novel

A mutant killer baby. Lampshades and pickle jars that come alive. Sinister sewers. A demonic clown that preys on children.

HBO Max’s “It: Welcome to Derry,” the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s epic 1986 novel about a deadly clown named Pennywise, has already scared up a lot of buzz since its Oct. 26 premiere with its mix of evil events and nightmarish images.

The first episode featuring Robert Preston warning “Ya Got Trouble” via the classic musical “The Music Man” is an ominous introduction to the subsequent terrors. Gruesome sequences revolving around birth in the first two episodes will likely make several viewers cover their eyes. (The second episode drops Friday on HBO Max in time for Halloween, and it will air in its usual 9 p.m. PT Sunday slot on HBO.)

A prequel to 2017’s “It” and 2019’s “It: Chapter Two” — both directed by Andy Muschietti — the new drama is set in 1962 in the fictional small town of Derry, Maine. Bill Skarsgård, who played Pennywise in the films, will reprise his role during the season.

The large ensemble of child actors and adults features several Black characters, including Air Force Maj. Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo); his wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige), a civil rights activist in a Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat; and son Will (Blake Cameron James). Also featured is Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), the town’s theater projectionist, and his teen daughter Ronnie (Amanda Christine).

Developed by Muschietti, his sister Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs, the creators have prioritized increasing the intensity of the films. But the Muschietti siblings add that they are also incorporating certain messages into the mayhem. Many of the Black characters face bigotry and resistance in the predominantly white town that echo challenges that people of color currently face.

“Stephen is a master of weaving these issues into his stories, and it’s impossible to think of doing one of his stories without having that texture front and center,” Barbara Muschietti said.

The Muschiettis, in a video call, discussed diving deeper into the story of Pennywise, getting their young cast to act like kids from the 1960s, and what gives them nightmares. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Siblings Barbara Muschietti and Andy Muschietti on the set of HBO’s “It: Welcome to Derry.”

(Brooke Palmer / HBO)

How soon after the two “It” movies did the idea of a deeper dive into the world of Pennywise come about?

Andy Muschietti: The novel was the inspiration. There are all these enigmas still lingering, enigmas intentionally left unresolved in the book. Part of the greatness of the novel is that you finish 1,200 pages and at the end, you still have no idea what “It” is and what it wants. It’s all speculation. We had conversations with Bill about how great it would be to do an origin story of Bob Gray, this cryptic character, and give him the opportunity to play the human side, the man behind the clown. It’s about completing the puzzle and uniting the stories that lead one to another, creating a story with the final purpose of getting to this conclusive event, which is the creation of Pennywise, the incarnation of evil.

Barbara Muschietti: Once the idea start percolating, we got in touch with Mr. King and he loved the idea. At the beginning of the pandemic we went to (then-Warner Bros. TV chief) Peter Roth. He bought it in the room and we’ve been on it ever since. Not a day of rest.

“The Music Man” plays a prominent role in the first episode, and it gets dark pretty quickly. I’m a huge fan of that movie, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at that joyful musical the same way again.

Andy Muschietti: I actually wanted us to create a musical ourselves that would pretend to be a movie from 1962. But we would have spent so much money and energy. So we started a quest for the right musical. “The Music Man” was made by Warner Bros. in 1962, and it’s about someone coming to a small town not unlike Derry, talking about trouble, trouble. And it just seemed to fit.

Barbara Muschietti: We also hope a lot of younger people will be curious and go see “The Music Man.”

What is the superpower of “It” that makes it a story that keeps giving and giving?

Andy Muschietti: There are a lot of things people connect to. One of them is childhood. Most of us cherish those years as being full of magic and imagination. We’ve all been children and we’ve all been afraid of something. The novel is a testament to the virtues of childhood, and those virtues normally disappear when you become an adult. Arguably the adults are always the enemy in the world of ‘It.’”

Apart from the clown, there’s a whole mythology that has yet to be connected. My purpose in this series is to reveal the iceberg under the water.

Black characters, including Hank (Stephen Rider), Ronnie (Amanda Christine), Leroy (Jovan Adepo) and Charlotte (Taylour Paige) play central roles in HBO’s “It: Welcome to Derry.” (Brooke Palmer / HBO)

You could not have planned the timing of the show coming on, but it seems like the topical issues addressed in this show, like bigotry, have a relevance to what’s going on in the country today.

Andy Muschietti: What’s going on is not new. It’s just found a new expression. It has been going on and on in cycles. We have this illusion that things are good, but around the corner is another dictator trying to come. We came from Argentina, and we don’t have the kind of racial tension that America has had for hundreds of years. Most of Stephen’s books are a song to empathy in general, and denouncing injustice everywhere. It is important to show, especially in an era where some people in the country are trying to delete history.

Barbara Muschietti: Sadly, these horrors keep haunting us, and racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia is still sadly a human condition, needing to find someone below you that you can punch. Yes, our history makes us a little more sensitive. We live in the United States, it’s a country we love, but it is surprising …

Andy Muschietti: Alarming.

Barbara Muschietti: … that more people are not more concerned.

Andy Muschietti: It’s the fog that Stephen King was talking about. People, basically out of fear, look the other way, trying to suppress things they see, and forget. It’s all part of the same reflection.

It’s immediately obvious that some horrific things will be happening in this show, even more so than the films. The imagery is really nightmarish.

Andy Muschietti: Being a shape-shifter is the thing which keeps giving and giving, and there was a clear intention for us to raise the volume of intensity. You need to meet the expectations of the audience — they don’t want to see more of the same. And we are also dealing with a different time when the collective fears were different because of the social and political situation of that era — the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis — was just around the corner. Then there’s social unrest and segregation.

Barbara Muschietti: I’d like to say it’s all very cathartic. We’re very nice people. I swear.

A demon baby birthed in Episode 1 is among the monsters seen in “Welcome to Derry.”

(HBO)

The show also has a great feel and look to it when it comes to depicting the 1960s.

Andy Muschietti: There was a lot of instinctive respect and attention to accuracy, aesthetically and spiritually. It was the true work of a team in every department, the same folks who had worked on the movies. There was also the research from the writers.

Most of the cast members are kids who did not live in that era. How do you communicate that era and feel to a young cast?

Andy Muschietti: There is a lot of talking. Stephen King knows a lot about this because he was a kid in the 1950s. The book is so rich in detail. We have Ben Perkins, who is a child actor coach. And there is imagination. These kids like to play and at this age, they thrive when you don’t put a lot of restrictions on them. The only thing that went overboard was the cursing.

Barbara Muschietti: That’s one thing that Stephen came back to us with. “There’s too many f—.” We also send the kids with Ben who basically sets up a camp — a bicycle riding camp, a swimming camp, stuff like that which kids in 2024 did not have access to. We’ve been doing that since 2016 very successfully. Because of all of this, all these kids have an incredible bond. They’re friends for life. They get to say goodbye to adolescence on our sets in the most beautiful way.

How long will you keep expanding the ”It” universe?

Andy Muschietti: It’s Derry, Derry, Derry all day. “Welcome” is an arc that expands over three seasons. Why is “It’” Derry, and why is Derry “It”? We will eventually reveal a bigger story revolving around the existence of Pennywise.

I have to ask — what gives you two nightmares? What is scary to you?

Barbara Muschietti: Fascism. Guns.

Andy Muschietti: Violence in general. We’ve come so far as a civilization, and it seems like we haven’t learned anything. What happened to empathy, and seeing what makes us similar, instead of things that divide us?

Barbara Muschietti: And love and respect.

Great writing, even when an author sets a story in early 20th century Maine or during ancient uprisings, often sheds light on our own era. From a novel starring a sentient gale-force wind, on to a memoir from a leading African American writer, this month’s titles provide illumination as we lose daylight.

FICTION

Helm: A Novel
By Sarah Hall
Mariner Books: 368 pages, $30
(Nov. 4)

U.K. inhabitants of Hall’s native Cumbria region have grappled for centuries with a wind known as “The Helm.” Different eras have deemed it a measure of divine anger or human sin, and more recently, as one of earth’s vital signs. Helm’s narration alternates with chapters from perspectives including an astrologer, an astronomer, a Crusader, an herbalist and a climatologist, each adding to the strength of the immortal force.

Palaver: A Novel
By Bryan Washington
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 336 pages, $28
(Nov. 4)

As in his first two novels “Memorial” and “Family Meal,” Houston-based Washington weaves scenes of Americans at home and in Japan with exquisite attention both to queer culture and to emotions. “The mother” and “the son” are never named; her Jamaican origins affect his upbringing, as well as his identity. When she makes an unannounced visit to see him in Japan, the title’s gentle irony becomes apparent.

Queen Esther: A Novel
By John Irving
Simon & Schuster: 432 pages, $30
(Nov. 4)

Readers will recall Dr. Wilbur Larch from “The Cider House Rules.” Here he is the 1919 go-between for Esther Nacht, a 14-year-old Jewish refugee whom he places with the Winslow family as an au pair. Like so many women through the ages, that role results in a different kind of labor for her, one that turns this most Irving-esque (wrestling! sex!) book into writer Jimmy Winslow’s origin story.

The Silver Book: A Novel
By Olivia Laing
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 256 pages, $27
(Nov. 11)

The 1975 murder of Italian subversive film director Pier Paolo Pasolini forms the tortured heart of Laing’s first historical novel. In 1974 protagonist Nicholas Wade leaves England and lands in Venice, where he meets Danilo Donati, costume designer for Pasolini as well as Fellini and others. Their relationship reflects those auteurs’ themes, especially those of fascism’s rebirth in Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.”

The White Hot: A Novel
By Quiara Alegría Hudes
One World: 176 pages, $26
(Nov. 11)

Noted playwright Hudes pens a stunning debut novel that rends conventional notions of motherhood. Years after disappearing from her child’s life, April Soto writes her daughter Noelle a letter to read on her 18th birthday. Less apology than explanation, and less explanation than soul-searching screed, this novel has a huge voice, a woman’s attempt to create meaning from the depths of family trauma.

NONFICTION

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts
By Margaret Atwood
Doubleday: 624 pages, $35
(Nov. 4)

Only Margaret Atwood could write a debut memoir at age 85 and make it significantly different from her previous work while at the same time infusing it with her droll wit and many passions, literary, environmental and familial. While she has always combined public and private in her acclaimed and groundbreaking novels, essays, and poetry, this volume beautifully fuses Atwood the person, and Atwood the writer.

Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia
By Brian Barth
Astra House: 304 pages, $29
(Nov. 11)

Barth, a freelance journalist, spent time in three different Bay Area encampments of unhoused people, including Oakland’s Wood Street Commons, and, as Gov. Gavin Newsom moves forward on a new task force targeting these areas for removal, he argues that solutions to homelessness should come from the ground up, with the involvement of those most affected.

Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime
By Sarah Weinman
Ecco: 320 pages, $32
(Nov. 11)

Until the 1970s in most states, a married woman could not legally refuse to have sex with her husband. The 1978 Oregon trial of John Rideout for marital rape of his wife Greta — despite his then-acquittal — raised awareness of this legislation and led to Rideout’s conviction for rape and sodomy nearly four decades later in a case involving two other partners. Weinman (“The Real Lolita”) writes with energy about a case with present-day ramifications.

Revolutions: A New History
By Donald Sassoon
Verso: 432 pages, $40
(Nov. 18)

You say you want a revolution — and historian Sassoon says: Consider your predecessors. Although we focus on hot-button moments, the long tale of these uprisings can lead to long-term instability and injustice (e.g., the young United States choosing to persist with enslavement). What is the real price of transformation? Is it worth considering when people unite against tyranny and oppression?

Languages of Home: Essays on Writing, Hoop, and American Lives 1975–2025
By John Edgar Wideman
Scribner: 400 pages, $29
(Nov. 18)

Wideman’s 1985 essay “The Language of Home” was about the power of words to capture our foundations, so it’s fitting that his new collection covering 50 years of his powerful prose mimics that essay’s title. The new title’s plural refers to the author’s constant themes, which aren’t surprising. What does surprise is his prescience about still-relevant concerns, from a disappearing middle class to police brutality.

“Maigret,” premiering Sunday on PBS, is the fourth British series (plus one failed pilot) to be titled “Maigret,” after its main character, Georges Simenon’s Paris-based police detective. As I’ve written here before, he’s my favorite fictional detective, both because the stories serve my Francophilia — they provide a virtual map of the city and beyond — and for his ordinariness as a middle-aged, middle-class, happily married man, who is thoughtful, kind, uncomfortable around the rich and sympathetic to the poor, including many who might be counted among the criminal class. You wouldn’t call him melancholy, exactly, but he feels the weight of the job, of his difficult superiors, of the wicked world. He’s an honest policeman who describes himself as a “functionnaire,” a civil servant, and whose belief in justice might sometimes lead him to letting a malefactor escape. And he likes his food, and he likes his drink.

