John of John, by Douglas Stuart (Grove). Set on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, this rich, intricate novel follows a young gay art-school graduate, Cal, who returns home when his devout father, John, a tenant farmer who raised him alone, intimates that his grandmother is ill. In Falabay, the largely Presbyterian village of his upbringing, Cal hides his sexuality; he remembers people looking at him, as a teen-ager, with “faint unease.” Stuart’s novel examines the threads that bind Cal and John together—blood, faith, tradition, grievance, violence, and more commonalities than they know. At the same time, it is a coming-of-age story, in which Cal must define the relationship between himself and his origins. “Do you even want all this?” his mother asks him, at one point. “To be home. To be here.”

Body Double, by Hanna Johansson, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson (Catapult). This eerie novel of obsession and transference alternates between two story lines. In one, two women move in together soon after they mix up their coats in a department-store café. One of the women, Laura, tells the roommate, Naomi, very little about herself, and appears to have no job or friends—indeed, no existence at all outside of the one the two women share. In the other story line, an unnamed woman who transcribes recordings for a ghostwriter hears an unnerving whisper on a tape: “I have seen you. Have you seen me?” Together, the story lines fuse into an exploration of feminine selfhood, as the characters grapple with what it is to know oneself and to be known by others.

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What We’re Reading

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

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The Rolling Stones, by Bob Spitz (Penguin). It all started in 1961: “Two boys meet at a train station one morning, in a suburb east of London.” The teen-agers, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, bonded over a mutual love of the blues—“an alien music that has no roots in England”—and started a band that became, once the Beatles had left the stage, the world’s biggest rock act. This rascally, standard-bearing biography presents the saga of the Rolling Stones as a melodrama fed by forces in diametric opposition: blues versus pop, sobriety versus altered consciousness, the Stones versus the law, Stone versus Stone. By 1970, the band had survived many ordeals, and, Spitz writes, “Despite it all, they never considered breaking up.”

Unvaccinated Under God, by Kira Ganga Kieffer (Princeton). Vaccine hesitancy in the United States is as old as vaccines themselves. In this concise and lucid history, grounded in the observation that anti-vaxxers are poorly understood in part because vaccine proponents shame skeptics as aberrant, Kieffer reframes vaccine hesitancy as a form of religious expression. She demonstrates how the modes of thought and behavior that have shaped anti-vaccine movements parallel those found in American evangelical Christianity—particularly an emphasis on personal experience as the highest authority. Ultimately, Kieffer argues that if the establishment hopes to address hesitancy effectively, it must learn to engage with patients’ anxieties, and “move beyond oversimplifying people to their positions.”