Recent titles of interest:
THE EVENING AND THE MORNING, by Ken Follett. (Viking, $36.) The latest entry in Follett’s Kingsbridge series, a prequel to his best-selling “The Pillars of the Earth,” weaves multiple narrative strands into a story of Europe just before the Middle Ages.
CUBED: The Puzzle of Us All, by Erno Rubik. (Flatiron, $25.99.) The inventor of the Rubik’s Cube describes his creative process, which emphasizes perpetual curiosity and a willingness to make mistakes, and recalls the unexpected success of the toy he designed for his own amusement.
OUR MALADY: Lessons in Liberty From a Hospital Diary, by Timothy Snyder. (Crown, paper, $12.) After undergoing emergency surgery at the end of last year, Snyder began to reflect on the critical need for health — and health care — in a free society, a lesson that holds new urgency in the face of our current pandemic.
THE DISCOMFORT OF EVENING, by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. Translated by Michele Hutchison. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Rijneveld’s debut novel, which won the 2020 International Booker Prize, centers on a dreamy girl growing up in straitened circumstances on a Dutch farm.
THE DEEPEST SOUTH OF ALL: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi, by Richard Grant. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) An entertaining tour of a complex Mississippi town built on slavery and defined today by a handful of eccentric characters.
What we’re reading:
Times are tough all around. So why not imagine a world where a giant asteroid landed on the Eastern United States in the 1950s, prompting an earlier space race to get to the moon and Mars much faster than we’ve managed in our timeline? That’s what Mary Robinette Kowal does in her “Lady Astronaut” series. Starting with THE CALCULATING STARS, which won a Hugo Award for science fiction writing, the story is told through the eyes of Elma York, a pilot and mathemagician who becomes the first of the “lady astronauts.” Elma’s dry wit and assortment of talents help her tackle a variety of problems: overcoming sexism in the astronaut corps; contending with a bit of impostor syndrome; and, even fixing a clog in the darned spaceship toilet. Kowal is an excellent writer — she’s written for us in Science Times — and she researches the heck out of the details, making her series both accessible to the casual sci-fi reader and believable to the space enthusiast.
—Michael Roston, senior staff editor, Science