That the new series, starring Benjamin Wainwright (“Belgravia: The Next Chapter”), is set in the present day is not unusual. With 75 novels and 28 stories published between 1931 and 1972, it’s impossible to locate the character in any specific time anyway; most adaptions are set in the time in which they’re filmed, but even the period adaptations don’t necessarily reflect the year of publication.

Nor does the fact that “Maigret” 2025 swerves from the original texts distinguish it from films and series that have preceded it — most of them, obviously, made in France, where Maigret has many times appeared on the big screen, notably portrayed by French film icon Jean Gabin and recently by Gérard Depardieu in a well-regarded 2022 film, also called “Maigret,” as well as two long-running television series. The latter, another “Maigret,” which ran from 1991 to 2005, starred Bruno Cremer, widely regarded as the best — or among the best, to not start any arguments — of the screen Maigrets. Maigret series have also appeared in Russia, Italy and Japan; America, to the extent we’ve been interested, has imported English-language adaptations from the U.K., which is once again the case.

What’s different this time is that Maigret himself has been given a makeover, made younger, buffer, sexier, slightly more of an action hero, with the beard often assigned to the modern police detective. If you come to the series with a love for Simenon’s character — envisioned by the author as “a large powerfully built gentleman [with] a pipe, a bowler hat, a thick overcoat” and more or less faithfully represented in previous films and series — you’ll have to overlook this transformation, or else look away. The question of whether Wainwright’s Maigret is, you know, really Maigret, is one surely to be debated among the fans.

Meanwhile, there are other Maigrets waiting for you by way of comparison, officially or unofficially streaming. What follows is a short guide (mostly) to the English-language “Maigrets”; each has it charms and most are recommended.

A new “Maigret” has arrived on PBS, starring Andrea Lucas (Kerrie Hayes), from left, Karim Lapointe (Reda Elazouar), Jules Maigret (Benjamin Wainwright), Joseph Torrence (Blake Harrison) and Berthe Janvier (Shaniqua Okwok).

(Csaba Aknay / Playground Entertainment; Masterpiece)

Pierre Renoir, ‘Night at the Crossroads’ (1932)

The first screen Maigret, included here for historical interest and because a subtitled version is available on YouTube. Directed by Jean Renoir the year after the novel was published — Simenon, fast out of the gate, published 10 Maigret novels that year — and starring his brother Pierre as Maigret, the film is moody, foggy, dark and slow and has the advantage of actually representing its period. Pierre Renoir’s Maigret is stoical and efficient, and will not be vamped by Winna Winifried’s peculiar femme fatale, as hard as she tries.

Charles Laughton, ‘The Man on the Eiffel Tower’ (1950)

From the novel “La Tête d’un homme (A Man’s Head),” also from 1931, the first English-language adaptation lists “the city of Paris,” on whose streets it was filmed, among the cast in the opening credits. (It’s a trip in time and space.) Laughton plays Maigret with dry humor, though he’s capable of being roused when exasperated or angry, as he often will be here. Co-producer and co-star Franchot Tone chews the beautiful scenery (in color) in a battle of wits Maigret and you both know he’s bound to lose. Directed by Burgess Meredith, who also plays a murder suspect, it adds a thrilling chase up the actual Eiffel Tower, no special effects required. (Laughton isn’t doing the chasing.) Dark film noir compositions alternate with bright sunny street scenes. Stream on Tubi.

Rupert Davies, ‘Maigret’ (1960)

Fifty-two episodes across four seasons were made of this BBC series, shot on video, as many British series were then, and so acted largely on soundstages, which suits a character whose job consists largely of asking questions and listening to other people talk; long interrogations, often lasting overnight, with beer and sandwiches brought up from a neighboring restaurant, are a specialty of the house. (What location filming there is, is actually Paris, in the heart of the nouvelle vague era.) Davies’ Maigret is active and energetic without breaking a sweat, very much a man who makes things happen. Davies also played the detective in a 1965 theatrical production, “Maigret and the Lady,” by Philip Mackie. Stream on Prime Video and Apple TV+.

Richard Harris, ‘Maigret’ (1988)

This version is a curiosity, which gives us Maigret without the Simenon. Harris is a rangy, bespectacled, Irish-y Maigret in this oddity, feature-length failed pilot, with an original story by Arthur Weingarten, whose other credits include “The Mod Squad,” “Ironside” and “T.J. Hooker,” much of which is set on a cruise ship. (Real Paris locations are also featured.) Located firmly in its era, with a synthesized score, it features a Maigret in need of a haircut, wearing his sweater misbuttoned as he explains the case to the gathered suspects — some sort of acting choice, I guess — but also in a tuxedo drinking a cocktail with an umbrella stuck in. (Not very much in character in either case.) The signature pipe is very much a smoking presence, making Harris, on record as a huge fan of the books, look a little like Popeye. Stream on YouTube.

Michael Gambon, ‘Maigret’ (1992)

A period piece set in post-World War II Paris, this series logged two seasons of six episodes each. This is where I discovered the character, when it aired on PBS, before I moved over to the books, and it remains my favorite interpretation. Gambon, who in an odd coincidence followed Harris in the role of Albus Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” films is (not unlike Dumbledore, after all) soft-spoken but stern when necessary. With his thinning hair and a mustache you can forget is there, he melts into his surroundings — this is the first of these series to substitute Budapest for Paris — becoming one sympathetically with his city and its citizens. A scrappy Geoffrey Hutchings shines as Sgt. Inspector Lucas, Maigret’s right hand. Stream on BritBox.

Rowan Atkinson, ‘Maigret’ (2016)

The man who was — is? — Mr. Bean plays it absolutely straight in the role — indeed, he is the most serious, saddest and possibly gentlest Maigret to date; it’s as if he feels all that prevents the world from breaking to pieces. Set in the mid-1950s, slightly after the Gambon “Maigret,” it comprises four feature-length episodes, in the current manner of British mystery adaptations, including a “Night at the Crossroads” that differs greatly from the book and previous film. An often compelling production, this series, too, was shot, handsomely … in Budapest. Stream on BritBox.

Benjamin Wainwright, ‘Maigret’ (2025)

And so, back once again in Hungary, we come to this year’s model. Police headquarters have moved from the dusty old warrens at the Quai des Orfèvres, as in the real world, a hop and a skip from Notre-Dame, to a gleaming new digs with plenty of light and all modern conveniences out in Clichy. There are changes that make good sense for a series set in 2025, including some gender and ethnic diversity injected into the “Faithful Four,” Maigret’s team of close collaborators, and among the characters they encounter. Madame Maigret (Stefanie Martini), always an intelligent and helpful partner, gets a job as a medical professional; Maigret, whom in olden days was brought coffee and served dinner, brings home takeout, cooks a little, helps with the dishes. And they’re trying for a baby.

The action is naturally adjusted for modern technology — of course, one of the attractions of the earlier and period series is that there is none. Wainwright’s Maigret doesn’t smoke a pipe, but he carries one, inherited from his late father, who managed the estate where Maigret grew up, which is knitted into the series as a long arc (three two-part episodes, incorporating multiple cases). Wainwright, appropriately low-key, is fine — the least interesting of these actors to my mind — but if you’re looking for a new detective series set in Budapest-as-Paris, this is nicely made and sufficiently involving, with an excellent supporting cast. I would like to think that a weather report on the radio is a nod to Simenon’s habit of opening a story with a description of the season and the climate, but perhaps that is overthought. Watch on PBS and stream on PBS.org, the PBS app and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video channel.

In our fiercely tribal and divisive culture, when consensus is illusory and we can’t seem to agree on even the most fundamental facts, the notion of shared history as a societal precept has left the building. But if we are indeed living in a post-truth era, Ian McEwan is here to tell us that things will only get worse.

In his bracing new time bender of a novel, the great British novelist posits that the past is irretrievably past, particularly in matters of the human heart, and any attempt by historians or biographers to wrench it into the present is folly — or in the case of this novel’s protagonist Thomas Metcalfe, intellectual vanity.

Metcalfe is an associate humanities professor and a researcher living in England in the 22nd century (2119, to be exact) who has taken it upon himself to unlock the mystery of a poem called “A Corona for Vivien,” written in 2014 by a deceased literary eminence named Francis Blundy, a poet whose genius, we learn, once rivaled that of Seamus Heaney. The poem was composed for his wife Vivien’s birthday dinner in October 2014, an evening that has taken on mythic proportions in certain academic circles in the intervening years. It even has a name: The Second Immortal Dinner, in which Blundy for the first time read his corona, a poem composed as a sequence of sonnets, that had been lost long ago.

In Metcalfe’s hothouse literary universe, Blundy’s poem is important because it is a revenant. In the intervening years, interpretive speculation about it has run rampant. Some have called it a warning about climate change. Others say Blundy was paid a six-figure sum by an energy company to suppress the poem. Only fragments of it exist, certain fugitive lines that appear in correspondence between Vivien, Blundy and Blundy’s editor, Harold T. Kitchener. Metcalfe has taken it upon himself to find the long-lost document, allegedly written by Blundy on a vellum scroll and buried by Vivien somewhere on Blundy’s property.

Metcalfe’s task is greatly complicated by the fact that he lives in a future world where much of the planet has been either immolated or else submerged underwater by a nuclear cataclysm that McEwan calls “The Inundation.” There has also been a mass migration — “The Derangement” — in which millions, deprived of resources and land, have been driven from England into Africa. Entire cities have been lost, “the land beneath them compressed and lowered, so they did not drain, but persisted like glacial lakes.” Whatever repositories of learning that weren’t destroyed now exist on higher ground in the mountains, where the “knowledge base and collective memory were largely preserved.”

The built environment has eroded, but fortunately for Metcalfe, the digital world of the past is intact. Biographers from 2000 onward, McEwan writes, are “heirs to more than a century of what the Blundy era airily called ‘the cloud’ ever expanding like a giant summer cumulus, though, of course, it simply consisted of data-storage machines.” Here in the cloud are the many hundreds of emails and texts from Blundy, his wife and their circle, allowing Metcalfe the satisfaction of knowing he can piece together the events of the epochal dinner party down to granular details: cutlery used, foods prepared, toasts proffered.

Ian McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.

(Annalena McAfee)

What Metcalfe knows of the Blundys’ life together can be gleaned from the 12 extant volumes of Vivien’s journals. From the journals Metcalfe has surmised that Vivien, herself a brilliant literary scholar and teacher, had willfully lived out her marriage under Blundy’s shadow, the dutiful handmaiden to a literary eminence. “She enjoyed producing a well-turned meal,” Metcalfe posits. “She was once a don, a candidate for a professorship. Abandoning it was a liberation. She always felt herself to be in control. But it had surprised her how … she had emptied herself of ambition, salary, status and achievement.”

Despite the pile-up of particulars, Metcalfe knows he must find the lost poem, that it is the keystone without which the story crumbles into insignificance. If he fails in this task Metcalfe, already feeling like an “intruder on the intentions and achievements” of Blundy, loses his mojo: his mission aborted, his career stalled.

But just when it seems as if Metcalfe, after a long and arduous journey across land and water, has discovered something significant, McEwan drops the curtain on that story, and rewinds the narrative 107 years, back to Vivien Blundy and her story. At first, the basic contours conform to Metcalfe’s version of events: Vivien did forsake her academic ambitions for Blundy, who did write a poem for her that he read aloud on her birthday, and so on.

But Metcalfe, as it turns out, has the details right and the motives all wrong, never more so than when McEwan reveals the fact of a murder, conceived in such a way that no snooping academic could ever unearth it. Emails are composed yet remain unsent. Digital correspondence is deleted into the ether, sneaky evasions that are beyond the biographer’s grasp. Metcalfe’s thesis is driven by a romanticized notion of Blundy’s life, but as McEwan slowly and carefully reveals, his poem, ostensibly a “repository of dreams,” more closely resembles a passive-aggressive act. As for Vivien, the narrative she has proffered in her journals is far from the whole story. She is resentful of Blundy, thwarted in her career, simmering with resentment. Despite his scholarly assiduity, Metcalfe is moving down an errant path that will never square the facts with lived experience.

Of course, facts are important, but they don’t necessarily reveal anything; it is the biographer’s folly to ascribe deeper meaning to them, to extrapolate truth from a disparate series of events. Metcalfe’s pursuit of revelation in a single lost poem is magical thinking, a relentless grasping for a chimera. McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

Walter Mosley has penned more than 60 novels in the course of about four decades, but the Easy Rawlins mysteries are arguably his most readily recognized body of work. After writing about Easy, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander and other memorable characters in the series since their 1990 debut in “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the Los Angeles native is certainly entitled to sit back and enjoy the significant milestone in Easy’s history. But neither the success, the accolades nor the 35-year anniversary matter to Mosley as much as the work itself.

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“It’s funny,” he muses over Zoom from his sun-drenched apartment in Santa Monica where he’s working one August afternoon. “Everyone has a career. Bricklayer, politician, artist, whatever. But what you think of as a career, for me it’s … I just love writing.”

