New York Times - Top Stories

It arrives in the mail. On the flip side of a touristy photo is a list of four names — family members who perished at Auschwitz. So begins the drama that makes up the French writer’s first book to be translated into English. In it, the narrator, Anne, plumbs questions of memory, motherhood and belonging as she interrogates her relationship with her Jewish identity.

Across 1970s Hong Kong, apartheid-era South Africa and present-day Silicon Valley, a historian evaluates policies — like tax havens and special economic zones — of free-market economics.

El-Ariss’s stirring memoir alternates between his childhood in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war and his adult life migrating to Europe, Africa and eventually New York. En route, he pays homage to the philosophies, specters and natural elements that composed what he calls “the fragmented world that I had come from and that was chasing me wherever I went.”

Equal parts thriller and police procedural, this “story of power, greed and betrayal,” as our reviewer described it, begins with the discovery of a suit-clad dead body on a Virginia shoreline and a journalist’s discovery that a corporation is funneling billions of dollars into privatizing the U.S. Army.

Taylor’s latest novel follows a poet, a finance student, a factory worker, a logician and three dancers as they try to make art, love and — elusively — a sense of themselves in Iowa City. Amid their fears and fantasies, our reviewer writes, are “flashes of beauty, circling a hothouse of young people on the brink of transplantation into the harsh outside world.”

A British journalist combines personal reflection, historical commentary and political analysis to take stock of the idea of Europe — a “paradox” that was formed by postwar economic prosperity, the legacy of the Soviet Union, tourism, immigration and more.