11 New Books We Recommend This Week

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Our list this week starts off with two very different debut novels. Hermione Hoby’s “Neon in Daylight” borrows its title from the poet Frank O’Hara, and recalls prior novels about ambivalent women by writers like Joan Didion and Zadie Smith. A. J. Finn’s “The Woman in the Window,” already a best seller, is packed with Hitchcock references and plot twists. Other suggestions include a sweeping history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an account of how Istanbul has evolved through the centuries and James Lee Burke’s latest Dave Robicheaux mystery.

John WilliamsDaily Books Editor and Staff Writer

NEON IN DAYLIGHT, by Hermione Hoby. (Catapult, $16.95.) In Hoby’s radiant first novel, Kate, a British Ph.D. student, is visiting New York in 2012, in the waning days of summer. Hurricane Sandy is about to unleash itself on the city. Our critic Parul Sehgal says the book’s characters are “propelled less by desire than by a desire for desire; for any kind of strong feeling, really,” and that “precision — of observation, of language — is Hoby’s gift. Her sentences are sleek and tailored. Language molds snugly to thought.”

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, by A. J. Finn. (William Morrow, $26.99.) Finn is actually Dan Mallory, a longtime editor of mystery fiction who is well versed in the tricks of the trade. His first novel starts out with a setup reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” An agoraphobic woman thinks she has witnessed a crime in a neighboring building. But has she? Our reviewer Janet Maslin writes: “Dear other books with unreliable narrators: This one will see you and raise you.”

ENEMIES AND NEIGHBORS: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, by Ian Black. (Atlantic Monthly, $30.) Black, a veteran correspondent for The Guardian, argues in this sweeping history that Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were irreconcilable from the start, and that peace is as remote as ever.

THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE: Stories, by Daniel Alarcón. (Riverhead Books, $27.) The stories in this slim, affecting work of fiction feature young men in various states of displacement after dictatorship yields to fragile democracy in an unnamed country. Alarcón, who also happens to be a gifted journalist, couples narrative experimentation with imaginative empathy.

TEXAS BLOOD: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands, by Roger D. Hodge. (Knopf, $28.95.) Hodge, a seventh-generation Texan who now lives in Brooklyn, has written a fervent pastiche of memory and reportage and history that tells the story of South Texas as it intersects with his ancestors. “He’s smart, observant and skeptical,” our reviewer Stephen Harrigan writes. “He has no interest in adding another volume to the library shelves of rousing Texas hoohah.”

SOLAR BONES, by Mike McCormack. (Soho Press, $25.) A civil engineer sits in his kitchen feeling inexplicably disoriented, as if untethered from the world. In fact, he is dead, a ghost, even if he does not realize it. This wonderfully original book owes a debt to modernism but is up to something all its own.

ISTANBUL: A Tale of Three Cities, by Bettany Hughes. (Da Capo, $40.) A British scholar known for her popular television documentaries shows readers how a prehistoric settlement evolved through the centuries into a great metropolis, the crossroads where East meets West.

THE WRITTEN WORLD: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization, by Martin Puchner. (Random House, $32.) Puchner, an English professor at Harvard, makes the case for literature’s pervasive importance as a force that has shaped the societies we have built and our very sensibilities as human beings. His fieldwork takes him to every continent, digging inexhaustibly into cultures for their foundational and sacred stories.

THE FLOATING WORLD, by C. Morgan Babst. (Algonquin, $26.95.) An inescapable, almost oppressive sense of loss permeates each page of this powerful debut novel about a mixed-race New Orleans family in the days after Hurricane Katrina. As an elegy for a ruined city, it is infused with soulful details.

ROBICHEAUX, by James Lee Burke. (Simon & Schuster, $27.99.) The Iberia Parish sheriff’s detective Dave Robicheaux tangles with mob bosses and crooked politicians in this latest installment in a crime series steeped in the history and lore of the Louisiana bayous.

THREE FLOORS UP, by Eshkol Nevo. (Other Press, paper, $16.95.) Three linked novellas about life in an Israeli apartment building capture the lies we tell ourselves and others in order to construct identity. Our reviewer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen writes: “This book and its conflicted apartment dwellers stayed with me long after I finished reading.”