Sometimes books confirm our familiar sense of the world, and sometimes they disrupt it by transporting us to places we could never have encountered on our own. This week’s recommendations do the latter in spades, with close-up looks at worlds and stories most of us will never experience firsthand, from disastrous space missions to a military bribery scandal to daily life in the restrictive state of North Korea. In “The Wide Wide Sea,” Hampton Sides takes readers back to Captain James Cook’s third voyage, and in “The Work of Art,” Adam Moss interviews dozens of creative people to get at their methods of invention. Finally, in fiction, we have new novels from Claire Messud, R.O. Kwon, Allen Bratton and Elise Juska. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Unfolding over seven decades and across the globe — from Algiers to Sydney and Buenos Aires — Messud’s elegant, affecting new novel is inspired by her family’s history, that of a French Algerian family buffeted by war and harboring a scandalous secret.
In this masterly investigation, full of sex and consumption, the Washington Post reporter Whitlock draws on 10 years of research to show how Francis Leonard became a wealthy military contractor, making millions off the American taxpayer in one of the Navy’s worst corruption scandals in recent history.
Simon & Schuster | $32.50
As recounted in this history of the 1986 space shuttle disaster, the tragedy was a preventable lesson in hubris and human error. Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the players involved even as he focuses on the relentless string of snafus that plagued the mission from the start.
Bratton’s electric debut novel transforms Shakespeare into a modern, queer drama that’s as bawdy as it’s sharp. We follow a reimagined version of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, now envisioned as a gay party boy grappling with the trauma of ongoing abuse.
The Unnamed Press | $29
Two Korean American women — a married photographer and a ballet dancer — explore sadomasochism in a brief, poetic novel that lingers like a mysterious, multihued bruise. “Exhibit” is a highly sensory experience, awash in petals and colors, smells and flavors, that adds to the literature on a proclivity much discussed and often misunderstood.
Riverhead | $28
Sides tracks Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait of an explorer reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power.
North Korea’s daily existence has been largely shielded from Western eyes. But Zaidi, a self-taught photographer whose previous collection intimately documented the influence of gangs on life in El Salvador, was allowed rare access under rigid conditions that included the constant presence of state chaperones. Nevertheless, his images still manage to capture small, revelatory glimpses of daily life.
Kehrer Verlag | $50
Moss, the former editor of New York magazine, interviews nearly 50 people who make things — in a very broad sense of that phrase, encompassing everyone from artists and poets to cookbook writers and crossword designers — with a caseworker’s interest in what we feebly call “the creative process.”
Three former classmates, one 25th college reunion and a lingering pandemic later, Juska’s third novel makes its own contribution — a solid, thoughtful and wryly funny one — to the annals of friendship literature. Dwelling as it does on both the regrets and freedom of early middle age, “Reunion” might not be for everyone. But for a certain audience, this nostalgic, realistic novel squarely hits the mark.
