10 Must-Read New Books Out This Week

Music columnist and poet Kendra Allen revisits her experience growing up in Dallas, Texas — including the repressive environment of the Southern Baptist church where her great-uncle preached — in her debut memoir, Fruit Punch.

C.J. Carey’s alt-history novel follows Rose, a civil servant living in Nazi-run London. Her job is to update classic literature to echo the principles of the Third Reich — but things get more interesting when she’s reassigned to investigate Widowland, the dilapidated neighborhood where childless older women live.

Amaya has one goal: stopping her ex-boyfriend and estranged friend, Kaavi, from getting married. But that animosity puts a target on Amaya’s back when Kaavi disappears, and Amaya is quickly pegged as the prime suspect.

In Lisa Jewell’s long-awaited follow-up to The Family Upstairs, human remains connected to a 30-year-old cold case turn up on the banks of the Thames, instigating a series of events that could destroy one woman’s life forever.

As a child, Anna saw her mother’s mental health deteriorate when their family moved from a working-class neighborhood to the suburbs. Now, she’s been called back home by her sister, and she’ll have to reckon once more with everything that happened back then.

Coming into her witchy powers has taken its toll on Voya’s life, and she finds herself without allies when she needs them the most. She’s just had a premonition about her family’s coming destruction, but who will help her save the rest of her coven?

After his father goes missing, Yitian, a Chinese American professor, returns to China to find him. He turns to Hanwen — the woman he once thought he’d marry, now a bureaucrat’s wife — for help, and together, they delve into the mystery... and revisit their own shared past.

In the world of The Memory Index, humans struggle to retain memories — so much so that they rely on artificial recall to go about their daily lives. A new technology might fix people’s minds for good, but there’s something fishy about the ongoing medical trial designed to prove its efficacy.

Banana Yoshimoto — a Japanese author celebrated for her fabulist fiction — returns to store shelves this week with Dead-End Memories, a new English translation of her 2003 short story collection.