One woman’s entire novel is Rachel Kushner’s aside. A master of cultural analysis by decade, Kushner now gives us The Mars Room (Scribner). When the story opens it’s 2003 and Romy Hall, a former stripper and single mother, is en route to a women’s correctional facility in Northern California, where she has been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. As Romy looks back on the life that landed her there, the reader is treated to Kushner’s electrifying take on the chaos of 1980s San Francisco.

Mother, is that you? Joanna Cantor turns the crushing death of a parent into an urbane adventure with her debut novel, Alternative Remedies for Loss (Bloomsbury). The irreverent and honest Blanche McCrary Boyd is back with Tomb of the Unknown Racist (Counterpoint), her first novel in two decades and the last of her trilogy about family secrets, race, and the struggle for the truth. And in true Michael Chabon style, the essays in Pops (Harper) explore the magic and mystery of fatherhood.

In Short

O Captain! Our Captain! Robin (Henry Holt) is Dave Itzkoff’s biography of Robin Williams. V.F. contributing editor Laura Jacobs gets us into first position with Celestial Bodies (Basic). Charles Spencer sets out To Catch a King (William Collins) in this 17th-century version of The Fugitive. It’s murder and mirth in Christopher Buckley’s The Judge Hunter (Simon & Schuster). Catch a rare glimpse of a fledgling David Attenborough in the wild with Adventures of a Young Naturalist (Quercus). Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man (New Press) finds freedom in the forest. Mark Adams’s moose-cellaneous memoir is just the Tip of the Iceberg (Dutton). William Stadiem’s Madame Claude (St.Martin’s) escorts privilege to pleasure. Passion and preservation conspire in Elizabeth Barlow Rogers’s Saving Central Park (Knopf). Richard M. Cohen puts a potential cure for M.S. under the microscope in Chasing Hope (Blue Rider). Michael Ondaatje, master of memory and supplier of suspense, returns with the post-W.W. II Warlight (Knopf). Novelist Nick Dybek can never forget The Verdun Affair (Scribner). Questlove whips out the wisdom in Creative Quest (Ecco). Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s stories face forward in Heads of the Colored People (Atria/37 INK). Fiction is as suspenseful as truth in Jake Tapper’s The Hellfire Club (Little, Brown). Violence heats up in Gilbert King’s Beneath a Ruthless Sun (Riverhead). Jon Meacham finds The Soul of America (Random House). Michael Pollan rolls psychology and psychedelics in How to Change Your Mind (Penguin Press). Mary Karr waxes poetic in Tropic of Squalor (Harper). Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess (Knopf) offers a madeleine of mademoiselles. History is written in blood and ink in Marwan Hisham’s Brothers of the Gun (One World), illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Mark Strausman’s salad gets dressed in The Freds at Barneys New York Cookbook (Grand Central Life & Style). Lance Richardson stitches together the House of Nutter (Crown Archetype). John McCain rides The Restless Wave (Simon & Schuster). Nadine Strossen speaks power to Hate (Oxford). Simon Winchester draws the straightest line with The Perfectionists (Harper). Alan Stern and David Grinspoon decipher a demoted planet by Chasing New Horizons (Picador). The city may be sinking, but living in Lydia Fasoli and Toto Bergamo Rossi’s Venice (Rizzoli) seems swell to me.