NYT Books

“True Nature,” a new biography, chronicles the many lives and pursuits of the writer Peter Matthiessen.

Adam Johnson’s new novel focuses on two radically different island communities.

Megha Majumdar’s new novel follows two disastrously entangled lives in a famine-ridden future.

In “The Wounded Generation” and “1942,” the historians David Nasaw and Peter Fritzsche show how civilians struggled with the long tail of the war.

Gabrielle Hamilton’s new memoir, “Next of Kin,” lacks the visceral shock and searing vision of her prior work.

In “The Unveiling,” a tortured film location scout is haunted by a traumatic past and a supernatural present.

The devil, Prada-clad or not, stays on the periphery of Caroline Palmer’s “Workhorse,” a novel about an ambitious assistant at a Vogue-like publication.

In “Splendid Liberators,” Joe Jackson presents the U.S. wars in Cuba and the Philippines as part of a misguided project to spread freedom across the world.

“Minor Black Figures” encompasses race, class, religion and art, but at its heart it’s really about “what happens when you encounter a priest at a bar one hazy summer night in New York.”

In “The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus,” Matthew Restall explores the seemingly immortal reputation of one of history’s most projected-on figures.