Also of interest...in witchcraft and wizardry

The Ruin of All Witches by Malcolm Gaskill (Knopf, $30)

Don’t mistake The Ruin of All

Witches for a fairy tale, said Caroline Fraser in The New York Times. Malcolm Gaskill’s “deliciously suspenseful” book recounts a true story about a Springfield, Mass., couple arrested in 1651 and tried on suspicion of witchcraft. Gaskill’s meticulous recounting of the incidents that led to the arrests, including a cow’s milk spoiling, the death of an infant, and a neighbor’s nightmare, makes for a tale that’s “never less than riveting.”

Madly, Deeply by Alan Rickman (Holt, $32)

In a book like this recent best-seller, “what we want is gossip,” said Dominic Green in The Wall Street Journal. “Tragically,” the British actor Alan Rickman, who died in 2016, was too dedicated to surface congeniality to spear anyone even in these collected diary entries. When he’s not describing every celebrity he meets as “sweet,” including his Harry Potter co-stars, he does manage to create the impression “that he was, like his cartoonish later roles, a lonely misanthrope, and embittered by his journey.”

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese (St. Martin’s, $28)

Laurie Lico Albanese’s novel “turns The Scarlet Letter on its head,” said Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor. Narrated by a married woman from Scotland who has an affair with Nathaniel Hawthorne and inspires his shamed heroine Hester Prynne, this version of the story “dramatizes the challenges for women seeking autonomy in a maledominated world.” Set in both Glasgow and Salem, with flashbacks to witch hunts, Hester proves “colorful in more ways than one.”

Beyond the Wand by Tom Felton (Grand Central, $28)

Tom Felton’s honesty about his life since the Harry Potter movies “elevates what otherwise would be a diverting but disposable tome of trivia,” said Thomas Floyd in The Washington Post. The 35-year-old actor, known to Potter fans as the bully Draco Malfoy, scatters some charming behind-thescenes stories through his memoir’s early pages but “finds greater purpose” when detailing his later struggles with drugs and alcohol. “Still, Beyond the Wand should only be assigned reading for Hogwarts completists.”