WARLIGHT, by Michael Ondaatje. (Vintage, $16.95.) In this novel, set in post-World War II London, a couple leave their two teenagers in the care of a band of misfits, claiming to head overseas to work in Singapore. But when their mother returns alone, without their father, the children begin to question what they’ve been told. Later, the son discovers his mother was actually doing top-secret intelligence work, with lasting consequences for the family.
AIR TRAFFIC: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America, by Gregory Pardlo. (Vintage, $16.95.) Pardlo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, was one of the thousands of air traffic controllers fired in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan. The author examines the ramifications of the episode on his family’s legacy, then expands to consider questions of race, addiction and fatherhood.
TIN MAN, by Sarah Winman. (Putnam, $14.) In this slim, deeply affecting novel, a reprint of one of van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers paintings proves to be an emotional salve after the fracturing of a childhood friendship. As New York Times reviewer Gayle Forman wrote, “The slow build of emotion and the cascade of quiet, well-earned tears are testament to how rich this meditation on love, art, loss and redemption truly is.”
ON GRAND STRATEGY, by John Lewis Gaddis. (Penguin, $18.) Gaddis, a leading historian of the Cold War, draws on examples from the seminar he teaches at Yale, taking up the subject of wars — and how not to lose them. Times reviewer Victor Davis Hanson called the book “a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.”
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY, by Rachel Lyon. (Scribner, $17.) It’s 1990s Brooklyn, and Lu, an aspiring photographer, is at work on a series of hundreds of self-portraits. In the 400th, she unintentionally captures the image of her 9-year-old neighbor falling to his death in the background. The manner in which Lu, convinced that the photograph is her masterpiece, appropriates his death haunts her throughout the novel.
THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA: Love and Marriage in Mumbai, by Elizabeth Flock. (Harper Perennial, $17.99.) After moving to India, Flock, a U.S. journalist, was struck by many Indians’ approach to romance, what she saw as “a showy, imaginative kind of love.” Her book focuses on three couples, using their travails as a way to understand modern, middle-class Indian life.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.