We bring you a true grab bag of recommended books this week, united by little besides excellence and interest. There’s a wildlife memoir and a family history and the collected diaries of a celebrated Australian writer; there’s a supremely topical book about companies doing business in modern Russia. And in fiction, there’s a new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and a Canadian debut about a road trip gone very wrong. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
RAISING HARE:
Chloe Dalton
During the Covid pandemic, Dalton — a British writer and political adviser with foreign policy expertise — stumbled across an abandoned newborn brown hare, or leveret, in the English countryside and decided to raise it herself despite knowing nothing about hares (or their smaller domesticated cousin, the rabbit). Her sweet memoir, accompanied by naturalistic illustrations, describes how that choice changed her outlook on life during the pandemic and beyond.
THE PASSENGER SEAT
Vijay Khuran
Khurana’s unsettling and powerful debut novel follows two teenagers on the fragile cusp of manhood in a Canadian border town, who set off on a turbulent road trip with a loaded gun in tow. The precise, subtle narration roves freely between both boys to plumb their rich interior lives.
DREAM COUNT
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie’s first novel since 2013 — when she won a National Book Critics Circle Award for “Americanah” — draws on a notorious real-life sexual assault case; the circuitous narrative follows the lives of three Nigerian women and one of their former housekeepers, paying close attention to hierarchies of language and the reality of women’s bodies.
HOW TO END A STORY:
Helen Garner
In this barbell-weight book gathering three volumes of Garner’s diaries from 1978 to 1998, beginning in her mid-30s, the Australian novelist and story writer ruthlessly expresses late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others, as she tracks the fluctuating fortunes of her romantic and professional lives.
ZERO SUM:
The Arc of International Business in Russia
Charles Hecker
As the Trump administration pushes for renewed business ties with Russia, this book by a former reporter for The Moscow Times (who went on to work as a geopolitical risk consultant advising Americans and Europeans investing in Russia) looks back at the companies that helped prop up illiberalism there after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
THE TROUBLE OF COLOR:
Martha S. Jones
Using her own family history as a prism, Jones — a historian and legal scholar — offers a sophisticated analysis of race in America while implicitly arguing for the centrality of Black women scholars in the historical profession. As she traces her family in the archives, identifying various errors and erasures along the way, Jones shows how Black women’s history is vital for those who want to honor the generations of Black people who paved the way for our current achievements.
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