'THE PERFECT PASS: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football' by S.C. Gwynne. The author of acclaimed books on Quanah Parker and Stonewall Jackson turns to an unexpected but equally American topic: football. "The Perfect Pass" is the story of the "Air Raid" passing offense, and the two Iowa Wesleyan coaches, Hal Mumme and Mike Leach, who developed it in the early 1990s and transformed the sport. (Scribner, $27)
'REPUTATIONS' by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. In the new novel by the author of "The Sound of Things Falling," a Colombian political cartoonist celebrated for a long, influential career, is forced to reconsider his achievements when a friend of his daughter pays a visit. Could his successful takedown of a politician decades earlier have been rooted in a lie? Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean. (Riverhead, $25)
'INCARNATIONS: India in Fifty Lives' by Sunil Khilnani. Indian history, writes the author, is a "curiously unpeople place" dominated by "dynasties, epochs, religions, and castes." "Incarnations" offers an antidote with 50 lively, short chapters, each profiling a historical figure _ from the Buddha and the 15th century poet Kabir to Mahatma Gandhi and filmmaker Satyajit Ray. (FSG , $30)
