a bike, with a kitten sitting on his shoulder like Long John Silver’s parrot,” Nicholson writes.

Nala, as the cat was eventually christened, becomes Nicholson’s travel companion, either perched on his shoulder or in a pouch on the front of the bike, taking in the world as it rolls by. Together, they cross from country to country, charming border guards and passers-by alike. There are moments of tension, like when Nala can’t be found for a whole morning, and profundity, like when Nicholson camps outside a school only to realize that it is being used as temporary housing for refugees from the Middle East. You won’t find evocative imagery in this writing; when something is beautiful, you have to take Nicholson’s (and his co-writer Garry Jenkins’s) word for it. The writing is more like people you just met at a hostel telling you about their travels after a few pints.

In Nicholson’s case, fame happened suddenly, the result of a viral video (“No warning. No buildup. Just boom!”). He deals with it admirably, and the look behind the curtain of Instagram celebrity is fascinating, but Nicholson is at his best when he tells the story of a man finding a sense of purpose from an unlikely (and adorable) source. Emboldened by his encounter with Nala, Nicholson stops at animal shelters regularly on his travels and raises tens of thousands of dollars for animal welfare causes from his — and Nala’s — Instagram followers. The charming book ends just as the coronavirus forces the pair to stay put in Hungary, having arrived on the day that country closed its borders. Nala and Nicholson make themselves comfortable in the outskirts of Budapest. “I was in the same boat as everyone else,” Nicholson writes. “It was proof, if I needed it, that we really are all in this together.”

Social media is an increasingly integral part of the travel experience. For some people, though, escaping the digital world is the reason to travel in the first place. That was the case for the Canadian writer Bruce Kirkby, who found himself paying attention to his phone screen instead of his wife, Christine, and two young sons, Taj and Bodi. “With unsettling frequency, I seemed to be drifting through life with my consciousness untethered,” Kirkby writes in the opening of BLUE SKY KINGDOM: An Epic Family Journey to the Heart of the Himalaya (Pegasus, 352 pp., $27.95), the story of how he and his family traveled — by canoe, cargo ship, train and foot — from Canada to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Zanskar Valley of the Himalaya Mountains.

The Hanjin Ottawa container ship, after a 17-day voyage, in Busan, South Korea.Bruce Kirkby

Taking your family halfway around the world because you are spending too much time looking at Twitter might seem extreme, but Kirkby deftly and emotionally describes the stakes: “It felt as if we had slipped into the ocean’s depths, and our only choice was to swim for all we were worth toward a distant, opaque light — something we hoped was the surface,” he writes.

The beginning of the book is dominated by the family’s three-month journey to the monastery, an intentionally slow trip, because “the idea of jetting across the globe in search of stillness felt wrong.” They are accompanied by a camera crew, one that Kirkby sometimes characterizes as clueless and unequipped to tackle the kind of expedition-style travel that is Kirkby’s specialty. (It is a harsh characterization, especially when that television show was partly funding the family’s adventure and Kirkby barely acknowledges the contradiction of having a film crew following their digital detox.)

The story really picks up when the camera crew leaves and Kirkby and family settle into life at the monastery, sharing a small house with the esteemed and eccentric Lama Wangyal, a senior lama. The kids find joy playing with the young monks instead of staring at iPad screens; the parents find purpose in teaching the monks English and arithmetic. Fortunately, throughout, Kirkby is mostly self-aware about how his journey fits into the written-to-death canon of stories about white men traveling east to find themselves.

Central to the story is the parents’ ongoing struggle to navigate their older son Bodi’s autism diagnosis. Kirkby’s writing is raw and moving when he confronts the diagnosis not as a shortcoming, but as one part of the boy’s complex personality. Bodi turns out to be a natural when it comes to meditation, while Kirkby struggles to find focus: “It seemed bitterly ironic that before leaving home, I often caught myself daydreaming about living at the monastery. And now that I was here, I daydreamed about being home,” he writes. Bodi, too, is a keen observer, as demonstrated in the sketches found throughout the book: The meticulous details in renditions of prayer wheels and stupa show just how attentive a traveling child can be. Kirkby’s relationships with Lama Wangyal, the monastery students and the other people he meets in the valley are touching. But it is the family’s interior journey, and Bodi’s especially, that displays the curative powers of adventure.

For another story of comfort zones shattered, pick up WINTER PASTURE: One Woman’s Journey With China’s Kazakh Herders (Astra House, 320 pp., $28), by Li Juan, a writer famous in her home country of China but never before translated in the United States. (The book goes on sale in February.) To the shock of her neighbors, in a small town where she lives in the Altai Mountains, Li joins a family of ethnic Kazakh herders as they venture into the deserts of northwestern China with 30 camels, 500 sheep, over 100 cattle and horses, one dog and one cat. The nomadic herders are doing what they have been doing every winter for generations: taking their livestock to the family’s winter pastures. But Li, who is Han Chinese, envisions “an adventure truly worthy of an author.”

Kirkby’s monastic accommodations in the Himalayas are decadent compared with what Li encounters. The family of three, Li and a constant stream of visitors share a one-room burrow, carved six feet deep into the frozen earth and reinforced with sheep dung. During the coldest weeks of the winter, temperatures dropped to minus 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Far from being an observer, Li has to pull her weight in the family, gathering snow for water, herding cantankerous camels and explaining the plot of soap operas viewed on a tiny black-and-white, battery-powered television.

Early, before the flock headed out to pasture, the goats jumped out of their pen — from “Winter Pasture.”Li Juan

Life is difficult on the dunes and nothing is wasted. Broken disposable lighters are stored away to mine for spare parts when the next one breaks. Water is rationed and recycled. Old newspapers are read and reread — and then torn into strips to be rolled into cigarettes. Li’s writing is at times detached: She casually describes a few nauseating instances of animal cruelty, for example. But at other times, it is deeply moving, especially when she is face to face with nothing but the infinite horizons of the Xinjiang desert landscape. “Their world was something like this — a big sky and a big earth, in which they dwelt alone and far apart,” she writes.

Li’s account — full of humor, introspection and glimpses into a vanishing lifestyle — is backdropped by bigger forces that she mentions only in passing. She is told, at various points, that this is the last time these herders will be traveling to these pastures. The Chinese government has, according to Li, determined that overgrazing is such a threat that they are outlawing continued use of the land and are resettling nomadic herders along the Ulungur River. It’s not clear if it’s because of government censors, but Li spends too little time exploring the ramifications of this or the greater context around it, such as the various ways the Chinese government has oppressed ethnic minority groups in northwestern China, including Kazakhs. Instead, it is described — by Li and by the Kazakhs she spends her time with — as a simple, incontrovertible fact. “In the end, this wilderness will be left behind,” Li writes. “The grass seeds that drift onto the earth in autumn will no longer feel the force of stomping hooves that bury them deep into the soil.”

