DIRECTORATE S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Steve Coll. (Penguin, $18.) Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, delves into the miscalculations that guided military campaigns in Afghanistan after 9/11. Washington’s strained relationships with the Afghan and Pakistani governments only exacerbated the problems, Coll writes in his excellent, engrossing account.
THE FRIEND, by Sigrid Nunez. (Riverhead, $16.) After the suicide of a friend, an unnamed writer living in a tiny apartment inherits his Great Dane. The arrival of the dog — whose size matches the despair she feels — helps allay her sorrow, and the book expands to include meditations on sex, mentorship and the writing life. Nunez’s charming novel won the National Book Award in 2018.
WE CROSSED A BRIDGE AND IT TREMBLED: Voices From Syria, by Wendy Pearlman. (Custom House/Morrow, $16.99.) Between 2012 and 2016, Pearlman visited Syrian refugees across the Middle East and Europe and collected their stories of the war. Translated and shaped into a narrative by Pearlman, the accounts are a formidablecontributionto the body of literature about this nearly-eight-year war.
TRENTON MAKES, by Tadzio Koelb. (Anchor, $16.95.) In 1940s New Jersey, a wife kills and dismembers her abusive husband, assumes his identity and carries on living as a man. To complete the transformation, “Abe” finds work in a factory, remarries and even manages to impregnate his new wife. Times reviewer William Giraldi called the book “a novel of bewitching ingenuity, one whose darkling, melodic mind conceives a world of ruin and awe, a sensibility cast in sepia or else in a pall of vying grays.”
WHO WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, by David Reich. (Vintage, $16.95.) The Harvard scientist uses information extracted from ancient DNA to explain new, and occasionally shocking, facts about our ancestors. The book reconstructs the histories of modern Europeans, Indians, Native Americans, East Asians and Africans, and later takes up the contentious subjects of race and identity.
HAPPINESS, by Aminatta Forna. (Grove, $16.) In London, a Ghanaian psychologist and an American studying the city’s foxes collide on a bridge, and their ensuing friendship is deepened by the private grief they each carry. As Times reviewer Melanie Finn put it, “Forna’s finely structured novel powerfully succeeds on a more intimate scale as its humane characters try to navigate scorching everyday cruelties.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.