Three of our recommended books this week show characters grappling with tumultuous change well after they might have assumed their life paths were settled: Lucy Sante’s “I Heard Her Call My Name” is a memoir of her gender transition as she approached her 70s, while Roxana Robinson’s novel “Leaving” is an operatic story of late-life romance and Anna Quindlen’s novel “After Annie” shows a widower and two other characters coping with profound and sudden grief.
We also recommend a powerful Holocaust memoir and the history of a segregated mental hospital in Jim Crow Maryland; in fiction, our picks include a surreal adventure about a struggling writer, an audacious Australian satire about the clash between modernity and Indigenous culture, an uncanny story collection and a charming do-it-yourself mystery that lets the reader sift through clues alongside the heroine. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Sante, who for decades has been a leading literary and cultural critic, here traces her late-in-life gender transition, reflecting on a career of seeking truths through writing while hiding an important truth about herself. The book vividly presents New York in the 1970s and documents a transformation both internal and external.
In this novel of small moments and momentous grief, Quindlen shows how a family pieces itself together after shattering loss. Perspective shifts among three characters — the husband, the eldest daughter and the best friend of a woman, Annie, who dies suddenly, leaving loved ones reeling.
Random House | $30
In this transcendent Holocaust memoir by a journalist and poet internee (translated by Paul Olchváry), the details of the camp and its horrors are rendered so precisely that any critical distance collapses. Debreczeni’s account was published in 1950 and lay obscure for decades due to Cold War politics.
Little, Brown | $30
A modern take on the epistolary novel, this riveting thriller lets readers sift through texts, emails and WhatsApp messages alongside a true-crime journalist in an effort to discover the real story behind a series of occult deaths years before.
Hylton spent a decade researching the history of Crownsville, a segregated mental hospital that operated in Maryland for 91 years. The result is not just a work of painstaking reporting, but a deeply human, often tragic story of an American failure to care for Black minds and bodies.
Legacy | $30
Waidner’s latest explores class and privilege alongside a heaping dose of the surreal. The novel follows a struggling writer who, to track down a literary prize, goes on an otherworldly adventure involving wormholes, mutants, reality television and more.
Graywolf | Paperback, $16
LEAVING
Roxana Robinson
This elegant love story follows two 60-year-olds who rekindle an old romance after a serendipitous reunion at the opera. There’s a problem, though: One of them is married.
Norton | $28.99
This bracing satire of clashing worldviews in Australia begins with a toxic haze settling over an Aboriginal town, where one resident believes he can fight climate change by replacing conventional transport with hordes of donkeys. The novel only gets stranger and funnier from there.
New Directions | Paperback, $22.95
An eerie mix of the familiar and unreal, this story collection written by a Bolivian writer (and translated by Chris Andrews) moves between genres like horror and cyberpunk, with stories set in prehistoric caves and peasant villages but also featuring nuclear power and interstellar travel.
New Directions | Paperback, $14.95
