Also of interest... in outsiders and exiles

The Exceptions by Kate Zernike (Scribner, $30)

When you read about Nancy Hopkins’ long career, “you may feel the need to knock a hole in the wall,” said Bonnie Garmus in The New York Times.

A molecular biologist who joined MIT’s faculty in 1973, she suffered countless indignities before becoming the unlikely leader of an inside group that documented pervasive discrimination against the small number of women on the school’s faculty. Their work shook up higher education, and this excellent book is packed with “jaw-dropping” details.

A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (Knopf, $30)

Though many books have been written about the war in Iraq, “this one matters,” said Renad Mansour in The Guardian. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a Baghdad native who turned to journalism shortly after the U.S. invasion, and his ground-level account shatters Western assumptions about the violent sectarian strife that has since made his city and country unrecognizable. Ghaith at least holds out hope that younger Iraqis will force reform. “At some point, he argues, change is inevitable.”

Künstlers in Paradise by Cathleen Schine (Holt, $28)

Cathleen Schine’s latest novel is, among other things, “a profound meditation on the nature and power of storytelling,” said Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. At the onset of the pandemic, an aimless young New Yorker gets stranded at the Venice, Calif., home of his grandmother. A Holocaust refugee, she soon begins entertaining him with tales of 1940s Hollywood and its émigré community. Schine brings her usual wit and deft touch to the story, and its “warmth and wisdom” prove uplifting.

Picasso the Foreigner by Annie Cohen-Solal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40)

Pablo Picasso is too easily remembered as an art-world Superman, said Hamilton Cain in The Wall Street Journal. This “astute” new biography reminds us that the Spanish artist spent most of his life as a watchful outsider. From the moment Picasso arrived in Paris at 19, French authorities surveilled him as a potential anarchist. French critics were also among the last to celebrate his greatness. By focusing on his vulnerability, this absorbing book “captures a facet of Picasso’s character long overlooked.”