Editor’s Choice
A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carre, $28. Government knaves and compromised idealists duel over the fate of an alleged terrorist in le Carre’s latest examination of The Way We Spy Now. Le Carre (“The Mission Song,” etc.), without lecturing, puts human faces and human costs on the paranoid response to the threat of terrorism. Kirkus
FICTION
A Country Called Home, Kim Barnes, $23.95. A newly married couple abandon the comfort of upper-class Connecticut and stake their claim in 1960s Fife, Idaho, in Pulitzer finalist Barnes’ novel. Barnes’ descriptions of the rugged landscape are vivid, and the characters’ sadness and desires are revealed with wrenching detail. Publishers Weekly
The Ghost in Love, by Jonathan Carroll, $25. Death is not the end but rather the start of a series of madcap and sometimes moving adventures for characters in this spry novel about the un-afterlife. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
Searching for Schindler, by Thomas Keneally, $25. Keneally chronicles the conception, birth and rich afterlife of his most celebrated work. The author is a genial, unaffected companion in this leisurely voyage around “Schindler’s List” (1982), which began with a broken briefcase in California. An essential companion to the original novel. Kirkus
The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War, by Asne Seierstad, $25.95. In this searing journey through a traumatized Chechnya, two children orphaned by the civil war — Timur, a violent street urchin, and his sister Liana, a waif molested by her uncle who becomes a kleptomaniac — symbolize their country’s agony, abandonment and lingering dysfunctions. Publishers Weekly
Bumping Into Geniuses: Inside the Rock and Roll Business, by Danny Goldberg, $26. Goldberg has been CEO of several record companies, managed the careers of Nirvana, the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth, and produced various television programs and rock documentaries. This is a guy with an entire cocktail party’s worth of stories to tell, and here he shares reminiscences about such performers as Bruce Springsteen, Kiss and Led Zeppelin. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World, by Jessica Snyder Sachs, $14. Chapter and verse on the bugs that outnumber, outwit and no doubt will outlast us. The good news is that for the most part these bugs, a.k.a. bacteria, help or at least do no harm … basically the message is, “Get over it! Learn to live and let live in a natural balance.” Kirkus
The Quiet Girl, by Peter Høeg, $15. Høeg built his best-selling mystery, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” around the science of ice. In this labyrinthine, intellectual thriller, Høeg focuses on the nature of sound, and in particular the music of Bach. Publishers Weekly
Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, $22. Award-winning Norwegian novelist Petterson renders the meditations of Trond Sander, a man nearing 70, dwelling in self-imposed exile at the edge of Norway in a primitive cabin. Petterson coaxes out of Trond’s reticent, deliberate narration a story as vast as the Norwegian tundra. Publishers Weekly
COMING UP
The Women, by T.C. Boyle, $27.95. Having brought to life eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in “The Road to Wellville” and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in “The Inner Circle,” Boyle now turns his fictional sights on an even more colorful and outlandish character: Frank Lloyd Wright. (February)