Finally, for another look at a part of the world that is often shrouded by government-enforced silence, turn to Iran. If, more than landmarks or monuments, it is people that make a place, then Tara Kangarlou’s THE HEARTBEAT OF IRAN: Real Voices of a Country and Its People (Ig, 279 pp., paper, $19.95) is as much a guidebook as it is a piece of journalism. (Publication has been delayed until April.) Kangarlou, an Iranian-American journalist, explicitly hopes her collection of human stories, each chapter a profile of a different Iranian, will change perceptions of one of the countries she calls home. It is a mission born of personal experience, as she has seen firsthand the misconceptions about Iran that circulate in the West, informed by geopolitics rather than person-to-person interaction. The misconceptions and the blanket animosity have been stretched to such lengths that Kangarlou has often found people unwilling to accept that she can love both places: “I consider myself a proud Iranian and a proud American; I embrace my upbringing in Tehran, my unique education in both countries, and the ability to call two of the world’s most remarkable lands my home,” she writes.

Kangarlou offers a tour of the diversity of cultures, beliefs and experiences that exist in a country like Iran, often portrayed as a monolithic place since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. There’s the reformist cleric, once arrested, now retired; the world’s only Muslim female racecar champion; the famous pilot, Iran’s answer to “Sully,” who saved a failing plane from a nearly fatal crash and has since spoken out about how sanctions are crippling the country as a whole and not just the government (he blames the plane’s mechanical failure on faulty black-market parts).

But the moments where Kangarlou’s book truly shines are when she turns to “ordinary” Iranians. In these chapters, it’s as if you are hearing family stories passed down through generations or having the kind of chance encounters that make traveling so rewarding. While Kangarlou’s writing can at times feel stilted and overly explanatory, it rarely matters because she gives people space to speak for themselves. Within these stories, there is the mundane: the struggles of a kebab shop owner in a time of hyperinflation and economic uncertainty, for example. And there’s also the extraordinary: the gay man who found the courage to come out in a country where sex between members of the same gender can lead to the death penalty, and the transgender woman who had to find a new family in the L.G.B.T.Q. community when her own struggled to accept her. Most of all, though, in every story, there’s that great lesson of travel: that far more unites us than separates us.

Sebastian Modak, a freelance writer and multimedia journalist, was the 2019 52 Places Traveler. Before being selected to report on the annual New York Times list, he worked at Condé Nast Traveler as an editor and staff writer.

Jessica Luther and Kavitha A. Davidson challenge us to ponder the intersections of sports and culture in LOVING SPORTS WHEN THEY DON’T LOVE YOU BACK: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan (University of Texas, 336 pp., $26.95). With cleverly titled chapters, Luther and Davidson immediately draw readers into thoughtful confrontations of many of the hypocrisies of sports fanhood, tackling topics like “Watching Football When We Know (Even a Little) About Brain Trauma,” “Doubling Down on Your March Madness Bracket Even if the Athletes Don’t Make a Dime” and “Enjoying the Olympics Despite the Harm to Your Community.”

Each discussion then pulls back the curtain, leaning heavily on academics, expert beat reporters (Luther and Davidson are sports journalists themselves) and others to lay out why the less pleasant sides of sports should matter to fans. The prevalence of brain injuries in football, for example, is considered not just as a brutal coda to long N.F.L. careers, but as a looming problem in many other sports — including those played by children.

Certainly, it can take mental gymnastics to enjoy sports, just as it can to overlook the shortcomings of Hollywood and the music industry when you kick back with a movie or a catchy tune. Luther and Davidson keenly raise issues that many fans may not have considered while cheering for their favorite teams. And they understand just how thorny these challenges are. “We admit that this book is not full of solutions. Sorry!” they write. “If we had the answers to the major systemic problems we discuss in these pages — racism, sexism, homophobia, class inequities, among many others — that would be a hell of a get.”

True, but the smart accounts presented throughout this book would benefit from more people within sports weighing in, especially team owners and executives. Without them, debates about topics like the popularity of women’s sports and public financing for stadiums miss out on some necessary heft. Still, getting readers to recognize that these issues exist at all is a worthy goal by itself.

Jeff Pearlman’s THREE-RING CIRCUS: Kobe, Shaq, Phil and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 448 pp., $30) is itself an example of the joys and perils of blind fanhood.

Phil Jackson, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal during one of their happier moments.Jeff Haynes/Agence-France Presse, via Getty Images

Here, with a cadence and spirit befitting an HBO romp like “Ballers” or “Entourage,” Pearlman whirls through the exploits and strained relationships of the N.B.A. superstar Kobe Bryant during the rise and breakup of the formidable Los Angeles Lakers teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s, drawing out the personality of the mercurial champion through the perspectives of those who were around him, including his coach Phil Jackson and key teammates like Shaquille O’Neal.

There are many merits to this timely and well-crafted book, released months after Bryant’s tragic death in January with his 13-year-old daughter and seven others in a helicopter crash. Unfortunately, they are undercut by some critical fumbles when revisiting one of the ugliest moments of Bryant’s life, the 2003 rape allegation that consumed the attention of the sports world and that, for some, forever altered perceptions of the player.

Pearlman begins his discussion of this sensitive topic with an asinine assertion: that Bryant’s encounter with the woman who made the accusation would not have happened had a few unrelated events played out differently before he arrived at the Edwards, Colo., resort where she worked. Pearlman’s alternate timeline theory: Had Bryant accepted a room offer when shuttled to the wrong hotel at the start of his trip or, as noted in a footnote, had he accepted an offer for a cameo in the Snoop Dogg film “Soul Plane,” the encounter and its fallout would have been avoided. “That’s the first fact one should know, because it changes absolutely everything about this story and its 100,000 ramifications,” Pearlman writes about the hotel stay (emphasis his).

Bryant certainly could have made better choices. But by framing the encounter and its fallout around an artificial moment of serendipity, Pearlman trivializes the scandal’s import and spares himself a deeper questioning of Bryant’s actions.

The treatment is not limited to what could be dismissed as one insensitive gaffe. Pearlman recounts Bryant’s initial interview with local detectives, in which he mentions the infidelities of O’Neal, his superstar teammate. One of the detectives wrote that “Bryant stated that Shaq would pay his women not to say anything. He stated Shaq has paid up to a million dollars already for situations like this.”

The salacious assertion added significant friction to the already fractured Kobe-Shaq relationship. O’Neal even used it as fodder during a freestyle rap skewering Bryant: “Kobe ratted me out. That’s why I’m getting divorced.”

