REQUIRED READING
Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple (Little, Brown)
You could call it the desperate housewives of Seattle. In the latest comedic novel from Semple (“Where’d You Go, Bernadette”), narrator Eleanor Flood wakes up one day determined that this is the day she will become her best self. Then she discovers that her son Timby is in a playground fight — over the eye shadow he wore to school. Things go from bad to worse when her husband goes missing. The icing on the cake: the appearance of a mysterious memoir, “The Flood Girls,” which delivers some truths about Eleanor and her estranged sister, Ivy. You’ll chortle into your morning cup of Starbucks.
Stalin’s Englishman Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring by Andrew Lownie (St. Martin’s)
Writer and literary agent Lownie delivers a book about scandalous secret agent Guy Burgess, the louche upper-class Englishman recruited by the Soviet Union to work on the notorious 1930s Cambridge spy ring. Wealthy and spoiled, a drinker and a promiscuous gay man, Burgess lived a large and loud personal life that worked well as a cover for his even more scandalous spying activities. This one’s a real-life page turner.
The Guineveres by Sarah Domet (Flatiron Books)
They called them Gwen, Win, Ginny and Vere. In Domet’s debut novel, four girls, each abandoned by her parents in a wartime convent, share the same name and the same dream of escape. When a plan to abscond inside a hollow parade float backfires, the four girls’ punishment is to work in the convent’s convalescent hospital. Everything changes when four comatose soldiers from an unspecified foreign war arrive at the hospital — one for each Guinevere.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles (William Morrow)
In the days before the Web, TV or radio, men traveled to remote areas to read the news to listeners who paid a dime to hear it. In Jiles’ new novel, war veteran Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, age 70, works as such a reader and also takes on other jobs to get by. It’s tough going at times, but everything changes for Kidd when he gets another business proposal: Return a young girl who was kidnapped by the Kiowa Indians during the Civil War to her only surviving family — an aunt and uncle 400 miles away in San Antonio.
Nicotine by Nell Zink (Ecco)
Thank you for smoking? In Zink’s (“Mislaid,” “The Wallcreeper”) latest tale, newly minted MBA Penny inherits her eccentric father’s childhood home in New Jersey. Penny soon discovers that a group of peaceful anarchists have taken over the family manse. Staunch defenders of smoker’s rights, they have renamed the property “Nicotine House.” Penny finds the squatters’ passion for their cause to be life-changing and takes them under her wing, despite the protests of her family. A healthy dose of comedy for the unconventional and conventional alike.