REQUIRED READING

Avenue of Spies

A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in NaziOccupied Paris

by Alex Kershaw (Crown)

Talk about a dangerous neighborhood. Kershaw (“The Liberator”) tells the story of Sumner Jackson, an American doctor who spent World War II living on Paris’s Naziridden Avenue Foch — where neighbors included not only Gestapo headquarters but also the man responsible for sending the French Jews to concentration camps. Horrified by the Jewish roundups, Jackson joined the resistance, running operations out of his home, right under the Germans’ noses. A true story that reads like a thriller.

Infinite Home

by Kathleen Alcott (Riverhead Books)

Remember when Brooklyn’s Myrtle Avenue was nicknamed Murder Avenue? For the heroine of Alcott’s new novel, life hasn’t changed much since that time. Widowed Edith has lived in her Brooklyn brownstone for 66 years, renting apartments to a revolving cast of eccentric characters including actors, agoraphobes and invalids. When Edith’s memory starts to fail, her tenants must band together to keep evil son Owen from evicting them all. An intimate look at life in the borough of homes and churches.

Walking With Abel

by Anna Badkhen (Riverhead Books)

If you thought commuting to work in Midtown was rough, try SubSaharan Africa. Badkhen (“Peace Meals”) joins a group of Fulani cowherders in Mali on their annual, yearlong trek across the Sahel grassland belt that stretches from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. The odyssey’s purpose: to find grazing lands for their cattle. Although the Fulani have never heard of climate change, they can document its effects in terms of rising temperatures and shrinking grass supply. Other problems include the growing threat of Islamic militant groups and the exodus of young people to cities.

Black Chalk

by Christopher Yates (Picador)

Yates’ novel spins a tale of friendship and betrayal set mostly at the historic and beautiful Oxford campus. We meet an American expat and the five Brits who become his pals. But as the group gets involved in a mind game with a cash prize and the stakes get higher and more dangerous, everything unravels. The increasingly dark tale travels between that fateful freshman year and presentday New York.

Shooting for the Stars

by R.G. Belsky (Atria)

Gil Malloy is a cynical New York City tabloid reporter whose best days may be behind him. He hangs onto his job by a thread — and once in a while he sinks his teeth into a story that keeps him in the game. In his last time out in “The Kennedy Connection,” he got into the JFK assassination. In his latest adventure, he delves into the case of Laura Marlowe, a starlet killed by a crazed fan in a murdersuicide 30 years back, and discovers it’s linked to a presentday serial killer. A fastpaced yarn from tabloid veteran Belsky.