It’s a good thing that he does. In the 17 mysteries in the series, Easy has given readers a front-row seat to Mosley’s vision of L.A.’s evolution from a post-World War II boom town proscribed by race and class to the tumultuous ’70s, with seismic social shifts for Black Americans, women and the nuclear family. These are the long-term changes that Easy must navigate in “Gray Dawn,” out Sept. 16.

The year is 1971 and Easy, now 50, is beset by memories of his hardscrabble Southern youth and first loves before he enlisted to serve in World War II in Europe and Africa. And while coming to L.A. after the war meant opportunity, real estate investments and success as “one of the few colored detectives in Southern California,” Easy has not lost his empathy for the underdog. So when he’s approached by the rough-hewn Santangelo Burris to find his auntie, Lutisha James, Easy leans in to help, even after he learns Lutisha is more dangerous than he suspected and brings with her an unexpected tie to his past. Then his adopted son, Jesus, and daughter-in-law run afoul of the feds and Easy must also figure out a way to save them from a certain prison sentence. Add assorted killers, business tycoons, Black militants and crooked law enforcement to the mix, all of whom underestimate Easy’s grit and outspoken determination to protect himself and his chosen family, and the recipe is set for another memorable tale.

Given Easy’s maturity and the world as it was in 1971, Mosley felt the need, for the first time, to write a note to readers to put Easy and his times into context. “When I was writing this book, I realized that, in 2025, there are some readers who may not understand where Easy’s coming from.”

Mosley’s introduction provides that frame, calling the combined tales “a twentieth century memoir” and linking them to the fight for liberation and equality. “Black people, people during the Great Enslavement,” Mosley writes, “weren’t considered wholly human, and, even after emancipation, were only promoted to the status of second-class citizenship. They were denied access to toilets, libraries, equal rights, and the totality of the American dream, which had often been deemed a nightmare.” But Easy, with his passion for community and love for the underdog, is always there to help. “He speaks for the voiceless and tried his best to come up with answers to problems that seem unanswerable.”

Despite these conditions, Mosley explains to me, the series’ recurring characters — Mouse, Jackson Blue, Fearless Jones, among others — who serve as Easy’s family of choice have prospered since the beginning of the series, Easy most of all. “Easy is a successful licensed PI, living on top of a mountain with his adopted daughter, plus his son and his family are around too. So for readers who pick up the series at this point, everything seems great. But then, Easy walks into a place [in the novel] and he’s confronted by some white guy who says, ‘Well, do you belong here?’ Before, when I had written something like that, I assumed that people are going to understand how those kinds of verbal challenges are fueled by the racism of the time. But this time I thought there are readers who may not understand it, even though it’s speaking to something about their lives or their world, even today.”

Easy Rawlins also speaks to other writers, who read the mysteries as a beacon of hope, a crack in the wall through which other voices can be heard.

S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of “Blacktop Wasteland” and “All the Sinners Bleed” and an L.A. Times Book Prize winner, clearly remembers his introduction to Easy’s world. “Reading ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ was like being shown a path in the darkness. It spoke to me as a writer, as a Southerner and as a Black person,” he said in an email. “In some ways, it gave me ‘permission’ to write about the people I love.”

Easy also offers a unique lens through which to view L.A. Steph Cha, Times Book Prize winner for “Your House Will Pay,” discovered “Devil in a Blue Dress” as a freshman in college. “I was totally thunderstruck,” she said in an email. “This was before I had the context and vocabulary to articulate its importance in the broader literary landscape, but I knew I loved Easy Rawlins and his eye on Los Angeles. Walter was one of my primary influences when I started writing fiction. I even named a character Daphne in my second book after the missing woman in ‘Devil.’”

But why does the series endure? Cha credits the quality of the man himself: “Easy’s been through so much over 35 years, but he’s still the same guy, a man who will go anywhere, talk to anybody and bear anything, while still giving the feeling he bleeds as much as the rest of us.”

But Easy’s also thinking about the future, which in “Gray Dawn” means helping Niska, a young Black woman in his office, develop into a detective. Along the way, he shares his creed and his hope for what she will become one day: “‘Toes in the soil beneath my feet.’ That’s what a detective has to have. She has to know the city, its peoples, dialects, and languages. Its neighborhoods and histories. Everything you could see and touch. A detective’s mind has to be right there in front of her. Your city was your whole world.”

Back on our Zoom call, I ask Mosley whether he was thinking of Raymond Chandler’s seminal 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” and the oft-quoted line “Down these mean streets…” when writing that passage. Not consciously, but he liked the comparison because “Easy in many ways is the opposite of Philip Marlowe.”

Not the least of which is his willingness to help a woman become a detective. “Even though Easy is skeptical about a woman being a detective,” he explains, “he recognizes it’s the 1970s and, with the women’s movement, he’s willing to help her if that’s what she wants.”

As the song goes, the times they are a-changin’, and Easy with them. What does Mosley hope readers take away from “Gray Dawn,” Easy’s midlife novel? “I want them to see how Easy has developed and changed over the years. And that family, even though Easy’s doesn’t look like the nuclear family, is what America has always been about.”

“I love being a writer so much that even if I had much less success, or even none, I would still be doing it,” Walter Mosley says.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Mosley’s also experienced enough to know that what writers hope readers understand and what readers actually see in their writing can be very different. And while he appreciates comments from writers like Cosby and Cha, he puts it all in perspective. “As a writer, I think it’s important for you to remember not to judge your success by what other writers have said about your work. Because writers more than anybody in literature are confused about what literature actually is. Writers will say, ‘I did this, and I did that, and I wrote this, and this was my intention, and I started here, and I moved it there.’ But the truth is you’ve written a book, you’ve created the best thing you could have written, and all these people have read it. And for every person who has read it, it’s a different book.”

Mosley is also a talented screenwriter, having served as an executive producer and writer on the FX drama “Snowfall.” Most recently, he shared a writing credit (with director Nadia Latif) for the screenplay of the upcoming film “The Man in My Basement” — an adaptation of his 2004 standalone novel — starring Willem Dafoe and Corey Hawkins. Mosley is particularly cognizant of how book-to-film translations can have different meanings for their creators.

“With very few exceptions, books and the films that they spawn are very different,” he explains. “And they have to be because books come to life in the mind of readers, who imagine the characters and places the writer describes. And books are language, and your understanding through language as a reader is a part of the process. But a film is all projected images. So when somebody says they’re writing a book, you tell them, ‘Show. Don’t tell.’ When you produce or direct a movie, they just say, ‘Show.’”

Mosley praises Latif, who, in her directorial debut, leaned into certain aspects of his novel. “She’s very interested in the genre of horror and uses certain elements of it in the film,” he notes. “But I don’t think she could do that without those elements already being there in the novel.”

Beyond “Gray Dawn” and the forthcoming film, Mosley’s collaborating with playwright, singer and actor Eisa Davis on a musical stage adaptation of “Devil,” as well as working on a monograph about why reading is essential to living a full life. But regardless of the medium, Mosley’s purpose is crystal clear. “For me, it’s about the writing itself,” he says, leaning in to make his point. “I love being a writer so much that even if I had much less success, or even none, I would still be doing it.”

This summer, I read my way around Los Angeles and highly recommend the experience.

There were plenty of freshly published L.A. novels to dive into: My literary journey began in pre-Eaton fire Altadena (“Bug Hollow”) and ended in a run-down Hollywood mansion crawling with influencers (“If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You”); other novels transported me to West Adams Heights post-World War II (“The Great Mann”), Laurel Canyon of the mid-’60s (“L.A. Women”), contemporary Glendale (“The Payback”) and, farthest afield, Salton Sea (“Salt Bones”). And while the novels varied greatly, each was engagingly local. The familiar L.A.-ness of narratives populated with malls, dreamers and celebrities real and fictionalized added to those books’ appeal, while others set in less familiar (to me) communities enriched my understanding of the area.

To help you choose your next L.A. literary adventure, we asked five authors to tell us why they set their latest novels in and around SoCal, along with their favorite local spots to visit.

(Phoebe Lettice Thompson)

‘L.A. Women’

Ella Berman

The title of this retro novel telegraphs its setting while echoing an earlier work by Eve Babitz, a famous L.A. scenester who contributed to Movieline magazine when I worked there decades ago, though as a newcomer to the city I did not appreciate it then. Berman’s novel centers on two, rather than one, woman: A pair of frenemies — reminiscent of Joan Didion and Babitz — circle each other in the Laurel Canyon creative scene during the mid-’60s to early-’70s, navigating relationships with rock stars and visits to the Troubadour and Chateau Marmont as the free love vibe begins to sour.

Why L.A.? “This story couldn’t have been set anywhere other than Los Angeles,” says Berman. “The central relationships, conflict and emotional stakes are all a product of this beautiful city during this period of cultural upheaval.” To get the period details straight, she relied on a friend “who had lived in Hollywood since the late 1950s,” writing the first chapter from a hotel room in West Hollywood after lunch with her. “Later, I walked up to the Canyon Country Store immortalized by Jim Morrison in ‘Love Street’ and I felt a sense of wonder for the ghosts of the past.”

Fave hangout spots: “I love anywhere that feels like I’m time traveling so a classic margarita at Casa Vega, the eggplant parmigiana at Dan Tana’s, a show in the close-up gallery of the Magic Castle or a martini at Musso & Frank’s always deliver,” says Berman, who also loves to browse the Rose Bowl Flea Market for midcentury treasures and vintage band T-shirts.

‘The Payback’

Kashana Cauley

Once a Hollywood costume designer, Jada is working in an unspecified mall that seems suspiciously like the Glendale Galleria when Cauley’s novel begins, but that job doesn’t last either. Sticky fingered and bogged down with college debt, she ends up recording ASMR videos to make money while fleeing the debt police — until she and her pals come up with a scheme to erase their financial woes. The storyline will surely resonate among those saddled with their own college debt or just feeling pinched by rising costs at the grocery store.

Why Glendale? “I wanted my main character, Jada, to feel truly kicked out of Hollywood, as she is,” the writer with credits on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” explains. “So part of me was like, well, where’s the farthest place, vibe-wise, you can get from Hollywood, and still, in Jada’s case, feel very L.A., and the Glendale Galleria fit.” Cauley much prefers the Galleria to the Americana and says fellow transplant Jada feels the same.

Favorite spot: “These days I’ve been hanging out at Taqueria Frontera in Cypress Park because I’m unable to fight my massive addiction to their carne asada queso-taco. It’s perfect. The meat is tender and just the right amount of salty. The cheese is present without being overwhelming. It comes with a handsome scoop of quality guac and a charming green salsa,” she says. “But also the restaurant itself is a vibe. It feels more outdoor than indoor because of a big row of stools out front that’s alongside the kitchen. And it attracts a large, laid-back crowd that feels like a party.”

‘Salt Bones’

Jennifer Givhan

Far from L.A.’s suburban sprawl, a Salton Sea butcher is haunted by the disappearance of girls in a novel suffused in Latina and Indigenous cultures. The water that once sustained the community is horribly polluted and younger characters dream of escape; Mal, the mother of two daughters, is visited by a shapeshifter in her dreams. A book for fans of mysteries and magical realism, it illuminates the environmental hazards of agrifarming in Southern California.

Why Salton Sea? Growing up in the area, her mother warned her that the water was poisonous. “We could smell for ourselves the fish die-offs, the weeks-long stink of toxic algal blooms,” she says. Visiting later, Givhan heard from a friend that the Salton Sea was drying up and releasing toxic chemicals like arsenic from decades of pesticide runoff and “became increasingly concerned about the fate of the place that raised me.” When activists encountered apathy from Sacramento politicians, “I knew I had to tell this story,” she says. “My soapbox may have been slippery, but people tend to love murder mysteries. So I wrapped my heart in one.”

Fave SoCal spots: “Anything by the water; I love hanging out on the beach and eating tacos. As I write in all of my novels, the water haunts me,” Givhan observes. “Many of the pages of ‘Salt Bones’ were drafted while we were living in Chula Vista and making trips back to the Salton Sea and surrounding communities for research. I started this novel at Imperial Beach, where we couldn’t go into the water because of the sewage problem and the signs warning No Nadar! Then I moved to Coronado Beach. On the way onto the peninsula, we’d stop at a great little burrito place for breakfast burritos, and I’d haul my portable typewriter to a picnic bench, set it up with the ocean spread before me and start tapping away.”

‘If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You’

Leigh Stein

Back in Hollywood, influencers have set up shop in a crumbling mansion with an infamous past, desperate to go viral; the owners of the property are looking for sponsorship money to pay for its repairs. In steps photographer turned entertainment journalist Dayna, who gets dumped on Reddit in humiliating fashion as the book opens. Stein’s novel, in case that description does not make clear, has much to say about Hollywood, social media and the creator economy; at its heart is a gothic horror story wrapped up in a mystery with satirical undertones.

