Supported by
editors’ choice
9 New Books We Recommend This Week
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
Sometimes books confirm our familiar sense of the world, and sometimes they disrupt it by transporting us to places we could never have encountered on our own. This week’s recommendations do the latter in spades, with close-up looks at worlds and stories most of us will never experience firsthand, from disastrous space missions to a military bribery scandal to daily life in the restrictive state of North Korea. In “The Wide Wide Sea,” Hampton Sides takes readers back to Captain James Cook’s third voyage, and in “The Work of Art,” Adam Moss interviews dozens of creative people to get at their methods of invention. Finally, in fiction, we have new novels from Claire Messud, R.O. Kwon, Allen Bratton and Elise Juska. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY
Claire Messud
Unfolding over seven decades and across the globe — from Algiers to Sydney and Buenos Aires — Messud’s elegant, affecting new novel is inspired by her family’s history, that of a French Algerian family buffeted by war and harboring a scandalous secret.
Credit...“Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one. … Messud manages to let time’s passage itself supply great feeling.”
From Joan Silber’s review
Norton | $29.99
FAT LEONARD:
How One Man Bribed, Bilked and Seduced the U.S. Navy
Craig Whitlock
In this masterly investigation, full of sex and consumption, the Washington Post reporter Whitlock draws on 10 years of research to show how Francis Leonard became a wealthy military contractor, making millions off the American taxpayer in one of the Navy’s worst corruption scandals in recent history.
Credit...“Whitlock’s book is a farce of the highest order, as richly stuffed as the liver of a foie gras goose. His reporting is astonishingly detailed.”
From Nicolas Niarchos’ review
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