Editor’s Choice
The Deportees and Other Stories, by Roddy Doyle, $24.95. Doyle’s dynamic first collection of short stories offers light and heartfelt perspectives on the effects of immigration on Irish culture. Doyle’s immense talent as a writer is neatly showcased throughout, and his sharp wit adds a richness to every tale. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story, by Kim Powers, $25. Fans of “In Cold Blood” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” will welcome this offbeat novel from Powers (“The History of Swimming”) about the odd relationship between Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Kirkus
Saturday’s Child, by Ray Banks, $25. Cal Innes is fresh out of prison and ducking a past muddied with ties to local gang lord “Uncle” Morris Tiernan. Some American readers may struggle a bit with Tiernan’s street dialect, but like Ken Bruen and Allan Guthrie, Banks is updating the noir novel with an original sensibility. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, by Craig Childs, $24.99. In these eloquent essays, naturalist and adventurer Childs (“House of Rain”) describes some of his extraordinary experiences with creatures — from wasps, red-spotted toads and hummingbirds to grizzly bears, coyotes and jaguars. Publishers Weekly
Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government, by Dana Milbank, $30. Mix one part freshman anthropology with nine parts Washington insider politics, and you get this caustic sendup of “Potomac Man.” Milbank knows where the fossils are buried and offers an entertaining field guide to the manners and misdeeds of the political species. Publishers Weekly
My Life as a Traitor, by Zarah Ghahramani, with Robert Hillman, $23. The second-year Iranian college student in 2001 knew that “making that speech meant trouble,” but she “had no real expectation of being kidnapped in the heart of Tehran and hustled off” to the notorious Evin Prison. Her straightforward style, elegant in its simplicity, has resonance and appeal. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
Killing Che, by Chuck Pfarrer, $15. In this ambitious, meticulous thriller, Pfarrer’s first novel, set in 1967, CIA officer Paul Hoyle travels to Bolivia to participate in an operation to eliminate the leftist revolutionary Che Guevara. As Hoyle descends deeper and deeper into a web of suspect alliances and unsavory types, he begins to have doubts about his mission. Publishers Weekly
First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller, $14.95. George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, entered Nagasaki on Sept. 6, 1945, four weeks after the atomic blast leveled the city. His dispatches were intercepted and buried, however, by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s censors. Publishers Weekly
Arlington Park, by Rachel Cusk, $14. In this devastating ensemble novel, Whitbread Award-winner Cusk (“Saving Agnes”) exposes the roiling inner lives and not-so-quiet desperation of young mothers in the well-to-do London suburb. Publishers Weekly
COMING UP
So Brave, Young, and Handsome, by Leif Enger, $24. From the author of “Peace Like a River” comes a story of an aging train robber on a quest to reconcile the claims of love and judgment on his life and the failed writer who goes with him. (March)
The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur, by Daoud Hari, $23. After escaping from the Darfur region in Sudan, the author returned six times over three years, leading Western journalists through the region. (March)
The Disagreement, by Nick Taylor, $26. In this piece of historical fiction, we follow the story of John Alan Muro, a Virginia medical student who must choose between family and ambition during the Civil War. (April)
