A first-person narrator from a small Black community near Los Angeles stands before the Supreme Court and reflects on the chain of incidents that led him there, including provocative attempts to respond to historic racial injustice in his hometown.

An aging and famous former movie star commissions a single, final interview with a relatively unknown journalist, using that conversation to recount her life and relationships.

Set around wartime conflict in Ethiopia, the book follows characters caught up in the pressures of invasion and resistance. Its central orientation is toward people’s inner responses to violence and the ways ordinary lives and loyalties are tested by war.

A newly placed woman at a secluded country house confronts eerie, inexplicable phenomena tied to the home’s past while she navigates grief, social scrutiny, and household secrets. The book sets up a slow-building collision between domestic routine and uncanny intrusions that heighten psychological strain.

Journalistic nonfiction that documents a contemporary, human-caused mass extinction by surveying past mass die-offs, profiling particular species losses, and reporting from scientific sites and researchers.

A firsthand account of encounters with octopuses that uses field observation and scientific context to investigate octopus behavior and signs of consciousness. The book links specific animal interactions to accessible explanations from marine biology to consider how octopuses think, sense, and relate to humans.

An author convalescing with a chronic illness observes and cares for a wild snail that becomes a daily companion. The book records close, patient attention to the snail’s behavior and anatomy while using that relationship to reflect on bodily experience, time, and recovery.

An anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole embedded in the South Vietnamese army, recounts life after the fall of Saigon while living among a South Vietnamese exile community in the United States.

A live-in nanny takes a job at a remote, high-tech Scottish house and later finds herself accused of a murder that occurred there.