Nine books we recommend

By The New York Times VICTORY CITY:

by Salman Rushdie. ( Random House, $ 30.) Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th- century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WHAT LIES IN THE WOODS:

by Kate Alice Marshall. ( Flatiron, $ 28.99.) Though the tropes are familiar — a decades- old crime, a podcaster asking hard questions, a damaged woman tied to long- buried secrets — Marshall elevates this psychological thriller with plot twists and a fascinating dance between past and present.

THE WIFE OF BATH:

A Biography, by Marion Turner. ( Princeton University, $ 29.95.) Neither princess nor witch nor damsel in distress, Alison of Bath — better known as the wife of Bath, from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” — is unlike any female character before her. Turner, an Oxford professor, argues that she is the first real woman in English literature, and that she subverted sexist medieval stereotypes.

ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED:

A Biography, by Matthew Dennison. ( Pegasus, $ 27.95.) The third major biography of the children’s author stresses his tragedy- speckled life more than his often ugly behavior. In Dennison’s telling, the swashbuckling creator of Matilda and Willy Wonka was arrogant yet desperate for acclaim.

ROUGH SLEEPERS:

Dr. Jim O’connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People, by Tracy Kidder. ( Random House, $ 30.) By turns tender, moving and enraging, Kidder’s deeply reported portrait animates a Boston physician who has dedicated his career to the growing population of men and women who live on his city’s streets.

HOW TO SELL A HAUNTED HOUSE:

by Grady Hendrix. ( Berkley, $ 28.)

The haunted doll or puppet is an archetype of the horror genre, as ancient as the Golem and as contemporary as Annabelle. Hendrix has created a wholly original creature here in Pupkin, an evil sock puppet with all the traits of a vindictive, psychopathic sibling, one who will kill for parental love.

RIKERS: An Oral History, by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau. ( Random House, $ 28.99.) For this chilling book, the journalists Blau and Rayman spent years interviewing a range of people connected to New York City’s notorious jail complex: former inmates, correction officers, lawyers, social workers, officials.

THE FARAWAY WORLD:

by Patricia Engel. ( Avid Reader, $ 26.) In Engel’s wistful, understated story collection, characters seek connection in a disconnected world. But these tales of the Latin American diaspora are also about small moments that, like the book they’re collected in, add up to something big. ESSEX DOGS: by Dan Jones. ( Viking, $ 30.) A best- selling historian of Britain, Jones here welds fact and fiction in a cinematic, adrenaline- soaked chronicle — the first novel of a projected trilogy — featuring a band of mercenaries enlisted to fight for King Edward III in his 1346 invasion of France.