It's holiday shopping season _ but don't forget to pick up a paperback for yourself! Here's a half-dozen freshly published possibilities.
"The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale" by James Atlas (Vintage, $19). Atlas, who has written acclaimed books about Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, immerses us here in the life of the biographer, and the obsessions that develop thereof. The story of his dogged pursuit of Bellow, wrote The Guardian in a review, is "an inspiration for compulsive biographers everywhere."
"Freshwater" by Akwaeke Emezi (Grove Atlantic, $16). "Potent and moving, knowing and strange, this is a powerful and irresistibly unsettling debut," wrote Seattle Times reviewer David Wright of this novel, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Set both in southern Nigeria and in a realm of gods and demons, it's a unique coming-of-age story. The paperback includes a new essay by the author, "Writing Into the Unknown."
"Everything Under" by Daisy Johnson (Graywolf Press, $16). Johnson's debut was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; she's also the author of the acclaimed short-story collection "Fen." "Everything Under" is a retelling of "Oedipus Rex," set in the community of people who live in boats along the canals of Oxford. Kirkus Reviews called it "a tense, startling book of true beauty and insight."
"The Music Shop" by Rachel Joyce (Random House, $17). This novel, by the best-selling author of "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry," is "an unabashedly sentimental tribute to the healing power of great songs," wrote The Washington Post's reviewer, adding that it "captures the sheer, transformative joy of romance." Taking place in 1988, it's set in a music shop (vinyl only), whose proprietor has a magical way of finding just the right piece of music for each of his customers.
"The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State" by Nadia Murad (Tim Duggan Books, $16). Murad, winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, tells her story in this acclaimed memoir: the massacre of her northern Iraqi village by Islamic State militants and her subsequent kidnapping at the age of 21, in which she was held captive, raped and forced into the ISIS slave trade. Finally escaping, she now works with barrister Amal Clooney (who wrote the book's foreword) to prosecute the Islamic State for its crimes. Her book concludes with "I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine."
"The Frolic of the Beasts" by Yukio Mishima (Vintage, $15). Written in 1961 (its author died in 1970, at 45), this novella set in post-World War II Japan is being translated into English for the first time. The tale of a strange love triangle between a student, his would-be mentor and the mentor's enigmatic wife, it's written in "baroque, beautiful prose hinting at depravity on every page," wrote Publishers Weekly in a starred review, calling it both "disturbing" and "masterful."