Why Hollywood? “Like ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ my novel is about fears of aging and irrelevance in an industry that runs on youth and beauty,” Stein says. “I’m obsessed with how the creator economy is completely reshaping the media and entertainment industries.” The mansion is inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Feliz, which has appeared in movies including “Blade Runner” and also has a troubled legacy. “The more research I did, the more it seemed cursed,” she says.

Fave L.A. haunts: “I’m originally from Chicago and I first fell in love with Los Angeles through Francesca Lia Block novels, where everything is magic and draped in curtains of bougainvillea,” the author says. “My ideal day in L.A. would be taking the Berendo Stairs to Griffith Park, checking out the staff recommendations at Skylight Books and going to Erewhon to get their spicy buffalo cauliflower and some overpriced adaptogenic beverage that promises to change my life.”

‘Loved One’

Aisha Muharrar

Less overtly L.A. than the rest of the novels on this list, “Loved One” unfolds in L.A. and London following the death of Gabe, a 29-year-old indie musician who was the first love of Julia, a UCLA law student who became a Hollywood jewelry designer. Eager to reclaim his prize possessions for her and Gabe’s mother’s sake, she meets Gabe’s girlfriend Elizabeth in England. Through a series of flashbacks, key moments in Julia’s relationship with Gabe — and her life in L.A. — are revealed.

Why L.A.? Muharrar initially resisted the idea of setting her book in L.A., but ultimately felt moving there would just be the logical next step for a musician like Gabe, who has “a passion and then, career-wise, it turns out L.A. is the best place to pursue it.” Julia, she notes, arrives in L.A. for school with one career goal in mind and then ends up doing something else.” In the end, “it’s just a place people live.”

Fave L.A. hangout spots: “I love the bookstores: Reparations Club, Chevalier’s, Skylight. And I also love Silver Lake Library. It closed in July for several months of renovations and won’t be open until 2026 and I am, no exaggeration, devastated,” she says. “Also: Above the Fold in Larchmont. Is it the last newsstand in L.A.? I think it might be.”

Editor’s note: The newsstand has since closed.

In Nicholas Boggs’ lively and vigorously researched biography of James Baldwin, the great writer’s search for the source of his art dovetails with his lifelong search for meaningful relationships. Black, gay, born without the benefit of money or guidance, repeatedly harassed and beaten in his New York City hometown, Baldwin physically removed himself from the turmoil of America, living abroad for long stretches to find proper distance and see his country plain. In “The Fire Next Time,” “Another Country” and “Giovanni’s Room,” among other works, Baldwin gleaned hard truths about the ways in which white people, white men in particular, deny their own sexual confusions to lash out at those who they feel may pose a grave threat their own machismo codes and their absolute dominion over Black Americans. In his novels and essays, Baldwin became a sharp beacon of hard truths.

Baldwin was reared in an oppressive atmosphere of religious doctrine and physical violence; his stepfather David, a laborer and preacher, adhered to an quasi-Calvinist approach to child-rearing that forbade art’s graven images in the home and encouraged austerity and renunciation. Books, according to Baldwin’s father, were “written by white devils.” As a child, Baldwin was beaten and verbally lashed by his father; his brief tenure as a religious orator in the church was, according to Boggs, a way to “usurp his father at his own game.” At the same time, Boggs notes, Baldwin used the church “to mask the deep confusion caused by his burgeoning sexual desires.”

As a child, Baldwin is marginalized for being too sensitive, too bookish, a “sissy.” At school, he finds mentors like Orilla “Bill” Miller and the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who introduced him to Dickens and the 18th century Russian novelists. When his stepfather loses his job, it is down to Baldwin to support his mother and eight siblings. Taking a job at a local army base, he is confronted with virulent race-baiting from his white supervisor and co-workers.

Baldwin leaves Harlem behind shortly thereafter and falls into the artistic ferment of Greenwich Village in the ‘40s. He shares ideas about art, music and literature with a fellow budding aesthete named Eugene Worth until he jumps to his death from the George Washington Bridge in the winter of 1946. His death “cast a pall over Baldwin’s life,” Boggs writes, “but it would also play a major and enduring role in his development as a writer.” Baldwin, who had developed strong romantic feelings for Worth but never made them plain to his friend, makes a promise to himself, vowing to adjoin his private life as a gay Black man to the public life of an artist, so that “my infirmities might be forged into weapons.”

Beauford Delaney, a respected painter and Village fixture, becomes Baldwin’s lodestar and encourages him to confront his sexuality head-on in his art. What that art might entail, Baldwin doesn’t yet know, but it would have something to do with writing. Delaney would become a lifelong friend, even after he began suffering from mental deterioration, dying after years of hospitalization in 1979.

Baldwin’s life as a transatlantic nomad begins in 1948, when he arrives in Paris after winning a scholarship to study there. More importantly, he meets 17-year-old Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss painter, and a relationship blossoms. Happersberger shares deep artistic and sexual affinities with Baldwin, but Lucien is also attracted to women and becomes a kind of template for Baldwin’s future partners, most notably the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, that he would pursue until his death in 1987.

Baldwin held these romantic relationships in tantalizing suspension, his love affairs caught between the poles of desire and intimacy, the heat of passion and long-term commitment. The love triangles these relationships engendered became a rich source for his fiction. Boggs asserts that many of the author’s most enduring works, including “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and his breakthrough novel about gay love “Giovanni’s Room,” sprang from these early, formative encounters. “The structure of a not fully requited love was a familiar and even eroticized one for Baldwin,” Boggs writes, “and would come to fuel his art.”

Away from the States, Baldwin was freed “from the trap of color,” but he was pulled ever deeper into the racial unrest in America, taking on journalism assignments to see for himself how systemic racial oppression worked in the Jim Crow South. In Atlanta, Baldwin meets Martin Luther King Jr., who invites him to Montgomery to witness the impact of the bus boycott. Entering a local restaurant, he is greeted with stony stares; a white woman points toward the colored entrance. In Mississippi, he interviews NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, who is busy investigating a lynching. Baldwin notes the climate of fear among Black citizens in the city, speaking to him like “ the German Jews must have talked when Hitler came to power.”

Nicholas Boggs tracked down a previously unwritten-about lover of James Baldwin for his new biography.

(Noah Loof)

These eyewitness accounts would feed into Baldwin’s impassioned essays on race such as “Down at the Cross” and his 1972 nonfiction book “No Name in the Street.” For Boggs, Baldwin’s nonfiction informed his fiction; there are “continuities and confluences between and across his work in both genres.” The throughline across all of the work was Baldwin’s ire at America’s failure to recognize that the “so-called Negro” was “trapped, disinherited and despised, in a nation that … is still unable to recognize him as a human being.”

Baldwin would spend the rest of his life toggling between journalism and fiction, addressing racism in the States in articles for Esquire, Harper’s and other publications while spending most of his time in Turkey and France, where a growing circle of friends and lovers nourished his muse and satisfied his need for constant social interaction when he wasn’t wrestling with his work, sometimes torturously so. Boggs’ book finds Baldwin in middle age poised between creative fecundity and despair, growing frustrated with America’s failure of nerve regarding race and homosexuality as well as his own thwarted partnerships. Despite a powerful bond with Engin Cezarr and, later, the French painter Yoran Cazac, who flitted in and out of Baldwin’s Istanbul life across the 1970s, the picture of Baldwin that emerges in Boggs’ biography is that of an artist who treasures emotional continuity but creatively feeds on inconstancy.

In fact, Cazac had never been cited in any previous Baldwin biography. Boggs discovered him when he came across an out-of-print children’s book called “Little Man, Little Man,” a collaboration between Cazac and Baldwin that prompted Boggs’ search. After following a number of flimsy leads, he finally finds Cazac in a rural French village, and they talk.

The novels that Baldwin penned during his last great burst of productivity, most notably “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Just Above My Head,” have been maligned by many Baldwin fans as noble failures lacking the fire and dramatic power of his early work. Yet Boggs makes a strong case for these books as successful formal experiments in which Baldwin once again transmuted the storms of his personal life into eloquent indictments of systemic racism. The contours of Baldwin’s romantic engagement with Cazac, in particular, would find their way into “Beale Street,” the first time Baldwin used a female narrator to tell the story of a budding young romance doomed by a gross miscarriage of justice. Boldly experimental in both form and content, “Beale Street” and “Just Above My Head” were, in Boggs’ view, unjustly criticized, coming at a time when Baldwin’s reputation was on the decline. Only novelist Edmund White gleaned something special in his review of “Just Above My Head,” Baldwin’s final novel, finding in his depictions of familial love a Dickensian warmth which “glow with the steadiness and clarity of a flame within a glass globe.”

A literary biography needn’t be an artful accretion of facts, nor should it traffic in salacious gossip and cheapen the subject at hand. Boggs’ even-handed and critically rigorous biography of James Baldwin is guilty of none of these things, mostly because Boggs never strays from the path toward understanding why Baldwin wrote what he did and how his private and public lives were inextricably wound up in his work. Boggs has dug much deeper than his predecessors, including Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming, whose book has been the standard bearer since its 1994 publication. “Baldwin: A Love Story” is superlative, and it should become the new gold standard for Baldwin studies.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

In 1984, at age 33, I fell in love with a woman for the first time. Her name was Cathy. Her previous girlfriend’s name was also Cathy. “Wasn’t that confusing, sharing a name with your girlfriend?” I asked. She shrugged. “Everything about being a lesbian is confusing at first,” she said. “You get used to it.”

In “Sweetener,” Marissa Higgins’ sexy, poignant second sapphic novel, the reader is served plenty of confusion, lesbian-related and otherwise. For starters, two of the book’s three protagonists, who are breaking up as we meet them, are both named Rebecca. With 18,993 girls’ names in active use in contemporary America, why would Higgins build this disconcerting element into “Sweetener’s” structure? It proves to be a decision well-made. As the reader turns the pages, learning to individuate the two Rebeccas (whose central struggle is learning to individuate from each other) gives us bonus information about, and empathy for, both of them.

“My wife and I have the same first name, though our friends never used mine; I’ve always been Rebecca’s wife,” Rebecca No. 1 says of Rebecca No. 2 — No. 2 being the more powerful one, since she’s the one initiating the breakup. “Our last names, too, are still the same, as I took hers at our court wedding,” No. 1 tells us. “With the same name, it’s easy to become one person instead of two.”

Applying for a part-time cashier job near her dismal D.C. apartment, Rebecca No. 1 mulls, “Inside the market, I remind myself I am a person. I have an age, a birthday, an address.” When the store manager asks about Rebecca’s hobbies, she thinks, “Making rent? Getting myself off? Finding a woman with more money than either of us to take me to the dentist?”

The engaging, original plot of “Sweetener” is complex, too. Unbeknownst to Rebecca No. 1, she and No. 2 (PhD student, less depressed, more conniving, heavy drinker) are both dating Charlotte. Obsessed with having a baby, Charlotte wears a fake pregnancy belly, a fact known only to Rebecca No. 2, because Charlotte keeps her shirt on while having sex with Rebecca No. 1. (Having Charlotte thinking, “Please don’t notice please don’t notice please don’t notice” to cover Rebecca No. 1’s failure to notice that her sexual partner is wearing a huge baby-shaped silicone belt seems a bit of an, um, stretch.) Both Rebeccas have great sex with Charlotte. Neither Rebecca wants to stop.

Rebecca No. 2 also wants a baby and doesn’t want to stop drinking, which means not bearing but instead fostering a child, which means enlisting Rebecca No. 1 in the effort, since the two are still legally married, and fostering as a single divorcee requires a minimum one-year legal separation. Neither Rebecca is certain whether pretending to be married will result in their actual reconciliation. Only Rebecca No. 1 is certain that she wants that.

“I know it’s not fair of me to ask anything of you,” Rebecca No. 2 admits in a phone call to her soon-to-be ex-wife, “but I’m serious about wanting to have a family.”

“Sweetener” is the second novel by Marissa Higgins.

(Catapult)

Desperate as she is for a reconciliation, Rebecca No. 1 mulls, “When she says she wants me to think about how important a family is to her, and what this could mean for her, I understand she is not using the word we… I tell her I miss her and she says she misses me, too. Then she says, ‘So you’ll come by when the social worker is here?’”

In 1984, when I dated Cathy No. 2, like the Rebeccas, most of the lesbians I knew were young, poverty-stricken and uncomfortably enmeshed with their lovers, and they considered “lesbian” to be their primary identity. Unlike the Rebeccas, we were also terrified by the consequences of being out during what were extremely dangerous times. During the 1980s and 1990s, Cathy and I were chased down city streets by men shouting slurs at us. We were refused rooms in hotels. Cathy would have been fired from her childcare job if she’d come out at work. My custody of my children was threatened. I was banished from my father’s home.

