6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week

On the cusp of Sri Lanka’s civil war, Sashi’s community endures brutal state repression. As her brothers join the militant Tamil Tigers, Sashi’s shifting relationship to violence shows, “with meticulous accuracy, what it feels like to inhabit a day-to-day life onto which someone else, from the privilege of great distance, can throw a word like ‘terrorism’ and be done,” our reviewer wrote.

Expanding on a 2019 article reframing a stutter as something people live with rather than “beat,” a journalist offers his own experiences and those of his interviewees to trace “an arc from frustration and isolation to acceptance and community,” our critic Jennifer Szalai wrote in her review.

In 1976 West Mills, N.C., someone murders the three Harmon siblings, who are Black, in their home. After the authorities do little to solve the crime, the town’s suspicion falls on the Harmons’ half brother, Lymp. But Lymp’s girlfriend, Jo, is determined to prove his innocence, and she begins to unwind the threads of both the murder and the town’s long-hidden histories.

Greenberg outlines several cryptocurrency schemes — like a dark web narcotics market founded by the elusive “Dread Pirate Roberts” and the theft of over $20 billion in Bitcoin — and the investigators who brought them to light.

When she was a struggling literary assistant, Em’s friends — Emily, a theater director, and Lucy, a novelist — kept her afloat; together the three women navigated the art world of 1990s New York. Years later, now a book editor, Em reflects “on the ways that friendship of a certain vintage can deepen — or atrophy — over the years,” our reviewer wrote.

“Tell each other how We sang/To Keep the Dark away,” ends the Emily Dickinson poem from which Pace gets the title of this collection, which explores gender, sexuality and liberation.