NYT Books

As Katie Rogers writes in “American Woman,” Jill Biden and other recent spouses are still locked in a role unlikely to change until the presidency does.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s “The American Daughters” tells the story of a powerful resistance coming from inside the house.

An overbearing mother; a vanished sister.

In “The Washington Book,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Carlos Lozada mines a genre known for sanitized prose to revealing effect.

A brooding biologist seeks transcendence in Martin MacInnes’s richly atmospheric, patiently unfurling novel “In Ascension.”

A German-born Jew who became a French writer and activist, he devoted his life to healing the divide between two historic enemies after the trauma of World War II.

In “Ferris,” a girl and her grandmother are visited by a friendly ghost; in Erin Entrada Kelly’s “The First State of Being,” a boy is visited by a time traveler.

Dwight Garner discusses a new oral history of the venerable alt-weekly, Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write.”

In Streisand’s new audiobook recording for her chatty, brick-size memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” the superlative diva adds a little freestyling.

In her new novel, “After Annie,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist shows how a family pieces itself back together after monumental loss.