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The tropes may be familiar in these romance novels — fake dating, falling for a celebrity — but the books themselves are fresh and beguiling.

“Girls and Their Monsters,” by Audrey Clare Farley, recounts the tragic story of the Genain sisters, seeing the subjects at the crossroads of psychiatric and societal forces.

The writer Itamar Vieira Junior says that to “feel the intensity of life on the streets of Salvador” in Bahia, Brazil, a reader must start with Jorge Amado.

A selection of recently published books.

Looking to a maestro on the mound to improve your writing game.

The author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” he was known for sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in his native Czechoslovakia.

Her new collection, “Onlookers,” is about shattered certainties in the wake of quarantine, growth and unrest.

In “When Crack Was King,” Donovan X. Ramsey offers a fresh history of the epidemic that gripped minority communities, inflamed media coverage and led to draconian drug laws.

In Sarah Rose Etter’s novel “Ripe,” a 30-something writes marketing copy by day, but spends her nights diving deep into the void.

In “The Parrot and the Igloo,” the novelist and journalist David Lipsky spins top-flight climate literature into cliffhanger entertainment.