NYT Books

Kelsey Norris’s “House Gone Quiet” and Justin C. Key’s “The World Wasn’t Ready for You” share an interest in the ways that being bound shapes our understanding of freedom.

Adam Thirlwell’s “The Future Future” follows a 19-year-old socialite through a prerevolutionary Paris that looks suspiciously like our present day.

“I Love Russia,” a collection of Elena Kostyuchenko’s reporting over the past 15 years, captures the lives of ordinary, often struggling, people in far-flung parts of the country.

In “The Lumumba Plot,” the Foreign Affairs editor Stuart A. Reid asks whether the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in the death of one of Africa’s most famous post-colonial politicians.

Fuchsia Dunlop’s “Invitation to a Banquet” is a cultural investigation of an impossibly broad and often misunderstood cuisine.

In “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts,” Gregg Hecimovich pieces together the story of a woman who fled slavery, and whose manuscript was lost for more than 150 years.

In Rupert Thomson’s new novel, “Dartmouth Park,” the sound of a mundane beep triggers in one man what may be either a revelatory metaphysical journey or a bout of male existential angst.

In “I Must Be Dreaming,” the cartoonist serves up nutty nocturnal admissions, considers theories of sleep and, yes, imagines losing her teeth.

Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel” and Heather Cox Richardson’s “Democracy Awakening” follow plots against America hatched by homegrown autocrats.

Clever and dexterous, his writing delights in puzzles, puns and lepidoptera. Here’s where to start. (There’s so much more than “Lolita.”)