NYT Books

Now unjustly overlooked, “The Ha-Ha” is the prizewinning first novel by Jennifer Dawson, an accomplished mid-20th-century chronicler of women and madness.

Learned, lively and often irreverent, David McWilliams’s “The History of Money” is rich with surprising details about currency, then and now.

Jean-Philippe Pleau’s book and play about moving up socially became a cultural reckoning in Quebec, but created a gulf with his family.

Andrew Miller’s novel “The Land in Winter,” a finalist for the Booker Prize, observes a world on the brink of cultural change.

In Britain, he sought to be “free not to have to puff some prince’s wedding / free to say up yours to Tony Blair.”

In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day.

A novelist and biographer, she was also a preservationist, and her meticulous investigations of houses, villages and cities revealed intricate histories.

From cradle to late life, the godmother of punk remembers it all — including, especially, her life with the late Fred “Sonic” Smith.

The second novel from Oyinkan Braithwaite, the breakout author of “My Sister, the Serial Killer,” offers a sweeping and sobering take on romantic fatalism.

In “Who Knows You by Heart,” a Black tech worker discovers that her company is hiding a terrible secret.