EDITOR’S CHOICE
Agnes and The Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer
Crusie and Mayer have crafted a bubbly novel with enough convenient coincidences, caricatured characters and ridiculous situations to make screenwriters of goofball date movies proud.|Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Patriot Acts by Greg Rucka, $25|Rucka expertly blends intense shoot-’em-up scenes with biting political commentary to uncover just how high a conspiracy reaches within the U.S. government.|Publishers Weekly
Hotel de Dream by Edmund White, $23.95|White’s latest imagines the final days of the poet and novelist Stephen Crane (“The Red Badge of Courage”), who died of TB at age 28 in 1900|Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin, $27.95|It’s not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women. New Yorker legal writer Toobin surveys the court from the Reagan era onward|Publishers Weekly
Walking the Gobi: 1,600 Mile-trek Across a Desert of Hope and Despair by Helen Thayer, $23.95|Thayer (“Polar Dream”) is a sure and steady guide; this harrowing travelogue reads like a nail-biting adventure, sure to enthrall fans of Jon Krakauer and Bill Bryson.|Publishers Weekly
No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945 by Norman Davies, $30|The war was not a simple victory of good over evil, (Davies) contends, but the defeat of one totalitarian state, Nazi Germany, by another, the Soviet Union, whose crimes were just as vast, if less diabolical. |Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
Bliss by O.Z. Livaneli, $13.95|Turkey’s wildly disparate and clashing cultures, from isolated Muslim fundamentalism to jaded secularism, collide in this romantic yet clear-eyed translation from a noted Turkish composer and politician, now a member of that country’s Parliament.|Kirkus
One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson, $13.99 |In the past Atkinson has played the minor time trick of letting events almost converge and then replaying them from slightly different points of view. She does that here to the same smart, unnerving effect.|The New York Times
The Family That Couldn’t Sleep by D.T. Max, $15.95|In this gripping, cannily plotted and elegantly educational book, D. T. Max shows us what happens when the insomnia isn’t ordinary and doesn’t end, no matter how aggressive the medical intervention or generous the sedative prescription…the book brims with great tales, some tragic, others cautionary. |The New York Times
COMING UP
DECEMBER
T Is for Trespass by Sue Grafton, $26.95|Beginning slowly with the day-to-day life of a private eye, Grafton suddenly shifts from the voice of Kinsey Millhone to that of Solana Rojas, introducing readers to a chilling sociopath.
OCTOB ER
The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman, $25.95 |Krugman, economist and left-leaning columnist for The New York Times, examines the past 80 years of U.S. history.
OCTOBER
The Ghost by Robert Harris, $26|The author of such novels as “Pompeii” and “Imperium” is back with a story that centers on Britain’s longest-serving prime minister and his effort to use a ghoshwriter to write his memoirs.
