ME, by Elton John. (St. Martin’s Griffin, 416 pp., $19.99.) “You can see a regular person becoming a star in real time,” Touré, our reviewer, wrote of this memoir about how Reginald Dwight became Elton John — from learning mental toughness by performing at a pub where fights broke out, to ending his engagement to a woman, to entering the clothing shop where he found his trademark outré fashion. The paperback edition has been updated with a new chapter.
CREATURES, by Crissy Van Meter. (Algonquin, 272 pp., $15.95.) It’s the night before Evie’s wedding and her fiancé may be lost at sea in this “vivid” debut novel whose island setting — a mix of “splendor and terror and rage,” as our reviewer, Laura van den Berg, put it — matches the “emotional ballast” of the heroine’s relationship with her “magnetic but reckless” father.
SLEEP DONATION, by Karen Russell. (Vintage, 160 pp., $16.) In this 2014 novella, Russell describes the hold of a deadly plague of insomnia on a futuristic America with “ ‘Twilight Zone’-like inventiveness” and the “brio of a natural fantasist” who has a knack for “blending the real and surreal, the psychological and the sci-fi,” according to the former Times critic Michiko Kakutani.
BORDER WARS: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration, by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear. (Simon & Schuster, 496 pp., $18.) This “exquisitely reported,” “scrupulously fair” account by two Times correspondents of the president’s policies toward immigrants, nativism and separating children from parents at the border, our reviewer, Joe Klein, argued, is “essential reading for those searching for the ‘beating heart’ of the Trump administration.”
10 MINUTES 38 SECONDS IN THIS STRANGE WORLD, by Elif Shafak. (Bloomsbury, 336 pp., $18.) The title of this “bold, subversive” novel shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize refers to the last moments of an Istanbul prostitute’s consciousness after her violent murder: “Leila’s heart has already stopped beating,” explained our reviewer, Julia Phillips, “but her thoughts sputter on.” Phillips called the work “a stunning portrait of a city, a society, a small community and a single soul.”
IMAGINARY FRIEND, by Stephen Chbosky. (Grand Central, 736 pp., $16.99.) “An ambitious tale narrated through multiple perspectives, mashing together horror, fairy tales and the (rewritten) Bible” is how our reviewer, Elizabeth Macneal, summed up this novel published 20 years after “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”