O’Neal admits to Pearlman that he had told Bryant about such payments — but says it was a fib. “I told him that as a story, just saying it happened to make it comfortable for him to go on and settle and just get rid of his own problem,” O’Neal says. But Pearlman does not follow up, leaving a clear hole in the story given that Bryant mentioned O’Neal’s supposed payments to investigators much earlier than the teammates ever talked about the case.

Pearlman, a former Sports Illustrated writer and the author of several books, including “Boys Will Be Boys” (about the ’90s Dallas Cowboys) and “Showtime” (on the ’80s Lakers), is far more thorough in exploring the petty dramas and ego-driven rivalries between Bryant, O’Neal and the other larger-than-life personalities associated with the Lakers during their rise to three consecutive championships from 2000 to 2002. Fans of Bryant and the Lakers — as well as their many haters — will recognize several of the stars and even some role players as they cross paths with Bryant and the glitzy stage of Lakers basketball. It will be no surprise if this cast of characters and these tales are eventually adapted for television.

Bryant’s path to the N.B.A., straight from Lower Merion High School in Pennsylvania to the pros in 1996, would not have been possible without a 1971 lawsuit brought by Spencer Haywood, who challenged the N.B.A.’s rule — really, an arrangement with the N.C.A.A. — to keep basketball players from going pro until they were four years removed from high school. The case went to the Supreme Court and Haywood won, securing his right to play professionally against the wishes of many team owners and league executives.

Haywood’s remarkable life, from a childhood picking cotton in Mississippi to stardom in pro basketball and a legacy that has shaped today’s N.B.A., is chronicled largely through his own eyes by Marc J. Spears and Gary Washburn in THE SPENCER HAYWOOD RULE: Battles, Basketball, and the Making of an American Iconoclast (Triumph, 240 pp., $28).

Spencer Haywood, who competed on the court — and in the courts.Harold Filan/Associated Press

Spears, an N.B.A. writer for The Undefeated, and Washburn, an N.B.A. writer for The Boston Globe, rely extensively on Haywood to reconstruct his life story, which gives the book the feel of a long conversation with a beloved older relative. It is filled with tangents and meandering reflections — and raises plenty of unanswered questions — yet along the way it reveals how the Haywood of today sees himself and his remarkable past with the benefit of hindsight. And as central to the story as Haywood himself is the role of racism throughout his life: his experiences as a Black man shaping the expectations and ambitions of family, sport and self. His birth in the town of Silver City, Miss., was marked only by a midwife scrawling his name into a Bible, which USA Basketball later used in lieu of a birth certificate to obtain Haywood a passport so he could play in the 1968 Olympics.

While hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Olympics, he was brought to tears as he reflected on the stark turnabout from picking cotton three years earlier. “It was different for me hearing it because I came from slavery,” Haywood said. “I know people are going to say I wasn’t a slave, but I was. I came from being an indentured servant.” From Haywood’s perspective, that upbringing helped enable him to run with the pros while still in high school, and — along with the desire to help his family financially — justified his fight to play in the N.B.A. as soon as possible. “I didn’t know it at the time, that I was training as a player when I was picking that cotton, dragging that sack around that was 100 pounds.”

The ups and downs of Haywood’s career and family life, including betrayals by coaches and team executives and his personal struggle with cocaine abuse, sometimes leave readers aching for outside perspective. Haywood is a fine narrator, but he clearly cares what others think of him and that often yields a limiting view of complex situations.

The book also carries forth an argument that Haywood has made for years: that the N.B.A. should credit him by name for the rule that allows athletes to play professionally before spending four years in college. “That’s been one of my problems, I can’t seem to reiterate how important this is,” Haywood said. “I know LeBron gets mad at me when I say, ‘You’re like $200 million richer because of me.’”

Haywood’s spirit of challenging the injustices in his own life resonates tremendously in 2020, when the most consequential development for sport besides the pandemic has been the galvanizing of athletes around social protests, which included a player-led shutdown of N.B.A. games following the police shooting of a Black man in Wisconsin.

In ONE LIFE (Penguin Press, 240 pp., $27), the American soccer star Megan Rapinoe — together with the Guardian columnist Emma Brockes — chronicles her own awakenings to the social issues she cares about and explains how they track with her career on the field.

Megan Rapinoe, a standout in every way.Pete Kiehart for The New York Times

Rapinoe, a forward for the United States Women’s National Team that won the World Cup in 2015 and 2019, helped the team transcend even those accomplishments during their latest championship run by fighting along with her teammates for equal pay with the men. “I love playing soccer. It’s the only job I’ve ever had. I want to play and I want to win, but given the amount my team and I do win — given, as the U.S. Soccer Federation likes to put it, the market realities — I also want to buy a gold Rolex and I don’t think it’s outrageous to say that,” Rapinoe writes. “Equally, I don’t think it’s outrageous to say that, while I’m grateful for my talent and other accidents of birth, I’m not grateful to the people making money from me and my teammates. I think they should be grateful to us.”

Equal pay, to be sure, is but one of many issues Rapinoe has sought to highlight in various ways, including expressions of solidarity with the W.N.B.A. players, who have often received less attention than other athletes for similar accomplishments, and with Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback who drew tremendous backlash for kneeling during the national anthem. Rapinoe’s activism evolves in parallel with the journey of her career, starting with an early rivalry with her twin sister, Rachael, who pushed her ambitions while serving as “a mirror” to help Rapinoe stay grounded. “We knew each other so well; each of us could instantly spot when the other was underperforming,” Rapinoe says. That self-awareness carries forward as Rapinoe describes her play, her outlook on the world and her relationships with teammates, coaches and loved ones concisely and clearly.

In the same way that Rapinoe found her voice through soccer, the pitcher Tom Seaver found his through baseball. Seaver died in September at age 75 with complications of Lewy body dementia and Covid-19. As a result, Bill Madden’s book TOM SEAVER: A Terrific Life (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $28) was hastened from a planned 2021 release.

“Tom Terrific”Ernest Sisto/The New York Times

Seaver won 311 games and led the so-called Miracle Mets to the 1969 World Series after they appeared to be out of the playoff hunt with less than two months to go in the regular season. Though Seaver played for four teams, he was best known for his time with the Mets, where he was nicknamed the Franchise and Tom Terrific. Madden speaks with Seaver, his wife, Nancy, and others for a biography that bolsters Seaver’s reputation as a thinker on the mound, who won by outleveling hitters in their mental preparation and often squabbled with those around him who couldn’t keep up.

Madden established his connection with Seaver in unusual fashion in 1984, when he was writing for The Daily News in New York and got a tip that resulted in what he described as “about the biggest story I would ever break.” The Mets had left Seaver unprotected in a free agent draft, and the Chicago White Sox were planning to nab him with the first pick. Madden called Seaver even though he did not know him well. “Thanks for giving me the head’s-up, Bill. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do now,” Seaver said. (He signed with Chicago, and played there for three seasons.)

