Scavengers*, by Kathleen Boland (Viking)*. In this riveting novel of madcap adventure, a woman named Bea leaves New York City for Utah, where her mother lives. Bea has recently been fired from her finance job and is recovering from the end of a romance—upheavals that, she feels, she can’t tell her mother about. When she arrives, she learns that her mother has also been keeping something to herself: she has become a devotee of the Conversation, an online forum about finding a treasure allegedly worth a million dollars. Soon enough, Bea and her mother decide to go on the hunt. What ensues is a journey that involves questionable characters, inclement weather, break-ins, a broken nose, and death—and that ultimately evolves, for each woman, into a search for the self.

Some Bright Nowhere*, by Ann Packer (Harper)*. When Claire, the protagonist of this tender portrait of terminal illness, decides to stop cancer treatment and spend her remaining time in hospice, her husband, Eliot, assumes that he will be the one to care for her—just as he has since her diagnosis, eight years earlier. He is shocked when she tells him that she would rather be looked after by two of her best friends, in an environment “full of female energy, chatter, tears, laughter.” As Packer examines Claire’s motivations, she explores the impact of the character’s decision on her family, including her two adult children. Most moving is Packer’s evocation of the choice’s effect on Eliot, who is forced to confront his inadequacies—both real and perceived—as a caregiver and a husband.

What We’re Reading

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Atlas’s Bones*, by D. Vance Smith (Chicago)*. Encompassing Africana studies, medieval scholarship, historiography, and philosophy, this book surveys centuries of literature, history, and theology to argue for Africa’s influence on Europe’s self-conception. Hegel’s fantasy that Africa “is no historical place in the world” guides Smith as he leaps from ancient civilizations, such as those of Alexandria and Carthage, to close readings of Virgil, Frantz Fanon, and Erich Auerbach. Smith’s synthesis of a wide range of sources, from antiquity to the modern era, strengthens his central claim: that “Africa was not only known to Europeans but played a profound role in how Europeans imagined both the world and themselves.”

Everything Is Photograph*, by Patricia Albers (Other Press)*. This biography tracks the triumphs and the travails of the twentieth-century Hungarian photographer André Kertész. Kertész’s compositions are notably strange—often off center and taken from high angles, they appear like nervous half glances at scenes of pedestrian shuffle—and many are reproduced here, enriched by thorough commentary by Albers. Her exploration of Kertész’s time as an infantryman in the First World War is especially illuminating, as she documents the curiously “flirtatious tender touch” with which he photographed his surroundings. This kind of artistic contradiction becomes a theme, as Albers unfurls details about Kertész’s romantic life, his move to America, and his later fame.