“My wife and I go to our first class on child development together,” Rebecca No. 1 tells us. “Next to my wife, I feel cool.” A few pages later, she observes: “The social worker tells me I’m lucky to have a partner who values non-threatening communication.” During their home visit with a second D.C. social worker, the Rebeccas lie about a lot of things — chiefly, their marital and financial instability. But they don’t lie about what Cathy and I would have had to hide if we’d tried to adopt a child in the 1980s. Living in a big, liberal city, the Rebeccas don’t feel the need (still required for safety in “red” locales) to call each other roommates or friends. They call each other wives, because in 2025 same-sex marriage and parenting are givens, not distant fantasies.

Ten years after it became “cool” (and legal, and publicly acknowledged) for a woman to have a wife; 40 years after I and many, many others paid a terrible price for coming out in our families, workplaces and neighborhoods, lesbians like Marissa Higgins are creating lesbian characters who live in a sweeter, changed-for-the-better world. The sugar that made life safer for us is the queer activism that begins with telling true tales of queer lives and persists today with renewed need and renewed vigor. “Sweetener,” the novel, is a fun romp through one version of lesbo-land circa 2025. Higgins’ “Sweetener” celebrates and accelerates the long, rough ride to lasting queer equality.

Maran, author of “The New Old Me” and other books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that’s even older than she is.

Are we in for a new age of scripted basic cable television? Given the successes of the old age, which threaded its way between broadcast and premium cable TV, a little bolder than the former, less pricier than the latter, making up what it lacked in resources with invention and charm — producing such shows as “The Detour,” “Halt and Catch Fire,” “Lodge 49” and “The Closer,” to name just a few of my favorites — I’d be all for it.

Premiering Friday on the USA Network, lately devoted to sports, reality shows and reruns, the legal drama “The Rainmaker” is the first fruit of an intentional return to the network’s self-styled “blue sky” era, when its slogan was “Characters Welcome” and “optimism” in storytelling was a stated goal. “Psych,” “In Plain Sight,” “Monk” and “Suits” — whose recent success after being recycled onto Netflix would seem to be a factor in this turnaround — were among the series born in that period.

Based on John Grisham’s 1995 novel, faithfully adapted by Francis Ford Coppola into a 1997 film starring Matt Damon and Claire Danes, the TV “Rainmaker” has been kitted out with some new and altered characters and a novel focus, and in order to keep you on the hook across 10 episodes, it stirs in a case of arson and a serial murderer. (And surely some additional complications — only five episodes out of 10 were available for review, so even though I wouldn’t tell you about what’s coming later, I couldn’t.) Serial killer notwithstanding — nothing drearier than a serial killer — the nuts and bolts and girders and panels of a USA show are here — colorful characters, one part comedy to one part drama, a mystery to solve, and just a tiny bit of sex. (This is basic cable, remember.)

We meet hot-headed good guy Rudy Baylor (Milo Callaghan) and his cheery girlfriend Sarah Plankmore (Madison Iseman), both not long out of law school, both yet to take the bar exam, at a legal-aid event, providing free advice to the sort of people who could never afford a lawyer, wouldn’t know where to start or maybe just want someone to listen to their stories. They meet Dot Black (Karen Bryson), who is very much not over the death of her son while in a hospital whose name I can’t recall but for my own convenience will just call Bad Hospital. Badspital. That the hospital — the Badspital — has offered her $50,000 while their motion to dismiss is still pending, sets Rudy to wondering what they might be trying to hide. Anyway, Dot, whom we’ll see again, finds the offer insulting and also needs an apology.

Rudy and Sarah have both been hired by the 800-pound gorilla law firm Tinley Britt. On their first day, he arrives late to work — and bloody, having gotten into a fight with his mother’s shiftless, but large, boyfriend. He proceeds to get into another fight, abstractly, with senior partner Leo F. Drummond (John Slattery), who fires him. (In the novel, Rudy is merely laid off in a merger — not so dramatic!) Moaning to friend and bar-owning sometime boss Prince Thomas (Tommie Earl Jenkins) that he’s been turned down by every other respectable firm in town, Thomas suggests “a not so respectable one.”

John Slattery stars as Leo Drummond, a senior partner at Tinley Britt, the law firm where Rudy is hired and subsequently fired.

(Christopher Barr/USA Network)

Here things depart significantly from the text, and the fun begins.

Rudy is delivered to the law offices of glamorous Jocelyn “Bruiser” Stone (Lana Parrilla) and associates, located in a partly converted Mexican restaurant — though past the receptionist the only associate in sight is “paralawyer” Deck Shifflet (P.J. Byrne). A purely comic character, Deck has failed the bar seven times but has many useful skills and qualities, not least a flexible sense of professional ethics. He insists on calling Rudy “Boo Boo.” It takes him a minute to realize it, but Rudy has found his people.

Gender flipped from the novel’s J. Lyman Stone, Bruiser (when not in court) favors animal prints, plunging necklines and short skirts. “I only need three things,” she says. “Kentucky bourbon, a bloody steak and a man who won’t spend the night.” You get the picture.

But there’s more to her than that. When Rudy, who has been with Deck trolling the Badspital for clients, suggests he wasn’t cut out to be an “ambulance chaser,” she also has this to say.

“You know where the term ambulance chaser came from? It was used by white shoe firms in the ’20s to crap on any lawyer that wasn’t a member of their club. When the contingency-fee law was enacted, small firms rose up full of attorneys who were just like their clients, the ones on the Statue of Liberty, the tired, poor, the huddled masses — those same people are our clients now, and if you think you’re better than them, you’re not. You are them.”

It’s good to know someone still takes Emma Lazarus seriously.

Among the figures Rudy and Deck encounter at the hospital, or the Badspit — oh, never mind — is Melvin Pritcher (Dan Fogler), whom we have seen in the series’ opening scene, escaping a house fire that kills his mother. There are several things to say about him that probably constitute spoilers, so I’ll just note that though Melvin is quite unpleasant, Fogler is very good.

With Sarah working for the Empire and Rudy embedded with the rebels, their relationship has been engineered by the writers to be problematic, possibly to break down — though each does seem to be trying. (They’re good kids.) She’s got a trust fund; he’s doesn’t own a suit of his own, dressing rather in one passed down from a dead brother. They’ll wind up in court opposite one another like Tracy and Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” for Tinley Britt is defending the hospital from Dot, who has become a client of Bruiser’s firm. Their future together is also potentially complicated by Kelly Riker (Robyn Cara), a woman who lives in Rudy’s building who is obviously being abused, and Drummond’s smarmy lieutenant Brad Noonan (Wade Briggs) — of course he’d be named Brad — who has been assigned to weaponize Sarah against Rudy.

Callaghan gives off a scintilla of Matt Damon vibes, but is his own Rudy, keeping his naive idealist free from leading-man tics. Parrilla finds the balance between Bruiser’s sauciness and seriousness; Byrne plays the clown adeptly; and Slattery, a boss again after “Mad Men,” softens his villainy with some Roger Sterling insouciance.

Developed by Michael Seitzman and Jason Richman, it’s a very watchable show — serial killer passages notwithstanding. There’s nothing fancy in the execution — it’s the opposite of stylish — but everything’s clearly defined and dialed up a step past normal into that space we call entertainment. Welcome back to the blue sky.

Contrary to some recent media chatter, the novel isn’t dead: A glance at this month’s choices, which include quirky robot sci-fi, an artist’s tale set in 1950s Mexico and a dysfunctional family’s reckoning with addiction, proves that imaginative storytelling has a strong heartbeat. Meanwhile, whether you’re looking for history or current events, check out an oral history of the atomic bomb, an expert’s thoughts on climate change and a thorough tribute to the writer James Baldwin. Happy reading!

FICTION

Automatic Noodle: A Novel
By Annalee Newitz
Tordotcom: 176 pages, $25
(Aug. 5)

Late 21st-century San Francisco: California has seceded from the United States, and robots serve humans like crypto money launderer Fritz Co, whose Burgers N More is a front. He absconds and leaves four robots adrift, but with aid from unhoused human “robles,” they reconfigure the joint as a ramen shop — until robophobes launch a campaign to shut them down. Robots Staybehind, Sweetie, Cayenne and Hands will capture readers’ hearts.

People Like Us: A Novel
By Jason Mott
Dutton: 288 pages, $30
(Aug. 5)

Soot, one of the protagonists of Mott’s funny and affecting new book, also appeared in 2021’s “Hell of a Book.” Like the (at first) unnamed narrator, Soot is now a middle-aged writer from North Carolina (Mott originally intended this story to be in memoir form), and both men’s paths illustrate the difficulty of reconciling being Black with being American. While the theme of gun violence plays an important role, Mott is ultimately concerned with how and where his characters find safety.

Fonseca: A Novel
By Jessica Francis Kane
Penguin Press: 272 pages, $28
(Aug. 12)

In this fictionalized version of British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s real-life trip to Saltillo, Mexico, in 1952, she arrives pregnant with her son Valpy in tow, hoping eccentric, elderly sisters might keep their promise to leave Valpy their silver mine. “Fonseca” (“dry well” in Latin) is how Fitzgerald always referred to Saltillo, but Kane’s remarkable excavation of this interlude, including real letters from Valpy, drips with juicy conflict and detail.

The Frequency of Living Things: A Novel
By Nick Fuller Googins
Atria: 336 pages, $29
(Aug. 12)

Three sisters make up the band name “Jojo and the Twins” — but Jojo, younger sister to identical twins Emma and Araminta (Ara), isn’t in the band. Instead, she’s the caretaker for her siblings, who made a fortune with their blockbuster hit “American Mosh,” then lost that fortune, in part due to Ara’s substance addictions. Chapters alternate between Jojo, Emma, Ara and their absentee mother Bertie, who all discover that big love has big costs.

Katabasis: A Novel
By R. F. Kuang
Harper Voyager: 560 pages, $32
(Aug. 26)

Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, Cambridge University doctoral fellows in Magick, wind up in Hell looking for their adviser in a dark academia thriller whose title is the Greek word for “downward journey.” This version of Hell closely resembles Dante’s “Inferno,” with many circles leading toward the very worst human actions. There’s a great deal of doubling back and a lot of incantatory action, both of which sci-fi/fantasy stans will appreciate.

NONFICTION

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
By Garrett M. Graff
Avid Reader Press: 608 pages, $35
(Aug. 5)

Many accounts of the unusual and unholy circumstances that led to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II center on scientific discovery, neglecting the enormous human and environmental toll involved. Not so with journalist Graff’s (“When the Sea Came Alive”) approach, in which everyone from theoreticians to site managers on to survivors of all ages share first-person stories of what they did, saw and understood.

Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974–
By Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 336 pages, $30
(Aug. 5)

Since her 1985 debut novel, “Annie John,” the Antiguan-born Kincaid has been impossible to ignore, and this collection of essays and journalism shows why: Even as some critics have found her prose too personal or political, Kincaid knows she meant it to be so. Ranging from her famed “Biography of a Dress” to pieces for the New Yorker on to essays on gardening, the works speak of a person who has refused to be defined by any kind of constraints.

Greyhound: A Memoir
By Joanna Pocock
Soft Skull: 400 pages, $19
(Aug. 12)

The Great American Road Trip, that idealized trek heading west, might be different now, according to author Pocock, who first made that journey in 2006 from Detroit to Los Angeles in the wake of grief after several miscarriages. In 2023, retracing her steps via Greyhound bus like French writer Simone de Beauvoir (“America Day by Day,” 1948), she discovers fewer humans, more dirt and less safety — but the same magical “sense of no longer existing.”

Baldwin: A Love Story
By Nicholas Boggs
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 720 pages, $36
(Aug. 19)

James Baldwin’s four great affairs (intellectual, romantic, platonic and artistic) provide a beautiful structure for this biography, which includes careful research into the writer/activist’s upbringing and political formation as well as his widespread influence. Beauford Delaney’s creative guidance, Lucien Happersberger’s intimacy, Engin Cezzar’s call to activism and French painter Yoran Cazac’s artistic collaboration — each forms a polished facet of Baldwin’s gem-like dazzle.

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization
By Bill McKibben
W. W. Norton: 224 pages, $30
(Aug. 19)

Since McKibben’s 1989 “The End of Nature,” the world’s temperature has risen by at least 1 degree Fahrenheit. Now the author and environmental activist wants to wake everyone up to the fact that we can’t stop global warming, but we can stave off reaching the next degrees if we enact the kind of political change necessary to use new technologies (like photovoltaic devices) that, instead of draining our planet’s resources, harness those beaming down daily.

Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan’s “Washington Black,” a prizewinning story of race, romance, friendship and identity set in the early 19th century, has been translated by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and Kimberly Ann Harrison into a Hulu miniseries. Unsurprisingly, it plays more like a miniseries than a novel, amplifying the action, the drama and the romance; beefing up lesser characters; drawing lines under, after all, valid points about prejudice, inequality and injustice; and dressing it up with Hollywood musical cues. Taking the show as a sometimes fantastic historical adventure, those aren’t bad things, but, unlike the book, subtlety is not the series’ strong suit.