Madden’s admiration for Seaver is clear as he weaves throughout Seaver’s seasons and constant acrimony with the Mets. This is augmented by an inside view of The Daily News, where the powerful sports columnist Dick Young antagonized Seaver in print as a “pouting, griping, morale-breaking clubhouse lawyer poisoning the team.”

Young helped prompt the Mets’ first trade of Seaver (to Cincinnati), by writing a column that implied Nancy Seaver was jealous of the wife of Nolan Ryan, who went from the Mets to the California Angels. “This attack on my family is something I will not take!” Seaver yelled at the team’s public relations director, a prelude to his trade.

Seaver has some softer and more sentimental moments, especially when talking about his affection for Nancy and when reflecting on pitching. When he was honored for his career at Shea Stadium in 1988, five years after he last pitched for the Mets, he dashed to the mound and took bows from the rubber to the cheers of the crowd. “It was just something I wanted to do. To say thank you from the mound. I was always happiest there.”

In their anthology LOSERS: Dispatches From the Other Side of the Scoreboard (Penguin, paper, 304 pp., $17), the editors Mary Pilon and Louisa Thomas amass a diverse collection of essays and stories about people who have largely been ignored. The mix touches numerous sports, some analysis and personal essays and a surprise entry by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who reported on a runner at the 1908 Olympic marathon who struggled to finish the race.

“Thank God, he is on his feet again — the little red legs going incoherently, but drumming hard, driven by a supreme will within,” Doyle wrote. “There is a groan as he falls once more, and a cheer as he staggers again to his feet. It is horrible, and yet fascinating.”

Pilon and Thomas, who playfully describe themselves as “seasoned losers,” argue that failure is a great teacher. In “If You Can’t Beat ’Em,” Louisa Hall re-enforces that observation with an engrossing essay that starts with her grandmother’s decision to buy a thoroughbred horse. The narrative unfolds in miniature chapters that faithfully capture her family’s story. It is at times disorienting — in a good way, much like the unwinding of any family tale pieced together by multiple stakeholders — and Hall plays on the chronology of story construction to build a narrative that is about so much more than horse racing.

Other highlights include “The Sporting House,” Charles Bock’s tale of his experience as a 17-year-old trying to impress a slightly older college prospect during pickup basketball games at a gym, and Mike Pesca’s “Losing on Purpose,” which highlights moments in sports when losing can emerge as a viable strategy.

“It turns out that sometimes winning in the end requires losing along the way,” Pesca writes.

Oskar Garcia is a deputy sports editor at The Times.

Evers’s shrewd depiction of the decades of Drum and Carter’s friendship, filled with lopsided obligations based on class and money and willfully blind loyalty, is played out against a shifting backdrop of public events — from ongoing troubles like labor strikes and immigrant tensions to galvanizing incidents like the Cuban missile crisis and the London terrorist attacks in the summer of 2005. But the event that will change everything takes place in the 1980s in an underground bunker and involves their own families, drawn there by Carter’s mysterious government job and a clandestine operation that will soon be shrouded by the Official Secrets Act.

In the aftermath, Drum’s teenage daughter will be removed from his life as effectively as if she’d been struck at ground zero. Which seems tragically fitting, since nuclear imagery has always aroused his primal sense of dread: “Drum saw it all, the radiation gusts skidding the Atlantic, the North Sea; the tactical deployments, the readying of the missiles, the way they erected slowly on their launch pads, the cradle of them in the aircrafts’ bellies, the fingers on buttons; how the buttons looked, not simply functional, but ceremonial.”

The look of hostile armies is very different in Siegfried Lenz’s THE TURNCOAT (Other Press, 384 pp., paper, $17.99), which was written in 1951 but rejected by his publisher and only appeared in 2016. John Cullen’s English translation offers ample proof that this antiwar satire would have been quite a shock to the system of a wounded, divided postwar Germany. “It’s this so-called duty,” one of the characters remarks. “They’ve shot us up with the stuff, like dope.”

Much of the early action is set in a fetid outpost on the Ukrainian-Byelorussian border called Waldesruh (Forest Peace), where Lenz’s deeply cynical protagonist, Pfc. Walter Proska, is stranded after three years at the front. Surrounded by a band of darkly comic incompetents vastly outnumbered by the local partisans, Proska wants merely to survive, dodging the brutality of both sides and engaging in some brutal acts of his own. Proska’s ostensible commander is capable of pausing the group’s random bickering to casually murder a priest. Proska’s contact (and later love interest) among the partisans is a young woman he meets on a train, carrying a jug filled with her brother’s ashes — and enough dynamite to kill most of their fellow passengers. Is it any wonder that when the time comes, Proska will have few qualms about switching his allegiance to the Red Army?

Not that he finds a lot to admire there. Moving on from its denunciation of “the national Pied Pipers” of the Reich, “The Turncoat” becomes no less scathing in its depiction of the realities of the Russian zone: “So this was the life those on the other side had to endure. … Leaves fell from those trees that were still upright. The bare branches reached skyward, clean and oddly polished-looking. Autumn. Autumn of convictions, autumn of conscience.”

In 1948, German machinery was stored in Munich warehouses before being distributed for reparations.The New York Times

Unlike Siegfried Lenz, Wolfgang Koeppen did find an accommodating publisher in Germany in 1951. And although PIGEONS ON THE GRASS (New Directions, 208 pp., paper, $15.95) is less explosive than Lenz’s novel, its vision of their country is equally persuasive. As Michael Hofmann explains in the introduction to his vibrant new translation, Koeppen has presented “a cross section of a damaged society,” portraying the activities of a wide range of characters on a single day in Munich in 1948 to ask some unavoidable questions: “What have we done to ourselves? What may we hope for? Is life from now on going to be different?”

In a city still filled with rubble, still inventing strategies for enduring another week or month, the comic and the tragic frequently intertwine. A writer spends most of his time trying to avoid an assignment while his neurotic heiress wife haunts the pawnshops. A hung-over matinee idol struggles into costume for a feel-good historical movie as his wife sleeps off their latest all-night party — and the nanny drags their daughter out to do penance at Mass. An American soldier calls home to the Deep South to tell his appalled parents he’ll be bringing back a German war bride; meantime, his girlfriend (who has “put her faith in the color of his money” rather than the color of their child) is making plans for an abortion. A bus full of quarreling schoolteachers from Massachusetts takes in the not-very-impressive sights en route to an evening lecture by a disillusioned poet charged with hailing “the imperishableness of the spirit, the deathless soul of the West.” Two boys enter into high-stakes negotiations over a stray dog.

In the street there will be a violent confrontation; in the lecture hall the audience will be falling asleep. Are the events of this day and these lives, as Koeppen’s title suggests, just as random as the pattern pigeons make when they land on the grass? “The birds are here by chance, we are here by chance,” one of his characters observes. “Maybe the world is a dreadful and stupid chance of God’s.”

