6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week

Our reviewer described fire as an “unforgettable protagonist” in this book about the May 2016 conflagration in Fort McMurray, a Canadian town that was home to 40 percent of American oil imports. Vaillant’s moment-by-moment retelling of the disaster was one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2023.

Over the course of a few weeks, an unnamed mountain lion — a resident of the hills around Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign — eavesdrops on hikers’ conversations, mourns its former loves and flees from a fire. Hoke’s novel, which the lion narrates, is an “act of ravishing and outlandish imagination,” our reviewer wrote.

In 1980s Bonaparte, Ala., Dutchess Carson is one of five residents holding down what was once a thriving all-Black town. Meanwhile, her daughter and grandson make a life for themselves in tumultuous Philadelphia. Shifting through their perspectives and those of others, Mathis’s novel mirrors “the reality that every historical event inspires multiple, conflicting points of view,” our reviewer wrote.

Reading “at times like a screenplay for a crime procedural, at others like a horror film,” our reviewer wrote, Egan’s history recounts the rapid expansion of the K.K.K. across the Midwest in the 1920s and the gruesome murder of a woman that eventually undermined its then leader.

Louise is the final victim of a serial killer, cloned back to life by a shadowy government agency. As she returns to her family and re-evaluates the last few weeks of her alienated life, the “self-possessed wisecracking” of her narration, according to our reviewer, reveals itself as the humorous “defense mechanism of a lonely and disconnected soul.”

From nursing’s history as one of the world’s oldest professions to the importance of nurses to the Covid-19 pandemic response and to harm reduction, DiGregorio “reminds us that perhaps more than ever before, nursing is politics,” our reviewer wrote.