NEW RELEASES

■“Biography of X,” by Catherine Lacey. (Picador, 416 pages, $19.) C.M., the New York City journalist narrating this novel, hated the biography published about her late wife, an artist named X. So she set out to write her own. In it, beneath “the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort,” Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote in his review.

■ “Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family,” by Rachel Jamison Webster. (Holt, 384 pages, $19.99.) In what a Times reviewer called a book about “unknowing rather than knowing,” Webster reconnects with family past and present after discovering she descends from Banneker, a Black astronomer and inventor famous for writing almanacs and a 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson on slavery’s injustice.

■ “Birnam Wood,” by Eleanor Catton. (Picador, 432 pages, $19.) Catton’s electric novel follows an alliance between two ideological opposites — Birnam Wood, an anarchist environmentalist group led by a horticulturalist named Mira, and Robert Lemoine, a billionaire building a doomsday bunker — as they come together on a tract of rural land.

■ “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom,” by Ilyon Woo. (Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $19.99.) This true story of love and liberty was one of the Times’ 10 Best Books of 2023. It centers on Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved couple who in December 1848 hatched a daring escape — light-skinned Ellen dressing as a wealthy planter, and William as her property — to the North, and eventually, across the Atlantic.