Despite its title, Aaron Gwyn’s ALL GOD’S CHILDREN (Europa, 400 pp., paper, $17.99) doesn’t suggest that early-19th-century Texas bore much resemblance to the Promised Land. At just 20, Duncan Lammons already needs to turn his back on the past, but leaving Kentucky for Mexico won’t exorcise his demons. Like many of the settlers drawn by the prospect of free land, he discovers early on that these new colonies are “a few apple trees shy of Eden.” And it turns out that, for him, Sam Houston’s ragtag army of independence is a far better fit. Over the years to come, as a Texas Ranger and later when the Rangers are mustered into the American military, Duncan will have “no home other than my own busted saddle.”

How does a man who’s most comfortable among violent ruffians and feels “nothing for women but a mechanical curiosity” find himself domesticated, presiding over a “strange little family” that sinks its roots in 1850s Kansas? The answers are to be found in a story that parallels Duncan’s, one that begins in Virginia with a 15-year-old named Cecelia as she makes what will be the first of many attempts to escape from slavery. She too will arrive in Texas, her freedom the result of “will and cunning and cruelty.”

Duncan comes from abolitionist stock, and his belief that white, Black and Indian people are all “God’s children” will put him on the wrong side of the region’s vigilantes. But it’s his friend Sam Fisk who will pay a disastrously high price for pushing that belief beyond the tolerance of his neighbors. Gwyn’s novel is a powerful depiction of the rough realities of frontier life, of the vicious influence of racism in a place where “men who didn’t dare look at you in daylight might burn you alive come sundown.” Cecelia has cut her ties with the monstrous plantations north of the border, but she’s always afraid that the America she fled will have “snuck up and surrounded us.”

In 1954, a ferryboat approached a deserted Ellis Island in New York Harbor.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times

A few generations later, immigrants from around the world would have a very different view of America, and more than 12 million of them would clamor for entry as they arrived in New York’s harbor. One witness to this “great tide of people” is the narrator of Gaëlle Josse’s THE LAST DAYS OF ELLIS ISLAND (World Editions, 208 pp., paper, $15.99). As its commissioner, John Mitchell presides over the facility in the autumn of 1954, preparing to close down its much diminished operations for good. Wandering the empty buildings, he looks back on his decades of service and reflects on some of the people who linger in his mind, “a crowd of ghosts floating around me.”

Josse’s novel, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, mixes invented characters like Mitchell with real ones like Arne Peterssen, the redheaded Norwegian sailor who was the island’s last official “guest.” For figures like Augustus Sherman, the registry clerk whose photographs are an important part of the archive at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, she fabricates a back story, as she does for an Italian interpreter, her own creation but with details borrowed from the experiences of Fiorello La Guardia, who held that job before becoming a lawyer and, eventually, the mayor of New York.

At the center of Mitchell’s reminiscences is a not-quite-credible account of his romantic obsession with a young woman from Sardinia whose brother’s coat had been chalked with an ominous X, the inspectors’ code for mental deficiency — and thus cause for deportation. Rather, it’s Mitchell’s evocation of the drama-filled daily routine involved in processing these crowds of eager yet terrified aspiring citizens that rings true. “All worlds collided here,” he notes, “and America was the only word they had in common.”

Very simple block-printed words turn surprisingly poetic in Michael Martone’s THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF ART SMITH, THE BIRD BOY OF FORT WAYNE (BOA Editions, 224 pp., paper, $17), an ingenious reimagining of the real-life inventor of skywriting, who died one night in 1926 when he mistook the lights of a farmhouse for a landing field. Arranged in suitably minimalist chapters accompanied by Brian Oliu’s renderings of Smith’s wispy messages, Martone’s novel takes us back to the earliest days of aviation, when pilots like Smith built their own planes “rigged with piano wire and waxed leather stitching.”

Smith was also a stunt pilot, a mail carrier, an advertising agent, a crop duster, even a scout for the final roundup of wild passenger pigeons. He eloped with his fiancée in a biplane and crashed en route; the couple attended the wedding swathed in bandages. Three years later, the marriage was over and, in one of the book’s most wrenching passages, Smith is seen flying over the train that carries his wife home to her parents, “etching in vapor” the single word “Still” again and again in a fruitless plea for a second chance.

Despite his talent and nerve, Smith was rejected for combat service in World War I. Not only was he too short to reach the pedals of the fighter planes, he wasn’t exactly in the peak of health, thanks to his frequent crashes. Undeterred by his pronounced limp, his numbed fingers, amputated toe and constant tinnitus, he modified his skywriting plane and became an ace instructor for the Army Air Force. But in the aftermath of the war, “the early optimistic elation that airplanes and flying promised seemed broken and exhausted.” Was there a hidden message in the “lyrical curlicue” Smith left among the turkey vultures and crows in the sky over rural Indiana? “An attempt to recapture some of the spent joy of his boyhood flight? A transcription of a sigh? A hieroglyph of a death wish?”

At the beginning of her career, the words of her fiction became a kind of smoke screen for Marian Evans, whose journey from anonymous obscurity to worldwide fame under her masculine pen name is delicately charted in Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s debut novel, IN LOVE WITH GEORGE ELIOT (Scribe, 360 pp., paper, $17). Working back and forth between the present-day world of fractious Eliot scholars and the 19th-century world of their emotionally fragile subject, O’Shaughnessy concentrates on the private ambitions and uncertainties of her characters, drawing on Eliot’s letters for inspiration.

Kate Boyd is a London academic, recently separated from her husband and about to participate in a conference on Eliot. Her own work, a novel about Eliot, is presumably the text that runs in tandem with her first-person narrative. So as we watch Eliot gradually emerge into the public’s acceptance of her scandalous cohabitation with the married George Lewes, we’re also drawn into Kate’s hesitant friendship with two of her colleagues, a husband and wife whose relationship is becoming increasingly tense. Fittingly, both plots will reach a dramatic climax in Venice.

O’Shaughnessy skillfully evokes the bond between Eliot and Lewes, mapping out the intricacies of their domestic life and documenting his role in allaying her insecurities. This makes Eliot’s actions after his death even more poignant as, sunk into an “insoluble muddle,” she accepts the marriage proposal of a much younger man, becoming as unseemly in this “respectable” union as she had been in her unsanctioned one with Lewes. “I am so tired of being put on a pedestal,” she sighs. Yet that may be why John Cross wanted to become her husband, with consequences neither of them could have expected.

