They are building their homes by headlight so that, come morning, the government can’t tear them down. So begins the first story in Daniel Alarcón’s polished and poetic The King Is Always Above the People(Riverhead). While we are never told who “they” are in this modern fable of immigration and determination, the story sets the tone for the subsequent nine narratives in Alarcón’s first collection in more than a decade. Here are the stories of a gang member’s childhood, a South America in turmoil, a city consumed with politics, and the hardships that haunt the modern world.

Home is a slightly different sort of precarious in Louise Erdrich’sFuture Home of the Living God (Harper): Cedar Hawk Songmaker finds herself at the center of this startling story of speculative fiction in which pregnancy has been placed under the jurisdiction of the state. With a drop of The Handmaid’s Tale and a drop of The Children of Men,Erdrich cooks up a reproductive-rights thriller all her own.

A flood of spare prose courses through Megan Hunter’s debut novel, The End We Start From (Grove). The big ideas keep flowing through The River of Consciousness (Knopf), by the late Oliver Sacks. Beverly Gray bangs on the glass of nostalgia with Seduced by Mrs. Robinson (Algonquin). And Jed Perl hangs an intricate mobile of art, biography, and criticism in Calder (Knopf).

IN SHORT

Alex Hammond and Mike Tinney’s The Secret Life of the Pencil (Laurence King) is the No. 1 book about the No. 2. Alan Bennett elicits literary laughs in Keeping On Keeping On (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Alec Baldwin and V.F. contributing editor Kurt Andersen pay taunting tribute to Trump with You Can’t Spell America Without Me (Penguin Press). Charles Bukowski brews a Storm for the Living and the Dead (Ecco). Latin-American legend Eduardo Galeano is a Hunter of Stories (Nation Books). Will Friedwald croons for The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums(Pantheon). Henry Louis Gates Jr. revisits 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro (Pantheon). Lawrence O’Donnell catches politicians Playing with Fire (Penguin Press). Joshua Greene uncovers The Essential Marilyn Monroe (ACC Editions). Franklin D. Roosevelt (Viking) wheels and deals in Robert Dallek’s biography. A monarch gets meddlesome in Deborah Cadbury’s Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking (PublicAffairs). Reza Aslandelves into divinity in God (Random House). David Hallberg is en pointe with A Body of Work (Touchstone). Nicholas Hytner pulls back the curtain in Balancing Acts (Knopf). Gregory Maguire squeezes the Nutcracker in Hiddensee (Morrow). Jefferson Morley eyes an agency spy in The Ghost(St. Martin’s). Activism is far from static in Bill McKibben’s Radio Free Vermont (Blue Rider). Photographer Jack Pierson (Damiani) pictures 1980s America. John Banville paints a portrait of Mrs. Osmond (Knopf). Madness ensues in Matthew Weiner’s Heather, the Totality (Little, Brown). Juli Berwald inspects invertebrates in Spineless (Riverhead). There’s always room for Joan Silber’s Improvement (Counterpoint).