Editor’s Choice
The Size of the World, by Joan Silber, $23.95. War, love and culture shock take various forms, but the size of the world, in Silber’s magnificent fiction, is often no larger than the distance to the person in bed beside you. All six stories turn on the tensions between home, exile and otherness. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
The Franchise Babe, by Dan Jenkins, $24,95. In Jenkins’ outrageous sports satire (after “Slim and None”), middle-aged sportswriter Jack Brannon is sick of writing about Tiger Woods and the boring testosterone-charged PGA tour. So the swaggering Texan decides to check out the ladies of the LPGA. Publishers Weekly
Blood Colony, by Tananarive Due, $25. This profoundly moving third Blood book (after 2001’s “The Living Blood”), set in 2015, finds that beneath the seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East is another, secret war waged over the drug Glow, made from magical blood that can heal any illness and even bestow eternal life. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
The Monster of Florence: A True Story, by Douglas Preston, with Mario Spezi, $25.95. Meticulous account of the collaboration between U.S. thriller author Preston (“Blasphemy,” etc.) and Italian journalist Spezi to plumb a long-unsolved series of murders. A cautionary saga about how the criminal-justice system can spin out of control. Kirkus
Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier’s Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II, by Brendan I. Koerner, $26.95. Journalist Koerner recounts an obscure 1944 murder whose story is linked to the building of the Ledo Road, a massive and ultimately useless American project that linked India to Chinese forces. Koerner’s engrossing story illuminates one of WWII’s fiascos, as well as the disgraceful treatment of black soldiers during that era. Publishers Weekly
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — And Why, by Amanda Ripley, $24.95. Ripley, an award-winning writer on homeland security for Time, offers a compelling look at instinct and disaster response as she explores the psychology of fear and how it can save or destroy us. Ripley’s analysis of the psychology, alongside survivors’ accounts, makes for gripping reading. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, $13.95. It should not come as a surprise that Florence and Edward, newlyweds who cannot discuss their previous sexual experiences (or lack thereof), do not communicate out loud with each other until all their emotions boil over at the conclusion of the first night of their honeymoon. Publishers Weekly
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, by David Talbot, $15. Talbot, the founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon, has written a fast-paced narrative of Kennedy’s search for his brother’s killers. He is careful to sidestep questions of who was actually responsible for the assassination. He dismisses the lone-gunman theory as a crock and wonders about the CIA, Cuba and Mafia involvement. Washington Post
The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown, $15.95. Diana’s tragicomedy is Shakespearean in scale, with its slippery royal machinations, its agonized ironies, its seething jealousies and heartbreaking inevitability. Brown is no Shakespeare. But she gives us a walloping good read. Washington Post
COMING UP
The Development, by John Barth, $23. Barth’s comic and humane collection of linked stories centers on surprising developments in a gated community. (October)
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan, $30. Morgan, Ginsberg’s longtime archivist, has gathered together what he considers the best of the poet’s correspondence with the likes of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, among others. (September)
