Also of interest... in the swing of the ’60s

Dolls! Dolls! Dolls! Miss Iceland

For readers seeking an escape, this atmospheric novel could be the ticket, said Heller McAlpin in NPR .org. But “another time and place doesn’t necessarily mean a rosier time and place”—not if you’re a woman burning with literary ambition in 1963 Iceland. And not if you are either of her two gay housemates. Hekla is named after a volcano, though, and she is a force of nature. In this unsettling but “quietly mesmerizing” book, her voice, at least, prevails.

Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

(Tin House, $16)

Rosalie Knecht’s second novel about Vera Kelly picks up in 1967 and continues the “consciously vintage” style of the first, said Lydia Perovic in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The former CIA agent has reluctantly turned private eye after being fired for being a lesbian, but she has not turned introspective. Instead, she flings herself into a search for a missing boy whose family members are Dominican dissidents. What will Vera’s next job be? “I hope we don’t have to wait long to find out.”