Ghost-Eye, by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This sweeping novel opens in nineteen-sixties Calcutta, when a three-year-old girl demands to eat fish, shocking her family of Jains. Disturbed, her parents summon a psychologist, who concludes that she is the reincarnation of a person who grew up in a fishing village in the Sundarban forests, to the southeast. Fifty years later, an energy corporation announces plans to build a plant in that area, threatening ecological devastation. The psychologist’s adult nephew has been recruited by an environmentalist who believes that the psychologist’s case files hold the key to saving the forest. The story—replete with history and science, spiritualism and synchronicities—suggests that to find salvation, we must “remind ourselves of the old ways.”

Whistler, by Ann Patchett (Harper). When Daphne, the middle-aged narrator of this pensive novel, was a child, she developed a precious bond with Eddie, her stepfather. But, after the pair got into a car accident, Daphne’s mother divorced Eddie, alleging that he was negligent, and then cut him off entirely. Daphne “put the whole thing”—her memories of Eddie, and of that night—“in a box.” For nearly half a century, she left those thoughts untouched. Then Daphne and Eddie run into each other, and, despite all the time that has passed, Daphne finds that the two are still profoundly connected. Together, she and Eddie face their respective pasts, untangling the feelings of betrayal, regret, and love that emerge in the process.

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What We’re Reading

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

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Newcomers, by Alan Mikhail (Liveright). In this short but powerful biography, Mikhail investigates the lives of Anthony Jansen van Salee and his wife, Grietje Reyniers, who rose from obscure origins—Mikhail speculates that Salee was a freed slave; Reyniers was a barmaid and sex worker—to become one of New Netherland’s founding families. Regarded by their fellow-colonists as “sinful moral outsiders,” van Salee and Reyniers were banished from the colony’s mainstay on Manhattan and forced to live on Long Island. It was there, by means of a war that the colony waged on Native people, that the couple forged new reputations as defenders and “anchors” of Dutch settlement, accruing property, hiring laborers, and joining the ranks of the landed élite.

Fires in the Night, by Matthew Wolfe (Viking). During the nineties and two-thousands, a decentralized activist group known as the Earth Liberation Front set fire to “prominent symbols of ecological destruction” and freed animals from labs and farms. For a time, their actions inspired many climate and environmental activists who were disillusioned with nonviolence. Then, just as the F.B.I.’s antiterrorism efforts rapidly grew in the wake of 9/11, the arsons got out of control—one activist wondered whether they had become “a kind of addiction” that “gradually took on its own independent momentum while producing diminishing effects.” As Wolfe recounts E.L.F. missions, he also details the F.B.I.’s pursuit of its members, in an interplay that allows difficult moral questions to emerge.