Is the “father of South African poetry” worthy of his own pedestal or is his legacy due for reassessment? Zoë Wicomb’s ebullient new novel, STILL LIFE (New Press, 304 pp., $25.99), charts the attempt of a present-day female writer to tell the story of a dead white man (“of which there are so very many”) named Thomas Pringle, a Scot known for verses documenting his experiences in the Eastern Cape in the early 19th century. Exhuming this relic of colonialism will require some assistance, so our narrator quickly summons two figures from Pringle’s past: Hinza Marossi, the Motswana boy he brought back with him to England, and Mary Prince, the West Indian whose slave narrative he helped ready for publication.

As if bringing these two from the spirit world to 21st-century London weren’t enough, Wicomb also enlists a collaborator from the realm of literature: Sir Nicholas Greene, the time traveler from Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.” Mary, Hinza and Sir Nick promptly take center stage, elbowing Wicomb’s narrator aside as they wrangle over historical memory, poetic license, cultural appropriation and a host of other concerns. Not least of which is the realization that they seem, if only temporarily, to be inhabiting a modern society where biography is about as trustworthy as magic realism.

It’s no surprise, then, that we learn as much about Mary, Hinza and Sir Nick as we do about Pringle, with their versions of him sliding in and out of their lively arguments and adventures. Poor Hinza is caught in the crossfire, doubting his origins and wondering how much he has absorbed the version of himself that’s been enshrined in Pringle’s poetry. He’s only more confused when the others send him on a research trip to contemporary Cape Town, which bears no resemblance to the city he briefly visited so long ago. Is Pringle, as a scholar he meets there insists, “no more than a cipher, constructed by liberal English South Africans intent on distinguishing their polite racism from the crass Afrikaner version”? For all his newfound skepticism, Hinza is inclined to hold a more forgiving view. “What we know and believe are like the stars in motion,” he recalls Pringle telling him on one of their last nights in South Africa, “and we must never rest in the belief that we know once and for all.”

Alida Becker is a former editor at the Book Review.

In July 1971, the poet Bernadette Mayer undertook another act of documentation: her life for a month, at a rate of one roll of film per day, accompanied by a journal. In 1971 artists — such as Vito Acconci, then her brother-in-law and co-editor with her of the little magazine 0 TO 9 — were keen on documentation, especially of routine, unglamorous, interstitial situations and processes. At the same time, Stephen Shore was driving across the country, documenting his meals and motel rooms as well as the fortuitous tableaus he caught and framed. Mayer’s MEMORY (Siglio, 335 pp., $45) resembles both of these processes in alternating ways, her more than 1,100 artfully artless photographs collecting rooms, skies, flowers, streetscapes and landscapes, friends and family in vibrant 1970s color. The photos are necessarily small (roughly 2½ inches by 1¾ inches), arrayed in grids of nine, along with intermittent full-page blowups, and as lovely as individual images are, their power is cumulative: a wide-ranging work of personal cinema, in stills. Her journal provides the narration in galloping long-breath prose poetry that feels as spontaneous and alive as the pictures.

An after-after-hours club on West Houston Street, from “Taxi.”Joseph Rodriguez

Also keeping a record in the 1970s was Joseph Rodriguez, who later became a much-admired photojournalist and teacher of photography, but in those days was driving a cab. TAXI: Journey Through My Windows 1977-1987 (powerHouse, 120 pp., $35), with an essay by Richard Price, is Rodriguez’s tour of some of what he saw through his window or in his back seat as he worked the edges of Manhattan. He frequently lined up outside the sex clubs of the Lower West Side, where, as he recounts, a man could climb into his cab wearing full leathers, with a whip, and emerge at a Park Avenue address in “khakis, oxford shirt and penny loafers.” The New York of those days was wide open and desperate, with poverty and chaos rampant. Although the soon-to-be-homeless are still sheltered in S.R.O. hotels, Rodriguez sees passed-out bodies on the street everywhere, as well as naked sex workers, a public masturbator and a line of hunched men who might be waiting for a bus, or for a drug connection. But he also picks up people who open up to him in the space of a 20-minute ride, or at least stay on the sunny side: an aged couple, still happily married; a radiant young family on their way to church. In any situation, Rodriguez is not a taxi driver who takes pictures, but a fearless, astute and inspired photographer who happens to drive a cab.

The Sept. 9, 1957, issue of Life was, unusually for that magazine, illustrated not with a photograph but with a colored-pencil drawing. The subject was “A New York Street Gang”: generic youths in fancy jackets, presumably the Sharks. Inside, the first installment of a series on crime in the United States was illustrated with highly stylized photographs by Gordon Parks. GORDON PARKS: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 (Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl/D.A.P., 168 pp., $40), by Sarah Hermanson Meister, assembles all of those pictures along with 60-odd unpublished others. Parks, then a staff photographer, shadowed detectives in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, recording patrol cars, dark streets, raids, arrests, heroin injections, morgues, prisons. He deploys bright patches of color against mostly dark backgrounds, along with artful lighting and cropping, to suggest the ubiquitousness of the machinery of crime. The photos are undeniably authentic and specific, but suspects’ faces are blurred while the gestures are broad, making them seem archetypal. They are not so much reminiscent of movies — their closest cinematic relative might be the re-enactments in Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line” — as they are of the posters for those movies: the silhouette of a cop, at night, flanked by illuminated Broadway theater marquees; an elegantly articulated hand, cigarette between the fingers, poking out from behind bars, seen from the side. A stylish Black man raises a hand — we can’t see the other one — and turns his face away, and that is all we need to know that he is being stopped by the police, and that it isn’t his first time.

Chris Killip, who died in October, made his name with stark black-and-white photographs of misery in northern England in the 1980s, collected in his book “In Flagrante” (1988). The pictures in THE STATION (Steidl/D.A.P., 80 pp., $70) date from the same period, documenting a punk club in Gateshead, across the Tyne River from Newcastle — they were found in a pile of neglected contact sheets in 2016 by Killip’s son. The pages are very large (11.3 inches by 14.7 inches), many of the pictures stretch across the spread, and the camera seldom ranges farther than about three feet from its subjects, who are consequently in your face. They are the audience (primarily), and they are passionately engaged in what might be considered dancing but looks somewhat more emotionally grueling and explosive. In a typical lineup, one boy looks furious, another ecstatic, a third about to collapse — that one wears a badge that says “Coal Not Dole,” a reminder that this is the place and time of the last great miners’ strike in Britain. The bands have names like Sons of Bad Breath and Legion of Parasites. The clothes, the slogans, the chains, the piercings all intend to convey desperation, but Killip focuses on the vitality in the room, its untapped potential, and the release that this ritual permits its initiates, allowing them to go on with their otherwise constricted lives.

