6 Paperbacks to Read This Week

This best-selling novel follows two friends, Sam and Sadie, as they design a video game that rockets them to fame. Readers who are unfamiliar with the world of gaming, our reviewer concluded, “will wonder what took them so long to recognize in video games the beauty and drama and pain of human creation.”

Hull, a fifth-generation Floridian, shows Central Florida’s rapid change from rural land dense with orange groves to the world of Disney and tourism through the prism of her own life. As she animates her “muggy, buggy, sun-beaten setting,” Carl Hiaasen wrote in his review, “she has that sly eye for sublime details.”

This riveting novel, about the love between a Sámi reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter, is set in 19th-century Scandinavia as geopolitical shifts and the Lutheran Church’s “civilizing” attempts clash with the Sámi people’s nomadic lifestyle.

Akorfa and Selasi are born on the same day in Ghana. When Selasi loses her parents, Akorfa’s family takes her in but treats her like a servant, the beginning of widely divergent paths. “It is only through the meeting of their perspectives that the two women are finally able to find some measure of freedom,” our reviewer noted.

A poet delves into Mozart’s music and influences, from his charged relationship with his father to his frustrations with Parisian social life. According to our reviewer, Mackie “presents Mozart as a kinetically restless, socially observant musician constantly in dialogue with his culture.”

Oliva, who translates for asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, writes that “the work of the translator” is “to meet people where they are, on either side, and bring their meanings to meet in the middle.”