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Editors’ Choice

11 New Books We Recommend This Week

Two old friends debate the issues that accompany aging; an old friend of thriller readers (Jack Reacher) shows a softer side; a new story about Humpty Dumpty gets told with a twist. There is something for everyone this week, from difficult, essential history to fiction set in the 18th century to several new books for young readers.

John Williams
Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

AGING THOUGHTFULLY: Conversations About Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, & Regret, by Martha C. Nussbaum and Saul Levmore. (Oxford, $24.95.) This book is framed as a conversation between the law professor Saul Levmore and the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, colleagues at the University of Chicago. They debate mandatory retirement ages, cosmetic surgery and other subjects. “Nussbaum and Levmore are as interested in asking the right questions as they are with notching the right answers,” our critic Dwight Garner writes.

KEEPING ON KEEPING ON, by Alan Bennett. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) Life’s small dramas, unappeasable longings and sorrows, and political outrage are all on display in this collection of diaries by Bennett, the British playwright of stage-to-screen hits like “The History Boys” and “The Lady in the Van.” “His book is a string of wry asides to the audience — pensées, jokes and anecdotes with the compression and tang of a Lydia Davis short story,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes.

THE MIDNIGHT LINE: A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child. (Delacorte Press, $28.99.) A more compassionate Jack Reacher emerges in Lee Child’s latest novel about the lonely drifter with knuckles the size of walnuts. The plot is driven by Reacher’s desire to learn how a West Point class ring ended up in a pawnshop. The novel “adds its share of classic moments to the Reacher canon,” our reviewer Janet Maslin writes, and “the last chapters have more emotional heft than anything Child has written before.”

MY LAI: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent Into Darkness, by Howard Jones. (Oxford, $34.95.) This book about the famous massacre of Vietnamese villagers by American soldiers may be difficult to read — but it is essential for understanding our recent history. “It is a book at once painful and useful,” our reviewer Thomas E. Ricks writes, “and is likely to become the standard reference work” on the subject.

BIRDCAGE WALK, by Helen Dunmore. (Atlantic Monthly, $26.) In her radiantly charged final novel, Dunmore (who died of cancer in June) imagines the turbulent life of an 18th-century British woman, a political activist at the time of the French Revolution, and the effect her radicalism has on her daughter’s troubled marriage to an imposing real estate developer.

KISS ME SOMEONE, by Karen Shepard. (Tin House, $19.95.) A sharp-edged short story collection that vividly demonstrates how a woman can be another woman’s worst enemy. “They’d always walked the line between teasing and cruelty,” Shepard writes of four bridesmaids, nominally friends, in one story.

A MOONLESS, STARLESS SKY: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, by Alexis Okeowo. (Hachette, $26.) A Nigerian-American journalist profiles ordinary Africans living in defiance of the continent’s extremist movements, dramatically at times but more often through simple daily endurance.

AFTER THE FALL, by Dan Santat. (Roaring Brook, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) What if Humpty Dumpty (here decked out in jeans and a skinny tie) decided to pull himself together and get back up on that wall? Santat’s picture book explores that premise in a delightful tribute to resiliency and facing fears, with a stellar surprise ending.

THE STARS BENEATH OUR FEET, by David Barclay Moore. (Knopf, $16.99; ages 8 to 12.) In this debut novel celebrating community and the power of imagination, a 12-year-old boy in the Harlem projects, still grieving his brother’s recent death, finds answers to his life’s questions by competing to build cities with Lego.

TUMBLE & BLUE, by Cassie Beasley. (Dial, $17.99; ages 8 to 12.) A generations-old family curse and a mystical swamp-dwelling alligator are at the center of Beasley’s second fantasy novel, featuring a warmhearted exploration of fate.

GOOD NIGHT, PLANET, by Liniers. (TOON Books, $12.95; ages 4 to 8.) The latest picture book from the Argentine cartoonist Liniers is a lively tale of a stuffed rabbit who, once his little girl falls asleep, promptly heads out for an adventure of his own. Our reviewer Jabari Asim writes: “It’s a fast-moving, richly imagined story that loses nothing in repeated readings.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 31 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Staff Picks From the Book Review. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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