Written in the first person, the novel proceeds chronologically, while the series, which follows other, sometimes added characters into interpolated storylines, switches between 1830 — when our hero, George Washington Black, called Wash, is 11 years old and enslaved on a Barbados sugar plantation — and 1837, when he lives as a free young man in Halifax, Nova Scotia, drawing beautiful pictures and designing a before-its-time airship. (For the benefit of American viewers wondering why we’re in Halifax, opening narration helpfully identifies it as the last stop on the Underground Railroad.)

The split timeline does make Entertainment Sense. We don’t have to wait around for young Wash (Eddie Karanja) to grow up into older Wash (Ernest Kingsley Jr.), and we are immediately introduced to Tanna Goff (Iola Evans), arriving from London with her father (Rupert Graves) for a “fresh start.” (There was a scandal back in Britain.) Unbeknownst to Tanna, her father plans to marry her off to a young Canadian bigwig (Edward Bluemel), for what he believes is her own security. This is new, if very familiar, material.

Wash and Tanna meet-cute at the docks where he works, when based on her skin, he mistakes her for a servant — she’s been passing for white, but he (and we) recognize her as a person of color. (Melanesian, to be exact.) In the coming days, he’ll contrive to meet her here and there, until they get friendly, and friendlier. Like Wash, she’ll be a voice for living free, “to be myself, to live in my own skin.” (“We’re both dreamers,” she muses. “Can’t we dream up a different world?”) Coincidentally, and not unfortunately, her papa is a marine biologist, the author of a book Wash, who has a keen interest in the subject, knows well. Wash’s gift for capturing the essence of living things on paper may prove useful to him.

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1. Eddie Karanja plays young Wash in the series. (James Van Evers / Disney) 2. Sterling K. Brown, an executive producer, also stars. (Chris Reardon / Disney)

Meanwhile, if that’s the word, back in 1830, the future looks dim for young Wash under the harsh rule of plantation owner Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt), a situation eased only by his beloved caring protector Big Kit (Shaunette Renée Wilson). (Ironically, the end of slavery throughout the British Empire was just around the corner.) One day, Erasmus’ brother Christopher (Tom Ellis), called Titch, arrives driving a giant steam-powered tractor for no practical reason other than to announce him as a somewhat eccentric inventor, like Caractacus Pott; but it provides a point of connection between Titch and Wash, who becomes his assistant. Another character who had to leave London, Titch plans to use an island hilltop to launch his “cloud cutter,” a flying machine that won’t exist in the real world for many years but which looks cool. (Steampunk is the applicable term.)

When an incident on the island threatens to paint Wash, wrongly, as a murderer, Titch takes him up, up and away in his beautiful balloon. It’s in the supercharged spirit of this adaptation that when they crash into a sailing ship, it should be full of pirates, and not merely pirates, but pirates who have stolen from the British a new sort of craft powered by a dynamo that looks heavy enough to sink it. This passage is crafted to show us a self-determined society, multiethnic and multigendered. When the pirates mutiny (bloodlessly), the new captain is a woman. They like Wash more than Titch, whom they throw in the brig, but they are nice, relatively speaking.

Titch is an avowed abolitionist who won’t use the sugar the plantation produces, and though we are called upon to note small hypocrisies or to question his motivations — is he trying to assuage his 19th century white liberal guilt even as he uses Wash to his own ends? — I will declare him sincere, if also a man of his time. The showrunners put him into a (very) brief debate with fierce figure from history Nat Turner (Jamie Hector), opposing Turner’s militarism against Titch’s less persuasive “reason, logic and the appeal to man’s better nature,” an argument suspended when Turner holds a knife to his throat. (Wash intercedes on his behalf; he is more than once his mentor’s protector.) It also adds a shot of American history into this Canadian story.

Sterling K. Brown, an executive producer, plays Medwin, a character much expanded from the novel, the unofficial mayor of the Black community who will swashbuckle in when a day needs to be saved. (There are bounty hunters from down south, looking for Wash; Billy Boyd, former Hobbit, is wonderfully creepy as Willard.) As to Wash, it’s not enough that he’s a gifted artist and scientist; the show introduces him as “a boy brave enough to change the world.”

The novel trots the globe, from Barbados to Virginia to Nova Scotia to the Arctic to London to Morocco, and besides the hot-air balloon, includes the invention of the public aquarium. Though only four episodes of the series were available to review, photos indicate that lands of snow and sand are indeed on the itinerary (not sure about the aquarium), and as a fan of 19th century globe-trotting adventures, I do remain eager to see what the series makes of them. Kingsley and Evans, in their blossoming love story and otherwise, are good company throughout.

Edugyan ends her book on a suspended chord, a note of mystery I don’t imagine will be definitive enough for the filmmakers. But we shall see.

NEW YORK — Martin Cruz Smith, the best-selling mystery novelist who engaged readers for decades with “Gorky Park” and other thrillers featuring Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, has died at age 82.

Smith died Friday at a senior living community in San Rafael, “surrounded by those he loved,” according to his publisher, Simon & Schuster. Smith revealed a decade ago that he had Parkinson’s disease, and he gave the same condition to his protagonist. His 11th Renko book, “Hotel Ukraine,” was published July 8 and billed as his last.

“My longevity is linked to Arkady’s,” he told Strand Magazine in 2023. “As long as he remains intelligent, humorous, and romantic, so shall I.”

Smith was often praised for his storytelling and for his insights into modern Russia; he would speak of being interrogated at length by customs officials during his many trips there. The Associated Press called “Hotel Ukraine” a “gem” that “upholds Smith’s reputation as a great craftsman of modern detective fiction with his sharply drawn, complex characters and a compelling plot.”

Smith’s honors included being named a “grand master” by the Mystery Writers of America, winning the Hammett Prize for “Havana Bay” and a Gold Dagger award for “Gorky Park.”

Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pa. , he studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and started out as a journalist, including a brief stint at the AP and at the Philadelphia Daily News. Success as an author arrived slowly. He had been a published novelist for more than a decade before he broke through in the early 1980s with “Gorky Park.” His novel came out when the Soviet Union and the Cold War were still very much alive and centered on Renko’s investigation into the murders of three people whose bodies were found in the Moscow park that Smith used for the book’s title.

“Gorky Park,” cited by the New York Times as a reminder of “just how satisfying a smoothly turned thriller can be,” topped the Times’ fiction bestseller list and was later made into a movie starring William Hurt.

“Russia is a character in my Renko stories, always,” Smith told Publishers Weekly in 2013. “‘Gorky Park’ may have been one of the first books to take a backdrop and make it into a character. It took me forever to write because of my need to get things right. You’ve got to knock down the issue of ‘Does this guy know what he’s talking about or not?’”

Smith’s other books include science fiction (“The Indians Won”), the Westerns “North to Dakota” and “Ride for Revenge,” and the “Roman Grey” mystery series. Besides “Martin Cruz Smith” — Cruz was his maternal grandmother’s name — he also wrote under the pen names “Nick Carter” and “Simon Quinn.”

Smith’s Renko books were inspired in part by his own travels and he would trace the region’s history over the past 40 years, whether it be the Soviet Union’s collapse (“Red Square”), the rise of Russian oligarchs (“The Siberian Dilemma”) or, in the novel “Wolves Eats Dogs,” the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

By the time he began working on his last novel, Russia had invaded Ukraine. The AP noted in its review of “Hotel Ukraine” that Smith had devised a backstory “pulled straight from recent headlines,” referencing such world leaders as Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin of Russia and former President Joe Biden of the U.S.

Smith is survived by his brother, Jack Smith; his wife, Emily Smith; three children and five grandchildren.

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

“The Institute,” a 2019 novel by Stephen King, Maine’s Master of the Macabre — or horror, I just said macabre for the alliteration — has become a miniseries with some major additions and minor emendations. Premiering Sunday on MGM+, it belongs to a popular genre in which superpowerful young’uns are gathered in some sort of academy, and more specifically to one in which children with extraordinary powers are weaponized by adults for … reasons. They always have reasons, those cruel adults.

The child at the center of the story is 14-year-old Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman, who shoulders a lot of dramatic weight), a genius with a mostly untapped ability to move things with his mind. (Classic power!) One night while Luke is asleep, people break into his house, and when he wakes in the morning in his bed, you know as well as I that what he’ll find outside his bedroom door is not the rest of his house — just like Patrick McGoohan in “The Prisoner,” one of several other works for the screen that may cross your mind as the show goes on. “Stranger Things,” “The Matrix,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Severance” are some others that came to my mind.

Luke is in the Institute, a drab complex, whose young inmates are identified either as “TK” (telekinetic) or “TP” (telepathic), or once in a blue moon, “PC” (precognitive). Just how Luke’s kidnappers fixed on him in the first place is something for you not to think about. But there he is, and because he is also a genius, his warders think he might be more than usually useful to them. Ms. Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker) runs the place; her cheery tone and promises of fun food and no bedtime does not hide from you, or from Luke, the fact that she is a liar. That she tells Luke he’s there as part of a project to “serve not just your country but the whole world” is not something to impress any kidnapped teenager.

Fionn Laird, left, Mary-Louise Parker, Simone Miller, Viggo Hanvelt and Arlen So in “The Institute.”

(Chris Reardon / MGM+)

Aiding and abetting Sigsby are sepulchral security head Stackhouse (Julian Richings), who at one point will speak the words “unjustly vilified term final solution”; Tony (Jason Diaz), an almost comically sadistic orderly; and Dr. Hendricks (Robert Joy), who has cooked up the pseudoscientific nonsense at the heart of the plan and puts Luke through a variety of upsetting “tests.” Housekeeper Maureen (Jane Luk) is nice, though — not to be completely trusted, necessarily, but nice.

Meanwhile, handsome Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes), a former policeman, decorated for an incident that left him bad about feeling decorated, hitchhikes into town — the town near the Institute, whatever it’s called — and gets himself a job with the local constabulary as its “nightknocker,” checking that businesses have locked their doors and the streets are trouble free. At the police station, he meets Officer Wendy Gullickson (Hannah Galway), which makes space for some light guy-gal vibing, while his nocturnal peregrinations will bring him into contact with Annie (Mary Walsh), a street person and conspiracy theorist, who does know an actual thing or two, and who will inspire Tim to poke around that place up on the hill with the guards and the barbed-wire fence. He may not be a cop anymore, but he is not, he says, “the kind of guy who can look the other way.”

At the mostly empty, sort of shabby Institute — like a student center that hasn’t been updated in 30 years, because what’s the point — Luke meets fellow inmates Kalisha (Simone Miller), who inexplicably kisses him upon first meeting, Iris (Birva Pandya), cool kid Nick (Fionn Laird), and later little Avery (Viggo Hanvelt), who may prove the most powerful of all.

The institute has a Front Hall and a Back Hall; at some point, kids from the former are transferred to the latter, which completes a “graduation” the staff mark with a cake and candles. (They’re told that after doing time in the Back Hall, they’ll be going home, which could not possibly be part of the plan.) The meaning of the column of smoke rising from one of the compound’s buildings should be immediately obvious.

Written by Benjamin Cavell (who co-wrote the 2020 adaptation of King’s “The Stand”) and directed by Jack Bender (King’s “Mr. Mercedes”), it drags at times and isn’t particularly interesting to look at, though there’s action and a few special effects toward the end, which, King being King, isn’t over until it’s over — and it never is. Parker is always good to watch, and her Mrs. Sigsby is given some material to make her seem human — if not quite to humanize her — but nothing regarding the Institute and its complicated plans and methods really makes any sense, even in King’s made-world.

Still, if you regard “The Institute” as a kind of YA novel about resistance and revolt, and a metaphor for the way young people have been sacrificed by the old to feed their agendas and wars, it has some legs.

There are a frightening number of ways an American can become indebted today: there’s medical debt (I won’t be paying off my child’s birth until he’s nearly 5 years old, and I have insurance). Mortgages, of course (though as a millennial living in an expensive city, I wouldn’t know what those look like). And then there’s student loan debt carried by nearly 43 million Americans, and which disproportionately affects Black women. But hey, at least one good thing has come of that, as TV writer and novelist Kashana Cauley graciously acknowledges in her new book, “The Payback”: “To the student loan industry,” reads her dedication, “whose threatening phone calls made this book possible.”

Narrated by Jada Williams, a wardrobe designer turned retail salesperson, “The Payback” is full of such you-gotta-laugh-to-keep-from-crying humor. The book opens at Phoenix, the clothing store at the Glendale mall where Jada now works, and includes a hilarious yet mostly sincere appreciation for the beleaguered centers of suburban America: “I loved mall smell,” Jada narrates, waxing poetic about the scents of the bins at the candy store and the ever-present pizza smell before admitting that she sometimes even leans down to smell the plastic kiddie ride horses. “Sometimes, when there were no kids, I’d lean into the horse and sniff it to get a whiff of plastic, childhood dreams, and dried piss. Yes, I know, nobody’s supposed to savor the aroma of pee, and I wouldn’t rank it first among the smells of the world, but pee is life. It’s humanity. It’s the mall.”

