HEAVY: AN AMERICAN MEMOIR, by Kiese Laymon. (Scribner, $16.) Laymon’s profound memoir reflects on his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, and shows how his pursuit of excellence was a means to survive. Touching on everything from the racism he encountered to the physical and sexual abuse he endured, Laymon compares his childhood memories with how he feels in middle age, and offers a complex, nuanced portrayal of his mother.
CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX, by Jordy Rosenberg. (One World, $17.) Rosenberg’s novel is a heady romp through an 18th-century England awash in sex, crime and revolutionary ideas. When Dr. Voth, the principal narrator, finds a mysterious manuscript at a book sale, the novel expands to tell the story of Jack Sheppard and Bess Khan, notorious thieves and jailbreakers in London, and their high jinks.
FLY GIRLS: HOW FIVE DARING WOMEN DEFIED ALL ODDS AND MADE AVIATION HISTORY, by Keith O’Brien. (Mariner, $15.99.) Amelia Earhart wasn’t the only female pilot to take to the skies in the 1920s, this lively new account shows, but many have been overlooked. In addition to Earhart, the book focuses on Ruth Nichols, Louise Thaden, Ruth Elder and Florence Klingensmith. As O’Brien puts it, “Each of the women went missing in her own way.”
DO THIS FOR ME, by Eliza Kennedy. (Broadway, $16.) Raney Moore thought she had the perfect life. A lawyer at a top-flight Manhattan law firm, she is the mother of charming teenagers and happily married. But when she discovers her husband is having an affair, she torches their life together — canceling his credit cards, deleting his email account and shipping his belongings to his mother’s house — and must determine the future she wants for herself. It’s an exhilarating, if over-the-top, novel of divorce.
THE MARSHALL PLAN: DAWN OF THE COLD WAR, by Benn Steil. (Simon & Schuster, $20.) Steil, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, untangles the complicated politics that led to America’s intervention in Europe, and focuses on the debate over the continent’s economic future. Our reviewer, Timothy Naftali, praised the book’s handling of “a large cast of statesmen, spies and economists that perhaps only Dickens could have corralled with ease.”
A PLACE FOR US, by Fatima Farheen Mirza. (SJP for Hogarth, $17.) In this debut novel, an Indian Muslim family gathers for the eldest daughter’s wedding, and sets up a long-awaited reunion with an estranged sibling. Mirza’s book follows generations of the family as they navigate their lives in India and the United States, weathering racism, betrayals and crises of faith.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.