Editor’s Choice
Winter in Madrid, by C.J. Sansom, $25.95. The playing fields of Rookwood did little to prepare reluctant spy Harry Brett for the moral no man’s land of post-Civil War Spain that awaits him in this cinematic historical thriller from British author Sansom (“Sovereign”). Publishers Weekly
FICTION
The Age of Shiva, by Manil Suri, $24.95. The second novel from Suri (“The Death of Vishnu”) follows Meera Sawhney from her unhappy 1950s marriage to aspiring singer Dev Arora through to her own son’s coming-of-age. Suri’s vivid portrait of a woman in post-independence India engages timeless themes of self-determination. Kirkus
The Senator’s Wife, by Sue Miller, $24.95. How loyalty and betrayal occur within marriage and within friendship are the central but not only questions raised in this quietly provocative domestic novel from Miller (“Lost in the Forest”). Kirkus
NONFICTION
House Lust: America’s Obsession With Our Homes, by Daniel McGinn, $24.95. The book does not offer much analysis of economic or sociological factors, but its peripatetic author captures the pride and the anguish of those whose stories he tells. A highly readable pastiche of anecdotes that constitutes a snapshot album of 21st-century American life. Kirkus
How the South Could Have Won the Civil War: The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat, Bevin Alexander, $25.95. The Stars and Bars might yet wave, if only someone could have convinced Robert E. Lee not to attempt all those frontal assaults on heavily defended positions. … Alexander wonders why the Confederates did not move on Washington after the rout that was First Manassas, a tactic that could have ended the war. Kirkus
The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine, by Anne Harrington, $25.95. Harrington uses case studies and stories of healings to show how deeply embedded the idea of positive mental health is in the quest for physical health, as well as the ways that contemporary medicine has incorporated a focus on mind-body healing into its black bag. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACK
House of Meetings, by Martin Amis, $14. “House of Meetings” is a powerful, unrelenting and deeply affecting performance, a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.The New York Times
News of a Kidnapping, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; translated by Edit Grossman, $14.95. Garca Marquez, Latin America’s Nobel prize-winning novelist, turns his hand for the first time to nonfiction to explain, through one individual’s experience, the widespread kidnapping in Colombia. Library Journal
Mothers and Sons, by Colm Toibin, $14. The mothers and sons in Toibin’s superlative first collection resist the changes wrought by transformative events. With precise and poignant detail, Toibin, twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for “The Blackwater Lightship” and “The Master”), reveals how they try to normalize their respective situations. Library Journal
COMING UP
The German Bride, by Joanna Hershon, $24.95. From the author of “Swimming” comes a novel about a woman who leaves Germany in the mid-19th century and makes a new life for herself in the American frontier. (March)
Golda, by Elinor Burkett, $27.95. Burkett looks beyond the accomplishments of Golda Meir, the late Israeli leader, to the personal and contradictory sides of the legendary woman. (May)