Jada loves the mall, and she even loves her job, which is not a given for anyone who’s lost their dream career like she did. She’s passionate about helping people find the clothes that look and make them feel good, even if she’s doing that for 20% commission. She’s definitely gotten over her sticky fingers habit, too, except that, well, on the day the book opens, someone leaves an expensive watch in the fitting room, and Jada can’t help but pocket it. This eventually leads to her getting fired, but not before the boss she likes, Richard, dies on the store’s floor and Jada and her co-workers get to witness the newly formed debt police in action chasing and beating up Richard’s grieving widower during his wake.

The debt police are exactly what they sound like: cops who come after people in debt. Cauley, a former writer for “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” who has contributed to the New Yorker, has fun with this concept: she dresses them up in turquoise and makes them all obnoxiously hot and as annoying as the worst Angeleno cliché you can think of (they’re especially obsessed with overpriced new age treatments and diet culture). The cherry on top is their true apathetic evil. “These Leo moon incidents are always the worst,” a debt policeman says, for example, while literally beating Jada up.

Six months after she’s fired, Jada is making money by “eating food on camera in the hope that internet people, mostly guys, according to their screen names and Cash App handles, would pay [her] rent.” She eats shrimp for its pop and the way she can lick it; graham crackers for their whisper and crackle; almonds for their snap; celery sticks for their crunch. On the one hand, she’s paying her rent; on the other hand, her relationship to food has become sonically focused and exhausting.

The saving grace is that Jada manages to stay friends with her former Phoenix co-workers, Lanae (frontwoman of a punk band, the Donner Party) and Audrey (a runner and hacker in her spare time). Together, they come up with a plan to erase their own — and everyone else’s — student loan debt. It’s a heist, of sorts, except instead of getting rich, they’ll stop being in the hole for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the real pleasure, just like it is in any good heist movie, is witnessing the three women spending time together and becoming closer over the course of the book.

Jada is a deeply imperfect narrator. She’s quick to judge others, slow to trust, and even steals a watch on page 12 (Gasp! She’s a thief!) So, yes, she’s a messy millennial who has some issues to work through, but neither she nor anyone deserves to spend the rest of their life indebted to a system that claimed a college education as the only way to break into the middle class, and which instead ends up keeping so many from it.

The novel is a satire, of course, and the debt police are over the top because it’s generically appropriate, but also because Cauley is using humor to approach the horrifying reality that people really do go to prison for having debt in this country. And even when they don’t, student loan debt ends up increasing the racial wealth gap. According to the latest data from the Education Data Initiative, “Black and African American college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white college graduates.” Flash-forward four years after graduation, and “Black students owe an average of 188% more than white students.”

Yet the job of a novelist isn’t to hit you over the head with statistics but to entertain you — if you learn anything along the way or think more deeply about something you’d never considered, that’s great, but it’s not the main point. For all that it deals with systemic racism and economic precarity, “The Payback” is a terrifically fun book that made me laugh out loud at least once every chapter.

Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”

Brigitte Knightley’s debut novel, “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy,” has everything fans of enemies-to-lovers romance are looking for: disagreement that becomes flirtatious banter, ethical quandaries, forced proximity, and characters who can overcome their prejudices to see a human beneath a label. Featuring a brutal assassin and a magical healer forced to work together while trying — desperately — not to fall in love, the heat of this romantasy novel is perfect for warm summer nights.

Osric Mordaunt, considered a dark magic user, is part of an order of assassins hated and dismissed by Aurienne Fairhrim’s light magic order of healers. When Osric seeks medical treatment for a degenerative condition, he gets roped into helping Aurienne’s order cure an outbreak of pox that is killing children in droves. The pair traipses around seeking healing under romantic full moons and become involved in spycraft that reveals evidence that the outbreak is not what it seems. They begin to see each other beyond their individual allegiances, but it happens slowly, prejudices unraveling at a crawling pace. The author’s bio declares that she puts the unresolved back in “unresolved sexual tension,” and it’s true: Knightley is a master of the slow burn.

There is plenty of fun along the way: Getting to know both magical orders, their fortes and foibles, is a squelching, bodily fluid-filled delight: The only thing sharper than their wit is the divide that separates their lives. The magic system has an almost science-fiction element to it, with lots of medical talk about magical maladies and a well-rendered in-line breakdown of how “Outlander”-esque menhir travel works. Aurienne is as much a scientist as a witch, which is a treat in a genre overrun by wand-waving laziness. The novel is set in the 19th century, but in a version of England where the Norman Conquest of 1066 failed. Instead of a unified empire, the smaller kingdoms of the Heptarchy still dominate, their various dangerous machinations providing the raison d’être for the differing orders.

“Irresistible” might be set in the period we know as the Victorian era, and there are royals and attendant paraphernalia, but lovers of polite courtly romances might want to steer clear. With more dick jokes than a Deadpool movie, Knightley’s novel is dirty. Sexual attraction is not hidden behind genteel metaphors; Aurienne and Osric want. They’re not blushing virgins on their way to an altar, but adults who have loved and lost, who each bring a trolley’s worth of emotional baggage and sexual preferences to their relationship. Their self-awareness is part of the charm; they might wield magic like us mortals wield butter knives, but they’re relatable.

Readers plugged into the world of fan fiction may recognize the author’s name, which is a pseudonym. Writing under a previous nom de plume, isthisselfcare, Knightley gained an enormous fan base dedicated to “Draco Malfoy and The Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love,” her 199,000-word Dramione — short for Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy — on a popular fan-fiction site. With a Jane Austen-influenced voice, it was ironic, sarcastic and delightful. Knightley’s new novel is like a grown-up version of “Mortifying” — more mature, more grounded and more voicey than ever. Fans will be pleased to see how she’s grown.

People love to denigrate fan-fiction writers, though some of today’s most popular authors started as fan-fiction writers: Cassandra Clare, Naomi Novik and Andy Weir, to name just three. Novels like “Irresistible” are proof positive that writing fan fiction is an excellent training ground for building a novel. To write truly great fan fiction, a writer must identify what makes the source material sparkle and then replicate it. It’s not enough to graft existing characters into new situations. The most effective fan fiction shows readers how characters can continue to grow beyond the bounds of the original work while remaining consistent with the source material. That exercise in maintaining consistency and internal logic is excellent practice for creating original worlds.

In some cases, that also means identifying elements about characters that original authors themselves might not see. This was especially true of the explosion of Draco/Hermione fic after the Harry Potter series ended. Where author J.K. Rowling saw an irredeemable villain in Draco Malfoy, thousands of people saw an abused child who had grown up in a dangerous household and was trying to survive. Fan fiction allowed writers to transform Draco into a good person who falls in love with his childhood enemy; this gave readers the redemption arc Rowling set up but didn’t follow through on. There are tens of thousands of fics that explore this arc.

Literary-minded sociologists could probably study how millennial women never fully recovered from Draco’s lost redemption. The preponderance of platinum blond bad boys with chances at redemption has only grown as the girls who grew up reading Harry Potter became authors themselves: Coriolanus Snow in Hunger Games trilogy prequel “Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” Sebastian Morgenstern in “City of Glass,” Cardan in “The Cruel Prince.” (“Buffy’s” Spike is a clear predecessor.)

With Knightley’s debut, we can add Osric Mordaunt to the list. He is a tragic figure, doomed to a life filled with violence after an abusive childhood. He’s shaken out of this destiny by meeting the STEMinist figure Aurienne, who accepts no excuses for his bad behavior.

Though Osric seems to have Malfoy DNA at his heart, the rest of the cast is original and well-developed. That said, Aurienne does toe the line between aloof and arrogantly unlikable. We get the hint that she has a dark backstory, that her snark is a shield, but we’ll have to wait for Book 2 to find out. Until then, “Irresistible” will probably inspire fan fiction of its own, training a new generation of authors.

Castellanos Clark, a writer and historian in Los Angeles, is the author of “Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of.”

Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your July reading list.

It’s officially beach-reads season: Whether you do your reading outdoors or inside in air-conditioned comfort, July’s hot new releases will help you stay cool. Topics range from analog memories of Golden Age Hollywood to a maverick female athlete. Happy reading!

FICTION

In Pursuit of Beauty: A Novel
By Gary Baum
Blackstone: 256 pages, $29
(July 1)

Baum, a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter, draws on knowledge he has gleaned about cosmetic surgery, the profession of his protagonist, Dr. Roya Delshad. Dr. Delshad, who is multiracial and once supposedly plain, remakes herself into a glorious bombshell — but then lands in prison. She’s agreed to consider interviews with a ghostwriter named Wes Easton, who will soon discover why she’s called “the Robin Hood of Roxbury Drive.”

Typewriter Beach: A Novel
By Meg Waite Clayton
Harper: 320 pages, $30
(July 1)

Like the carriage of a well-oiled Olivetti, this novel moves between Carmel and Hollywood, in two different centuries, with ease. In 1957, actress Isabella Giori hopes to land a career-making role in a Hitchcock film; when her circumstances change and she winds up secluded in a tiny cottage in Carmel-on-the-Sea, a blacklisted emigre screenwriter named Léon Chazan saves her. In 2018, his screenwriter granddaughter finally learns how and why.

Vera, or Faith: A Novel
By Gary Shteyngart
Random House: 256 pages, $28
(July 8)

Vera, the child narrator of this wry and relevant new novel from Shteyngart (“Our Country Friends”), brings a half-Korean heritage to the Russian-Jewish-WASP Bradford-Shmulkin family. Between Daddy, Anne Mom, and her longing for her unknown bio Mom Mom, Vera has a lot to handle, while all she really wants is to help her dad and stepmom stay married — and to make a friend at school. It’s a must-read.

Mendell Station: A Novel
By J. B. Hwang
Bloomsbury: 208 pages, $27
(July 22)

In the wake of her best friend Esther’s 2020 death, Miriam loses faith in almost everything, including the God that made her job teaching Christian scripture at a San Francisco private school bearable. She quits and takes a job as a mail carrier (as the author also did), not only finding moments of grace from neighborhood to neighborhood but also writing letters to Esther in an effort to understand the childhood difficulties that bonded them.

Necessary Fiction: A Novel
By Eloghosa Osunde
Riverhead: 320 pages, $28
(July 22)

The title tells so much about how queer people must live in Nigeria, and so does the structure: Osunde (“Vagabonds!”) calls it a novel, although its chapters read more like short stories. If it doesn’t hang together like a traditional novel, that may be part of the point. Characters like May, struggling with gender identity, or Ziz, a gay man in Lagos, know that their identities don’t always hang together in traditional ways — and that’s definitely the point.

NONFICTION

The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature
By Charlie English
Random House: 384 pages, $35
(July 1)

Decades of Cold War espionage between the United States and the Soviet Union included programs that leveraged cultural media. The Central Intelligence Agency’s Manhattan-based “book club” office was run by an emigre from Romania named George Midden, who managed to send 10 million books behind the Iron Curtain. Some of them were serious tomes, yes, but there were Agatha Christie novels, Orwell’s “1984” and art books too.

The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It
By Iain MacGregor
Scribner: 384 pages, $32
(July 8)

Crucially, MacGregor’s painstakingly researched history of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II includes Japanese perspectives. The historian (“Checkpoint Charlie”) treats the atomic bomb more as a weapon of mass murder and less as a scientific breakthrough, while managing to convey the urgency behind its development for the Allied forces.

On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports
By Christine Brennan
Scribner: 272 pages, $30
(July 8)

Let this sink in (basketball pun very much intended): Caitlin Clark has scored more points than any player in major college basketball history. Not just the female players — the male players too. Now that she’s in the WNBA as a rookie for the Indiana Fever, Clark is attracting the kind of fan base once reserved for male basketball stars like Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Brennan’s longtime coverage of Clark’s career makes this book a slam dunk.

Strata: Stories From Deep Time
By Laura Poppick
W. W. Norton & Co.: 288 pages, $30
(July 15)

Each stratum, or layer, of our planet tells a story. Science writer Poppick explains what those millions of strata can tell us about four instances that changed life dramatically, from oxygen entering the atmosphere all the way to the dinosaur era. Ultimately, she argues that these strata show us that when stressed, the earth reacts by changing and moving toward stability. It’s a fascinating peek into the globe’s core that might offer clues about sustainability.

The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne
By Chris Sweeney
Avid Reader Press: 320 pages, $30
(July 22)

The once-unassuming Roxie Laybourne became the world’s first forensic ornithologist in 1960, when the FAA asked the Smithsonian — where Laybourne was an avian taxidermist — to help them identify shredded feathers from a fatal airplane crash in Boston. She analyzed specimens that contributed to arrests in racial attacks, as well as in catching game poachers and preventing deaths of fighter pilots. In her way, Laybourne was a badass.

