WHAT’S NEW

“The Whispers” by Ashley Audrain: The lives of four women become tangled after tragedy strikes their neighborhood. While a boy fights for his life after a fall from a second-story window, everyone recalls the months-ago party where his mother was overhead screaming at him. Judgments abound as theories develop about how and why the incident occurred, and it becomes apparent how women can hold each other back, castigating one another — and themselves — for their decisions. Audrain (“The Push”) delves into the minds of women entering midlife who must now face the choices they made as well as their own complicity in shaming those who prioritize something different for themselves.

“Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It: A Memoir” by Greg Marshall: The nucleus of Marshall’s bracingly candid memoir is his leg, the one that limps and twitches and gets in the way of his foundational desire to appear “normal.” But perhaps “normal” was never in the cards. Raised in Utah during the 1990s in an oddball family of nonmormons, Marshall traded playful insults with his four siblings while his larger-than-life mother wrote a weekly newspaper column between chemotherapy treatments and his father battled complications from a cervical fracture followed by an ALS diagnosis. It took Marshall until freshman year of college to come out as gay, but it wasn’t until he was almost 30 that he learned the reason for his troublesome leg: He has cerebral palsy. With that diagnosis came understanding, and a lifetime of resilience enabled him to find the silver linings that allow him to live life on his own terms.