These days, high modernism can sometimes look as distant as a faraway star, a place of heedless optimism and tranquil contemplation. For that very reason, though, the images can be tonic, lowering one’s blood pressure as they induce concentration of sight. Imogen Cunningham took up a camera at the dawn of the 20th century, when few women were working in the field, and made pictures for nearly seven decades. She took every sort of photo; portraits, street scenes and landscapes all figure brilliantly in her body of work. What she did best, though, was to convey the sensual impact of harmonious forms, finding these especially in nudes, both male and female, and in the vegetable kingdom. IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM: A Retrospective (J. Paul Getty Museum, 245 pp., $50), by Paul Martineau, displays her ecstatic studies of flowers — lilies, tuberoses, magnolias — seen in extreme close-up as if they were worlds in themselves, and juxtaposes them with languorous sprawled bodies that become dunes and arroyos. She can turn her eye with similar entrancement to ceramics, textiles, the organically flowing wire sculptures of Ruth Asawa, and even industrial structures. She has never been granted anywhere near the attention accorded her counterpart and contemporary Edward Weston, but revision is clearly in order.

Mary Ellen Mark was endowed with the ability to make people trust her — every kind of person, children especially, but also mental-ward patients, movie stars, drag-pageant contestants, twins, sex workers, circus performers, teenage runaways, white supremacists, homeless families, and the sick and dying. She photographed these and many more over the course of her 50-year career (she died in 2015), and very often returned to them again and again, as in the case of Tiny, a.k.a. Erin Blackwell, whom she followed for over three decades, from her early teenage years as a street prostitute in Seattle to her middle life as a recovering drug addict and mother of 10.

“Crissy, Jesse, Linda, and Dean Damm in Their Car,” from “The Book of Everything.”Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

Mark was so comfortable behind the lens, and such a consummate professional, that her pictures can occasionally be magazine-glib, but there is no denying the often startling power of her strongest shots: A man lying on his stomach on the street, in handcuffs, cranes his head to look up at her with a bleary but beseeching look; middle-aged white twins with cerebral palsy are lovingly held on the laps of their Black nurses, who are also twins. Mark’s art of empathy is unrolled at great expansive length in the three-volume THE BOOK OF EVERYTHING (Steidl/D.A.P., 880 pp., $500), which is organized chronologically, showing her travels and assignments and her leaps from milieu to wildly contrasting milieu, and also demonstrates her absolute consistency of approach, which unites all her subjects in one strong embrace.

I was very young when I first saw a copy of Peter Beard’s THE END OF THE GAME (Taschen, 304 pp., $100), which has now, in the wake of his death last spring, been lavishly reprinted. I had never seen a book like it, with its montages of pictures, handwritten insertions, pages photographed from scrapbooks that included their ragged edges — and I couldn’t quite believe that some of its images could be real. Back in the mid-1970s, when I first looked through it (the book was originally published in 1965), I didn’t know much about the looming extinction of species, especially in Africa, which I persisted in thinking of as a harmonious Eden for animals of all descriptions. The book’s sepulchral last chapter, “Nor Dread Nor Hope Attend,” with its scores of images of dead elephants, culminating in vast, acres-wide spreads of elephant bones, seemed mind-boggling and impossible, as did some of the earlier pictures, such as the one of men crouching on a field of zebra skins, apparently stitched together into a giant carpet.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, from “Peter Beard.”Peter Beard Studio

We all know better nowadays, and the book appears as an early warning of what was to follow in the ensuing half-century and more. “The End of the Game” is not without its problems, of course, since it has come out that Beard and his helpers may have gathered far-flung bones and piled them together for a stronger image, for example. And his attitude toward white colonialism sometimes tends toward the heroic Victorian impression even as he assigns blame for the depredation of species, while his view of native Africans is often uncomfortably noble-savage. It nevertheless remains a unique book, in its scope and breadth, its boldly time-spanning and contrast-rich design, even its noble-Victorian sense of mission. The present edition is published in conjunction with PETER BEARD (Taschen, 770 pp., $150), a distillation of his diaries and notebooks that is equally lavish and ambitious.

Luc Sante’s books include “Low Life” and, most recently, “Maybe the People Would Be the Times.”

What if Little Red Riding Hood and the legendary archer Hou Yi were middle-aged women in a fantastical China, hanging out and hunting sunbirds while resolutely ignoring their respective painful pasts? What if they were both aching for the loss of their wives and children, and slowly revealing their histories to each other in a halting, stilted way while journeying together on one last quest to confront Hou Yi’s destructive former apprentice? What if they were both fearsome hunters struggling against the violence of their natures and finding solace and renewed purpose in their friendship?

“Burning Roses” is all that, but more. It manages, between bittersweet twinings of genre, to portray the realities of identity and immigration, marriages of culture and language, in a way that enhances the fairy tales without distracting from them, any more than the scent of roses distracts from the sight of the blooms or the feel of their petals. The novel is both lovely and original, a fine exemplar of how to retell fairy tales by building on their initial enchantment instead of banishing it. I hope to see it on next year’s awards lists.

Cory Doctorow’s ATTACK SURFACE (Tor, 382 pp., $26.99) is a new, stand-alone novel in the world of his previous books “Little Brother” and “Homeland” — a world a few steps sideways from ours, where technocrats lay siege to civil liberties and young rebels hack circles around them to fight back.

Masha Maximow has built a career in surveillance technologies, breaking the operational security of whomever her employers — be they the U.S. government or the dictatorial clients of transnational firms — point her toward. For over a decade she has compartmentalized her feelings about the work she has done and salved her conscience by helping foreign dissidents she likes resist her own surveillance measures. But when she gets a call from a childhood friend fighting for racial justice back home in Oakland, Calif., the borders between her compartments begin to dissolve, and she finds herself confronting the consequences of her choices and the need to reconcile her allegiances.

Doctorow is a riveting speaker, and he writes the way he speaks. While reading the book, I was sometimes surprised to see whole paragraphs of in-character speech repeating verbatim what I’ve heard him say in interviews, and even more surprised to find that I didn’t much mind it — even when a character says, “I half understand, so let me try and we’ll see if we get it right,” before launching into a lengthy description of facial recognition technology that reads like an article on the subject. There’s long been a (reasonably justified) distrust of anything that smacks of didacticism in literature, but there’s a difference between didacticism and pedagogy, and Doctorow’s work falls squarely in the latter camp. In “Attack Surface” — and in his oeuvre more broadly — Doctorow is less interested in telling readers what to think than in educating readers about issues they should be thinking about.

And while Doctorow is vocal and unflinching in his activism on surveillance and intellectual property, among other issues, it doesn’t arrive completely naked on the page: He writes fascinating, interesting villains with comprehensible motivation, and flawed, wounded protagonists caught in complicated relationships with them. “Attack Surface” is ultimately optimistic, and that optimism is rooted in a belief that humans will choose meaningful connections over the numbing, narcotic effects of instant, empty gratifications.

THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS (Margaret K. McElderry, 449 pp., $19.99) is Chloe Gong’s debut, an ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in 1920s Shanghai. It’s both a translation and a transformation of the play: Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai are the heirs to the White Flowers and the Scarlets, two feuding crime families who’ve carved the city up between them. But Shanghai’s factionalism is further complicated by the imperial interests of France and Britain as well as the rise of Communism among its workers — and when sightings of a monster in the harbor begin to coincide with bouts of contagious, insect-borne madness that make the afflicted tear out their own throats, Roma and Juliette must put aside their differences and work together in secret to solve the mystery.

This retelling expands the timeline, cast and geography of the original; it gives the lovers histories of romance and betrayal, Juliette another cousin in the form of Rosalind’s transgender sister, Kathleen, and the women educations and upbringings in New York and Paris. The ensemble is strong and diverse, and Gong leans into the nuances of belonging and identity in a city where foreign powers create gated communities that keep the native population out. Juliette is both bemused and pained by these developments: “She had paused outside the Public Garden, spotted a sign that read NO CHINESE ALLOWED and burst out laughing. Who in their right mind would forbid the Chinese from entering a space in their own country? Only later did she realize it hadn’t been a joke.”

Shanghai is a character in its own right, never a static backdrop so much as a hungry, breathing creature both containing and mourning the actions tearing it apart. But the most welcome change is in Juliette herself, who, in addition to being as dangerous as any of the gangs’ men, takes a much more active role in the plot than her namesake does in the play.

“These Violent Delights” is best when it revels in being its own story, its characters original and arresting, full of longing and anger and desire in a lovingly rendered setting. It sometimes stumbles in paying its homage too faithfully; famous lines from the play land awkwardly and distract from the whole, like slicing into a loaf of fresh bread and hitting a lump of dry flour. (I winced when the Mercutio character yells a version of “a plague on both your houses” while an actual plague grips the city.) The pacing is sometimes stilted, tottering between unconvincing contrivances of convenience and delay — but those contrivances do enable the spot-lit character relationships to bloom and, somewhat incredibly, set up a sequel, with an audacity the Bard would surely approve of.

Speaking of sequels and audacity, HARROW THE NINTH (Tor.com, 510 pp., $26.99) continues Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, which began with “Gideon the Ninth” last year. With a second-person narrator, a plot that’s not so much nonlinear as it is non-Euclidean, a setting that mixes dream worlds and memories, past and present, and more twists of history and parentage than you can shake a Greek chorus at, “Harrow” is a much messier book than its predecessor, more ambitious but ultimately less successful.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, having become a powerful immortal necromancer, or Lyctor, at the cost of her cavalier’s life, is fighting battles on several fronts. As one of the Emperor’s Saints, she must prepare to fight Resurrection Beasts, monstrous revenants who have claimed most of her predecessors. As the youngest Lyctor she’s in a tense rivalry with Ianthe — her fellow recent arrival — and in conflict with her ancient sorcerous colleagues. And as a flawed, broken Lyctor who can’t seem to heal or gain access to the whole of her powers, she’s in constant conflict with her own mind and body, the jagged edges of her self-inflicted memory loss, and the strange notes she has written to herself and others to be opened under highly specific circumstances:

“Understand that I envy you more than I have ever envied anyone, and that I look upon your birth as a blessing. Look upon me as a Harrowhark who was handed the first genuine choice of our lives; the only choice ever given where we had free will to say, No, and free will to say, Yes.

“Accept that in this instance I have chosen to say, No.”

Embattled, self-loathing and self-destructive, Harrow is a living nightmare, haunted by literal and figurative ghosts. But she has a job to do — as soon as she figures out what it is.

I love the second-person point-of-view and puzzle-box books, and I have nothing but respect for such a breathtakingly deliberate departure from everything that made “Gideon” appealing. “Harrow” is work while “Gideon” is pleasure; “Harrow” is convoluted and endlessly expansive where “Gideon” is taut and contained. This certainly suits their respective protagonists, and is thematically appropriate: “Harrow” misrepresents and overwrites whole sections of “Gideon” in precisely the way that Harrow overwrites her memories. As a tactic, it makes sense; as a reading experience, it doesn’t quite cohere. I say this not because I shied from the effort “Harrow” requires for basic comprehension, but because I wanted a book as disciplined as Harrow’s character. I wanted it to deliver on the initial promises of its puzzle-box structure more effectively. Instead it did the narrative equivalent of dissolving into sand: surprising, certainly, but difficult to hold on to.

That said, I’m no less fully along for the ride than I was after “Gideon,” and am deeply curious about how the whole will resolve in “Alecto the Ninth.”

Hannah Abigail Clarke’s THE SCAPEGRACERS (Erewhon, 394 pp., $17.95) is a fierce and magnificent debut, raw and wet as bloody scratches from manicured nails. Taking cues from the 1996 film “The Craft,” and full of the kind of furious love for teenage girlhood that Rory Power bares in her novel “Wilder Girls,” Clarke tells a violently beautiful story of the magic girls make together, whom it threatens and whom it attracts.

Sideways Pike is a weirdo loner, a lesbian high school student whose two fathers run the town’s antique shop. She’s a witch, too, and doesn’t care who knows it. In fact, she shows off the tricks she has learned from her mysteriously obtained grimoire in exchange for cash and gifts. But she has always worked alone in fits and starts until three popular girls — Jing, Yates and Daisy — pay her $40 to make something cool happen at one of their parties. There, holding hands with them during a ritual, she gets a taste of what it’s like to make magic with others, to belong to a group and be transformed by it. But as long as there have been witches, there have been those who hunt them — and as Sideways and her friends’ powers grow, so does the danger that stalks them.

I loved everything about this book, from the hot, suturing needle of Clarke’s prose to the broken-glass grind of Sideways’s voice. Clarke’s girls are glittering and terrifying, in love with one another and in opposition to the world that disdains and desires them. Their magic is less systematic than rhizomatic, a network of pulsing roots and intuitions, and I was both relieved and thrilled to find a witchy book in which incantations aren’t so much twee rhymes as they are screams of “I want” at the world, as eloquent as the girls know how:

“We’re inviting the liquid night, the molten magic. We’re inviting the star-spiked darkness inside and calling it to this circle. Our hands entwined are a chalice. Flow through us and spill. All this dancing is in triumph and our booze is all libations. We’ve brought you beats and lights and glamour, we brought fresh meat, new blood and booze, and in return, we want some chaos. We want havoc. Bring us hell.”

As tender and intimate as it is ferocious and volatile, “Scapegracers” deserves to be this generation’s go-to grimoire. May it launch a thousand covens of angry, loving, brilliant girls.

Amal El-Mohtar is a Hugo Award-winning writer and co-author, with Max Gladstone, of “This Is How You Lose the Time War.”