Ryan Gosling puts the “not” in “Astronaut” in the new trailer for “Project Hail Mary.”

The upcoming sci-fi film, based on Andy Weir‘s novel of the same name, stars Gosling as middle school teacher turned reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace, who’s tasked with saving humanity from the effects of a dimming sun. However, when he wakes up from a coma as the sole survivor aboard a spaceship, he must overcome his amnesia to remember where he is and why he was sent there.

“It’s an insanely ambitious story that’s massive in scope and it seemed really hard to make, and that’s kind of our bag,” Gosling said of “Project Hail Mary” at CinemaCon in April, where he debuted footage from the film, according to Variety. “This is why we go to the movies. And I’m not just saying it because I’m in it. I’m also saying it because I’m a producer on the film.”

The trailer, released Monday by Amazon MGM Studios, opens with Gosling startling awake on the spacecraft, his hair and beard uncharacteristically long. “I’m several light-years from my apartment,” he proclaims, “and I’m not an astronaut.”

It then jolts back in time to show Grace pre-launch as he learns from Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) that if he does not journey into space, everything on Earth will go extinct. According to Stratt, who heads the mission, Grace is the only scientist who might understand what is happening to the sun and surrounding stars.

The trailer, which progresses through an intense montage set to Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times,” teases Gosling’s signature humor. “I can’t even moonwalk!” the “Barbie” actor declares at one point. (Gosling portrayed moonwalker Neil Armstrong in another recent space movie, Damien Chazelle’s “First Man.”)

Everything leads up to Grace meeting an alien, who isn’t shown in full — but fans of the book know it plays an integral role in saving planet Earth and beyond.

The film, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, marks the second book-to-movie adaptation for Weir, whose novel “The Martian” became an Oscar-nominated 2015 blockbuster starring Matt Damon. An adaptation for his book “Artemis” is also in development with the same directing team.

“Project Hail Mary” hits theaters March 20.

Amy Bloom’s exquisite “I’ll Be Right Here” is a slim volume spanning close to a century. While it’s tempting to label the novel a family epic, that description would fail to capture how Bloom reconstitutes “family” on the page, or how her chapters ricochet forward and backward from decade to decade or year to year, shifting perspective not only from character to character, but from first- to third-person point of view.

These transitions, while initially dizzying, coalesce into a rhythm that feels fresh and exciting. Together they suggest that memory conflates the past, present and future, until at the end, our lives can be viewed as a richly textured tapestry of experience and recollection, threaded together by the people we’ve loved.

The novel opens with a tableau: Siblings Alma and Anne tend to their longtime friend, who’s dying. They tenderly hold Gazala’s hands in a room that “smells like roses and orange peel.” Honey — once Anne’s sister-in-law and now her wife — massages Gazala’s thin feet with neroli oil. “Anne pulls up the shade. The day is beautiful. Gazala turns her face away from the light, and Alma pulls the shade back down.” Samir “presses his hand over his mouth so that he will not cry out at the sight of his dying sister.” Later in the novel, these five will come to be dubbed “the Greats” by their grandchildren.

The scene is a foreshadow, and signals that the novel will compress time, dwelling on certain details or events, while allotting mere lines to other pivotal moments, or allowing them to occur offstage, in passing. At first this is disorienting, but Bloom’s bold plot choices challenge and enrich.

In 1930 Paris, a young Gazala and her adopted older brother, Samir, await the return of their father from his job at a local patisserie, when they hope to sample “cinnamon montecaos, seeping oil into the twist of paper,” or perhaps a makroud he’s baked himself. In their cold, tiny apartment, Samir lays Gazala “on top of his legs to warm us both, and then, as the light fails, our father comes home.”

The Benamars are Algerians, “descended from superior Muslims and Christians both, and a rabbi,” their father, M., tells them. He delights in tall tales of a Barbary lion that has escaped Northern Africa and now roams the streets of Paris. Years elapse in the course of a few pages, and it’s 1942 in Nazi-occupied France. One night before bed, M. Benamar shreds the silk lining from a pair of worn gabardine pants to craft a belt for his daughter. Then,“he lies down on the big mattress he shares with Samir and turns his face to the wall.” He never awakens.

Now orphans — we don’t know exactly how old they are — the pair must conceal that they are on their own. Samir lines up a job where their father worked, while the owner’s wife finds Gazala a position as companion to a renowned writer, offering her “up to Mme. Colette like a canape.” Colette (yes, that one!) suffers from arthritis, and is mostly bedridden. She hides her Jewish husband upstairs, while entertaining guests below. Gazala observes that her benefactor’s “eyes are slanted under the folds of her brows, kohl-rimmed cat’s eyes in a dead-white face, powder in every fold and crack.”

Soon, the sister and brother’s paths diverge, and Gazala makes her way to New York City.

It’s 1947. Through Colette, Gazala has found work at a shop on Second Avenue, and sleeps in the storeroom above. Enter Anne and Alma Cohen, teenage sisters who take an instant liking to Gazala and her French accent; in short order, they’ve embraced her as a third sibling. Months later, there is a knock on the bakery door, and it’s Samir, returned from abroad, in search of Gazala. For the rest of their lives, the nonblood-related siblings will conceal that they are lovers.

Going forward, the plot zigs and zags, dipping in and out of each character’s life. It’s 2010 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Samir and Gazala have lived together in a rambling old house for decades, maintaining appearances by keeping separate bedrooms. They are old, and Samir “brushes her silver hair away from his lips.” She tells him she doesn’t mind that he smells of the shallots in their garden.

It’s 1968, and Anne, by now a wife, mother and lawyer, has fallen in love with her husband Richard’s sister, Honey. We glimpse their first sexual encounter after years of simmering emotions. Alma — who receives minimal attention from her author — marries a bighearted chicken farmer named Izzy, and later grieves the early loss of her husband, and the absence of children.

As they grow older, the circle consisting of Gazala, Samir, Anne, Alma and Honey will grow to include Lily, Anne’s daughter, and eventually Lily’s daughter, Harry. Gazala and Samir take in Bea, whose parents were killed in a car accident; she becomes the daughter they never had. This bespoke family will support each of its members through all that is to come.

It’s 2015 in Poughkeepsie, and Gazala’s gauzy figures float through her fading consciousness. Beneath the tree outside her window — ”huge and flaming gold” — sits her father, reading the paper. “Madame pours mint tea into the red glasses.” The other Greats are gathered round. One last memory, the most cherished of all: It’s 1984 and Gazala and Samir are in their 50s. He proposes a vacation in Oaxaca. “Let’s go as we are,” he whispers. At their hotel, “they sit beneath the arches, admiring the yellow sun, the blue sky, the green leaves on the trees, all as bright as a children’s drawing.” There, they freely express their love for each other.

As Bloom has demonstrated throughout her stellar literary career, which began in 1993 with the publication of her acclaimed story collection, “Come to Me,” she can train her eye on any person, place or object and render it sublime. Her prose is so finely wrought it shimmers. Again and again she has returned to love as her primary subject, each time finding new depth and dimension, requiring us to put aside our expectations and go where the pages take us. As readers, we’re in the most adept of hands.

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

There are rare moments in the culture when a children’s book resonates with everyone. Parents who buy the book for their kids find themselves moved by a story that is not intended for them but somehow speaks to them. Peter Brown’s “The Wild Robot” is one such book.

A tender-hearted fable about a robot who washes ashore on a remote island and goes native, the 2016 middle-grade novel from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers has spawned two sequels and last year’s hit (and Oscar-nominated) adaptation from DreamWorks Animation, with book sales for the series topping 6.5 million worldwide. Brown has now created a picture book titled “The Wild Robot on the Island,” a gateway for those still too young to read the original work.

“This new book gave me a chance to create these big, colorful, detailed illustrations, while still maintaining the emotional tone of the novel,” says Brown, who is Zooming from the Maine home he shares with his wife and young son. “I’ve added some little moments that aren’t in the novel to give younger readers an introduction and when they’re ready, they can turn to the novel.”

“The Wild Robot on the Island” picture book is geared for a younger audience than Brown’s earlier children’s novels featuring Roz the robot and friends.

(Peter Brown / Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

The new book’s mostly-pictures-with-some-words approach is a return to Brown’s earlier work when he was creating charming fables for toddlers about our sometimes fraught, sometimes empathetic attitude toward nature. In 2009’s “The Curious Garden,” a boy encounters a patch of wildflowers and grass sprouting from an abandoned railway and decides to cultivate it into a garden, while 2013’s “Mr. Tiger Goes Wild” finds the title character longing to escape from the conventions of a world where animals no longer run free. This push and pull between wilderness and civilized life, or wildness versus timidity, has preoccupied Brown for the duration of his career, and it is what brought Brown to his robot.

“I was thinking about nature in unlikely places, and the relationships between natural and unnatural things,” says Brown, a New Jersey native who studied at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. “And that led to the idea of a robot in a tree.” Brown drew a single picture of a robot standing on the branch of a giant pine tree, then put it aside while he produced other work. But the image wouldn’t let him go: “Every couple of months, I would think about that robot.”

Brown began researching robots and robotics, and slowly the story gestated in his mind. “Themes began to emerge,” says Brown. “Mainly, the idea of this robot becoming almost more wild and natural than a person could be. That was so fascinating to me that I wanted to let this thing breathe and see where it took me.”

Brown knew the involved narrative he had imagined wouldn’t work in picture book form; he needed to write his story as a novel, which would be new territory for him. “When I pitched the idea to my editor, she basically said, ‘Pump your brakes,’ ” says Brown. “If I was going to write, I had to include illustrations as well. The publisher thought it was a bit of a risk. They wanted pictures in order to sell it, because of what I had done in the past.”

(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

Brown locked himself away out in the wilds of Maine, in a cabin with no Wi-Fi, and got down to it. “I was nervous, and my editor wasn’t sure, either,” says Brown, who cites Kurt Vonnegut as a literary influence. “I realized there was no other option but for me to do it. And once I got into it, I had a blast.”

Like all great fables, Brown’s story is deceptively simple. A cargo ship full of robots goes down in the middle of the ocean. Some of these robots, still packed in their boxes, wash ashore on a remote island. A family of otters opens one such box, which turns out to be Roz, Brown’s wild robot. As Roz explores this strange new world, she encounters angry bears, a loquacious squirrel and industrious beavers, who regard her as a malevolent force. But the robot’s confusion, and the animal’s hostility, soon dissolve into a mutual understanding. Roz is the reader’s proxy, an innocent who acclimates to the complex rhythms of the natural world. Eventually she is subsumed into this alien universe, a creature of nature who allows birds to roost on her chromium shoulder.

“Roz has been programmed to learn, but her creators, the men who built her, don’t expect her to learn in this particular way,” says Brown. “And so she uses that learning ability to mimic the animals’ behavior and learns how to communicate with them. Roz is the embodiment of the value of learning, and part of that is adapting, changing, growing.”

The story isn’t always a rosy fairy tale. There are predators on the island; animals are eaten for sustenance. Real life, in short, rears its ugly head. “It gets tricky. Life is complicated, right?”, says Brown. “But thanks to Roz’s influence, all the animals discover how they are all a part of this interconnected community.”

Roz adopts an abandoned gosling that she names Brightbill, and the man-made machine is now a mother, flooded with compassion for her young charge. Their relationship is the emotional core of Brown’s series. At a time when the world is grappling with the increasing presence of robotic technology in everyday life, Brown offers an alternative view: What if we can create robots that are capable of benevolence and empathy? Roz reminds us of our own humanity, our capacity to love and feel deeply. This is why “The Wild Robot” isn’t just a kid’s book. It is in fact one of the most insightful novels about our present techno-anxious moment, camouflaged as a children’s book.

The author kept his underlying fable intact in the new “Wild Robot” picture book.

(Peter Brown / Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

“Technology is a double-edged sword,” says Brown. “There’s obviously a lot of good that is happening, and will continue to happen, but in the wrong hands it can be dangerous.” He mentions Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” and Haidt’s prescriptions for restricting internet use among children, which Brown endorses. “I don’t have a lot of answers, but I just think we need to reinvest in our own humanity,” he says. “We have to make sure things are going in the right direction.”

In subsequent books, the outside world impinges on Roz’s idyll. “The Wild Robot Escapes” finds Roz navigating the dangers of urban life and humans with guns, while a toxic tide in “The Wild Robot Protects” leaves the animals scrambling for ever more scarce resources. None of this is pedantic, nor is it puffed up with moral outrage. Brown knows children can spot such flaws a mile away. Like all great adventure tales, Brown’s “Wild Robot” stories embrace the wild world in all of its splendor, without ever flinching away from it.

“In the books, I just wanted to acknowledge that the world is complicated, and that people we think are bad aren’t necessarily so,” says Brown, who is currently writing the fourth novel in the “Wild Robot” series. “Behind every bad action is a really complicated story, and I think kids can handle that. They want to be told the truth about things, they want to grapple with the tough parts of life.”