As a kayaker, I may be more receptive than some readers to a good seafaring tale, but really: What’s not to love? From “Kidnapped” to “Moby-Dick” to “The Perfect Storm” to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, authors have repeatedly proved that the high stakes and narrow confines of adventure and disaster at sea make for riveting narratives.
To that list we can now add David Grann’s new history, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,” about the disputed circumstances surrounding the fate of an 18th-century British warship. The book’s account of the routine onboard hardships that sailors faced even on successful journeys is a marvel — dare I say that Grann’s sense of detail is granular? — and will make you grateful to be reading it on dry land.
We also recommend a new poetry collection this week, Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Tanya,” along with a bounty of new fiction from Catherine Lacey, Han Kang, Peter Robinson and more. In nonfiction, besides “The Wager” we recommend a new history of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s Midwest and a study of one of the great roles in theater, Tennessee Williams’s enduring character Blanche DuBois. Happy reading.
—Gregory Cowles
After the H.M.S. Wager, a British man-of-war, was shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia in 1742, surviving crew members returned to England with dramatic — and starkly conflicting — tales about what had transpired. Grann recreates the voyage in all its enthralling horror.
Doubleday | $30
In this novel, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, Han’s unnamed narrator loses the ability to speak after the death of her mother and the loss of her son in a custody battle. She decides to take a course in ancient Greek to see what might be possible in a language other than her native Korean.
The 28th and final Inspector Banks novel from Robinson, who was one of the finest police procedural writers around before his death in October, is a complex and sly tale involving a young girl’s murder, the Yorkshire Ripper and a long-buried body.
Morrow | $30
Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through a fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene. The America of this novel is recognizable but barely, divided into territories that are attempting a difficult reconciliation.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $28
Huang’s debut novel uses the tools of both horror and satire to examine our obsession with self-improvement. The novel follows a piano prodigy who, after a tragedy, begins working at a glamorous beauty brand. But the shine of the company masks an unsettling reality.
Dutton | $27
Published in Germany in 2021 and translated here by Jon Cho-Polizzi, Otoo’s novel mixes and remixes the human spirits of four different Adas — from 15th-century Ghana to Victorian England to a German concentration camp to present-day Berlin — in a thorny treatise on systemic oppression
Riverhead | $27
This brisk and powerful book tells the story of the Klan’s expansion across the American Midwest of the 1920s, its chokehold on civic life and political power, and its ultimate collapse.
Blanche DuBois, the self-deluding Southern belle at the heart of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” is one of the plum parts in all of show business. This lean but graceful book gives Tennessee Williams’s most indelible character her due.
Harper/HarperCollins | $30
Shaughnessy’s latest collection filters love, absence and loss through a philosophical lens; in these poems, the self is fluid and love is “timelessness itself.”
