A best-selling author and mother of five wakes up from surgery to remove a brain tumor and needs to be reminded, again and again, how she has arrived at this point. Kinsella’s autobiographical novella is both devastating and, against all odds, devastatingly funny.

After a poorly planned abduction upends the lives of several young characters in a rural Irish town, Barrett shifts gracefully between the kidnappee, who’s being held in a basement by two unstable brothers, and his intrepid girlfriend, who sets out to find him.

In her latest historical novel, Hannah shows the Vietnam War through the eyes of a combat nurse. But what the former debutante witnesses and experiences when she comes home from the war is the true gut punch of this timely story.

The Mexican writer Enrigue recasts the fateful meeting between Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs in this hallucinatory novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Moctezuma is fearsome yet depressed, often tripping on magic mushrooms, while the conquistadors grow increasingly anxious.

A story about losing love and losing in baseball and finding unexpected love despite all your mistakes, this story cuts to the heart of what it means to be human (and also, there’s soup).

This history stretches from Hussein’s earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, tracking the dictator’s state of mind with the help of 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein “recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon,” Coll says.

This memoir by a former public relations operative for the wealthy and the corrupt is greasy fun — stocked with scoundrels, cocktails and guns, and showing off the charm and quick wit that catapulted Elwood to the top of the sleazy, amoral world of high-end spin.

A striking debut by a young critic who has been heralded as a throwback to an era of livelier discourse. Rothfeld has published widely and works currently as a nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post; her interests range far, but these essays are united by a plea for more excess in all things, especially thought.

In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Haidt took a hard stand against helicopter parenting. In this pugnacious follow-up, he turns to what he sees as technology’s dangers for young people. Haidt, a digital absolutist, cedes no ground on the issue of social media.

Garten’s gift has been to make everything look effortless: the recipes in her 13 cookbooks; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa; the many occasions when she’s advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network. In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys.

In his latest book, the Harvard scholar shows how African American writers have used the written word to shape their reality despite constraints imposed on them from outside, using the metaphor of the box to reflect ordeals withstood and survived since Africans were first brought to this continent.

The farm Robertson’s grandparents owned in Promise Land, Tenn., a town founded by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, serves as the springboard for this sensitive, often deeply personal exploration of utopianism in Black American thought and life.