Book Reviews

In “The Paris Novel,” Ruth Reichl is a glutton for wish fulfillment.

In “Habsburgs on the Rio Grande,” Raymond Jonas’s story of French-backed nation building in Mexico foreshadows the proxy battles of the Cold War.

Three books describe the work of government investigators who want to uncover or bury the truth.

Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker unearth botany’s buried history.

Two hundred years after his death, this Romantic poet is still worth reading.

In “The Sorrow Apartments,” Andrea Cohen’s signature maneuver is a kind of twist that shifts a poem away from the ending that seems to be coming.

“In the Shadow of Liberty,” by the historian Ana Raquel Minian, chronicles America’s often brutal treatment of noncitizens, including locking them up without charge.

“Crooked Seeds,” by Karen Jennings, is set in a drought-stricken South Africa where its fraught history is ever-present.

There’s more than blarney in Caoilinn Hughes’s riotous, ambitiously structured new novel.

Gillian Linden’s slim debut novel, “Negative Space,” explores the being and nothingness of modern motherhood.