Editor’sChoice
Into the Beautiful North, by Luis Alberto Urrea, $24.99. “Perhaps it is time for a new kind of femininity,” declares Nayeli, the 19-year-old heroine of this engaging postglobalization immigration story from the author of “The Hummingbird’s Daughter.” Nayeli decides to journey north herself, not to seek her fortune in “Los Yunaites” but to bring back some of the men who have abandoned their families and their country, thereby saving her beloved town. Library Journal
FICTION
The Dark Horse, by Craig Johnson, $24.95. In Johnson’s superb fifth contemporary mystery to feature Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire (after 2008’s “Another Man’s Moccasins”), Walt has his doubts about Mary Barsad’s guilt when she confesses to shooting her husband, Wade, after Wade allegedly burned down their barn with all Mary’s horses inside. Publishers Weekly
Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga, $24. This short story collection, teeming with life in the small Indian city of Kittur between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991, serves as a prelude to Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning “The White Tiger.” Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
Renegade: The Making of a President, by Richard Wolffe, $26. “Renegade” stakes an audacious claim to its own importance and largely lives up to it. The book is clear, concise and well written, effectively retelling a story that still astonishes us, even after we all lived through it. Washington Post
American Passage: The History of Ellis Island, by Vincent J. Cannato, $27.99. A sweeping history of “the place where the United States worked out its extraordinary national debate over immigration for over three decades.” Telling details illuminate the vastness of the immigrant experience. So many people came through Ellis Island in 1906, for example, that “it witnessed 327 deaths, 18 births, 2 suicides, and 508 marriages.”Ambitious in scope and rooted in solid storytelling. Kirkus
The Rise and Fall of Communism, by Archie Brown, $35.99. Essential history of a multifaceted political movement that ended in tears in many places — but endures in many others. There are few people more qualified than Brown to write authoritatively on the communist states of the world; during a 40-year career he has studied in most of the principal powers. Kirkus
PAPERBACKS
Yesterday’s Weather, by Anne Enright, $14. The Man Booker Prize-winning Irish writer’s new work is a beguiling collection of 31 short stories. Love — of partners, children, friends, siblings, the afflicted — is the hallmark of this group of rich, often short vignettes. Kirkus
The Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago, by Simon Baatz, $15.99. Historian Baatz replays the crime (on which Meyer Levina’s 1956 novel “Compulsion” was based) from the killers’ point of view, detailing their intense, often sexual, relationship that culminated in the murder. But they left a crucial piece of evidence and eventually confessed to the murder. Publishers Weekly
Pope Joan, by Donna Woolfolk Cross, $15. Cross makes an excellent, entertaining case in her work of historical fiction that, in the Dark Ages, a woman sat on the papal throne for two years. In this colorful, richly imagined novel, Cross ably inspires a suspension of disbelief, pulling off the improbable feat of writing a romance starring a pregnant pope. Publishers Weekly
