10 New Books We Recommend This Week

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/books/review/10-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

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Troubling history lives on, vividly and urgently, in this week’s recommended books. Julián Herbert’s latest book revisits, with “shame and fury,” the massacre of 300 Chinese immigrants in the city of Torreón during the Mexican Revolution. Mark Bowden follows detectives as they crack open a 40-year-old cold case involving the disappearance of two sisters. “The Lions’ Den” examines how thinkers on the left have grappled with the idea and the reality of Israel. And the starkly titled “Hate” is about the history — and the present — of anti-Semitism in France.

We also look at one of the year’s most highly anticipated novels, “Normal People,” Sally Rooney’s follow-up to “Conversations With Friends,” and at two debut novels: one comic and one terrifying.

John WilliamsDaily Books Editor and Staff Writer

NORMAL PEOPLE, by Sally Rooney. (Hogarth, $26.) Rooney’s second novel, following “Conversations With Friends,” was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It’s about Marianne and Connell, gifted teenagers from different social classes in Ireland. The book tracks them across four years. They are never quite boyfriend and girlfriend in the conventional sense. They “merely break each other’s hearts over and over again,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. Rooney’s “intimate and pared-down style can be reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s,” Garner says, and her novels are satisfying “because there aren’t dueling narrators or cat’s cradles of plotlines. You buy Rooney’s ticket, you take her ride.”

THE HOUSE OF THE PAIN OF OTHERS: Chronicle of a Small Genocide, by Julián Herbert. Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. (Graywolf Press, $16.) The latest by Herbert, a Mexican writer and musician, tells the story of a massacre that took place in the city of Torreón, over the course of three days in 1911, during the Mexican Revolution. Three hundred Chinese immigrants were shot and bludgeoned to death in the streets. The crime has been misunderstood and misrepresented. But it has never been truly forgotten. Our critic Parul Sehgal writes: “The great strength of Herbert’s book, written with such shame and fury, is that it is not framed as epitaph but as dispatch from a live crime scene, attentive to the silences, the still seething resentments, relinquishing nothing to history.”

CHARGED: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, by Emily Bazelon. (Random House, $28.) Prosecutors, often hoping for higher office, have embraced a tough-on-crime stance that gives them undue power, according to this riveting argument by a staff writer at The Times Magazine — at once an indictment and a call for reform. Bazelon persuasively indicts prosecutorial excess, arguing that the lawyers who work in the more than 2,000 prosecutors’ offices around the country bear much of the responsibility for over-incarceration, conviction of the innocent and other serious problems of the criminal justice system.

THE LAST STONE, by Mark Bowden. (Atlantic Monthly, $27.) In this thoughtful, stirring true-crime tale, Bowden follows cold-case detectives as they crack a 40-year-old case involving the disappearance of two Maryland sisters — a story he covered at the time as a young reporter. Bowden shows how even the most exquisitely pulled-off interrogations are a messy business, in which exhaustive strategizing is followed by game-time gut decisions and endless second-guessing and soul-searching.

SAVE ME THE PLUMS: My Gourmet Memoir, by Ruth Reichl. (Random House, $27.) A delicious account of a decade that took The Times’s former restaurant critic from the glory days of editing at Condé Nast to the morning when the office door was closed for good. Tantalizing recipes provide punctuation to her career twists and turns.

THE LIONS’ DEN: Zionism and the Left From Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, by Susie Linfield. (Yale University, $32.50.) Linfield tackles the fraught question of how Jewish thinkers of the left, devoted to universal values, contend with Israel, a country founded to solve the particularist problem of Jewish sovereignty. The heart of the book is a series of individual portraits of iconic, midcentury left-wing thinkers who wrote extensively on the idea and reality of Jewish statehood. Linfield is an associate professor of journalism at New York University and her writing combines the storytelling of a journalist with a scholar’s analysis of ideas.

HATE: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France (and What It Means for Us), by Marc Weitzmann. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) France has become a difficult place for Jews to live. Weitzmann details a number of recent incidents in which Jews have become the scapegoat in a nationalist moment looking for cosmopolitan, globalized elites as culprits. This impassioned book swirls from personal to historical reflections, setting out to understand the reasons for the scourge and to cut through what he sees as persistent French obfuscation of it.

RIVER OF FIRE, by Qurratulain Hyder. (New Directions, paper, $19.95.) This epic novel of India’s partition gushes across more than 2,000 years of the subcontinent’s history. Hyder wrote it in Urdu, then again in English — a process she calls “transcreation” rather than translation.

THE ALTRUISTS, by Andrew Ridker. (Viking, $26.) This comic and remarkably assured first novel charts the clash of expectations when a cash-starved widower’s two adult children return to the family home in St. Louis. Ridker’s ambitious blend of global perspective and intimate human comedy seems likely to evoke comparisons to the work of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill.

THE ALARMING PALSY OF JAMES ORR, by Tom Lee. (Soho, $23.) In this debut novel, an ordinary man wakes up one day transformed by a grotesque facial affliction. It’s a fresh take on Kafka, highlighting the potential for terrifying change that may lurk in our DNA. Lee explores themes of illness and the almost dystopian alienation that emerges between sufferers and the well, and does so with artfulness and delicious doses of body horror and contemporary British social satire.